George Gilder, Metaphysic (Derbyshire refutes another creationist)

National Review ^ | 7/13/2006 | John Derbyshire

[curiosity]

I seem to have got myself elected to the post of NR’s designated point man against Creationists.* Indignant anti-Creationist readers have urged me to make a response to George Gilder’s long essay “Evolution and Me” in the current (7/17/06) National Review

Well, I'll give it a shot. I had better say up front that I am only familiar with George’s work — he has written several books, none of which I have read, I am ashamed to say, since I know he has read one of mine — in a sketchy and secondhand way, so what follows is only a response to the aforementioned article “Evolution and Me.” It is possible that George has already dealt with my points in some other of his writings. If so, I hope readers will direct me to the right place.

I’ll also say that I write the following with some reluctance. It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.

It would be less boring if they’d come up with a new argument once in a while, but they never do. I’ve been engaging with Creationists for a couple of years now, and I have yet to hear an argument younger than I am. (I am not young.) All Creationist arguments have been whacked down a thousand times, but they keep popping up again. Nowadays I just refer argumentative e-mailers to the TalkOrigins website, where any argument you are ever going to hear from a Creationist is whacked down several times over. Don’t think it’ll stop ’em, though.**

* * * * *

Jonah Goldberg and I have occasionally, though only very briefly, batted around the idea that the modern age is in want of a metaphysic. I can’t speak for Jonah, but the thought that is in my own mind when I say this is that both naked materialism and the metaphysics appended to the traditional religions are unappealing to great numbers of moderns. Materialism fails to convince because it implies that mind is an illusion. To this, an ordinary person will reply: “To what is this illusion presenting itself?” Materialism has no answer. Nor does it have anything to tell us about free will, morality, or any of the other conundrums discussed at the end of Pinker’s How the Mind Works. To adhere to religious metaphysics, on the other hand, you actually have to belong to one of the established religions, all of which require belief in things (resurrection, transubstantiation, reincarnation, Chosen People) that seem, to many minds accustomed to the evidentiary standards demanded by modern science and law, incredible.

There are of course lots of people who are perfectly satisfied by materialist atheism, and many more who find they can leap the credulity hurdles required by traditional religions. To many hundreds of millions of moderns, though (I am not speaking of only the U.S.A.: the rest of the world does, after all, exist), there is no satisfactory conceptual grounding for their beliefs, desires, and intentions. We really ought to be able to come up with something.

Well, here is George Gilder, taking up the challenge. He offers us a complete metaphysic. He then makes the very large claim that science cannot (or will soon be unable to — I am not clear on this point) progress any further unless it abandons its present materialist assumptions and takes up this new metaphysic of his. What can we make of this?

* * * * *

First let’s take a look at George’s metaphysic. It is pluralistic, which is to say, it argues that the basic substance of the universe is of several different kinds. In George’s schema there are three kinds of stuff: intelligence, information, and matter.

(That is how I read George’s essay. Since he didn’t have space for a really full exposition, my reading may be incorrect. His metaphysic may be of the dualistic mind-matter type, with information merely an aspect of intelligence. Or it may even be monistic, with everything just a manifestation of intelligence. This isn’t clear to me.)

Information, says George, is by definition intelligently organized. If it were not, it would not be information, only random static. Further, information needs some material substrate on which to be inscribed, so that matter (understood in the modern sense of matter-energy) is the carrier of information.

Information is thus at the center of his schema, standing between matter, the substrate on which it is inscribed, and intelligence, which organizes it.

One’s first thought here is that this looks promising right away. We are living in the Information Age. What more suitable for us than a metaphysic in which information plays a starring role? One’s second thought unfortunately cancels out the first one: isn’t this all a bit present-centric? What if, 50 years from now, we are in some other age? Is George’s schema going to lose its appeal? One wants one’s metaphysic to have some staying power. A third thought is that not only is this a bit present-centric, it’s even a bit George-centric. George has, after all, been immersed in the information sciences for decades — has in fact been a mover and an achiever of some note in those sciences, and a prolific and successful expositor of them.

Leaving all that aside, let’s continue examining the schema. There is a hierarchy of being, with insensate matter at the bottom, carrying very little information, up through living creatures, which carry immensely more, having far more complex material substrates, to a supreme intelligence which (I think) has the entire universe as its substrate.

Information, designed by intelligence, makes everything happen. The information in a computer program makes your phone bill happen (and the programmer’s intelligence makes the program happen); the information in DNA makes proteins happen. This is a one-way process: Your phone bill can’t make the computer program happen (nor can the program make your intelligence happen), a protein can’t make a gene happen, etc. Nothing at the lower-information level — a phone bill, a protein — can make anything at the higher-information level — program, gene — happen. This refutes materialism’s assertion that higher information-bearing structures can arise from lower ones. It also refutes evolution, which has high-information-bearing substrates arising out of low-information-bearing ones.

I hope I have got all that right, at least in outline. As metaphysics go, it’s a pretty good schema. Possibly a reader better versed in philosophy than I am might tell you it is not original, that Spinoza or Leibniz or someone came up with something of the kind. I don’t know (though I’d be mildly interested to hear). At any rate, I declare here and now that I am not going to argue with George’s metaphysic, or pick holes in it, though I think I see a couple to be picked.*** Let’s take it as given that this is a good metaphysic for our age.

We then proceed to George’s main point, which is, that science cannot (or will soon be unable to) progress any further unless it abandons its present materialist assumptions and takes up this new metaphysic. What can be said about that?

I think the main thing to be said about it is, that George’s metaphysics is going to be a tough sell to scientists. This is important, because science is a very important part of our culture — “the court from which there is no appeal” (Tom Wolfe). If you can’t sell your metaphysic to scientists, George, then it is just an intellectual curiosity, headed nowhere.

There are two reasons why George’s ideas, as presented in this essay, are a tough sell. First, he loses biologists right away with his Creationist patter. Second, George’s Discovery Institute and his Center for Science and Culture don’t discover things and don’t do any science.

First, the Creationist stuff.

* * * * *

Creationists seem not to be aware of how central evolution is to modern biology. Without it, nothing makes sense. I recently, here on NRO, reviewed Nicholas Wade’s book about human origins. We have known a good deal about human origins for a long time, from researches in archeology and zoology. Darwin himself wrote a book on the topic back in 1871. Now, with the tools of modern genomics at our disposal, we are finding out much, much more. None of this would be possible, none of it would make any sense, if speciation by evolution were not the case. A research program in paleoanthropology premised on the idea that speciation by evolution is not the case, would have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing to tell us. It is hard to see how any such program would be possible; though if George will tell me, I’ll be glad to broadcast his idea.

It’s not just paleoanthropology. Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied. Note that in the latter category fall such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops, new understandings of the brain, with consequences for pedagogy and psychology, and so on. To say to biologists: “Look, I want you to drop all this nonsense about evolution and listen to me,” is like walking into a room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers and telling them that classical aerodynamics is all hogwash.

Biologists are of all scientists least in need of a new metaphysic. Neurophysiology aside, it is in the “hard” sciences that our epistemological underwear is showing. When physicists have to resort to explanations involving teeny strings vibrating in scrunched-up eleven-dimensional spaces a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of an inch across, or cosmologists try to tell us that entire universes are proliferating every nanosecond like bacteria in a petri dish, there is a case to be made for a metaphysical overhaul. Not that work in these fields has come to a baffled dead stop, as George seems to imply. Far from it; the problem in fundamental physics and cosmology is not so much that we have run out of theories, as that we have too many theories. I’ll grant that there are epistemological issues, though.

Biology, by contrast, really has no outstanding epistemological problems. With the tools of modern genomics at its disposal, it is in fact going through a phase of great energy and excitement, so that biologists are much too busy to be bothered with epistemological issues. To modify the simile I offered above: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, around 1930. “Hey, those machines of yours don’t really fly, you know…”

Another turn-off is the blithe way George makes pronouncements about the limits of our understanding. Doesn’t he know the track record here? I think the star of this particular show is Auguste Comte, who declared in 1835 that we could never possibly know the composition of the stars. The spectroscope was invented in 1859.

Not deterred by Comte’s example, George writes that: “This process of protein synthesis and ‘plectics’ cannot even in principle be modeled on a computer.” You sure about that, George? “Even in principle”? How do you know that? Computer modelers are awfully ingenious and creative people. Are you quite sure that you are ahead of all of them? Even that team of 19-year-old, 190-IQ whiz kids in that Microsoft-funded lab in Shanghai, whose heads are full of amazing new ideas? Oh, you’ve never met them? Perhaps you should. And that other team over here, and that one there, and the folk in Bangalore, and the guys in Stuttgart, and that great new institute in Budapest... Never met them either? Oh.

If, five years from now, one of these innumerable teams of researchers develops a really good computer simulation of protein synthesis, will George discard that metaphysic of his, that told him it couldn’t be done? I hope he will.

George’s attitude here is anyway at odds with his “social” arguments. He cannot imagine that anyone could come up with a computer model of protein synthesis because... well, no one ever has. Similarly, Michael Behe of Darwin’s Black Box fame, back in the 1990s, could not imagine that anyone could come up with an evolutionary pathway for the bacterial flagellum, because... no-one ever had. They since have. So George’s assertion that “Behe’s claim of ‘irreducible complexity’ is manifestly true” is manifestly false. Yet these are the people who lecture us on Establishment Science’s reluctance to countenance new ideas!

* * * * *

That brings us to the second problem that scientists have with George’s system: After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.

Scientists discover things. That’s what they do. In fast-growing fields like genomics, they discover new things almost daily — look into any issue of Science or Nature. What has the Discovery Institute discovered this past 16 years? To stretch my simile further: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, never having flown or designed any planes themselves. Are they really surprised that they get a brusque reception?

(I should say here that the handful of Creationists who are themselves professional working scientists produce papers that are, I am told, scientifically valuable. None of those papers are premised on Creationist principles, however, and none have appeared under the aegis of the DI or CSC. The Creationism of Creationist scientists like Michael Behe is extramural — a sort of spare-time hobby. The same can be said of the militant atheism of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, incidentally.)

Creationists respond to this by telling us that they can’t get a hearing in the defensive, closed-minded, “invested” world of professional science. Creationist ideas are too revolutionary, they say. The impenetrably reactionary nature of established science is a staple of Creationist talk. They seem not to have noticed that twentieth-century science is a veritable catalog of revolutionary ideas that got accepted, from quantum theory to plate tectonics, from relativity to dark matter, from cosmic expansion to the pathogen theory of ulcers. Creationism has been around far, far longer than the “not yet accepted” phase of any of those theories. Why is the proportion of scientists willing to accept it still stuck below (well below, as best I can estimate) one percent? The only answer you can get from a Creationist involves a conspiracy theory that makes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion look positively rational.

Three or four paragraphs into George’s piece, seeing where we were headed, and having accumulated considerable experience with this kind of stuff, I did a “find” on the phrase “scientific establishment.” Sure enough, there it was: those obscurantist, defensive old stuffed shirts of “consensus science” — the Panel of Peers, George calls them — keeping original thought at bay.

In George’s example the original thinker was Max Planck, whose first publication on his revolutionary quantum theory of radiation was in 1900. Poor Max Planck was so thoroughly shunned and ostracized by that glowering, starched-collar Panel of Peers for daring to present ideas that violated their settled convictions, that five years later they made him president of the German Physical Society, and in 1918 gave him the Nobel Prize for Physics! Those mean, blinkered scientific establishmentarians!

Creationism has been around in one form or another for well over a century, which is to say, more than 20 times longer than the interval between Max Planck’s first broadcasting of his quantum theory and his election as president of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The fact that Creationism still has no scientific acceptance whatsoever — no presidencies of learned societies, no Nobel Prizes, not a bean, not a dust mote — does not show that the science establishment is hostile to new ideas, it only shows that scientists cannot see that Creationism has anything to offer them.

What gets the attention of scientists is science. Scientists do not shun Creationism because it is revolutionary; they shun it because Creationists don’t do any science. They started out by promising to. The original plan for the CSC (then CRSC) back in 1992 had phase I listed as: “Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity.” The CSC has certainly been energetic in writing and publicity, but if they have done any scientific research, I missed it.

* * * * *

Look at the last paragraph of George’s piece. It is a call to science to: “grasp the hierarchical reality [that the summit of the hierarchy, a.k.a. God] signifies,” to transcend “its [i.e. science’s] materialist trap,” to “look up from the ever dimmer reaches of its Darwinian pit and cast its imagination toward the word and its sources: idea and meaning, mind and mystery, the will and the way.” Science, says George, must — must! — “eschew reductionism — except as a methodological tool — and adopt an aspirational imagination.” (Isn’t that one humongous big “except” in that last sentence there, George?)

A scientist, reading those words, might reasonably ask: “Why? Why must I do those things you urge me to do? I’m getting along just fine as I am, discovering new things about the world, pushing the wheel of knowledge forward a few inches every year. Did you see that groundbreaking paper of mine in Developmental Biology last month? No? Well, everyone in the field is talking about it. So why should I buy into this metaphysics you’re selling? What’s in it for me? What’s in it for science at large?”

Replies George, from that same closing paragraph: because “this is the only way that science can ever hope to solve the grand challenge problems before it, such as gravity, entanglement, quantum computing, time, space, mass, and mind.”

The scientist will then say: “The only way, you say? But look, I’m not doing too badly generating scientific results — uncovering new facts about the world — by following my current way, from down here in my ‘Darwinian pit’. So right off, I can’t agree with you that this new way of yours is the only way. I have no feeling whatsoever that I am stuck, and looking for a way. I have a way — orthodox scientific method. It works. It generates reproducible results, and suggests testable theories. Possibly this essay of yours offers a better way, but yours sure isn’t the only way.

“And why should I think your way is even a better way to tackle the problems you listed? After all, you, with your ‘only way,’ and your institutes with high-sounding names and lavish funding, and all your decades of being in operation, have not generated any scientific results at all. If someone like you, with a radical new outlook, grounded in a radically new metaphysics, starts providing solutions to difficult problems like those in your list, of course I will be impressed. Of course I will take you seriously; I will adopt your methods; I will transcend materialism and eschew reductionism and all that good stuff you exhort me to do. Of course I will! I will come to you humbly to learn how to do the prescribed transcending and eschewing. I’ll be among the first to come knocking on the Discovery Institute’s door, I guarantee. I want to advance knowledge, along whichever path looks most promising. That’s why I’m a scientist.

“As it is, though, you have nothing to show me. Has your Institute, or your Center, actually come up with a new, testable theory of, say, gravity? Where can I read about it? Oh, you haven’t? Has your Discovery Institute, since its founding in 1990, actually, er, discovered anything?

“No? Well, look, no offense, George, but I’ll tell you what. Go back to your Institute, hire some bright new researchers, teach them your metaphysics and your new methodology, buy them some computers and lab equipment, and let them loose to do some science. When they’ve got testable theories and reproducible results, I’ll pay attention. Until then, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my own lab.”

What would you say to this guy, George?

—————————————————————————

* Amongst whom I include Intelligent Design proponents. The Kitzmiller case demonstrated, to courtroom standards of evidence, that I.D. is a species of Creationism. That’s good enough for me.

** The actual Creationist argument Gilder puts forth, the tautology argument, is about 120 years old. Defining “fit” to mean “apt to survive,” “survival of the fittest” is indeed a tautology. This does not disprove Darwin’s theory of speciation by evolution, though. It only proves that “survival of the fittest” is a lousy way to describe the theory. Darwin did not coin the phrase, and did not like it. Very few scientific theories lend themselves to brisk three- or four-word descriptions. This is not even the worst case. Try tangling with a person who takes Einstein’s theories to mean that “everything is relative,” a thing that Einstein rather emphatically did not believe!

*** For example: making generalizations, or even just a plural, out of “designing intelligence” suffers from the grievous problem that only one instance of designing intelligence is known to us, viz., our own. You can’t build generalize much from a single data point.

[Kenny Bunkport]

"The Darwinian theory has become an all-purpose obstacle to thought rather than an enabler of scientific advance."

Because anyone who raises problems with Darwinism is slapped down as a neanderthal (no pun intended), as a "religionist," as an adherent to backwood superstitions, is typically silenced in academia, run off, shouted-down, scorned, looked-down upon, sued by the ACLU, despite the real problems that Darwinism has. In other words, Darwinism isn't a science, but is a worldview that is protected by a fortress mentality. It doesn't answer objections, but only attempts to destroy its detractors. It neither welcomes nor entertains serious challenges. Gilder's right.

[DanDenDar]

This is not even in his area of knowledge and it is a terrible article.

I thought it was quite good. And I don't consider myself ignorant in this area.

[DanDenDar]

Because anyone who raises problems with Darwinism is slapped down as a neanderthal (no pun intended), as a "religionist," as an adherent to backwood superstitions, is typically silenced in academia, run off, shouted-down, scorned, looked-down upon, sued by the ACLU, despite the real problems that Darwinism has

Please identify a piece of criticism of the theory of evolution that is worthy of an sympathetic, intelligent reading.

[tallhappy]

I thought it was quite good. And I don't consider myself ignorant in this area.

What'd you think was the best part?

[Coyoteman]

Because anyone who raises problems with Darwinism is slapped down as a neanderthal (no pun intended), as a "religionist," as an adherent to backwood superstitions, is typically silenced in academia, run off, shouted-down, scorned, looked-down upon, sued by the ACLU, despite the real problems that Darwinism has. In other words, Darwinism isn't a science, but is a worldview that is protected by a fortress mentality. It doesn't answer objections, but only attempts to destroy its detractors. It neither welcomes nor entertains serious challenges. Gilder's right.

That relates directly to the nature of the challenges; when we hear "2nd law of thermodynamics" and "were you there?" and "its just a theory" for the 50th time, what response would you expect?

Bring science and you will be listened to. Bring junk science or creation "science" and you will be treated poorly. Why would you expect anything different?

[Kenny Bunkport]

Uncommon Dissent. If you’ve never heard the term "post-Darwinian," welcome to the world of thinkers who reject evolutionary theory and its reliance on the notion of chance (i.e. "random mutation"). In this provocative volume, biologists, mathematicians and physicists as well as theologians and other intellectuals argue, as editor Dembski writes, that "the preponderance of evidence goes against Darwinism." The contributors invoke mathematics and statistics to support their theory that an "intelligent cause is necessary to explain at least some of the diversity of life." In other words, the degree of diversity and complexity in life forms implies the need for an intelligent designer. The nature and identity of this designer is not discussed by all the writers; others call this intelligence God. Supporters of intelligent design differentiate themselves from creationists, but they, too, argue that their theory should be taught in high school biology courses. Anyone interested in these debates and their implications for education will find this collection to be important reading.

Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design. Woodward's account shows that the problem with the template of "religion versus Darwin" is that it simply doesn't fit the ID movement, although many detractors try to insist otherwise. The founder of the movement, Phillip Johnson, was, until his recent retirement, a Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. While on sabbatical in the late 1980s, he studied the scientific case for and against Darwinism and concluded that the empirical case for Darwinism was surprisingly weak. He then presented his findings at a symposium held through his law school and was further encouraged to pursue his criticism of Darwinism. As Woodward documents, the proponents of ID argue that Darwinism lacks crucial evidence, begs important questions, and often caricatures alternatives unfairly. They make their case against Darwinian evolution by pointing out flaws in the arguments and gaps in the evidence, not by citing religious texts.

There are a growing number of books defending and criticizing ID, but Woodward's book is unique in that it assesses the history of this movement of the past decade from the perspective of the classical discipline of rhetoric. Given the book's rhetorical angle, the reader is treated to both the straight arguments for and against Darwinism, as well as an inside look at the personalities and persuasive strategies used on both sides of the debate. (For example, when noted Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould first met Phillip Johnson, he dispensed with pleasantries and said, "You're a creationist and I've got to stop you.") In Woodward's account, Johnson emerges as the rhetorical mastermind of ID, who, though an outsider to the scientific guild, nevertheless mastered the scientific case against Darwinism and helped develop a consistent strategy for the ID movement. His simple charge is that Darwinism is driven more by a commitment to a materialistic worldview than by the actual evidence of biology. This book details the rise of the intellectual, scientific, and philosophical challenge to Darwinism.

“Doubts About Darwin is a delightful chronicle of the ways a small group of doubters are reshaping the debate and bringing out the inadequacies of natural selection to the general public. Doubters and believers alike ought to read Doubts About Darwin. It has much to teach them.” – Murray Eden, professor emeritus, MIT.

Darwinian Fairytales. Philosopher David Stove concludes in his hilarious and razor-sharp inquiry that Darwin's theory of evolution is a ridiculous slander on human beings. But wait! Stove is no creationist nor a proponent of so-called intelligent design. He is a theological skeptic who admits Darwin's great genius and acknowledges that the theory of natural selection is the most successful biological theory in history. But Stove also thinks that it is also one of the most overblown theories of science and gives a penetrating inventory of what he regards as the unbelievable claims of Darwinism. Darwinian Fairytales is a must-read book for people who want to really understand the issues behind the most hotly debated scientific controversy of our time.

Darwin’s Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement. This book honors Phillip Johnson, the Berkeley law professor whose 1991 publication Darwin on Trial and later books helped intelligent design emerge as a highly visible, and highly controversial, alternative to Darwinism. While it may be premature to hail Johnson as "Darwin's Nemesis," these essays reveal him as an influential strategist and mentor within the ID movement. Contributors to the 2004 symposium that spawned this collection include leading ID advocates Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells and Scott Minnich, as well as Darwin defender Michael Ruse, who has engaged Johnson in debate. Other contributors address cultural and political questions beyond evolution itself, such as Francis Beckwith's timely review of legal controversies over ID in the classroom, J. Budziszewski's discussion of naturalism and the Natural Law tradition and editor William Dembski's commentary on the professional—and often personal—"backlash" against ID advocates. Readers who are familiar with the basics of ID and curious about the movement's development and inner workings will find much of interest, although for an account of the most recent and current controversies over ID, they will need to consult other sources.

Privileged Planet. Is Earth merely an insignificant speck in a vast and meaningless universe? On the contrary. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery shows that this cherished assumption of materialism is dead wrong. Earth is more significant than virtually anyone has realized. Contrary to the scientific orthodoxy, it is not an average planet around an ordinary star in an unremarkable part of the Milky Way.

In this original book, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards present an array of evidence that exposes the hollowness of this modern dogma. They demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth-and the universe itself-were designed both for life and for scientific discovery. Readers are taken on a scientific odyssey from a history of tectonic plates, the wonders of water, and solar eclipses, to our location in the Milky Way, the laws that govern the universe, and the beginning of cosmic time.

Review of The Privileged Planet (The Royal Astronomical Society)

What Darwin Didn’t Know. This book has to do with medical facts and how they conflict with the theory of evolution. Darwin may have made a sincere effort to explain the life around him in the nineteenth century, but he knew little, if anything, about the human cell, heredity (why a child resembles his parents), immunity, hormones, blood pressure and scores of feedback loops that tell the body when it's too hot or too cold, hungry or full, sick or well, and tired or refreshed. These examples and many more are discussed. They all speak clearly for Intelligent Design, a discussion that needs to re-enter mainstream American dialogue. "There is a tide of data mounting against the Darwinian concept that randomness can explain the wonder of life. In What Darwin Didn't Know, Geoffrey Simmons converts the tide into a tidal wave of evidence." Gerald Schroeder, Ph.D.

Intelligent Design. "Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This statement, quoted by William Dembski, is a way of summarizing intelligent design theory, which argues that it is possible to find evidence for design in the universe. The author of The Design Inference (a scholarly exploration of this topic published by Cambridge University Press) aims in this book to show the lay reader "how detecting design within the universe, and especially against the backdrop of biology and biochemistry, unseats naturalism"-- and above all Darwin's expulsion of design in his theory of evolution.

Intelligent Design is organized into three parts: the first part gives an introduction to design and shows how modernity--science in the last two centuries--has undermined our intuition of this truth. The second and central part of the book examines "the philosophical and scientific basis for intelligent design." The final part shows how "science and theology relate coherently and how intelligent design establishes the crucial link between the two." This suggests that Dembski is not simply rejecting Darwin and naturalism on fundamentalist or biblical grounds. While grounded in faith, he wishes to show how "God's design is accessible to scientific inquiry."

The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design. Dembski, a philosopher and mathematician who has been an important theorist for the intelligent design movement, handles a wide range of questions and objections that should give both fans and detractors of ID plenty to chew on. While most of the core arguments of this book will be familiar to readers of the ID literature, they are presented here in (if one may say so) a more highly evolved form: explanations are clearer, objections are borne more patiently, distinctions and concessions are artfully made. Without denying the theological and cultural implications of ID, Dembski is more concerned with ID's future as a scientific enterprise: a point where despite some successes the movement continues to struggle. The book's format makes for a clear read. Chapters can focus on a single issue and adopt an appropriate tone: basic questions get basic replies, pointed objections get forceful rejoinders, and technical questions allow Dembski to unleash a faculty for technical detail that can only be called impressive.

”It will not do for those to whom Dembski has issued his challenge to rely on their standing or authority within the scientific and academic establishments to wave him away. The truth is that the honor and integrity of science really are at stake.” – Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University.

Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Joining the ranks of Philip Johnson and Michael Behe, Cornelius G. Hunter gives us Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil, the latest must-read installment of scholarship on human origins. Beginning with the provocative statement that "evolution is neither atheism in disguise nor is it merely science at work," Hunter denies evolution's claim to be pure science, beyond the "entanglements" of faith or belief. Ultimately, he shows how Darwin's theological concerns-particularly his inability to reconcile a loving, all-powerful God with the cruelty, waste, and quandaries of nature-led him to develop the theory of evolution.

Hunter provides the crucial key to engaging the intelligent design debate in the context of modern theology. He addresses the influences of Milton, rationalism, the enlightenment, and Deism, quoting extensively from Darwin's journals, letters, and scientific writings. Readers of history, science, philosophy, and theology will enjoy this honest telling of a complex and engrossing story.

Not By Chance. Physicist Lee M. Spetner's book has biologists and geneticists praising this book as one of the most serious challenges to the modern theory of evolution. "It is certainly the most rational attack on evolution that I have ever read"--Professor E. Simon, Department of Biology, Purdue University.

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Often invoked as justification for unbelief, in this book modern science provides the basis for an unusual and provocative affirmation of religious faith. A professor of theoretical particle physics at the University of Delaware, Stephen Barr deploys his scientific expertise to challenge the dogmas of naturalistic materialism and to assert his belief that nothing explains the order of the universe better than divine design. To be sure, Barr recognizes that Darwin's work has swept away the arguments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theologians, who traced the handiwork of God in birds, flowers, and seashells. But the old argument-from-design reemerges with new sophistication after Barr presses evolutionary theory for a plausible account of the origin of what quantum physics demands – that is, a conscious observer – and comes away with nothing but skepticism about the skeptics. Barr indeed relishes the irony of a skeptical logic of random chance that forces unbelievers who balk at one unobservable God to accept, on doctrinal faith, a myriad of unobservable worlds on which the matter-motion lottery has not produced the winning ticket of conscious intelligence. The absurdity grows even more palpable among astrophysicists who avoid acknowledging the human-friendly pattern in subatomic and cosmic architecture found in the observable universe only by theorizing the existence of an infinite number of unobservable universes in which sovereign randomness has dictated other and more hostile architectures. Neither religiously sectarian nor technically daunting, this book invites the widest range of readers to ponder the deepest kind of questions.

In the Beginning Was Information: A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature. Information is one of the most fundamental parts of our world, yet we don’t often think about it. This classic book demonstrates the importance of information to life of any kind. More to the point, it demonstrates the necessity of an Organizer and Originator of the information necessary for life. The author shows that the highly complex information present in DNA mitigates a non-intelligent beginning for life.

Werner Gitt has a doctorate in engineering, and has been a professor at the Federal Physics-Technology Institute in Braunschweig, Germany, since 1971.

[DanDenDar]

I felt Derbyshire captured the ferment of activity in bioinformatics exactly. Gilder made the ridiculous assertion that biologists were ignorant of information theory. Derbyshire points out that in fact there is so much going on in bioinformatics that biologists are too busy to navel-gaze, the way physicists are prone to do.

Neither of them is fully biologically literate. What do they mean by 'modelling protein synthesis'? But Derbyshire is far more literate than Gilder, who committed a dozen solecisms in his silly article.

Not a bad piece by a layman, at all. To anyone who has argued with creationists for any lenght of time, his 'whack-a-mole' analogy is exactly right.

[js1138]

So where's the original research?

[Disambiguator]

Well, that settles it! I have my summer reading for next year.

That is quite the list.

[tallhappy]

I felt Derbyshire captured the ferment of activity in bioinformatics exactly.

Very interesting. I thought that that was the weakest because this ferevncy which is there (yes yes yes!!!) really has nothing to do with this crevo debate and is well beyond anything either side is talking about.

In reality the "ferment of activity" is being and will be very negative to traditional what can be called cannonical evolutionary theory. In other words it is wrong. This will allow anti-evolutionists to use these finding later to detract from evolution and the same argument will go on forever.

I bolded the key part.

[PatrickHenry]

Evolution Ping The List-O-Links

A conservative, pro-evolution science list, now with over 380 names. See the list's explanation, then FReepmail to be added or dropped. To assist beginners: But it's "just a theory", Evo-Troll's Toolkit, and How to argue against a scientific theory.

[blowfish]

And it's a typical response of the Darwinists to characterize creationists as slack-jawed idiots.

Based on some of the recent geology discussions, it's a tempting conclusion - but one I will resist making.

[DanDenDar]

In reality the "ferment of activity" is being and will be very negative to traditional what can be called cannonical evolutionary theory.

Copuld you please give an example of this. Be as specific as possible.

[ml1954]

It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole.

And there's high probability this thread will illustrate this point.

[PatrickHenry]

Thanks for the ping.

[DC Bound]

This was an entertaining read. Derbyshire makes a few comic points about Gilder, but doesn't seem to be mean-spirited. While his intent was to respond to Gilder's article, he doesn't seem to wander very far beyond the single point, "show me the science." Being a lay person with slight familiarity with the debate, and leaning toward the creationist side, I'd like to hear a reasonable response to his challenge.

The single greatest point Derbyshire made, to me, was that after a century of debate, hell, after twenty years of debate, with all the modern tools of communication and research available, why hasn't the "truth" of creationism won more converts? If it is true, more than 1% of the people who devote their lives to scientific study should have signed on by now.

And I'm not buying the argument that the Darwinian Establishment has too much to lose. Not all of them. Most of them have the same values we do. And what about the young scientists who are still idealistic, those most prone to work on radical ideas that overthrow the established order? They should be signing on in droves.

As I said, I lean to the creationist side. But creationists who try to evade the rules of debate by taking the argument out of the sphere of science get what they have due. Free speech means that the merit of the speech is up for debate. If creationism is true, science will support it. I'd like to hear more about that science, if it exists, and less of the rhetoric from both sides that ultimately says nothing but, "Trust me, you're wrong. And you're an idiot."

[bobdsmith]

I seem to have a mental flaw where if any article which I am reading which contains the words "materialism" or "metaphysics" I turn off completely and cannot read another word. I can stare at it all I want but nothing sinks in from that point on.

[ml1954]

The single greatest point Derbyshire made, to me, was that after a century of debate, hell, after twenty years of debate, with all the modern tools of communication and research available, why hasn't the "truth" of creationism won more converts? If it is true, more than 1% of the people who devote their lives to scientific study should have signed on by now.

And a well made point it was. And so it bears repeating. Creationism isn't concerned with winning more converts, at least any beyond the age of about 15. It's concerned with loosing converts it made before they were about 15 and recruiting as many before that age as it can.

[forsnax5]

Whack-A-Placemarker

[stands2reason]

So the researchers at DI should have tons of discoveries since they aren't hampered by ToE.