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Is Darwinian evolution an established fact, or a dogma ready to be overtaken by the next scientific revolution? The intelligent design movement argues the latter. 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 also a useful contrast highlighting the amazing power of Darwinian thinking and the wonders of a complex world without design.
Matt Young is the author of No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe. He was a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and is now Senior Lecturer in Physics at the Colorado School of Mines.
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.
