in books. this is all understood and accepted as obvious reality by everyone except loons. red sure did recommend lots of books. if he has read all of those, i have a renewed respect for him. i would just recommend "the blind watchmaker" by the newly celebritized richard dawkins. years ago i got into the concept of evolution and read all his books, and they were all awesome. that was before he was famous as a god destroyer and was just a biologist.
I am a moderate. martin and the atheists would call creationism a childish fantasy, fiction, and a twisted delusional misperception of reality. But the anthropologist in me considers it to be a legitimate ancient creation myth and therefore sociology. In that sense it can be scientifically discusssed. Just not as biology.
I actually own hardback copies of all of them except Larson and Tattersall, which were borrowed. I do have Tattersall's earlier book however. I have not read it, but I did read his The Ancestors Tale which I should have listed above. Dawkins is an interesting writer who, even though he is creditied with few discoveries, he is a fine analyst and a far better storyteller than some of the authors I mentioned. Damn! Speaking of better writers, I should have mentioned the late, great Stephen Jay Gould for Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.
mr gould explains here the confusion over the word "theory" when used regarding evolution, which is a fact: "creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it?... ...Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered." from http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html gravity is always the example that is easiest to understand. it is incredible how commonly misunderstood this is. because there are different theories on the exact machinery of evolution, that does not cast any doubt on the actual fact of evolution.
