John Brockman, the literary agent par excellence for materialist scientists intent on making their materialism available to the wider public, has finally put together the anti-ID collection to best all anti-ID collections.
Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Edited by John Brockmanhttp://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/it06/it06_index.html.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction â€â€John Brockman
Publisher & Editor, Edge; Editor, What We Believe but Cannot ProveIn some ways, the media chatter provoked by the intelligent-design movement has made collective fools of large segments of the American public. Educated Americans are dumbstruck by the attempt of the state of Kansas to officially redefine science to include the supernatural. Europeans cannot believe that such an argument should be raging in the twenty-first centuryâ€â€and in the United States, of all places, the seat of our most advanced technology and a leader in so many areas of scientific research.
Intelligent Design: The Faith the Dare Not Speak Its Name â€â€Jerry Coyne
Evolutionary Biologist; Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago; Author (with H. Allen Orr), SpeciationNot only is ID markedly inferior to Darwinism at explaining and understanding nature but in many ways it does not even fulfill the requirements of a scientific theory.
The Good Fight  Leonard Susskind
Physicist, Stanford University; Author, The Cosmic LandscapeI suspect there is more at stake than biology textbooks in Kansas. As a longtime observer of the science-government-politics triangle, it looks to me as if there is another hidden agenda: to discredit the legitimate scientific community. A well-respected scientific community can be a major inconvenience if one is trying to ignore global warming, or build unworkable missile-defense systems, or construct multibillion-dollar lasers in the unlikely hope of initiating practicable nuclear fusion.
The Hoax of Intelligent Design and How it Was Perpetrated  Daniel C. Dennett
Philosopher; University Professor, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Breaking the SpellEvolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all.
Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite  Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, Seeing RedSo, here’s the irony. Belief in special creation will very likely encourage believers to lead biologically fitter lives. Thus one of the particular ways in which consciousness could have won out in evolution by natural selection could have been precisely by encouraging us to believe that we have not evolved by natural selection….Anyone for “natural creationism”?
Human Evolution: The Evidence  Tim D. White
Paleontologist, and U.C. Berkeley Professor; Co-director, the Middle Awash project, the world’s largest and most successful scientific research effort into human origins and evolution.A denial of evolution  however motivated  is a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance.
The “Great” Transition  Neil H. Shubin
Evolutionary Biologist, University of Chicago; Specialist in the evolutionary synthesis of expeditionary paleontology, developmental genetics, and genomicsWhen we look back after 370 million years of evolution, the invasion of land by fish appears special. However, if we could transport ourselves by time machine to this early period, it isn’t clear whether we would notice anything extraordinary. We would see a lot of fish, some of them big and some of them small, all of them struggling to survive and reproduce. Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life  a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. (see excerpt below)
Intelligent Aliens  Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor’s TaleNatural selection is not some desperate last resort of a theory. It is an idea whose plausibility and power hits you between the eyes with a stunning force, once you understand it in all its elegant simplicity.
Why Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design  Frank Sulloway
Evolutionary theorist; Author, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative LivesInspired by the striking evidence from the Galápagos Islands, and armed with his novel theory of natural selection, Darwin began to reexamine the basic assumptions of creationism and to compare the predictions one would make based on these two radically different theories. The more extensive his reexamination became, the more he realized that the theory of intelligent design, which gave creationism its scientific legitimacy, was overwhelmingly contradicted by the available evidence.
Unintelligent Design  Scott Atran
Anthropologist, University of Michigan; Author, In God’s We TrustNothing indicates that people who believe that life arose by chance also believe that morality is haphazard.
Evolution and Ethics  Steven Pinker
Psychologist, Harvard University; Author, The Blank SlateAn evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one.
Darwinism All the Way Down  Lee Smolin
Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Three Roads to Quantum GravityIt should not, after all, be surprising if people who believe that all truth comes from an ancient text disagree with Darwin, whose ideas are in no ancient text. Rather than bemoaning the fact that fundamentalists disagree with Darwin, let’s ask a much more interesting and disturbing question: Why do so many non-fundamentalist theologians and religious leaders have no trouble incorporating Darwin into their worldview?
Intelligent Design, Science or Not?  Stuart A. Kauffman
Theoretical Biologist; Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry, University of Pennsylvania; Author, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-OrganizationTo state that a given organ is so improbable that it requires design is just ill founded. The argument uses standard probability, which does not apply to the evolution of the biosphere.
How Smart Is the Universe?  Seth Lloyd
Quantum Mechanical Engineer, MIT; author The Programmable UniverseScientific knowledge is by definition resilient. In societies where government or religion has tried to replace it with ideologically inspired fictions, scientists and nonscientists alike have resisted. Scientific lies can fool some of the people some of the time (even to the extent of being published in reputable journals), but exactly because scientific ideas are designed to be tested, in the end scientific lies fool no one. The universe is scientific.
Designing Words  Lisa Randall
Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Warped PassagesWe don’t have an intelligent designer (ID), we have a bungling consistent evolver (BCE). Or maybe an adaptive changer (AC). In fact, what we have in the most economical interpretation is, of course, evolution.
Parental Guidance Required â€â€Marc D. Hauser
Psychologist and Biologist, Harvard University; Author, Wild MindsWhat counts as a controversy must be delineated with care, as we want students to distinguish between scientific challenges and sociopolitical ones.
Evoliteracy â€â€Scott D. Sampson
Chief Curator, Utah Museum of Natural History; Associate Professor Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah; Host, Dinosaur Planet TV seriesRather than removing meaning from life, an evolutionary perspective can and should fill us with a sense of wonder at the rich sequence of natural systems that gave us birth and continues to sustain us.