Biology textbook authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos are leaders in the life sciences. They are accomplished researchers and professors from leading universities. But their writings mislead students. In their otherwise well written and highly produced textbook The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008), Johnson and Losos misrepresent science and make fallacious arguments when they present evolution to the student. It is yet another example of smart people spreading the usual evolutionary message.
Consider the chapter on evolution and natural selection. After misrepresenting what we know about the relationship between microevolution and macroevolution and biological variation, and making a non scientific, metaphysical, truth claim that just happens to mandate the truth of evolution, one would think it couldn’t get any worse.
One would be wrong.
Regarding a fossil sequence of hoofed mammals, Johnson and Losos write:
It is important not to miss the key point of the result you see illustrated in figure 17.3: evolution is an observation, not a conclusion. Because the dating of the samples is independent of what the samples are like, successive change through time is a data statement. While the statement that evolution is the result of natural selection is a theory advanced by Darwin, the statement that macroevolution has occurred is a factual observation.
A sequence of fossils is an observation of macroevolution? It would be difficult to imagine a more misleading statement than this. And it is not as though this was an unintended mistake that just happened to elude the 100+ reviewers. Johnson and Losos went out of their way to make and elaborate this message, and the army of evolutionist reviewers all nodded their heads.
Johnson and Losos are not some computer hackers throwing mud around an Internet chat room. They are full professors at top schools (Washington University and Harvard University). McGraw Hill is not a second rate publisher and The Living World is not hastily prepared volume. These are the best authors, working with a top publisher, under the review of hundreds of evolutionists, to create a beautiful textbook used ats campuses across the country.
And so there is no excuse for misinformation in the guise of science.
