Fred Bortz

Although this book actually lists Richard Dawkins's "The Ancestors Tale" in its bibliography, it seems that the author did not take the trouble to read that book as he demonstrates "the conceit of hindsight" against which Dawkins warns in "The Ancestor's Tale" as well as making other errors in the explanation of evolution in the book. For example, Archaeopteryx is called a transitional form between reptiles and birds; Dawkins spends many paragraphs in almost every one of his books trying to get that teleological view out of evolution discourse. Again, the author says evolution leads to forms ideally suited for their environment. Wonderfully suited, perhaps, but as Dawkins points out, since evolution is path-dependent, the organisms are far from ideal. Moreover, with limited grasp of cultural history, the author fails to grasp that Young-Earth Creationism is a modern movement and makes the historical error of foisting the opinions of Young-Earth Creationists on the Victorian intellectuals of Darwin's time. He is unaware of Paley's "Natural Theology", and that Darwin could have looked forward to a life spent as a naturalist while making himself useful to society as a vicar.

The problem with many of the books for children and young adults about Darwin and about evolution is that they are salvos in the culture war more than anything else. It doesn't matter to authors, publishers, editors or reviewers, if they are correct in their science or their history, so long as the children who use them for school assignments learn what "side" they ought to be on.

This book declares that Darwin disliked the sight of blood. Darwin recalled his own father saying to him, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching...". Is that the description of someone who dislikes the sight of blood? Maybe this is a prevailing Darwin myth for children.

The illustrations are photographs of various original sources, and are reasonably well selected and the writing is better than adequate. The factual errors are fairly trivial or at least slightly ambiguous. Given the quality of children's books about Darwin and about evolution one could easily do worse.… (plus d'informations)

I read the original version. This is an excellent book with an intriguing focus. It really is all about ALH84001, but in order to explain all it discusses projects that search for meteorites, why Antarctica is the best place to find them, what they are, and how discovered meteorites are processed and classified. Then it gives the conjectural life history of ALH84001, discussing various methods of dating by means of radioactive date, which seem to indicate the the rock was formed early in the life of the solar system, flung out 100 million years ago from Mars by an impact, and landed in Antarctica around the time the sabertooth tigers were going extinct.

It was published in 1997 and expects that by now some rocks would have been brought back from Mars, somehow. They haven't, instead there have been the gradually more ambitious Mars rovers. Have their work either supported or called into question the conjecture that ALH84001 and similar meteorites are from Mars? This book, at least in its original edition, can not say.

The question of the fossil lifeforms is much more controversial.… (plus d'informations)