Product Description

"Highly recommended." —Choice

"A terrific book that explores, fairly and openly, whether proponents of ID have any scientifically valid gadgets in their toolbox at all . . . accessibly written throughout and an invaluable aid to teachers and scientists."––Kevin Padian, professor and curator, University of California, Berkeley, and president, National Center for Science Education

Is Darwinian evolution established fact, or a dogma ready to be overtaken by "intelligent design"? This is the debate raging in courtrooms and classrooms across the country.

Why Intelligent Design Fails assembles a team of physicists, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and archaeologists to examine intelligent design from a scientific perspective. They consistently find grandiose claims without merit.

Contributors take intelligent design’s two most famous claims––irreducible complexity and information-based arguments––and show that neither challenges Darwinian evolution. They also discuss thermodynamics and self-organization; the ways human design is actually identified in fields such as forensic archaeology; how research in machine intelligence indicates that intelligence itself is the product of chance and necessity; and cosmological fine-tuning arguments.

Intelligent design turns out to be a scientific mistake, but a mistake whose details highlight the amazing power of Darwinian thinking and the wonders of a complex world without design.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #351424 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"Highly recommended." - Choice "A terrific book that explores, fairly and openly, whether proponents of ID have any scientifically valid gadgets in their toolbox at all... accessibly written throughout and an invaluable aid to teachers and scientists." - Kevin Padian, professor and curator, University of California, Berkeley, and president, National Center for Science Education"

About the Author
Matt Young is the author of No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe. He was a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and is now Senior Lecturer in Physics at the Colorado School of Mines.

Taner Edis is an associate professor of physics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, and the author of The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science.

Customer Reviews

An excellent addition to the anti-ID literature
An excellent addition to the anti-ID literature

An encouraging development: during a relatively short period of time four new books have appeared, devoted to debunking the fallacy labeled Intelligent Design. The first three of these books (Unintelligent Design by Mark Perakh, Creationism's Trojan Horse by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross and God, The Devil and Darwin by Niall Shanks) have been rather extensively reviewed on this site. Now these three books have been complemented by one more high-quality treatise - a collection of articles by 13 scientists, edited by Young and Edis. Each of the 13 authors is prominent in his field and possesses impressive experience and erudition, enabling each of them to expertly dissect the errors which abound in the opuses of the IDists. Given the uninterrupted stream of publications by the IDists, all four books (and the new collection in particular) are very timely tools which will provide excellent ammunition to science teachers concerned by the attempts of religiously motivated crowds to subvert teaching our kids real science. It will also help those who are searching for a reasonable world look but are confused by the din of the anti-science propaganda. A very impressive book.

Not groundbreaking, but a good resource
So as not to rehash the better reviews by others, let me list a couple of things I liked about this book:

1. As a person who is skeptical of outlandish claims on both sides of this debate, I was pleasantly surprised at the restrained nature of this book. The opening chapter, written by one of the editors, sets the stage by going to great pains to admit that ID is not intriniscally forbidden from the scientific forum (p. 17), and that it is at least theoretically possible that future research could validate some form of ID (p. 18). This in constrast to many scientists would bar ID from the table forever. Of course, this point is only theoretical at present, since the book is all about how ID fails as science (and mathematics).

2. Unlike many anthologies, this book, especially in the first half, is quite self-conscious about not being repetitive; the chapter authors frequently refer the reader to other chapters that look at other aspects of their assigned topic.

3. While most of the chapters are informative and useful, two are particularly so, perhaps because they are not as focused on refuting Behe and Dembski. Chapter 3 is an excellent discussion of why common descent cannot be limited to the certain classification levels. This chapter addresses ID proponents who allow for a great deal of common descent and those who allow for very little. While the former are getting more press these days, the latter are still active in large numbers.

4. Chapter 7 is a fascinating look at how nature can, and demonstrably does, produce complexity and apparent design. This is probably the most approachable chapter in the book.

5. Chapters 9-11, although a bit repetitive and overly technical, provide a good introduction to some important statistical issues, including a nice discussion of random chance versus natural selection.

Overall, this is a good resource for various arguments to counter Behe and Dembski, as well as more general arguments. Some chapters, however, are not as approachable to the lay reader and may not be as useful in that regard.

This is one of the best books
This is one of the best books about the newest attack on science by adherents of intelligent design (mostly affiliated with the Discovery Institute of Seattle). It is a very fine addition to the books by Niall Shanks, Mark Perakh, and Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, which all have appeared recently and have already caused a lot of discussion. Unlike the three other books, this is not a creation of a single author (or two co-authors) but an anthology with 13 contributors. This format allowed for presenting a rainbow of views from different vantage points. All chapters, however, are united in the overall thesis according to which the new form of creationism, dubbed intelligent design, differs from the earlier versions of creationism in its seemingly larger sophistication, but essentially is as fallacious as its more primitive predecessors. While some of the arguments advanced in this book were heard before, in this or that form, the book contains plenty of fresh material as well, and when a previously known argument is reproduced it is usually done in a somehow novel fashion. A reader will find in this book many interesting points specifically addressing various fallacious assertions by intelligent design proponents. I was dismayed reading the numerous dismissive reviews of this book which blatantly distort the contents of this book and reflect the visceral rejection of its arguments by reviewers who more often than not do not at all talk about what the book actually says, indulging instead in unsubstantiated assaults.