NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Peter M. Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos (Basic Books, 2012). The preview consists of the greater part of chapter 8, "The Watch and the Ribosome," in which Hoffman asks, "How do molecules evolve?" and replies, "Despite the histrionic debates in various American school boards, the mechanism of evolution is ... quite obvious when contemplated with an open mind." Hoffman addresses "irreducible complexity" and "the information challenge" in passing later in the chapter.
