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Review Summary: A thorough trashing. |
Date: 2008-06-05 |
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Details: This rather technical (think roughly Scientific American as opposed to New Scientist magazines) response to the putative "arguments" for intelligent design provides a thorough refutation of this form of creationism. It does this without claiming too much for science (there are frank admissions about the gaps in our understanding of certain mechanisms, but no problems that cannot at the least be solved in principle). It also does this with very infrequent reference to religion or the supernatural. Even though it must be acknowledged that for most intelligent design promoters, the motivation behind their support is religious, the author treats the intelligent design position as series of hypotheses that can be critically examined and tested, not as some metaphysical doctrine that cannot be falsified. Using the tools of science from peer reviewed documents, observation, field and lab work, and most especially, math and logic, it is demonstrated with cogent clarity that while there is much that seems improbable about evolutionary theory, there is nothing that is implausible, and the tenets of the theory are by far the best inference from the evidence. Intelligent design, by contrast, rests on unsupportable assumptions, gut intuition, and willing ignorance of inconvenient facts. |
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Review Summary: Good information but above my head . . . |
Date: 2008-04-04 |
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Details: I am a high school biology teacher. I purchased this book to consider its use in my AP Biology class, but it is not suitable for this purpose. It is useful information and I will be able to insert a few of the ideas in my teaching, but much of the philosophy and mathematics is beyond my understanding. |
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Review Summary: Clearing out the garbage |
Date: 2007-07-16 |
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Details: It is easy to dismiss the farrago of nonsense that passes for the theory of intelligent design as so obviously silly that it is not worth wasting any time analysing it. A weaker version of this position is to recognize that Michael Behe does have some scientific qualifications, so one ought to make the effort to analyse his arguments, but not to waste time on other creationists, most notably William Dembski, who have no relevant qualifications at all. However, even the weaker course plays into the hands of those who claim that there is a vast conspiracy of orthodox scientists to deny alternative views a fair hearing, and Sahotra Sarkar has done science a great service by examining the main claims of intelligent design in careful detail.
Dembski's explanatory filter, for example, is supposed to supply a logical frame for choosing between regularity, chance and design, but, as Sarkar explains, the rules for applying the filter are set up in such a way that rejecting design as the explanation is never offered as a possibility. Essentially anything that allows rejection of regularity and chance leads inexorably to design. Worse than that, design itself is not adequately defined: we all know, of course, that it is a coded way of saying creation by God, but we are not supposed to say that.
Sarkar provides numerous examples to dispose of the conspiracy theory, showing that serious challenges to the current orthodoxy have always been addressed seriously, without any suggestion that unwelcome proposals should just be ignored. Charles Darwin himself -- ignorant of Mendelian genetics, which could have provided him with an escape route -- treated Fleeming Jenkin's objections to natural selection with all seriousness. Later on the idea that genetics made natural selection irrelevant was thoroughly argued out in the early part of the 20th century, leading eventually to the "new synthesis". In our own time there was no attempt to suppress Motoo Kimura's neutralist theory, or the theory of punctuated equilibrium of Niles Eldredge and Stephen J. Gould.
The "no free lunch" theorems have generated great excitement in the creationist camp in recent years, because they supposedly show that no algorithm is better than any other for solving optimization problems, and so natural selection cannot be better than random search. However, as Sarkar points out, decades of experience have shown computer scientists that some algorithms are consistently better than others for particular sorts of problem; the theorems refer to the set of all possible optimization problems, not to any particular class of such problems; and anyway evolution as understood by biologists is not a problem of optimization in a static environment.
Sarkar then examines Behe's claim that biochemistry offers various examples of "irreducible complexity", assemblies of components that can only work when all the parts are present. These examples are quite diverse, including blood clotting in vertebrates, flagellar motion in bacteria, and the citric acid cycle in the metabolism of a vast array of organisms. All of these, however, can be found working in some organisms even though some of the supposedly essential components are missing. According to Behe, for example, the bacterial flagellum requires a minimum of three parts, a motor, a rotor and a paddle, but unfortunately for this argument archaeal flagella work just fine with only two of these.
So it goes on. Sarkar always resists the temptation to dismiss a creationist argument as obvious nonsense, but takes the trouble to analyse it and point out where the logical or factual errors lie.
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Review Summary: Unintelligent Designers watch out ! |
Date: 2007-06-12 |
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Details: In this arena of Evolutionary Theory vs 'Intelligent' Design, there is often found a lot of 'shouting' and trading of insults, i.e., playing the man instead of the ball.
And there are also found clearly identifiable false propositions, and unsubstantiated claims.
SARKAR has eminent qualifications in Biology, Environmentalism, Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science.
He is no 'amateur ranter', as can often crop up in this topic.
Alas, he cannot resist sliding in the debating knife when he finds a weakness in his opponents argument(s).
It may have been better if he just demolished the argument(s) - as he does so profoundly and universally - and let the dialog speak for itself.
He is not the first to identify the egregious and weaseling lies offered by William DEMBSKI's publications, but he makes these falsities more transparent for the lay reader, in a topic that necessarily becomes quite technical.
Whatever axioms a reader might bring to this modern debate, this book and author are a "must read" before jumping in to the arena for combat.
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out of 4 Reviews
