Intelligent Design 101

Intelligent Design 101 – General Editor H. Wayne House ★★★★★
This was a delightful compendium of various authors in the Intelligent Design movement, displaying a broad summary, from the science to legal aspects of what is occurring in ID. The writing was quite variable, but still broadly high quality. Most of the writing was a re-hash of writings I’ve read before, some of which were very readable, such as Michael Behe’s chapter, others a little more ponderous, such as Casey Luskin delving into the science of evolution vs. ID. I had not read Luskin before and found him to be rather perceptive, offering new insights. Luskin was able to discuss beyond the issues of irreducible complexity, to discuss the issue of convergence, where similar functions co-develop independent of each other, an event with a prohibitively low probability of happening just by accident. He also discussed issues arising from the crisis of Linnean (morphological) and genetic family trees being moderately dissimilar, suggestive that perhaps it is not a tree-like evolutionary scheme, but rather parallel developmental processes from various species to the next. The writers never lapse into the Creation Science Research mold of a young earth but remain independent of the exact nature of the intelligence that may have brought about the world that we see. The final appendix was a rebuttal of Francis Collin’s text on the random evolution of monkeys into man, pointing out his errors in suggesting that such evolution was only accidental. All in all, a worthy read.