achieve “scientific literacy,” yet the authors seem unable to recognize their own built-in contradictions. In Chapter 1 they write that science is “guided by one overarching principle: the universe is regular and predictable. The universe is not random.”4 Yet in Chapter 17 they write, “Many scientists believe that millions of years of random mixing and shuffling of molecules culminated in the appearance of one living cell—an object that could consume surrounding chemicals to make exact copies of
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