I would like someone to recommend a book for me about evolution, written for the lay person who isn’t that scientifically knowledgable.
Also, are there any books by one who believes God kicked off evoltuion?
(set things in motion)
A good one is by Ken Smith, it’s called “Finding Darwin’s God”.
Also, “Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: A Basic Guide to the Facts in the Evolution Debate” by Tim Berra.
Both good books IMO.
Science and Creationism edited by Ahsley Montagu.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195032535/002-1867273-7351203?v=glance
While I wouldn’t recommend Darwin to the non-scientist, I thought you might be interested to know that he goes out of his way to discuss why his theory does not downgrade God’s participation in the process. I definitely got the impression that he believed God had an act of creation (or more than one) which included the mechanisms for evolution.
I’d recommend Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker”. I thought this was very well written (for semi-scientific types), and easily understandable for the average joe on the street.
I remember learning really “basics” of Darwinism way back in high school science and biology. But this book really filled in the gaps, and flushed concepts out. I loved it and have recommended it to a number of people.
I’ll second the recommendation for The Blind Watchmaker, and I’ll suggest Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene as well.
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel isn’t explicitly about evolution, but there’s a lot on human evolution in it.
I don’t like Stephen Jay Gould’s writing as much as I like Dawkins’s work (and I agree with Dawkins in his assessment of Gould’s notion of punctuated equilibrium), but I recommend SJG’s The Panda’s Thumb.
Maybe you should start with a secular book on the subject, but approach the theory of evolution as an explanation, an attempt to explain how living things change over the ages. Evolution is a mechanism, much like the way stars and magnets work; if you want to believe that God was the architect of that, then that’s a matter of personal faith that you needn’t abandon whatever book you read.
Second or third The Selfish Gene, which describes very clearly how molecules may have combined in the primordial stew to form self-replicating molecules, more and more complex until the cellular level is reached. I wouldn’t recommend The Blind Watchmaker to you, Vanilla, because I find it agressively atheistic. But others’ opinions may vary.
I’d also second any of S.J. Gould’s collections; any one essay isn’t going to give you a firm grounding in evolutionary theory, but they’re so interesting and such fun reads that you’re likely to pick up quite a lot just casually.
Biology texts from the used book store are very handy, too, for brushing up on ideas you have forgotten about.