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Whereas scientists select conclusions that are supported by the evidence, apologists do the opposite -- they select evidence that supports their pre-formed conclusions. Unfortunately, in spite of his Ph.D. degree, Johnathan Sarfati falls into the latter category. This follows because as an employee of Creation Ministries International (CMI), Sarfati is obligated to follow a Statement of Faith that defines the constraints he must use when interpreting scientific evidence. I suggest readers examine the statement [[...]], one clause of which (D6) states in part: "By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record". Consequently, Sarfati either has to reject the vast majority of scientific evidence that points to evolution and an old earth, or rely on fanciful re-interpretations to make evidence fit with his pre-formed conclusions. That is the very opposite of science. Sarfati will undoubtedly claim that scientists also hold strong opinions. They do. The difference is that scientists, unlike apologists, are free to change their conclusions if compelling new evidence is produced. Examples of such scientific turn-arounds include the eventual acceptance of plate tectonics, the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers, and the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts in eukaryotic cells. The operative word is compelling, and the overwhelming majority of scientists are still waiting for the proverbial rabbit fossil in the Precambrian, or any one of thousands of equivalents, before they change their minds about evolution. Having to put his own creative spin on scientific evidence so that it passes the CMI litmus test is bad enough, but it gets worse. The publisher, Creation Book Publishers, which is "committed to publishing books that promote a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis" is owned and operated by CMI. That makes "The Greatest Hoax on Earth?" essentially a self-published book, and its authority should be judged accordingly. Also, a large proportion of the references Sarfati uses to support his interpretations are to CMI's own website [[...]] and to CMI's own publications - namely, the magazine Creation and the `journal' J. Creation. The latter is claimed to be peer-reviewed, but the instructions to authors make it clear that papers "will be designed to support" CMI's Statement of Faith. That is hardly the equivalent of the critical scrutiny that peer-reviewed papers undergo in the academic world. So we have an author whose claims have to conform to the CMI statement of faith, and who has in effect self-published a book that uses as `evidence' publications that themselves have to support the CMI statement of faith. That adds up to the status of a church newsletter - the sort of book to be given away free at church picnics, which is probably why the publisher's blurb says "Buy it in bulk and save!" It should not be confused with a serious work of science. After all, Sarfati devotes an entire chapter - "Nature red in tooth and claw" - where pain and suffering in animals, the origin of carnivory, poisons, and defense mechanisms, etc., are attributed to the unfalsifiable religious notion of the Fall. Anyone who has followed the claims of young earth creationists (YEC) will find much familiar material in this book. Many of the old talking points about a young earth are here, including Earth's magnetic field decay, salt in the sea, polystrate fossils, helium in zircons, and comets -- all of which have been refuted elsewhere. He even includes the botched radiometric dating of a recent Mt. St Helens lava sample in order to cast doubt on the K-Ar method, and he repeats the old story of Colin Patterson (a senior paleontologist at the British Museum) who supposedly claimed that there are no evolutionary transitions. Dr. Patterson's own account in which he confirms that his statements were taken out of context makes interesting reading (see references in comments). Surely it is time to relegate all these to the "arguments creationists should not use" category. It is worth noting that Dawkins' book is a work of popular science that includes a mere fraction of the available evidence for evolution and an ancient earth. For example, the biostratigraphy of microfossils is not mentioned, so Sarfati has been spared the task of explaining how similarly-sized microscopic foraminifera, for example, managed to arrange themselves in an evolutionary sequence during deposition in Noah's flood. Dawkins does not discuss ice cores, so neither does Sarfati, yet cores from Greenland and the Antarctic date back many hundreds of thousands of years, complete with ash residues from known historic volcanic eruptions. On p72 Sarfati takes Dawkins to task for not knowing that land Galapagos iguanas apparently can interbreed with the marine iguana to form viable hybrids. Sarfati concludes "Naturally, Dawkins did not expect this because of his millions of years dogma, but it makes sense if the marine iguana diverged only in the last few thousand years". Of course Sarfati has to say that because of his adherence to the Statement of Faith. But consider the information he does not divulge. He does not mention, for example, whether such hybridization occurs in the wild and whether the offspring are themselves fertile, so he is not interested in contributing to knowledge, just in casting doubt. Also. he does not mention that phylogenetic analysis puts the land/marine iguana split at about 10-20 million years ago -- about the same as the split between horses and donkeys which readily form viable hybrids. Given that the present-day Galapagos islands are less than 1 million to 4 million years old, the split between land and marine iguanas probably occurred on older now eroded and submerged islands. The existence of a now-drowned Galapagos archipelago 14.5 Ma considerably increases speciation times for the island biota. In addition, the very fact that the Galapagos Islands constitute a volcanic island chain poses a severe problem for YECs. If the islands were really formed according to the fanciful catastrophic plate tectonic (CPT) scenario outlined on pages 177-180 they would each have essentially the same age, but they do not. This effect would be seen even more clearly in the 3000 mile long Hawaiian island chain, which was formed as the Pacific plate moved over the volcanic hot spot at a fixed rate. Consequently there is a linear relationship between the age of the islands and the distance to the hot spot which would not obtain with CPT. Interestingly, when Sarfati inserted himself into the comment section of David E. Levin's review, he was repeatedly challenged to explain the formation of the Hawaiian island chain. Sarfati responded with a number of abusive comments, but he ducked the question, which reveals a lot about him. In Ch 13, Sarfati disagrees with much of Dawkins' discussion about the `design' of the vertebrate eye with its "backwards' wiring, and he introduces recent findings about glial cells that act as fiber optic light guides. Fine, but there is nothing to suggest that this is anything other than natural selection effecting an improvement that Dawkins likened to repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. A professional refutation of Sarfati's views on vertebrate eyes (see comments) agrees with this assessment. Finally, am I the only one who objects to the chess symbolism shown on the cover and 22 more times at the chapter heads? It shows the black king of `Science' triumphant over the fallen white king of `Evolution'. What nonsense! The white king should obviously be labeled YEC.