Evolution: The Grand Experiment Vol. 1

Title: Evolution: The Grand Experiment Vol. 1
Author: Dr. Carl Werner
Major Themes: Creation, Evolution, Fossils
Synopsis: This beautiful, full-color hardcover book presents arguments both for and against evolution.

Over the past few months, I have been reading Evolution: The Grand Experiment Volume 1 aloud to my children on school mornings right after a few minutes of Bible study. We’ve just read two to four pages a day, and have found it quite an interesting study. Some of the children were more interested than others, but they all gleaned some things from it! I asked my 8-year-old what he thought of the book. He replied, “I learned that evolution is impossible. The chances of the hyena turning into the whale is impossible. It was really interesting, all the things disproving evolution.”

The subtitle of this volume is, The Quest for an Answer. If you read the second volume, Living Fossils, you will be able to understand that statement better. As it is, this book takes us on a journey around the world, through various fossil collections, searching for missing links and answers to the question as to whether evolution could work.

The first chapter describes the two opposing views of the origin of life. Chapter two talks about spontaneous generation; my boys loved the mice and maggots that were used as examples! Chapter three disproves Darwin’s ideas about acquired characteristics, and chapter four discusses natural selection and chance mutations. This is where the hyena-to-whale example is found, and the page of 0’s showing the odds of this happening by chance is pretty impressive! Next, we have a chapter about similarities between unrelated animals, and then we get into the fossil record and what Darwin predicted—did his predictions come true?

Chapters 7-16 give details about the fossil record of many different types of organism, including dinosaurs, birds, and whales. The chapter about the so-called feathered dinosaurs is extremely interesting, as the possibility of a grand hoax is revealed.

Chapters 17-19 deal more directly with the origin of life, as the author shows the odds of DNA, or even proteins or amino acids, forming spontaneously. We were amazed over and over by the impossibility of this happening. Chapter 20 summarizes the whole book, and the three appendixes restate, in more detail, the information given in chapters 7-16.

This book was a very worthwhile read for us. It has strengthened our belief in Creation. One of my sons, when we were talking about someone we met recently who did not believe in God but that life came about through evolution, wished he could get the man to read this book!

Besides being very worthwhile reading, this book is beautiful. It is a large, hardcover book with glossy pages, filled with full-color photographs. It is a great addition to any library!

No warnings!