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There was a period in which I was doubtful about the theory of evolution, mainly because of reading a crank book called The New Geology, by a creationist named George McCready Price. His attack on evolution was fairly sophisticated. He was a Seventh Day Adventist who believed that the fossils were remnants of life that perished at the time of the flood. He argued that the theory of evolution is largely based on the fact that when you consider the fossils in the different strata, you find very simple forms in the older strata, and then as you get into younger and younger strata, you get more complicated forms. But, he said, this is circular reasoning, because the way they date the beds is by the type of fossils they contain. So his New Geology is filled with photographs of places where the fossils are in the wrong order: you find the complicated fossils in the lower beds and the simpler fossils in the higher beds. What he didn’t realize is that these “upside- down” fossils are due to folding of the strata or cleavage along a fault line. But if you don’t know this fact, his arguments are quite strong. It was not until I took courses in geology at the University of Chicago that I understood where Price went wrong. His book is one of the great crank works of all time. Modern creationists are still citing it and recommending it—sometimes without giving him credit!

Priceless!