The one that literally made me scream was that he confused prokaryotic and eukaryotic flagella (p156, I believe). Let's see a few others (I have like thirty pages of notes, and I'm nowhere near finished with the booka
):
- An entire chapter about the origin of life that doesn't tackle the origin of nucleotides and doesn't even mention the RNA world hypothesis.
- The overconfidence with which he says that the phylogeny of major animal groups is no longer disputed (p136). Admittedly I've only just touched the surface of animal phylogenetics in my reading, but my impression is that the state of the field... um, doesn't warrant such confidence. Not at the phylum level, anyway. And the moment you say things like that to creationists, you can bet someone's going to find out that the solid consensus you're implying doesn't exist.
- Things like this:
(Well... just... *cringe*.)
- Another bit about DNA that looks thoroughly confused (p98):
(Who can spot the most mistakes?)
IOW, he seems to muddle molecular biology a lot.
- There's also a thing about the annelid --> mollusc "transition" (pp192-193). Basically, he's saying that annelid-like ancestors to "aplacophores" to monoplacophorans to other molluscs is a neat transitional series. Now, that idea bleeds... For example, "aplacophores" are not
that segmented (IIRC, the only segmented thing about them is the nervous system, which shows some seriation in
most bilaterians.), and they are certainly not more segmented than
Neopilina. I guess we could say that if I had to pick a few convincing transitions for a book, this one wouldn't be among them.
Then there are countless minor issues like calling chitin a protein (p193), most of what he writes about Archaea (calling it Archaebacteria and a kingdom of bacteria, saying that they are the most primitive living things or that they mostly live in extreme environments), calling "worms" a phylum (p123),
Pitx1 a Hox gene (p116), pterosaurs pterodactyls (*cringe*)...
Now I look like I'm bashing the book. To be fair, I don't actually think it's a bad book, but there are clearly areas Prothero is not comfortable with, and there are things that, IMO, are... cosmetically modified to make a point stronger.
(I have a distinct feeling that I'm too anal for my own good
)