“...[we are] no-holds-barred atheists. We therefore seek thoroughly naturalistic explanations of the facts of evolution, although we expect that they will turn out to be quite complex, as scientific explanations often are. It is our assumption that evolution is a mechanical process through and through.”

The cult of Darwin. Here are 2 Atheist-Darwinist Biologists who destroy the myth of natural selection [there is more science in Alice in Wonderland than in 'selection'] but who refuse to leave the cult. There are only 3 aspects to Darwinian magic:

1) God of natural selection

2) God of mutations

3) God of time

These three mythical, dialectical, mechanical 'processes' are then cojoined to the Goddess of the Universal Genome, who conveniently, placed the entire software code for 2 million species at the bottom of the 'Tree of Life'; from which phyla and species naturally select a comparative advantage and mutate into new species.....

The problem with Evolution goes far beyond the natural-selection nonsense. [why would a frog naturally select to become a lizard and where does this DNA genomic information come from?]. But once selection is dismantled it further proves that Darwin's theory is rather dumb.

“In fact, we don’t know very well how evolution works. Nor did Darwin, and nor (as far as we can tell) does anybody else.”

In other words once you destroy natural selection and its rhetorical, non-scientific gibberish, Darwinism collapses. Yet these 2 Atheists refuse to own up to reality and leave the cult. One suspects there is too much public money available for 'research' and too many 'friends' to unfriend on Facebook, for them to take such a daring step.

“we’ve been told by more than one of our colleagues that, even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, nonetheless we shouldn’t say so. Not, anyhow, in public. To do that is, however inadvertently, to align oneself with the Forces of Darkness, whose goal it is to bring Science into disrepute.”

'Forces of darkness' you say, like irrational, mechanistic, non-science which offends physical laws, common-sense, bio-chemical reality and the fossil record. You don't say.

More to the point Darwinism is junk but don't say so in public. Too much tax money and paid-for conferences in exotic locales at risk. In the authors' own words:

“what is wrong with Darwin’s account of the evolution of phenotypes is very closely analogous to what is wrong with Skinner’s account of the acquisition of learned behaviour.” [ie it is simply materialistic without basis in fact or logic]

“In neither learning nor evolution is the claim for gradualism self-evidently true. Apparent discontinuities in the fossil record were a cause of considerable worry to Darwin himself, and there continues to be a tug-of-war about how they ought to be interpreted: evolutionary biologists may see fortuitous geological artefacts where palaeontologists see bona fide evidence that evolution sometimes proceeds in jumps (Eldredge, 1996). Likewise, a still robust tradition in developmental psychology postulates a more-or-less fixed sequence of cognitive ‘stages’,”

[note; the geological record clearly refutes evolutionary processes.]

“whatever NS [natural seleciton] is, it cannot be the mechanism that generates the historical taxonomy of species”

“it is characteristic of evolutionary biologists to claim that the same laws of selection that shape the phenotypes of relatively simple creatures such as protozoa also shape the phenotypes of very complex creatures such as primates. It’s clearly an empirical issue whether, or to what extent, such environmentalist claims are true in either case. It turned out that OT [ontological taxonomy] greatly underestimated the role of endogenous structures in psychological explanation;”

typically the consequence of genetic mutation, and macromutations generally decrease fitness. If all that is true, and if evolution is a process in which fitness generally increases over time, it follows that saltations cannot play a major role in evolutionary processes.

theory of natural selection is internally flawed; it’s not just that the data are equivocal, it’s that there’s a crack in the foundations.

The book is a dense read and the Atheists' dismissal of natural selection ranges from the obvious to the obtuse. The authors still search however for naturalist explanations of why fish walked on land; how lizards turned into birds; and why shrews developed into humans with speech and a meta-conscious. In any event while there are a 1000 and one reasons why natural selection is wrong and banal we should give applause to these 2 Darwinists for stating the obvious. They are braver than their fellow cult-members.