Development

In addition to its profoundly misleading treatment of concepts like homology and of convergence, the book's handling of basic biological facts is often simply wrong, and as frequently is so confusing as to be meaningless. The book uses an example from differences in the developmental pathways in insects without first introducing basic concepts in insect development (a subject high school biology texts also do not cover). The authors do not give students the background to assess how a such a pathway works, or what consequences changing it might have. Students have no choice but to take the author's word that these and other phenomena are in fact inexplicable; a result that is not consistent with EE's claim to use an "inquiry-based" approach. In fact, the authors have simply ignored the existence of clear explanations for the developmental processes in question.

Presenting these examples as unanswered and unanswerable problems for evolution is simply wrong. In fact, the problem in this chapter derive from the book's inaccurate and inadequate presentation of basic concepts, and the authors' incomplete presentation of the existing knowledge on the topics they present. The consequence of this problematic treatment is an totally erroneous vision not only of the current state of scientific knowledge, but of how scientists gather and test new ideas, and how scientists use evolution to study similarities and differences between species.

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