Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction - Matt Young and Taner Edis Chapter 1. Grand Themes, Narrow Constituency - Taner Edis Chapter 2. Grand Designs and Facile Analogies - Matt Young Chapter 3. Common Descent - Gert Korthof Chapter 4. Darwin's Transparent Box - David Ussery Chapter 5. Evolutionary Paths to Irreducible Systems - Alan D. Gishlick Chapter 6. Evolution of the Bacterial Flagellum - Ian Musgrave Chapter 7. Self-Organization and the Origin of Complexity - Niall Shanks and Istvan Karsai Chapter 8. The Explanatory Filter, Archaeology, and Forensics - Gary S. Hurd Chapter 9. Playing Games with Probability - Jeffrey Shallit and Wesley Elsberry Chapter 10. Chance and Necessity-and Intelligent Design? - Taner Edis Chapter 11. There Is a Free Lunch After All - Mark Perakh Chapter 12. Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us? - Victor J. Stenger Chapter 13. Is Intelligent Design Science? - Matt Perakh and Matt Young Appendix 1. List of Organizations and Web Sites - Compiled by Gary S. Hurd References About the Editors About the Contributors Index

About the Author :
Matt Young is senior lecturer at the Colorado School of Mines and a former physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He is the author of No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe and two other books. 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.

Review :
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, Nation) Highly recommended. (Choice) Intelligent-design theory makes extravagant claims, but refuses to come up with even a small fraction of the evidence needed to sustain them. Why Intelligent Design Fails brings together clear and devastating arguments by true scientists, which will convince perceptive and fair-minded readers that 'intelligent design' belongs to the history of propaganda, not to the achievements of science. - Norman Levitt (author of Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary C) 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, Nation) This book is a readable and devastating scientific analysis of intelligent design creationism. . . . Unlike ID's proponents, these authors have done the real science that deflates the claims of intelligent design. Their work deserves the respect of everyone with a say in what is taught in public school science classes. - Barbara Forrest (co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design) Not only is the book largely successful, but several articles provide interesting updates of evolution science for nonprofessionals, quite apart from debate. (The Quarterly Review of Biology) 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, Nation)