Experimental Blog #44

Comments on the books "The $1,000 Genome - The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine" by Kevin Davies and "Why Us? - How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves" by James Le Fanu

The first book describes the fantastic advances in DNA "sequencing", or deciphering the chromosomes of any individual living organism. It took about 10 years and cost about 2 billion dollars to "sequence", decipher, the genome, that is, all the chromosomes, of the first individual person. Now, 10 years later, dozens of individual people have been sequenced-deciphered for about 10,000 dollars, or less, each. The process has taken as little as 7 to 10 days. It is expected that the cost of sequencing an individual human genome will fall to around 1,000 dollars, or less, and take less than an hour in the not too distant future.

The author, James Le Fanu, of the second book, "Why Us?", is a British medical doctor and a well known science writer. His extraordinary and very ambitious book is all about the even more remarkable achievements of what he calls the "materialist sciences; "the single most impressive intellectual achievement of all time," of the late 20th and beginning 21st centuries, in astronomy, geology, genetics, neurology, and other sciences.
However, the author is a very sceptical thinker, and he seems most sceptical of all about the many conclusions of Darwinian evolutionary biology, based on natural selection, including the work and conclusions of Charles Darwin himself and of his many followers. The author's views seem to be that the many millions and millions of people who study, learn, and teach Darwinian evolutionary biology do not really know what they think that they know, or understand what they think that they understand, about the history of all life on earth and, especially, about human history and evolution. He also says that the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is not necessarily better than no theory at all.
The author explains all of these matters extremely well, clearly, and persuasively. Was it surprising, or not, that James Le Fanu's book comes without any outside recommendations?