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William A. Dembski, ed. Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004. xxxvii + 366 pp. $28.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paper), ISBN 1932236309 (cloth), 1932236317 (paper).
Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii + 401 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 0195157427.
In the United States, the creation/evolution debate has witnessed the replacement of Recent Creationism with the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in public forums. To date, ID theory has grabbed the attentions of common citizens, students, and school boards and shows no signs of retreating. The ID movement avers that the formation of particular biological structures and phenomena cannot have resulted from the neo-Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection and mutation, but instead show empirically detectable signs of having been designed by some sort of Intelligence. Two recent books assess the ID movement: one in a positive manner that views ID as a new paradigm for science and the humanities that frees human intellectual pursuits from the shackles of atheistic confines, and another in a very negative light that sees ID as creationism redivivus and little more than an over-inflated political movement whose successes are the result of a slick public relations scheme rather than solid scientific ideas.
As a positive assessment, William Dembski's Uncommon Dissent is a collection of essays from scholars in various fields who find neo-Darwinian evolution unconvincing. This work is extremely uneven, with some chapters showing scintillating brilliance and others shoddy bricolage. None of the sixteen authors have expertise in evolutionary biology, and only three have training in biology. While it is not illegitimate for non-biologists to offer criticisms of evolutionary theory, it is incumbent upon such authors to display a good understanding of the theory they wish to critique, since indications of ignorance are usually good reasons for the reader to reject the writer's opinion out of hand. Herein lies the problem with Uncommon Dissent-some of the authors simply do not fully understand the theory they wish to critique.
On the bright side, Nancy Pearcey provides an excellent indictment of the use of evolutionary theory by social scientists and philosophers to create a truthless society devoid of value and responsibility. Such a creed, according to Pearcey,...