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

Matt Young; Taner Edis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081353433X ISBN 13: 9780813534336

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081353433X
• ISBN 13: 9780813534336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 238