Here’s a great idea for students starting biology this year, whether at the high school or college level. Give them a copy of Zombie Science. As author Jonathan Wells points out in a conversation with Robert Crowther for ID the Future, the evolutionary icons that Dr. Wells rapidly dismantles in this new book and its predecessor, Icons of Evolution, still turn up in many textbooks as triumphant illustrations of unguided evolution at work.

Download the podcast here, or listen to it here.

Obviously, Zombie Science isn’t intended as a textbook substitute. However, it is written at a level that a thoughtful and curious high school student can readily comprehend. In the podcast, Wells and Crowther discuss a pair of icons that remain nearly ubiquitous — the Miller-Urey experiment, which does not even begin to illuminate life’s origins, and the false notion that DNA is the “secret of life,” explaining everything about us.

If you know an inquisitive biology student, handing her a copy of Zombie Science would put a lot of things in a helpful context for the coming year.

Photo credit: jarmoluk, via Pixabay.