Signs of Intelligence is a collection of essays originally published in Touchstone magazine (July/August issue, 1999), about the "intelligent design movement". Due to popular demand, this collection has now become a book, with the essays now flanked by a new Introductory chapter by Dembski ("What Evolution Is Not") and a concluding chapter by Bruce Gordon ("Is Intelligent Design Science?").

     This book review will be divided into three parts - first an overview of some of the general themes in the book; next I will discuss my own impression of whether ID should be taught as science. Finally, I will take a more detailed look at each of the 15 essays, which represents different views from a variety of disciplines.

     1. Is the Universe Designed? In a nutshell, all of the essays advocate the point of view that the Universe is designed - not only designed with a purpose, but that this design is measurable (and OBVIOUS many would say). As someone who is NOT a materialist, and believes that there is more to the world around us than we can perceive, I actually am sympathetic with those who say that the Universe is Designed. This is something that one can choose to believe. However, one's choice to believe in a designed universe is based on their own personal faith, and not on science. That is, one can choose to believe based on what is seen in the world around us. Some people choose to believe, some choose not to believe - people have the freedom to choose for themselves. But one of the assumptions which the ID movement is based on is that science is unfairly excluding design from scientific discussions - in particular in evolutionary theory.

     Does science teach a random universe, with no purpose to life? If the Universe is Created with a purpose, then everything that happens must have a reason. Here is where many of the essays say that there simply cannot be randomness in the universe if God created it. For example, in the first chapter, Phil Johnson says that if ID is taught, "...the world will face the astonishing truth that the evidence of biology supports the popular belief that living organisms are the product of an intelligent creator, rather than a blind material force." (page 41). But my question, as a scientist, is whether this is REALLY what modern science is teaching, or rather what popular culture in America assumes.The thrust of nearly every chapter in the book is essentially that modern science teaches "randomness" and purposelessness of the Universe (and indeed of life itself many would say), whilst if only science would change the way that it is done, and allow room for the "prime mover", then life would have meaning and purpose again. Dembski traces the problem back to Francis Bacon, who almost 400 years ago ...

     Let's think about this for a few minutes. I suspect that most people who are reading this over the Internet (or a printout from a web page) would probably be willing to admit that in many ways science has been pretty succesful over the past 400 years, compared to the previous 10,000 years of recorded human history. The average person today has access to more information in a mere 24 hours, than Francis Bacon did during his entire lifetime! We are overwhelmed with information - so much that in many fields of science a problem is how to deal with simply too much information. OF COURSE, science has not solved all of our problems, and indeed the application of technology has created new problems as well as solving old ones. Nonetheless, in many ways science has accomplished a lot, using principles of the "Scientific Method" dating back to the time of Francis Bacon. Is Dembski saying that Bacon was wrong in not allowing metaphysics (e.g., Aristotle's prime mover) as part of the scientific method?

     So Dembski is saying that it would have been a good thing to allow metaphysical explanations in science. As a scientist (who believes in God) I have a difficult time trying to imagine an experiment to determine whether God was involved in this particular chemical reaction. What could I do - put the test-tubes in a "God-proof" container as a control, and allow God to interact with another set of test tubes? How exactly are we supposed to do experiments on God? Dembski and others would say that we shouldn't worry about doing experiments, just look for the evidence - that they can see the "fingerprints of God". But is this really making predictions and doing science, or is it theology? The border seems to be a bit blurred. Furthermore, as I will discuss below, the "science" of the Intelligent Design movement does not stand up to criticisms of scientists in the respective fields, and seems to instead rely mostly on popular books and press releases, rather than having to go through all the bother of trying to publish something in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

     2. On Materialistic Science. The problem is, says Phil Johnson, in the first chapter, that there are two models of science - the "materialistic model", or the "empirical model". According to Johnson, essentially all of modern science is based on [atheistic] materialism, and the majority of Americans simply don't buy it. "Over 40% of Americans seem to be outright creationists" he says (page 27). In the next chapter, Nancy Pearcey cites another survey in which "46% of Americans still believe human belings came directly from the hand of the Creaton" (page 43). Dembski also refers to a similar survey in his introductory chapter. So it sounds like most people don't agree with what the scientists are saying.

I have two comments about this: FIRST, there are many aspects of science which are not determined by popular vote. For example, 100 years ago, most people had not even heard of radio waves, yet they still existed. Many people in the U.S. presently seem to believe that Norway is the capitol city of Sweden, according to surveys. Does this mean that this "fact" should be taught in geography classes in the U.S.? Furthermore, statistics can also show another side of the coin. Contrary to what some of my Christian friends in the U.S. will want to admit, these numbers are very different if you compare with surveys done in Europe, or the rest of the world, for that matter. Let's say that the survey is correct, and that there are 100,000,000 young-earth creationists in the U.S., who all think there is compelling "scientific evidence" the world was created in 4004 B.C., in six 24 hour days. There's probably a couple of more million Creationists in Australia, probably less than a million in England, and MAYBE a few thousand in continental Europe (where I live). This still means that the "young earth" Creationists represent less than 10% of the Christians alive today (estimated at more than one billion). Furthermore, doesn't it seem kind of strange that there was no such thing as a "Creationist" a mere 200 years ago? This is a relatively new phenomena because most Christians have historically assumed that God used spontaneous generation to create life - that is, for roughly 1800 of its 2000 history, the church believed that God used "natural mechanisms", rather than the more recent "scientific" view of God creating all life only once, on the week of September 23, 4004 B.C. This is discussed in detail in Ronald Numbers' book "The CREATIONISTS - the Evolution of Scientific Creationism".

The SECOND POINT is that I am not sure that "modern science" is REALLY the problem here, but rather the fact that there are some scientists who try and use science to push their religious beliefs (or atheistic beliefs). But can science really prove (or disprove) something supernatural? I think that it is an interesting irony in that on the one hand the ID community are concerned about how "scientific materialism" has permeated society, and yet here they are, trying to use science as a crutch for their own religious beliefs. They say science only deals with the natural world, and can't explain everything, yet they think that it is necessary for science to prove their faith. I've read that Dembski thinks he has a mathematical PROOF for the existence of God, and that Mike Behe thinks he can PROVE God must have been there, creating those complex biochemical systems. But surely one cannot look under a microscope, and see God. I seem to remember a scripture that says something to the effect that "no man has seen God, and lived". So if it were that easy to see God when we look down a microscope at a cell, there would be a lot of dead scientists! Besides, what ever happened to the saying that "Blessed are those who have NOT SEEN and yet believed"? Is it really faith if you need scientific proof?

     Is There An Alternative? In his book, "When Science Meets Religion", Ian Barber lists four views of science and religion: Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration. He states up front that he would prefer views where science and religion can at least talk to each other ("Dialogue"), or better yet if they can actually be somehow integrated. I was at first surprised to see him place Phil Johnson and Mike Behe (two of the major players in the ID movement) in the "conflict" category, along with of course Richard Dawkins. But I think he does a pretty good job of explaining that both groups are emphasizing conflicts between science and religion, rather than some sort of reconciliation between the two. William Dembski also adopts the "conflict" view. In his book, "THE DESIGN INFERENCE- The Bridge Between Science & Theology", the "Bridge" in the title is meant to be a serious, scientific link between science and theology, restoring theology to its proper place as the "Queen of Sciences". However, it is obvious from reading the book that the view is one of conflict and war, rather than reconciliation. Science and Theology can be properly related to each other, according to Dembski, with the collapse of evolution and the admission of defeat and that science has been wrong all this time - THEN theology can accept Science's offer to once again take the victorious role as "Queen of Sciences". The reduction of science to a boolean "EITHER atheistic materialism OR [Christian] Intelligent Design" reminds me of Deborah Tannen's The Argument Culture, where everything is seen as only two sides fighting it out. (Of course, as a lawyer, Phil Johnson should be quite good at making arguments for why he is right and the other side is wrong - but must we really choose between science and God?) I think there are many alternatives to this simple-minded approach. Ian Barber is a good place to start; "SCIENCE & RELIGION - An Introduction", by Alister E. McGrath is another good book on the subject.. There's also Ken Miller's book, "Finding Darwin's God", in which he shows that Michael Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity simply don't stand up to scientific scrutiny - yet Ken Miller also points out that he is a Christian and still believes in God - once again, an example of how it is not a simple boolean "either/or" situation. Another two books are Michael Ruse's recent book, "Can a Darwinian Be A Christian", and from a theological perspective, "GOD AFTER DARWIN - A Theology of Evolution", by John Haught. Plenty has been written on this subject, and there are many alternatives out there to the simplistic (materialistic) science or ID argument.

     The subject of the last chapter in the book is on whether ID should be considered science or not. Bruce Gordan says that there are limits to science, and I fully agree with him here.

     Last summer I received an email from a friend who lives near Seattle, Washington. She wanted to know what I thought about an recent article in a local newspaper, which made an extraordinary claim - that there was evidence, based on the number of unique genes in bacterial genomes, for an "Intelligent Designer". She sent me a link to the article, which I read with great interest, because my research has to do with bioinformatics of whole genomes, and I work with a Ph.D. student who is improving gene finding methods for bacteria. My friend didn't know it, but we had submitted an article just a week before, on the same topic. Here's the observation - in nearly all bacterial genomes that have been sequenced (around 40 at the time), about a THIRD of genes with no known functions, nor any good matches to other bacteria. When the first few genomes were sequenced, this might not be too surprising, but to have so many genomes, with very roughly a third of the genes being "unkown" in every single one, becomes a bit of a conundrum. For several years, I have been complaining to students (or whoever would listen to me) about the overannotation of the E. coli genome. There's simply too many genes. Before the first E. coli genome was sequenced, everyone thought there was roughly 3000 genes in E. coli, with around 2000 or so genes expressed under normal growth conditions. However, the sequenced genome contains 4289 genes - according to the annotation - which is quite a bit more than expected. Very roughly, a third of the genes had known functions, a third had hypothetical functions, and a third didn't seem to match anything. (The hand of the Intelligent Designer??) Two students in our group decided to have a serious look at this problem, and wound up coming up with a couple of statistical tests to estimate how many might be expected to be in a sequenced genome. The end result was the paper that was submitted to Trends in Genetics; it was published in the August issue. (see the Skovgaard et al. ref., below)

     I believe that miracles can (and do) happen. But can you use science to prove that a miracle happened? Dembski and others claim on the one hand that they aren't looking for miracles, but on the other hand evidence for something being "intelligently designed" is essentially that the probability of event x happening is so small, that intervention by an "Intelligent Designer" (e.g., a "miracle") is required for it to happen. Thus I feel strongly that ID is not science on the one hand, but I certainly have no problem with people wanting to look for purpose in the Creation around us. I simply think that this question does not fall under the category of "science".

     IN SUMMARY, the Intelligent Design movement is part of a stategy to "bring God back to our Society", financed with lots of money by the Discovery Institute, and the primary agenda is religious, not one of science. The majority of the authors of the essays in this book are theologians and philosophers, not scientists, and even the ones who ARE scientists prefer to offer their arguments to the public in the form of books, rather than try and convince the scientific community through publication in peer-reviewed journals.

The short answer: No. I hope it should be obvious by now that I feel that there is very little room for science in the Intelligent Design movement, despite all the hype and claims that this is only about asking questions. The arguments are essentially an appeal to incredulity - this event is soooo unlikely to have happened, the only choice is to conclude a (Supernatural) Intelligent Designer Being made it with a Purpose. Of course students should be allowed to believe (or not) in God. But I think there is enough of a problem teaching science to the children in our schools as it is, and it would be difficult to try and explain to them that it is "equally scientific" to conclude that Supernatural causes are responsbile for what is difficult to explain.

     The Introductory Chapter (by William A. Dembski) discusses "What Intelligent Design Is Not". ID is not three things, according to this chapter: it is not optimal design, not religiously motivated, and finally is neither a mechanism nor magic. This all sounds rather grand (ID is conveniently NOT defined in any of the ways the critics choose to define it), but each one of these "nots" has their own set of problems.

     The "Intelligent Designer" of the ID movement does not have to be that skillful - Dembski points out that people often do not understand that to say something is intelligently designed is not the same as saying it is optimally designed.

So it's O.K. if the Intelligent Designer wasn't so intelligent - perhaps he/she could even be a bit stupid? So how can one tell the difference between a bumbling "Intelligent Designer", who didn't do a very good job, versus something selected for by a natural process? I guess I took Dembski's SETI analogy a bit too literal - so he's saying that if he found some sort of signal that kind of looked like a series of prime numbers, but a bit sloppy here and there - say something like 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11 - maybe if the pattern looks sort of O.K. (that is, if it is "designed" by a stupid designer), then we can still call this "Intelligent Design"?

Second, the Intelligent Design movement is NOT religiously motivated - it's supposed to be about science. So why is one of the authors pastor of a local church, and four of the authors have their Ph.Ds in theology? The subject of many of the essays seems to be religous to me - so I'm not convinced that ID is NOT religiously motivated.

Finally, Intelligent Design is NOT a "mechanism or magic" - by which Dembski means that ID does not substitute "magic for mechanism - alternatively, that it [ID] invokes a supernatural cause where an ordinary cause will do." (page 17). Dembski also says that ID is not creationism, yet I find there to be strong similarities between the creationist literature and that of the ID writings. For example, according to a recent creationist book (DARWIN'S DEMISE - why Evolution Can't Take the Heat", by Joe White and Nicholad Comninellis), there are three main sources which could verify evolution: Probability, Earth Age, and The Fossil Record. Surprisingly (or perhaps not, considering this is a Creationist book), evolution fails miserably in all three of these categories, so the only logical conclusion MUST be that Jehovah God Created the world (in 4004 B.C.). Take away the age of the earth, and you have the ID movement. You have (at least) four of the essays in "Signs of Intelligence" on probability (Chapters 7, 8, 12, and 13), and another two about mechanisms of evolution and the fossil record (Chapters 10 and 11). Furthermore, the general tone of both the Creationist literature and that of the ID movement sounds very similar to my ears. In both cases, the writings are filled with comtempt for the "randomness of Darwinian evolution", the "lack of purpose in evolution", and the spiritual implications of this philosophy. Both also discuss the "immenent collapse" of evolution. Any day now, it'll fall. Just wait and see, they say. (It is interesting to have a look at some of the Creationists from the early 20th century. A hundred years ago, they were saying essentially the same thing - evolution has been "overthrown" with this or that amazing new discovery.)

     The first chapter (by Phil Johnson) discusses the history and development of the Intelligent Design movement. Of course, as a lawyer, he is well versed in winning arguments, and this movement is all about proving that he is right, and the "enemy" (scientific materialism) is wrong. Like I've said earlier, this is a false dichotimy. In his book "Darwin on Trial", Johnson argues that if Darwinism were to be put on trial, there is simply not enough evidence to convince a court that evolution is true. However, one can argue that Darwin was indeed put on "trial by fire" when his theory first came out in the 1850's. J. William Schopf has written a book about the first 3 billion years of microbial fossil record, before the famous "Cambrian" explosion, called CRADLE OF LIFE - The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils. He discusses how science can deal with claims which might prove to be false, such as whether there is evidence of life on Mars, based on "bacterial fossils".

The acceptance of Darwinian evolution in the U.S. was accepted even more slowly and with more skepticism than in England, as described in "Darwinism Comes to America", by Ronald Numbers. But of course, Phil Johnson as a lawyer, through self-study and reading lots of creationists books knows far more about Darwinian evolution than any of us mere scientists. We should trust him when he insists that this is all about allowing "good science" [ID] to win the argument.

     Chapter 2 (by Nancy Pearcey) discusses the impact of Darwinism on the general public. According to Pearcey, "Darwinism" (atheism) has come to dominate our culture. However, "design is supplanting it [evolutionism] for three reasons": 1. The majority of Americans are being forced to "fight back" as they are taught evolution (here she cites the Gallup pole which says that 86% of the population believe God created life). 2. "The second reason design is a winner is that it is a full-fledged scientific research program, not a narrowly conceived ideological position." (page 45) (huh? I know I'm being a bit provocative here, but wouldn't that kind of imply that someone from the ID movement should maybe actually PUBLISH something in the scientific literature?) 3. "Finally, design is a winner in the public because it is a scientific research program that actually makes sense to ordinary people." (page 47). Yes, I guess I can see that most people think that spending millions of dollars on "science research" that explains something too difficult to solve with "and then a miracle happened" to be a wise investment of money.

     Chapter 3 (by Jay Wesley Richards) discusses how intelligent design can be used in Christian apologetics. That is, ID can be used to convince the world that Christianity is right and scientific materialism is wrong. He concludes the chapter as follows:

     Chapter 4 (by John G. West, Jr.) discusses the cultural implications of scientific materialism vs. ID. West outlines five cultural implications of the ID movement: 1. "First, intelligent design can help reinvigorate the case for free will and personal responsibility." (page 66) 2. "A second cultural implication of intellignt design concerns the defense of traditional morality." (page 67) 3. "A third area where intelligent design has cultural implications is the sanctity of human life. (page 67) 4. "A fourth cultural implication of intelligent design is the defense of science itself. Many in the natural sciences today are distrubed at the growing backlash against scientific rationality that can be seen in both the New Age and postmodernist movements." (page 67) 5. "A fifth cultural implication of intelligent design is its support of free inquiry." (page 67). What can I say to all of this? Am I against free inquiry, or against morality? Of course not! My only concern is whether all of these wonderful things can REALLY be the result of allowing metaphysics into the science arena.

     Chapter 5 (by Patrick Henry Reardon) discusses the impact of ID on "the world of religion and letters". Reardon is pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago. This is an interesting essay about "text". I often tell students in our introductory course in bioinformatics that information is like selling a house - the three most important things are location, location, and location. Context is everything. Reardon says that "we human beings can detect the presence of 'mind' and the intent to convey 'informtion' even in those instances when we are unable to decipher exactly what that information is or what that mind is trying to say. Human reason has the innate capacity for recognizing the presence of rationality..." I have no problems with what he has to say. I think that much of what the ID people are hoping to do by "reforming science" could actually be done just as easily by people accepting a rationally designed universe. I know of many scientists who have this as a working assumption. What I am not sure about is how to the ID movement can really tell the difference between something as simple as this - belief in a rationally designed universe - and someone who believes in "intelligent design".

     Chapter 6 (by John Mark Richards) discusses how ID will allow God to once again have a place in the discussions of science, and the implications of this, in terms of theology. Richards uses an example at the beginning of his essay about his four-year old son, Ian, who got lost at Disneyland. After Ian's parents found him, they told him they were very thankful to God for helping them find him. Ian replied that God couldn't have had anything to do with it, because the only way you can get into Disneyland is with a pass, and God doesn't have a pass. The theme of the essay is that we should allow God "a pass" in science. However, the problem I have with this analogy is that his four-year old son has a point here. What the Intelligent Design people would have us believe, it is perfectly acceptable to allow metaphysical explanations - they claim to have evidence for "the hand of God" in complex biochemical reactions or whatever. Yet in this simple example, what "scientific evidence" do we have that God helped poor Ian's parents find him? Maybe God helped Ian's parents, maybe God didn't - but is this REALLY a question for SCIENCE to answer, or is it more of a THEOLOGICAL question. I don't have any problem saying science can't answer all of the questions we have - but I wonder whether some within the ID movement have perhaps unknowingly fallen into the popular notion that EVERYTHING must be explained by science, including their theology.

     Chapter 7 (by Michael J. Behe) discusses a summary of his idea of "Irreducible Complexity". I have already discussed Behe's "irreducible complexity" of cilia and flagella. In 1997 I posted a web version of my review of Behe's book. Since then, more than half a million people have visited the web page, from more than 70 different countries, and I have received more than a thousand emails about the web review (very roughly 4 or 5 emails a week, over the past 4 years). About a third of the people that write me like my review, the other two-thirds assume I must be some sort of evil atheist, because I don't agree with Behe's version of science. One more thing I'd like to point out - in all fairness the interested reader should have a careful look through the reviews of Behe's book, and decide for themselves whether "the reviewers are not rejecting design because there is scientific evidence against it, or because it violates some flaw of logic. Rather I believe they find design unacceptable because they are uncomfortable with the theological ramifications of the theory." (page 100) I guess I'm just a radical trouble-maker because I would like to know the minimal components of an "irreducibly complex" system. You need 5 parts for a mouse-trap - how many components are needed for a flagella? I'm still waiting for the answer. No one seems to know.

     Chapter 8 (by Stephen C. Meyer) discusses DNA and information content. This is essentially an argument about how improbable a particular DNA sequence is, so THEREFORE it MUST be evidence for a supernatural designer. A good antidote for this is "The Ontogeny of Biological Information", by Susan Otyama, where she describes the problem many people have in confusing DNA with a computer programme - which of course results in the logical question of "who is the programmer". Susan says that this is the wrong question because the information in DNA (and biology) is so strongly contextual dependent. Meyer also discusses pre-biotic conditions, and Stanley Miller's experiment. Yes, the conditions were probably not the same as Miller used, and yes, the yields would have been less, but STILL there is detectable amounts of amino acids produced. Furthermore, the same ratios of abundances of the amino acids produced in these Miller type of experiments are found within certain types of meteorites, known as carbonaceous chondrites. There are many scientific articles on this subject, and it is also dealt with quite nicely in "The Molecular Origins of Life", edited by André Brack, and "Cradle of Life", by J. William Schopf.

     Chapter 9 (by Jonathan Wells) discusses why DNA simply cannot be what's responsible for embryonic development. I agree with him that it is not the ONLY determinant, but certainly it plays an extremely important and major role, as the recent spate of papers on hox genes have shown. Based on what he has said in this chapter, Wells might find himself agreeing with Ruth Hubbard's book, "Exploding the Gene Myth", in which she argues that genes have taken the place of "fate" in determining a person's destiny. (This is also discussed in the book "Not In Our Genes".) As I discuss in my review of Wells' chapter on "Four-Winged Flies" in his book, Icons of Evolution, there is much recent scientific evidence for the role of DNA in developmental biology. Because of its interest to the general public, there have been many "popular science" books published in this area. Again, Susan Otyama's "The Ontogony of Biological Information" is a good place to start. The field has changed dramatically in the past few years, so it is important to consider some of these recent findings. One book that I found particularly accessable is "DEAR MR. DARWIN - Letters on the Evolution of Life and Human Nature", by Gabriel Dover. Along with this is Enrico Coen's "The Art of GENES - How Organisms Make Themselves". Together these two very readable books make a good introduction to the field. There is also Walter Gehring's book, "Master Control Genes in Development and Evolution: The Homeobox Story". Finally, some of the pattern formation Wells talks about is described in "THE SELF-MADE TAPESTRY - Pattern formation in nature", by Philip Ball.

     Chapter 10 (by Paul A. Nelson) discusses the "fatal flaws" of natural selection, and the need to re-introduce design back into biology. Nelson spends several pages discussing how "fit" is circular when used in natural selection. From my perspecitve, why not just say that certain traits or characteristics are SELECTED FOR, under one set of conditions, and OTHER traits under a different environment. That's all natural selection is about - you have some sort of heredity, a bit of variation, and a method to select from the variation. It is not really that complicated. I'm not sure that it is necessary to introduce an outside intelligent designer. Nelson is also worried that Darwin couldn't quantitate variation. "This knowledge [of variation] must be gathered before natural selection can be invokedæ and it is here, in understanding the precise mechanisms of variation via development, that evolutionary biology has been least successful." (page 142) Of course Darwin couldn't because at the time the substance of heredity (DNA) was not understood. However, today we CAN look at variation, and see an enormous amount of variation - plenty enough to more than account for the necessary differences upon which natural selection can act. For example, some species of the fruit fly, Drosophila, can have from 100 million bp of DNA in their genome, whilst other species have 180 million bp of DNA, and one species even has as much as 800 million bp of DNA, or 8x as much as other members of the same genus. Thus variability in terms of differences in DNA content can be quantitated. For more on developmental biology, see the references cited for my comments on the previous chapter by Jonathan Wells.

     Chapter 11 (by Robert F. DeHaan and John L. Wiester) discusses whether "random mutations" can explain the fossil record. "The purpose of this essay is two-fold: first, to show how utterly mistaken it is to claim that natural selection provides the sole organizing principle in the history of life and especially in the formation of major innovations; and second, ot show the necessity of intelligent design in any plausable account of major innovations.

     Jonathan Wells is very critical of high school biology texts for showing false, outdated, and misleading information about evolution (see his ICONS OF EVOLUTION - Science or Myth? Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution is Wrong"). Of course, this problem is not unique to biology. I remember last summer when I discovered, amongst the dozen or so "science books" in the library of a small high school in Texas, a book which proudly said "some day man may reach the moon". I looked at the copyright, and it was from 1963. This book belonged more in the history section than in "science". DeHaan and Wiester's Figure 1 is a similar story - it belongs in the "history" section. In the section on "Evidence vs. Theory" (pages 148-151), the authors claim that there is lacking any fossil evidence for life before the Cambrian period. All of the sudden, fossils start appearing, whereas before this period, nothing is found. This was certainly a problem for Darwin, 150 years ago. However, I would invite the interested reader to have a read through J. William Schopf's book "CRADLE OF LIFE - The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils", where he describes the discovery of bacteria fossils dating back to 3.5 BILLION years ago. Fossils from about 1.5 BILLION years before the Cambrian period were reported in Science magazine in 1965, and since then there have been THOUSANDS of species named from millions of fossils, with a pretty steady history going all the way back to the oldest rocks. So when DeHaan and Wiester put a dashed line in their figure, and say that this is what THEORY says, but there is no fossil evidence before 550 million years ago (the beginning of Cambrian period), they are essentialy saying something along the lines of "some day man may reach the moon".
     There have been several books about animal fossils just before the Cambrian period. Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life" brought the attention of the Burgess Shale fossils to the general public more than a decade ago. There is also "The Garden of Ediacara" by Mark McMenamin, and "The Crucible of Creation", by Simon Conway Morris. Finally, for a good recent account of evolution throughout the Cambrian period and a bit later, I can happily recommend reading Richard Fortey's "TRILOBITE! Eyewitness to Evolution".

     Another good book for an overview of the past several billion years of fossil history is "LIFE - An Unauthorsied Biography - A Natural history of the first 4,000,000,000 Years of Life on Earth", by Richard Fortey. When one looks at the fossil record, over long periods of time you see the general sorts of trends one would expect - that is, for the first TWO BILLION YEARS of the fossil record, there are only fossils of simple prokaryotic organisms, and then roughly 1.8 BILLION years ago, the first unicellular eukaryotes are found, and then 1.1 BILLION years ago, the first sexual eukaryoties are found, and then the first animals appear around 550 MILLION years ago - the earliest forms are tiny animals so small that you'd need a magnifying glass to see them. Then, a bit later, the first larger creatures appear, although they're pretty simple and basic. Eventually, more complicated body plans are found. Later still plants appear on land. Then flowering plants and insects, then land animals. Now we can argue about whether the "Cambrian explosion" was 160 million years, as for example Niles Eldredge claims in "The Triumph of Evolution", or a "mere" 10 million years as is claimed by DeHaan and Wiester - but let's step back and look at the bigger picture here - assume that DeHaan and Wiester are correct, and that you have the formation of many of the major animal phyla over this short period of time. How exactly is this evidence for an "Intelligent Designer"? Are they arguing that the Intelligent agent created the animals pretty much as they are today, instantaneously? Or did the Intelligent agent take maybe 5 million years? They're both a mere blink of the eye geologically. But it sounds as if DeHaan and Wiester have no problem with the date of the early Cambrian period - that is, half a BILLION years ago. Now this is a very long time, and the fossil record clearly shows that the "animals" at the beginning of the Cambrian were considerably different than the animals we see in a zoo today. For example, there were fish, but certainly nothing approaching a mammal, no insects, no flowers - things were pretty much limited to the oceans at the time. So maybe the Intelligent Designer had forethought and KNEW how to make the different groups of animals so they could slowly change over the next half-billion years? Why did the Intelligent Designer choose to wait for 3 billion years or so before making the first large animals? I'm not sure why they choose THIS PARTICULAR point in time to introduce an Intelligent Designer. It seems to me that proposing an intelligent designer creates a lot more questions than might be answered by saying "an intelligent something" did it. Somehow it is not very satisfying to say "someone else did it", but not be allowed to ask WHY they did it this way. But the ID folks would like us to just accept the evidence that there existed an intelligent designer (who, according to Dembski could even be a bit stupid and not do a very optimal job of designing things) - and not worry about the "why" question. (This is because the "why" question is one of theology, not science.)

     Actually, I have another problem with Figure 1 in this chapter - not only is the bottom part wrong, where they claim there's no evidence despite an abundance of fossils, but they show each phylum as a tightly branching cluster, continuing pretty much the same through time, without much change in morphology - this is pretty different that the pictures I've seen in the more recent literature. Once again, it looks like they're trotting out an old figure from 50 years ago, blowing off the dust, and saying "see, this is what modern science still can't do - MAYBE someday man will reach the moon". I really am surprised that an editor with any knowledge of contemporary evolutionary theory would ever allow this - but then again, I guess that's the whole point - none of the essays really deal with modern evolutionary science - just a rehash of old arguments against evolution from the past 100 years.

     Chapter 12 (by Walter L. Bradley) discusses how all the constants of nature are finely tuned, such that a small change in any one of them would mean a drastically different universe, or in some cases no universe at all. This is known as the "anthropic principle", and is the subject of many popular books. The argument is pretty simple, and the hope for the "design inference" is clear. But I just wonder whether this isn't a bit like saying what is the probability that I met this particular person on this day, when there's so many other people alive on the planet, and so many days in our lives? Yes the probability in one sense is very small, but nonetheless, when an event happens, the probability collapses to one. So we have the constants of the universe that presently exist - if they are indeed "constant", then why should we be so worried about "what ifs"? Interersting conjectures, but hardly the sort of "smoking gun" type evidence, in my opinion.

     Chapter 13 (by William A. Dembski) discusses a more mathematical approach to determining whether an event is "a product of design". The subtitle of the chapter is "A Primer on the Discernment of Intelligent Design". Based on my rudimentary understanding of this chaper, what could I make of the following sequence, found in the middle of a virus that causes AIDS?

the sequence using the standard three-letter abbreviations:
      lys-arg-leu-arg-tyr-trp-ala-ser-his-glu-arg-glu-arg

using the standard biochemical single-letter abbreviations, this now becomes:
          KILRYWASHERE

     Adding a couple of spaces and an "O", this sounds like "KILROY WAS HERE". Could this "proof" that maybe the CIA was involved in designing the AIDS virus? Well, the first thing I would do to test this theory is to have a look and see how often I might find a similar sequence in other proteins. If this is very similar to a common motif, then perhaps an alternative explanation, one in which a few small changes resulted in this apparent message. To do this comparision, I use an alignment method called "BLAST", and paste the sequence "KILROYWASERE" into a box on a blast web page, click on the submit or "BLAST" button, and then wait for a few minutes for a comparison with all the proteins in the database. The best match in the report is displayed as follows:

     The subject of the last chapter (by Bruce Gordon) in the book is on whether ID should be considered science or not. Bruce Gordan says that he disagrees with Judge Overton's decision in the Arkansas Creation Science trial - he thinks that Creationism should be catagorised as "science" but he adds that he thinks Creationism is "bad science". I agree with him that Creationism is indeed very poor science - but there is also a clear element of religious belief to it as well. I followed the Arkansas Creation Science trail with interest because I grew up in a fundamentalist church in Arkansas, and was an ardent Creationist when I was in Jr. High. During my senior year, I took a biology course taught by a creationist, and realised that a lot of what the creationists were saying was not very scientific, and furthermore, when I started asking questions, it became obvious that my questions were not welcomed. The Arkansas Creation Science trial began when I was in college, and we followed it as part of our botany class (at William Jewell College, in Missouri - a safe distance from which to watch what was happening in my home state). It was kind of strange - you had the scientists lining up all the religious folks to testify that Creationism was religious, and you had the Creationists lining up scientists to testify that Creationism really was scientific. I remember shortly after the Arkansas Creation Science trial reading (and fully agreeing with) Michael Ruse's book "But Is It Science?". I think that "Creation Science" is BOTH bad science AS WELL as religion pretending to be science. How can it be both? Simply because there are elements within Creationism which are testable (e.g., evidence for the age of the earth) and simply do not hold up to the scrutiny of science. On the other hand, how can one use science to "prove" that a Supreme Being created the world in six 24 hour days, on Thursday, 23 September, 4004 B.C.?
Consider the following quote:

     So which of the intelligent design authors is this from? The answer is that the above quote is from a summary at the end of the creationist book "DARWIN'S DEMISE", by Joe White and Nicholas Comninellis (pages 138-139). The fact that it sounds no different from what's written in many of the essays in "Signs of Intelligence" testifies to the similarity between the Intelligent Design movement and the creationists. The only difference is that some of the creationists think the earth is young, and some of the ID people think the earth is old. But essentially the ID movement is the same as creationism, with all its religious implications. ID is not about science, but an attempt to change the religious philosophy of society.