A Superb, Quite Insightful, Primer on the so-called "Evolution vs. Intellligent Design Debate"

books:

	• Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design Michael Shermer Times Books, 2006 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Intelligent design is neither

A great book refuting so-called "intelligent design." Take that, Mike Seaver.
Intelligent Design is neither. The concept of creationism and teaching it in our schools is, in the words of the Dover, PA judge, "breathtakingly inane." Shermer is inimitable in his wit and brilliance.
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A great book about Darwin and evolution

Yesterday, I read Michael Shermer's excellent book Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. It was so darn good, I couldn't put it down. In his youth, Shermer had been a creationist and a born-again evangelical Christian. Now he is one of America's most famous skeptics, being the publisher and editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine. Remember that a skeptic is not a crusty old closed-minded curmudgeon; rather, he is someone who demands tangible, testable evidence before believing an extraordinary claim. Contrary to what many people will tell you, the believer in "weird things" is more often than not the closed-minded one. For nothing can shake the true believer's faith; a pile of evidence as high as Mount Everest would not be enough. A skeptic, on the other hand, is willing to change his mind upon receiving substantial evidence showing that what he had thought was right is wrong.

In the Darwin book, Shermer points out that if a witnessed phenomenon is not understood, people often jump to the conclusion that the phenomenon is supernatural. Shermer explains why people believe in magic, miracles, and God:

"One day I was thinking about what we might find if we went in search of an intelligent designer when I remembered Arthur C. Clarke's famous Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' This led me to consider what a sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from, which led me to formulate Shermer's Last Law: Any sufficiently advanced Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is indistinguishable from God" (40).

Along a similar line, many positive results that cannot be otherwise explained are attributed to God's intervening hand. Some people talk about a "miracle" happening in a hospital when a patient unexpectedly recovers from an ailment doctors had deemed untreatable (and they're not using the word miracle in a metaphorical sense). Why? Why jump to a supernatural explanation? Because a natural one has yet to be found! Throughout human history, there have been many phenomena that people could not understand, but as a curious species, we don't leave it at that; we want an explanation. If a natural one is not forthcoming, we default to a supernatural one. In the Middle Ages, when someone suffered what we now know to be an epileptic seizure, many came to the conclusion that the unfortunate person was possessed by the devil. Medical science has since taught most of us to know better. So isn't it more reasonable to assume that the aforementioned hospital patient recovered for natural reasons that we just haven't figured out yet? Take this a step further: Before Darwin's Origin of Species, it was perfectly understandable that people believed in God as the creator of the inhabitants of our planet. After all, there was no other explanation. But now we have an elegant natural scientific explanation, well-supported by tons of evidence, for the existence of all living creatures. So why hold on to the God hypothesis? Isn't it as silly as the devil hypothesis in the case of the seizure victim?

In his very readable book Finding Darwin's God, Kenneth Miller (who believes in God) writes the following in answer to a hypothetical arguer who maintains that the light from the sun is a miracle:

"The statement that the workings of the sun are miraculous would place them beyond explanation, beyond investigation. If what happens on the sun is a miracle, then there is no point in trying to understand it. [...] If taken at face value, the miraculous explanation would tell us that science is not worth the trouble, that it will never yield the answers we seek, and that nature will forever be beyond all human understanding. Sterile and nonproductive in its consequences, the claim of miracle would put a lid on curiosity, experimentation, and the human creative imagination" (28).

There are no miracles. There is no magic. There is just Nature. But why be depressed about that? Nature is filled with more wonder and awe-inspiring mystery than any supernatural nonsense that any theologian can dream up. It's just that understanding natural phenomena takes work. Any lazy-minded slacker can believe blindly in the supernatural. Believing in miracles takes no study, no research, just willing acceptance without asking for a shred of evidence. And the insidious thing here is that many times the faithful look down upon any search for evidence; a believer's faith is often considered more valuable, more worthy, if he seeks no evidence at all. This puzzling concept probably originated from something Jesus purportedly said to his apostle Thomas after the crucifixion: "Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29). Jesus apparently was not a champion of critical thinking. The skeptic, on the other hand, keeps his mind open at all times, never forgetting the need for extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims. As the physicist Richard Feynman once put it, "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

Many people believe in God because they figure that every effect needs a cause: The universe is the effect; therefore, God is the cause. But that argument raises a further question: If God created the universe, then who or what created God? Here's how Shermer responds to this conundrum:

"The theists' response to this line of inquiry is that God needs no cause -- God is a causeless cause, an unmoved mover. But why should God not need a cause? If the universe is everything that is, ever was, or ever shall be, God must be within the universe or be the universe. In either case, God would himself need to be caused, and thus the regress to a first cause leads back to the question: What caused God? And if God does not need to be caused, then clearly not everything needs to be caused. Maybe the initial creation of the universe was its own first cause and the Big Bang was the prime mover" (123-124).

So if someone argues that God just always was, it follows that it is also possible that the universe just always was -- and, presto, the need for God disappears.

Many people don't accept the theory of evolution because they see it as a chance process. They say, "Look at the human eye, for example. Don't tell me that the eye came about just by chance. It must have been conceived by an intelligent designer." But evolution by natural selection is the opposite of chance. Shermer explains:

"An understanding of evolutionary theory makes clear that natural selection is not 'random,' nor does it operate by 'chance.' Natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes. The eye evolved from a single light-sensitive cell into the modern complex eye through thousands of intermediate steps, many of which still exist in nature" (82-83).

Don't you find that explanation to be more reasonable -- and more awe-inspiring -- than the rather lusterless claim that "God did it"? And don't be fooled by those who say that evolution is "only a theory." They are purposely confounding the quotidian meaning of the word theory with the scientific definition. In ordinary talk, a theory is a guess: I have a theory about why Jimmy broke his date with Marianne. But to a scientist, a theory is "a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena" (American Heritage Dictionary). A couple of other things that are "only theories" are gravity and electricity. Almost every scientist will tell you that evolution is a fact because the theory of evolution by means of natural selection is one of the strongest and best-supported theories (because of mountains of evidence) in the annals of modern science. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is just creationism -- the notion that "God did it" -- dressed up to look like science.

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A Superb, Quite Insightful, Primer on the so-called "Evolution vs. Intellligent Design Debate"

In "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design" Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, reviews succinctly both the overwhelming evidence in support of contemporary evolutionary theory and the pseudoscientific religious nonsense known as Intelligent Design, and then, discusses "the real, unsolved problems in evolution". Shermer, for example, has ample space to describe briefly Ernst Mayr's theory of allopatric speciation, and its relationship to punctuated equilibrium, the evolutionary paleontological theory developed by American invertebrate paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. But he also devotes ample space to dissecting Intelligent Design concepts like William Dembski's "Law of Conservation of Information", noting its irrelevance to both current mathematical information theory and the transfer and accretion of information - via DNA - in living biological systems. He offers an elegant overview of the origins and history of the so-called "Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Debate", devoting ample time to the existence of the infamous "Wedge Document" and the trial proceedings of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial and, of course, the harsh verdict rendered by Federal Judge John E. Jones III against both Intelligent Design and the Dover Area School District board.

Shermer's terse tome is noteworthy for several reasons. First, he recognizes the necessity for engaging Intelligent Design advocates like Michael Behe and William Dembski, among others, in debates between themselves and knowledgeable critics on behalf of genuine science like Shermer, if only to educate public audiences on the nature of scientific inquiry, the ample facts obtained from genuine scientific research, and the disingenuous lies, half-truths, and omissions promoted zealously by Intelligent Design advocates. Second, he makes a most persuasive case explaining why evolution ought to be accepted by conservatives, as the agent ultimately responsible for the origins of morality in humans, and that "survival of the fittest" could be seen as a biological application of Adam Smith's concept of laissez faire free market economics. Last, but not least, Shermer contends that science should be viewed as being complementary towards spirituality, by engendering a "sense of awe" in viewing, for example, distant galaxies; therefore evolution can and should be seen in this very light. For these reasons, Shermer's terse tome deserves a place on the bookshelves of as wide a readership as possible.

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A patchwork, in which some pieces are more interesting than others

Michael Shermer's book Why Darwin Matters is a good illustration of the fact that the rather tiresome wrangling between evolutionists and IDers is in fact but one battleline in a more comprehensive war between worldviews. Shermer explicitly takes on ID. But in doing so, he gestures at the conflict between naturalism (science) and supernaturalism (religion) that fuels the more specific evolution/ID struggle.

Ultimately, Shermer argues that the conflict between science and religion is unnecessary and wasteful of time and energy because science deals with that which is "natural" and religion with that which is "supernatural." In short, he adopts a separate worlds model. Whether he accepts as legitimate possibilities any claim from the supernaturalist camp isn't clear. Early on in his book he cites, apparently approvingly, Tillich's claim that God is beyond existence, and that the project of natural theology is beside the point. This could mean that Shermer accepts Tillich's theological position, or that he's merely quoting Tillich to show that even believers can disagree with ID.

Shermer shines when he tries to account for why creationists refuse to take evolutionary theory seriously (chapters 2 and 3). Especially interesting is the data he and Frank Sulloway have collected on predictors of belief in God. The seven strongest predictors, they discovered, are (1) being raised in a religious manner; (2) parents' religiosity; (3) lower levels of education; (4) being female; (5) a large family; (6) lack of conflict with parents; and (7) being younger. Sulloway and Shermer also discovered that respondents generally claim intellectual justifications for their own belief in God, but attribute emotional ones when asked to explain why other people belief in God (chapter 3). These data are important contributions, I think, to formulating a natural history of religion.

Chapter 4, a long discussion of objections to arguments from design (not merely ID, as the chapter title misleadingly suggests), is probably the strongest one in the book. But much less compelling is Shermer's insistence, appealing to the by now famous "Wedge" argument, that IDers are conspiring to take over public school curricula, as well as Chapter 8's rather bizarre claim that an ethics derived from evolutionary principles ought to satisfy Christians and conservatives. Finally, the Coda Genesis Revisited with which Shermer closes his book is trite and offensive.

Three and a half stars.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

A creationist-turned-scientist demonstrates the facts of evolution and exposes Intelligent Design?s real agenda
Science is on the defensive. Half of Americans reject the theory of evolution and ?Intelligent Design? campaigns are gaining ground. Classroom by classroom, creationism is overthrowing biology.
In Why Darwin Matters, bestselling author Michael Shermer explains how the newest brand of creationism appeals to our predisposition to look for a designer behind life?s complexity. Shermer decodes the scientific evidence to show that evolution is not ?just a theory? and illustrates how it achieves the design of life through the bottom-up process of natural selection. Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents are invoking a combination of bad science, political antipathy, and flawed theology. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. He then appraises the evolutionary questions that truly need to be settled, building a powerful argument for science itself.
Cutting the politics away from the facts, Why Darwin Matters is an incisive examination of what is at stake in the debate over evolution.

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