I have posted the second video in my two part book recommendation series on the YouTube channel. In the previous video I highlighted many books that argue for intelligent design. My view is that proponents of design should face the strongest criticisms possible, and not be afraid of doing so. In line with this philosophy, in this video I talk about just a handful of the many books that attempt to refute ID. Again, I would be interested to know what others think are the best books that attempt to show ID is wrong.
60 Replies to “Ten (or so) Anti-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read”
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Discussion doesn’t persuade. Experience persuades.
That was a very lightweight list. It has all been thoroughly debunked.
The argument for ID can be done in two or three sentences.
No need for books except as evidence for the acceptance of complexity. Don’t get me wrong, the books are essential but just for the findings. The logic/conclusions to the findings are short.
All the arguments against it are based on logical fallacies. The most common one is begging the question. Each book should be evaluated on which logical fallacies they use.
Discussion over.
Setting aside the question of the burden of proof, which argument against ID commits the question-begging fallacy?
All God of the gaps arguments.
The ONLY argument against ID requires EVIDENCE that nature can do it. Yet to reach the design inference we have already eliminated that option, for a reason.
The Design Inference is based on our knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships in accordance with Newton’s four rules of scientific reasoning.
I read Ken Miller’s book “Finding Darwin’s God” shortly after it came out. I made extensive notes in the margins but then got an idea. I bought a new copy and made notes but used two different colors of ink. In one I made notes on how the text related to ID – in the other how it related to common descent. Studying this way can be highly illuminating and avoid a lot of confusion – at least for me. I may buy several of these old books and do the same thing.
There is no book that challenges ID. All these books are full with just so stories: probably, possibly, could have , maybe -not to mention having all range of logical fallacies .
Seversky(4), one example is the “Bad Design Means No Design” argument, which begs at least two questions: 1. Why do you assume that design must be perfect design or even good design? 2. Why do you assume that the astronomically complex trade-offs in the design of life can be effectively analyzed by the weak mind of a Darwinist? (See COMMENT POLICY / “Put A Sock In It” for more on the “Bad Design Means No Design” argument.)
Put me in the camp of “I’ve been bombarded with Evolutionist propaganda since I was a young lad, do I really need more?”
Ultimately, the show of a Fair and Balanced Approach is wasted on closed minds. An objective survey of arguments does nothing to restrain the Warriors from Beating The Drums.
Andrew
I have decided to abandon ID and theism and go full on evolution and will now attack you all with this obviously declared refutation for all you creationists with this infallible wiki article that crushes your points of view!!!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution
Now go and try to refute it because according to everyone else you all don’t understand evolution or use fallacies to argue against it
Such as evolution is just a theory is a fallacy you levy. If the definition of evolution is a change is population genetics it’s an obvious fact
Or thermodynamics doesn’t refute evolution you just lack imagination
Or we have a observed speciation multiple times
Or there are tons of transitions fossils for human evolution! Prove me wrong just don’t say there isn’t
And arguments for the Ramifications of evolution involving the mind is not an argument against evolution because it does nothing to disprove it’s true
Now go disprove this wiki or we are all fools
By the way I have not abandoned ID, I’m being sarcastic
But without resorting to the Wikipedia as just a bunch of biased assholes, can we dissect this wiki and shred some of the counter arguments that they post
They make claims that Jonathan Wells misrepresented the pictures fetuses saying that books aren’t saying this is how evolution works but are using the pictures to show that it’s historically wrong
AaronS1978 @ 11,
All of the arguments on the wiki article you cite are easily refutable. A good first step is use precise terminology. For example, ID argues against “Darwinism”, not against “Evolution”. Everyone knows that evolution occurs, e.g. wolves evolving into dogs. ID argues that the Darwinian process of random change and natural selection cannot generate the information necessary for macro-evolution. There is a lot of evidence for ID on this point, and not a shred of evidence for Darwinism. A good exercise is to study the arguments made by ID experts on a specific point until you understand it well enough to refute the Darwinist arguments on your own. After you do this a few times, you’ll notice that the Darwinists don’t have that many arguments. Instead they fill up space with lots of repetitions of a few old and discredited arguments, which they simply restate as if they aren’t listening. In fact, that’s all they have, since all new data and observations on origins and evolution of life support ID and not Darwinism. (Some good resources are the COMMENT POLICY / “Put A Sock In It” section on this site, and the evolutionews.org site.)
Jerry said:
“All God of the gaps arguments.”
If ID was a “God of the gaps” argument, it just so happens to be one that is so useful to science that its language cannot be avoided in discussion of biology. Even if you were to dismiss all the arguments for ID as an attempt to argue for a “Gap filler” (I mean you do want to fill gaps with something well evidenced right? But let’s ignore that.) there simply are not forthcoming explanations for things like the information necessary for the origin of functional proteins or highly complex structures in biology not to mention other aspects of the finely-tuned universe. So there is immense utility in this “gap filler” that gives us the necessary language and philosophical ground to discuss the mechanistic aspects of biology intelligibly. There’s no point in whining about it.
MikeW,
What if there once was a smooth genetic continuum that encompassed dogs, wolves, and foxes, and then many of the in-between species became extinct due to to failure to adapt or perhaps some world-wide cataclysm?
In any case, are you familiar with the fox domestication breeding experiments done by the Russians? If not, this ten-minute video might be interesting to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dwjS_eI-lQ
-Q
The “God of the gaps” accusation assumes that God is only to be found in the gaps, which is not true. God’s love and creativity fill our universe. Finding out how God designed things provides an amazing sense of delight.
In contrast, Darwinism is full of gaps that are filled with words like musta and coulda, and phrases in research papers such as “not completely understood” (which means we’re baffled) or even “poorly understood” (which means we’re so clueless that it seems like it was designed).
-Q
God of the gaps claims, as applied to the design inference on tested, reliable signs — such as functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information [–> FSCO/I] — are fallacious. That is, strawman fallacies loaded with accusations of theocratic hidden agendas. That, a decade after we took time to lay out weak argument correctives [see the resources tab above] they are still being resorted to is telling on the poverty and dishonesty of the evolutionary materialistic straight jacket imposed on origins sciences. For me, that cells use complex string based, 4-state digitally coded — so, linguistic — algorithmic — so, goal-directed — information systems with associated molecular nanotech execution machinery is decisive. There is no responsible, adequate blind chance and mechanical necessity explanation for that order of phenomenon, nor — given the islands of configuration-specific function in vast spaces of possible config dominated by gibberish — is there any plausible prospective blind search mechanism to account for such. KF
PS: My High School Biology textbook used Haeckel’s diagrams in the ’70’s. Wiki et al are trying to rewrite history to erase an utterly indefensible case of manipulation under colours of education, sustained in the teeth of correction for over 100 years.
JG, for convenience, could you list the books? KF
@kairosfocus:
What’s the Wiki-site you are talking about?
On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_drawing we can see a reference to the usage of the drawings in textbooks:
AC, in the thread above, I respond to the suggestion that the objections page tries to discredit the Wells expose of the Haeckel fiasco. KF
Querius @ 14:
In the cases of foxes and wolves evolving into dogs, fortunately these days we don’t need speculative “what if” questions or Darwinian “just-so” stories. As Michael Behe explains in “Darwin Devolves”, we have the data. From detailed genetic analysis, we know that wild wolves and foxes contain all of the genetic information needed to create any of the domestic dog breeds, and that the dog breeds are created by breaking and blunting existing wolf and/or fox genes. So dogs are essentially broken wolves and foxes. Their wildness has been blunted, to make them manageable, and their hunting and food gathering skills have been blunted to make them dependent on humans.
All plant and animal breeding follows this pattern. Wheat breeds are broken wild grasses, farm pigs are broken wild boars, purebred race horses are broken wild horses, etc. Almost all cases of Darwinian “evolution” actually devolve. For example, all antibiotic-resistant bacteria are broken from existing wild strains. There are very few examples where the Darwinian process is known to create a new biological feature. (Fish blood antifreeze may be one.) So it’s actually a stretch to extrapolate the Darwinian process from breeding even to simple micro-evolution. Stretching it to macro-evolution is laughable.
@kairosfocus:
On the page you’ve mentioned Wiki states:
Where’s the rewriting of history ?
Kairosfocus (17):
Sure. The books I mention are:
1) Origin of Species (Darwin)
2) Darwin & Design (Michael Ruse)
3) Finding Darwin’s God (Ken Miller)
4) Only a Theory (Ken Miller)
5) Tower of Babel (Robert Pennock)
6) Creationism’s Trojan Horse (Barbara Forrest/Paul Gross)
7) The Greatest Show on Earth (Richard Dawkins)
8) Evolution & Belief (Robert Asher)
9) Intelligent Design Creationism & It’s Critics (edited by Pennock)
10) Why Intelligent Design Fails (edited by Taner Edis & Matt Young)
I mention that number 10 is the strongest critique I’ve come across. I’m unaware of any specific responses to that book.
Anti ID books.
The Origen of Species – Darwin
Darwin and Design – Ruse
Finding Darwin’s God – Miller
Only a Theory – Miller
Tower of Babel – Pennock
Creationism’s Trojan Horse – Forrest and Gross
Greatest Show on Earth – Dawkins
Evolution and Belief – Asher
Intelligent Design, Creationism and Its Critics – Pennock
Why Intelligent Design Fails – Ellis and Young
Some are anthologies.
He includes a couple other anthologies that include Dembski as one of the authors.
My guess is that the author of the OP does not understand the logic of ID. It can be summed up in one or two sentences and doesn’t need books to understand.
It would be interesting to see the faulty logic of each anti ID book exposed in one or two sentences. For example, Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth only deals with proof for micro-evolution, something ID agrees with. Some extremely interesting things can happen likely from micro-evolution or modern day genetics. However, it is no substitute for a mechanism that can explain macro-evolution.
There is the obvious Begging the Question fallacy used by those citing a God of the Gaps argument. There is also the Stawman fallacy by associating ID with Young Earth Creationism or some other form of religion. This last rhetorical technique seems seems fairly prevalent.
Looks like I duplicated the OP author.
Joshua G @ 22:
If “10) Why Intelligent Design Fails” is the strongest critique of ID that is out there, then the case for Darwinism is even weaker than I thought. For example, that book criticizes Michael Behe’s arguments for Irreducible Complexity, which Behe responds to strongly on his website, and in his book “A Mousetrap for Darwin”. Behe’s data and logic completely demolish his Darwinist critics. For example, Behe shows conclusively that the Darwinian process is completely incapable of creating the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum or the blood clotting cascade. And Behe patiently explains the mistakes made by the critics in their arguments, some of which would be embarrassing, even for a layman.
Are there any other specific critiques in that book that you consider especially strong?
Joshua G @ 22:
One common stratagem of Darwinists is to ignore the responses that Behe and other ID proponents give to their Darwinist critics, and then claim that ID proponents like Behe never respond to their critics. That’s why Behe wrote “A Mousetrap for Darwin”, which is a collection of some of his responses to critics that he’s given in his websites and in articles he’s written, in order to make it harder for Darwinists to continue to make that claim. Of course, now the Darwinists simply ignore that book as well. I hope that’s not what you’re doing when you say that you’re unaware of any specific responses to an anti-ID book.
#10 is a complete joke. The authors don’t seem to understand ID.
AC, present in an historical context is suggestive of half truth. To begin with, from outset, the drawings were distorted and manipulative, constituting educational fraud used to manipulate public perceptions of embryology and its relationship to alleged evolutionary history: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. If the discussion was anything less than an expose of Haeckel, his fraud and how cases like this have been too common in this area — see, Piltdown man’s 50-year run as a second capital example — it is at best half-truth driven revisionism. For sure my HS bio textbook did NOT — repeat, NOT — do so. Likewise, I recall public education “science” documentaries at that time that used it as a matter of fact. Indeed, IIRC, a suggestion was that the human embryo was climbing the evolutionary ladder until it reached a culminating stage; I believe, this has been used in abortion promotion, to denigrate the humanity of the unborn child. I am of course open to being shown wrong, i.e. that from well before Wells wrote, the overwhelming majority of references to the drawings in textbooks and the like were as say text boxes exposing and correcting that sort of stunt. Something, however, tells me such is not the case. KF
PS: Kindly see ENV https://evolutionnews.org/2007/05/a_reply_to_carl_zimmer_on_embr/
JG, thanks. I am not familiar with the full list, but note that Ms Forrest and others have long since come across as manipulative, irresponsible and too often outright deceitful. The very use of terms such as “Intelligent Design Creationism” speaks for itself, and not to commend such works or their authors, publishers, promoters and enablers. The same for slanders such as “trojan horse.” Such culture war agit prop that has fed lawfare is dishonest, shoddy scholarship and indoctrination under colours of education. Kindly note the UD weak argument correctives under the Resources tab. KF
MW, sadly, you are quite correct. KF
F/N: I find a translation of an excerpt from Loennig’s 1971 thesis highly instructive:
https://evolutionnews.org/2021/06/intelligent-design-ahead-of-its-time-more-on-w-e-lonnigs-1971-thesis/
Food for thought. (Including, on the significance of language barriers.)
KF
KF @ 27, I had the same experience as you in my high-school biology class. The Haeckel diagrams were presented as fact. It’s instructive to see how Darwinists continue to keep the drawings in the textbooks, then bury a brief comment somewhere in the label or text to use as a foil when they’re called on it. They know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and that the lasting effects of the diagrams overwhelm any brief comments. Their science is atrocious, but their propaganda abilities are considerable.
@kairosfocus:
The topic is Wiki and rewriting of history. Please try to stay on topic. What we see from Wiki is a reference that Haeckel’s drawings were wrongfully used in text books. And wee see a correction of Well’s falsehoods about certain textbooks. Wiki didn’t claim that your textbook didn’t propagate the drawings as truth. There was no rewriting of history on Wiki, as you wrongfully suggested. Or, if there was, you’ve failed to show it.
AC, evasion. The point of the known bias of Wiki’s dominant ideological factions will lead them to wrench almost anything to attack design thinkers, as say the main article on ID notoriously demonstrates. The antidote to distortion is truth, especially historically anchored truth. As MW and I note, our HS textbook experience is that Haeckel’s drawings (fraudulent from the outset) were presented as though they were established, expertise and publisher editorial board-backed fact. Where, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny summarises thinking that embryological “evolution” is a significant line of evidence for the course of evolution, going back to Darwin et al. Wells’ point in his Icons, was to show prevalence after over 100 years, of a particularly dubious icon, and in that he succeeded, which was an embarrassment to those promoting evolutionism, for they had to explain how they could sustain something so indefensible in a context of education in Science. There is no justification for such behaviour, and unfortunately, the icon continued to be in place in too many textbooks for quite some years after this prominent critique. That compounds the indefensibility. MW points out that a picture is worth a 1,000 words and how a few weasel words in the text are not enough. Until the only presentation is a frank admission of fraud, apology for allowing such to be used for a century, and admission that this points to needed rethinking, the discredit remains. Wiki is trying to obfuscate indefensible history and the need to acknowledge it. Also, there are many other icons that are questionable if not outright frauds, including the one set up by Darwin himself in the sole illustration in Origin, the tree of life. There is no credible blind chance and mechanical necessity explanation for origin of cell based life using complex coded algorithmic information [~100k – 1 million bits] and there is none for the 10 – 100+ million further bits to specify novel body plans across the notorious tree. Further, such functionally specific complex organisation and/or information has just one known source, on trillions of observed cases. Intelligently directed configuration. It is high time that textbooks, museums and promoters of evolutionary materialistic scientism admitted this massively evident fact too. The shoddy rhetoric evident in book titles alone speaks telling volumes. KF
PS: I see you one Wiki and raise you one Creation dot com:
https://creation.com/haeckel-fraud-proven
https://creation.com/haeckel-fraud-proven-part-2
I clip the first of these:
>>In 1997, a ‘bomb’ exploded in the face of all those evolutionists who so fondly kept on using this evolutionary ‘icon’, when embryologist (and evolutionist) Dr Michael K. Richardson and his colleagues published a variety of real photographs of the relevant embryos.5 These drawings of Haeckel were later compared directly to the actual photos, and they were found to be far more different than everybody even thought. Richardson also published photographs of species additional to those which appeared in Haeckel’s popular embryo plates. This showed that Haeckel conveniently used those which tended to look more similar, while ignoring those which were different.
Although a minority of honest evolutionists have appreciated Richardson’s work, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Scott F. Gilbert (author of developmental biological books) and Paul Dombrowsky (a specialist in rhetoric), the embarrassment was just too severe and the iconic embryos too beloved among textbook authors to let things stay as they were. Robert John Richards, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, made a concerted attempt to rehabilitate not only the history around Haeckel, but also the very embryo sketches themselves. In 2008/9 Richards published a book and a paper in which he made some serious attempts to clear and clean up the name of his hero, Ernst Haeckel. My paper will look mainly at the works of Haeckel and the scientific issues around them, specifically set out in Richards’ paper named Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud not proven.6 Where necessary, related issues will be discussed.
Michael Richardson and his co-workers’ photos of actual embryos had shown just how far Haeckel’s illustrations were from reality. It is thus no surprise that Robert Richards tries every possible thing to disprove Richardson and others’ work and critiques it as “logically mischievous, historically naive, and founded on highly misleading photography” (p. 148). His target is fully set on the photos of Richardson et al.>>
From the second, on early objections (notice, 1868):
>>One of the first troubles in Haeckel’s career concerned illustrations in the first edition (1868) of what would become his wildly popular book, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte.8 When the Swiss zoologist, anatomist and palaeontologist Ludwig Rütimeyer reviewed the book in 1868,9 he noticed that Haeckel had used the same woodcut to print animal embryo illustrations of three (quite) different types of animals. We must point out that the problem is also that Haeckel tried to draw conclusions from these artificially created similarities. In this case, Haeckel’s illustrations purported to represent a dog, chicken, and turtle embryo at what Haeckel coined to be the Sandal-stage (see figure 1).
The ‘Sandal-stage’ is an old term for the neurula embryo.10 This is the phase when neurulation begins, i.e. the neural plate forms, then folds to form the neural tube, the precursor to the brain and central nervous system. It is also important to note that these embryos are generally in an earlier stage than the usual Haeckelian embryos which we sometimes still find in various textbooks in modern times. All this caused immense (and appropriate) disapproval and criticism as being misleading and unscientific. Rütimeyer was only the first of many people to launch complaints against Haeckel.>>
The issue is quite clear.
F/N: Icons, I suggest the PDF from Archive https://archive.org/details/Jonathan.Wells.Icons.of.Evolution
PPS: I looked up the phrase, and found Wiki again:
If that mid C20 claim has substantial truth, what was the Haeckel drawing or the like doing in textbooks for decades thereafter? (I speak here as a witness, and MW reports much the same; where, there is considerable documentation of a widespread embarrassing fact. Of course, we cannot any longer trust web searches not to be censored on any topic that is of interest to the radical secularist progressives.)
Something is not right, Wiki is giving a telling half-truth, once we know wider context.
F/N: After considerable search, Wells’ magazine article: https://www.discovery.org/m/2019/03/Survival-of-the-Fakest-Jonathan-Wells.pdf
@kairosfocus:
Thank you. I do try to evade your distractions and red herrings. 🙂
Wiki does not deny the fact that textbooks presented the drawings in a wrong light. Indeed Wiki mentions that fact. A truth you disgracefully call “weasel words”.
Let’s here Wiki’s words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_drawing
It’s not Wiki’s job to apologize for Haeckel’s falsehoods. It’s their job to point them out. Which they’ve done. 🙂
I now clip the Wells Am Spec article, recall, Dec 2000/Jan 2001:
>>Darwin thought “by far the strongest single class
of facts in favor of” his theory came from embry-
ology. Darwin was not an embryologist, however,
so he relied on the work of German biologist Ernst
Haeckel, who produced drawings of embryos from
various classes of vertebrates to show that they are
virtually identical in their earliest stages, and become
noticeably different only as they develop. It was this
pattern that Darwin found so convincing.
This may be the most egregious of distor-
tions, since biologists have known for over a cen-
tury that vertebrate embryos never look as similar as
Haeckel drew them. In some cases, Haeckel used
the same woodcut to print embryos that were sup-
posedly from different classes. In others, he doc-
tored his drawings to make the embryos appear
more alike than they really were. Haeckel’s con-
temporaries repeatedly criticized him for these mis-
representations, and charges of fraud abounded in
his lifetime. In 1997, British embryologist Michael
Richardson and an international team of experts
compared Haeckel’s drawings with photographs of
actual vertebrate embryos, demonstrating conclu-
sively that the drawings misrepresent the truth.
The drawings are misleading in another way.
Darwin based his inference of common ancestry on
the belief that the earliest stages of embryo devel-
opment are the most similar. Haeckel’s drawings,
however, entirely omit the earliest stages, which are
much different, and start at a more similar midway
point. Embryologist William Ballard wrote in 1976
that it is “only by semantic tricks and subjective
selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of
nature,” that one can argue that the early stages of
vertebrates “are more alike than their adults.”
Yet some version of Haeckel’s drawings can
be found in most current biology textbooks. Ste-
phen Jay Gould, one of evolutionary theory’s most
vocal proponents, recently wrote that we should be
“astonished and ashamed by the century of mind-
less recycling that has led to the persistence of these
drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of
modern textbooks.” (I will return below to the ques-
tion of why it is only now that Mr. Gould, who has
known of these forgeries for decades, has decided to
bring them to widespread attention.)>>
This context tells us that this claimed fact was viewed as quite strong evidence. So, we have rhetorical context. We can also see that Wells’ brief summary is accurate in substance, highlighting the history and the then current impact of Richardson.
Later, under homologies, Wells corrects 5th edn Biology by Raven and Johnson, McGraw-Hill, that human embryos never have “gills”. That is, the “gill slits” highlighted as a homologous point in the diagram.
The end of the article grades several major biology textbooks relative to the icons. None passes. One hopes there has been material improvement since then.
Did God allow the scientists to study genome , embriology? This is copyright infringement on God’s work. It’s piracy but even so “the scientists” have no clue no matter how long will study because the technology is too advanced for humans.
AC, do you notice, non-admission in that clip of what went on in textbooks for over a century? Especially i/l/o the further point that this “evidence” was claimed to be the strongest, implying just how weak other lines were once such has been broken. Please, get a clue. KF
F/N: Wiki’s lead for the Embryo Drawings article:
Evasion points to half truth, thence, the problems highlighted by Wells have a serious point.
KF
F/N: Section on Haeckel:
Such gives me, for cause, little confidence in this article and similar ones at the notoriously biased and manipulative, ideologically dominated wikipedia.
KF
The author should check out Stephen Blume for a possibly more insightful look at design. He redefines it as IID or Ingenious Invention and Design
His website has not been updated in 7 years and his books go back before them but he is still alive and active since he has issued Kindle versions of his books.
Personal site
https://evoillusion.org
Amazon site
https://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Stephen-Thomas-Blume/e/B01IJOSE2O/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Have to read his books or at least the latest one published on Kindle a couple months ago which was first published in 2013. He does not make the UD radar as nothing has been published on his writings here.
Jerry ingeniousness is extremely hard to study KF
KF : “Jerry ingeniousness is extremely hard to study”
An apt adjective, though, no? Invention isn’t. We do it all the time here.
Is it?
I believe you are the one who introduced TRIZ here.
Modern day assessment of invention is that it is a group effort. First comes the big idea then one innovation after the other. He specifically said
Anyway I will read his books. So far they look interesting.
I have read his first one, and it takes no prisoners. He’s very entertaining. I wish his website were more current, but everyone gets tired of debating the atheist materialists. Jerry, I will be particularly interested in your comments about where he calculates the rate of population increase, and how closely that correlates with what we objectively observe. It’s toward the back of the book.
He is apparently in his mid to late 70’s
He changed his mind after being a believer for years when he saw no changes in the fossil record.
After reading a little further, maybe ID should be called XD instead for extreme design. Still only in the beginning of his book.
He came here several years ago and was ignored.
Jerry, we can recognise, but to reduce to scales, suggest patterns and dynamics becomes difficult, especially when we are in effect trying to analyse and measure the extreme we call genius. The creator of TRIZ was in fact a recognised genius, TRIZ is itself a high level invention. ID has focussed on the more modest task of identifying intelligently directed configuration from observable traces. It turns out that this understanding of design as concept and as actual implementation, allows us to see the importance of implicit information in organisation, then to use bits tied to function based on complex configuration as a measure of complexity. Description languages can then describe configurations, similar to the 20-questions parlour game, and of course autocad etc exemplify. Functional specificity comes from recognising that configuration based function implies tight specification putting one on deeply isolated islands of function amidst vast seas of non-functional gibberish. Then, we see the issue of orientation, arrangement and coupling of parts, as can be seen through the issue of chaining appropriately oriented glyphs to make meaningful English sentences. This extends to algorithmic, informational strings such as in R/DNA. From such we can soon see that beyond 500 – 1,000 bits, undirected blind chance and/or mechanical necessity are inadequate explanations, but design readily accounts for such. Then, we look at the world of life, clear design by language using agency [codes! algorithms!]. The von Neumann kinematic self replicator shows that this applies too, to what makes reproduction possible, it is as Paley pointed out, a massive increment in the design. The mathematician identified is another recognised genius. KF
Kf,
Your comment will convince no one. It’s dense, incoherent and poorly written.
It’s obvious the OP author does not understand ID well based on his video. So I am looking for other interpretations.
Already in the beginning he clearly presents his Road to Damascus moment when he realizes the fossil record disproves Darwinism. He also nails the typical defender of Darwin by their robotic debate tactics.
Still mainly at the beginning.
Blume introduces 10 characteristics of design:
The descriptions after each point have been abbreviated.
Are these all there is to design? Are they redundant? Are some not needed?
Blume has obviously thought a lot about this and published. But ignored by UD.
Why many didn’t hear about Blume? He is a genius.
A few months ago one of our anti ID people recommended a philosophy of science expert (John S Wilkins) as one who understood the modern world. This choice was seconded by another anti ID person here who said he frequented sites where Wilkins was well respected.
So I went to Wilkins’ blog and he trashed Intelligent Design and recommended an author on evolutionary biology named Kostas Kampourakis who has written two evolutionary biology books in the last 10 years, each called Understanding Evolution.
In neither of Kampourakis’ two books does he deal with macro-evolution. He mentions it at best a couple times in passing but does not focus on it at all. But he trashes ID which is all about macro-evolution in terms of the evolution debate.
So this. is another of the dodges, used by Darwinists or anti-ID people. They don’t deal with the important area of evolutionary biology and. when ID questions this important area, ID is trashed. My guess the best word to describe this is “hypocrisy.”
Well he certainly has a fresh perspective which I am delighted to read.
I found him on Quora where he discusses politics and evolution. Mostly politics recently from what I can see.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Stephen-Thomas-Blume
He doesn’t seem to have written anything in the last few years but has turned his books into Kindle version, the last one published in April of this year.
Want to understand design more clearly then read Blume. I’m rapidly becoming convinced he’s the best design writer there has been.
He has three small books and so far I am a third through one. In the Evo-Illusion, why IID trumps ID and Evolution 2nd edition. He has done the best job I have seen of showing design in the invention of the universe. He has one simple explanation after the other about atoms, particles, forces etc.
Did you know that if you had a measuring tape that stretched across the visible universe and it represented the strong force, that 1 inch of that tape would represent gravity. A much better example than a comparison of something to 10 to some large number. And this relationship is fine tuned.
For $8 you can have all three of Blume’s books. Probably one of the best returns on investment one could ever make. Let’s hear it for
Ingenious Invention Design or IID
Stephen Blume Youtube Channel
I watched only one video Evolution of the bird and flight and I found few original arguments never heard before and as a bonus Blume has an umbelievable humor and irony toward darwinists and their arguments.
I’m beginning to believe Blume is the most intuitive genius of all of design theory. His concept that Darwinism/modern synthesis is just an illusion has changed my whole perception of the evolution debate.
His story of the discovery of DNA is alone worth the read. His most insightful conclusion.
DNA just codes for proteins which are very important but are far from what life is about.
The secret has always been in the assembly of body parts and DNA does not direct this.
Best learning experience on design in years.
Jerry, are we looping back to unproductive exchanges? Please consider recent threads. KF
You got to be kidding. Please tell me what is unproductive?
I know almost as much about design as you do though I certainly don’t spend as much time on it. I find Blume’s insight amazing.
He and Jonathan Wells are on the same page.
I will continue to express my reactions to his writings.
If those who say they are interested in design don’t read him, then they sre missing an understanding I haven’t seen before. Certainly not on this site.
I’ll repeat what I said on the other thread.
Prove me wrong!
This is a thread on books on design. Hardly inappropriate.
More unproductive information. A quote from Blume.
What if one asked 100 UD readers? How many would be correct?
Another quote by Blume. About the mapping of the human genome.
And another about the evolution debate
Is he wrong?
This is one of the biggest logical fallacies Darwinist always use.
Often called avoiding the issue.
DNA doesn’t do anything but break down. It is basically inert. Inside a living organism DNA codes for different RNAs. It can’t do anything without an existing suite of specific proteins and systems.