• Title: Why Evolution is True
• Author: Jerry A. Coyne
• Genre/Subject: Evolution, Science
• Publisher: Viking
• Publication Date: 2009
• Start date: 1/25/24
• Finish date: 2/12/24

Review:

This was excellent. Science communication at its finest, meaning lots of information but presented in such a way as to be easy to understand for a layman like me.

Very often I find that people are not as confused by evolution as they are resistant to it at a deep emotional level. This book is not going to change that, nothing can, but it will help those that aren’t mired in denialism.

Religious groups that want to promote their agendas spend a lot of time and buckets of money trying to poke holes in the mountains of evolutionary evidence. This is like trying to find a hole in a sandy beach and then the tide comes in regardless. And then when the tide ebbs to do the same thing all over again.

I learned a lot, transitional fossils like Tiktaalik, sexual selection, sexual dimorphism, vestigial traits, alleles, all sorts of things that I had heard of but didn’t really understand.

This book made me much better informed, didn’t make me an expert but certainly prepared me to better recognize disinformation and denialism.