Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions about Evolution  . By Francisco J.Ayala . Baltimore , MD : The Johns Hopkins University Press , 2010 . xiii + 85. $12.95 (hardcover).

Francisco Ayala is a world‐renowned scientist and conservationist. He is not above using a little humor (“Am I a Monkey?”) to draw us into a very serious conversation about religion and science in the area of evolutionary biology. In an introduction and six short chapters, he presents a powerful justification of why we should all recognize evolution and accept it as proven fact in the same way we accept the theories of the heliocentric solar system and the atomic structure of matter. While I find that I have some quibbles and much delight with the earlier chapters, the last leaves me unsatisfied.

First, a moment of delight: George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dohzhansky were leaders in establishing the Modern Synthesis, our basic understanding of how natural selection works and evolution occurs. Ayala agrees with the great geneticist Dobzhansky who famously said, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (p. 22). With that as background, Ayala proceeds to show that molecular biology substantiates and expands our understanding of evolution as described by Darwin even though this relatively recent field is “a source of evidence and documentation that Darwin could not even have imagined” (p. 24). This is a powerful affirmation, indeed. It is but one of many places in which Ayala puts his case aptly and clearly.

The central question of the book is the title of the last chapter: “Can One Believe in Evolution and God?” Ayala's first answer goes a good way toward the separate magisteria argument most notably propounded by Stephen J. Gould. Ayala says that science and religion look out on the same world through different windows. It is “the same world but [the views] show different aspects of that world,” and “[a]pparent contradictions only emerge when either science or belief, or often both, cross over their boundaries and wrongfully encroach upon another's subject matter. Science is a way of knowing but it is not the only way.”“Common experience, imaginative literature, art, and history provide valid knowledge about the world, and so do revelation and religion for people of faith. The significance of the world and human life, as well as matters concerning moral or religious values, transcend science” (p. xiii, 73–74). This approach may work with persons willing to enter the dialogue on Ayala's basis—seeing religion and revelation on a par with art, history, and common experience—but I believe the dialogue will end here for persons who hold that religion, revelation, and a literal reading of the Bible are supreme.

Ayala introduces several other approaches, seeking to create discussion between religion and science regarding evolution. He cites church fathers, popes, and doctrinal pronouncements; he notes that there are two stories of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis; and he raises the topic of “imperfections” in the products of evolution as well as the issues of death, predation, and disease. Considering the last, Ayala states that, from a biological perspective, these issues hardly need explaining, and are, in fact, acts of natural selection. The rationale for this stance is simply that “natural processes do not entail moral values” (p. 80), and thus, we do not need to ask God to explain why they occur. Ayala says that his approach leaves us with a world shaped through natural selection that is more exciting, and creative, than a Genesis world—rather we have a world in which evolution operates, “new species arise, complex ecosystems come about, and humans have evolved. … I am suggesting that [this point of view] will provide the beginning of an explanation for many people of faith” (p. 80). All this leads to Ayala's conclusion: “evolution is not the enemy of religion but, rather, its friend” (p. 83).

Ayala's approach may be useful to many. I believe, however, that most literalists will be untouched. Consider, for example, that literalists seem not much troubled by the existence of two creation stories or by doctrinal pronouncements. For them, Chapter 3 of Genesis may account for the harms, injustices, imperfections, and catastrophes of this world—the Fall having deranged the whole apparatus of creation. Ayala does not seem to recognize that his implied calls to move away from biblical literalism are either extremely wrenching to literalists or simply preposterous to them, just as it would be for him if someone asked him to seriously consider giving up the heliocentric model of the solar system. It would be interesting to track the response to this book among Christians committed to a literal interpretation of the Bible, a useful study for the right graduate student.