{"product_id":"intelligent-thought-isbn-9780307277220","title":"Intelligent Thought","description":"Evolutionary science lies at the heart of a modern understanding of the natural world. Darwin’s theory has withstood 150 years of scientific scrutiny, and today it not only explains the origin and design of living things, but highlights the importance of a scientific understanding in our culture and in our lives.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRecently the movement known as “Intelligent Design” has attracted the attention of journalists, educators, and legislators. The scientific community is puzzled and saddened by this trend–not only because it distorts modern biology, but also because it diverts people from the truly fascinating ideas emerging from the real science of evolution. Here, join fifteen of our preeminent thinkers whose clear, accessible, and passionate essays reveal the fact and power of Darwin’s theory, and the beauty of the scientific quest to understand our world.John Brockman    \u003ci\u003eIntroduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eJerry A. Coyne \u003ci\u003eIntelligent Design:  The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLeonard Susskind   \u003ci\u003eThe Good Fight\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eDaniel C. Dennett  \u003ci\u003eThe Hoax of Intelligent Design and How It Was Perpetuated\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eNicholas Humphrey  \u003ci\u003eConsciousness:  The Achilles Heel of Darwinism?  Thank God, Not Quite\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eTim D. White   \u003ci\u003eHuman Evolution:  The Evidence\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eNeil H. Shubin   \u003ci\u003eThe “Great” Transformation\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eRichard Dawkins \u003ci\u003e  Intelligent Aliens\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eFrank J. Sulloway   \u003ci\u003eWhy Darwin Rejected Intelligent Design\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eScott Atran   \u003ci\u003eUnintelligent Design\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eSteven Pinker  \u003ci\u003eEvolution and Ethics\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eLee Smolin   \u003ci\u003eDarwinism All the Way Down\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eStuart A. Kauffman   \u003ci\u003eIntelligent Design, Science or Not?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eSeth Lloyd   \u003ci\u003eHow Smart Is the Universe?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLisa Randall   \u003ci\u003eDesigning Words\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eMarc D. Hauser  \u003ci\u003eParental Guidance Required\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eScott D. Sampson  \u003ci\u003eEvoliteracy\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eAppendix  \u003ci\u003eExcerpt from the Memorandum Opinion of The United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, December 20, 2005\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all.”  –Daniel C. Dennett, Philosopher\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Natural 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.” –Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one.” –Steven Pinker, Psychologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot 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. –Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously declared, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” One might add that nothing in biology makes sense in the light of intelligent design. –Jerry A. Coyne, evolutionary biologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEvolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists, but intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything at all.  —Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA denial of evolution–however motivated–is a denial of evidence, a retreat from reason to ignorance. —Tim D. White, paleontologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNatural 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. —Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe supernatural explanation fails to explain because it ducks the responsibility to explain itself.—Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing indicates that people who believe that life arose by chance also believe that morality is haphazard. —Scott Atran, anthropologist and psychologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one. —Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo 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. —Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe 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. —Lisa Randall, physicist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat counts as a controversy must be delineated with care, as we want students to distinguish between scientific challenges and sociopolitical ones. —Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIncredulity doesn’t count as an alternative position or critique. —Marc D. Hauser, evolutionary psychologist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRather 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. —Scott D. Sampson, paleontologist\u003cb\u003eJohn Brockman\u003c\/b\u003e is a writer, agent, and publisher of \u003ci\u003eEdge\u003c\/i\u003e, the \"Third Culture\" website (www.edge.org), the forum for leading scientists and thinkers to share their research with the general public. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eBy The Late John Brockman\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Third Culture\u003c\/i\u003e and has edited several previous anthologies including \u003ci\u003eThe Next Fifty Years, Curious Minds\u003c\/i\u003e, and\u003ci\u003e My Einstein\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in New York City.Jerry A. Coyne\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Intelligent Design:  The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   \u003ci\u003e Intelligent design is not an evangelic Christian thing, or a generally  Christian thing or even a generically theistic thing. . . . Intelligent  design is an emerging scientific research program. Design theorists attempt  to demonstrate its merits fair and square in the scientific world-without  appealing to religious authority.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    -William A. Dembski, \u003ci\u003eThe Design Revolution\u003c\/i\u003e (2004)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003ci\u003e[A]ny view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be  seen as fundamentally deficient. . . . [T]he conceptual soundness of a  scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    -William A. Dembski, \u003ci\u003eIntelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science \u0026amp; Theology\u003c\/i\u003e (1999)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Well, which is it? Is intelligent design (ID) merely a sophisticated form of  biblical creationism, as most biologists claim, or is it science-an  alternative to Darwinism that deserves discussion in the science classroom?  As the two quotations above imply, you won't find the answers in the  writings of the leading advocates of ID.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The ambiguity is deliberate, for ID is a theory that must appeal to two  distinct constituencies. To the secular public, ID proponents present their  theory as pure science. This, after all, is their justification for a slick  public-relations campaign promoting the teaching of ID in the public  schools. But as is clear from the infamous \"Wedge Document\" of the Discovery  Institute, a right-wing think tank in Seattle and the center for ID  propaganda, intelligent design is part of a cunning effort to dethrone  materialism from society and science and replace it with theism.1 ID is  simply biblical creationism updated and disguised to sneak evangelical  Christianity past the First Amendment and open the classroom door to Jesus.  The advocates of ID will admit this, but only to their second constituency,  the sympathetic audience of evangelical Christians on whose support they  rely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nevertheless, let us give the ID movement the benefit of the doubt. Let us  suppose that ID might indeed be an alternative and superior scientific  theory-one that explains the natural world better than Darwinian evolution  does. Can such an argument stand up to scrutiny? Is it time for Darwinian  evolution to go the way of Newtonian mechanics, as a theory good for its  time but ripe for replacement by a new paradigm? No. Not 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What are those requirements? A scientific theory isn't just a guess or  speculation, it is a convincing explanatory framework for a body of evidence  about the real world. A good scientific theory makes sense of wide-ranging  data that were previously unexplained. In addition, a scientific theory must  make testable predictions and be vulnerable to falsification. Einstein's  theory of relativity, for example, received a definitive test (and  confirmation) by measurements of the bending of starlight by the sun during  a solar eclipse. If a theory can't be tested or falsified, it is not a  scientific theory. The theory that God caused the Big Bang, for example,  isn't a scientific theory, because (while it may be true) there are no  observations we can make to disprove it. When a theory has withstood many  tests and made many correct predictions, it becomes a scientific fact, which  we can understand as a theory having such strong support that all rational  people would accept it. The theories of atoms and of chemical bonds, for  example, have graduated from theory to fact. Both could conceivably be shown  to be wrong-all the data supporting the existence of atoms might have been  deceptive-but it's highly unlikely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So, how do Darwinism and ID compare when judged against these criteria?  Let's start by looking at Darwinism. The modern theory of evolution, called  neo-Darwinism in light of 150 years of post-Darwin research, has four parts.  Put simply, these are as follows:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    First, evolution occurs; that is, living species are descendants of other  species that lived in the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Second, evolutionary change occurs through the gradual genetic  transformation of populations of individuals over thousands or millions of  years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Third, new forms of life arise from the splitting of a single lineage into  two, a process known as speciation. This continual splitting leads to a  nested genealogy of species-a \"tree of life\" whose root was the first  species to arise and whose twigs are the millions of species living today.  Trace back any pair of twigs from modern species through the branches and  you will find that they share a common ancestor, represented by the node at  which the branches meet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And fourth, much of evolution occurs through natural selection. Individuals  carrying genes better suited to the current environment leave more  offspring, causing genetic change in populations over time which improves  the \"fit\" of the organism to the environment. It is this improving fit that  gives organisms the appearance of having been well designed for their  lifestyles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    These claims don't necessarily stand or fall together. Nevertheless,  evidence supporting all four began to accumulate starting with Darwin's 1859  On the Origin of Species and continues to inundate us today. Every bit of  information we have gathered about nature is consonant with the theory of  evolution, and there is not one whit of evidence contradicting it.  Neo-Darwinism, like the theory of chemical bonds, has graduated from theory  to fact.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What is this evidence? It is immense, so I will just touch upon what Darwin  himself presented, though he had only a fraction of the evidence available  today. It came from the fossil record, from curious remnants persisting in  the anatomy and development of living species, and from biogeography-the  geographical distribution of Earth's flora and fauna.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Let's start with the obvious place to look, the fossil record. Even in  Darwin's time, there was evidence here supporting evolution, in the sequence  of organisms laid down in the rocks. The deepest and oldest sediments show  marine invertebrates; fish appear much later, and amphibians, reptiles, and  mammals later still. Why should divine creation follow such a path, from the  simple to the complex? Yet it is what we would expect with evolution. Darwin  also observed that the species inhabiting any region-the living marsupials  of Australia, for instance-closely resemble fossils found in the same place.  This suggests that the former descended from the latter. We can trace  evolutionary changes in lineages through the record: Diatoms grow larger,  clamshells get ribbier, horses become larger and toothier, and the human  lineage evolves bigger brains, smaller teeth, and greater proficiency at  walking on two legs. There are transitional forms, too-but more on those  later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Leaving behind the dead, we also find ample evidence of evolution among the  living-relics that the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould dubbed \"the  senseless signs of history.\" They are many: The tooth buds developed in the  embryonic stage by birds and anteaters-buds that are later aborted and never  erupt-are remnants of their toothed ancestors. The tiny vestigial wings  hidden under the feathers of the flightless kiwi attest to its ancestors'  ability to fly. Some cave-dwelling animals have rudimentary eyes that cannot  see, degenerate remnants of their ancestors' sighted ones. What creator, or  guiding intelligence, would give animals such useless tooth buds, wings, or  eyes?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our bodies, too, are a palimpsest of our ancestry. The appendix is a  familiar example. Less well known is the bad design of the recurrent  laryngeal nerve-a nerve that runs from the brain to the larynx, helping us  speak and swallow. In mammals, this nerve doesn't take a direct route but  descends into the chest, loops around the aorta near the heart, and then  runs back up to the larynx. It is several times longer than it needs to be;  in the giraffe the nerve has to traverse the neck twice and so is fifteen  feet long-fourteen feet longer than necessary! The added length makes the  nerve more susceptible to injury, and its tortuous path makes sense only in  light of evolution. We inherited our developmental pathway from that of  ancestral fish, in which the precursor of the recurrent laryngeal nerve  attached to the sixth of the gill arches, embryonic bars of muscle, nerves,  and blood vessels that developed into gills. During the evolution of land  animals, some of the ancestral vessels disappeared, while others were  rearranged into a new circulatory system. The blood vessel in the sixth gill  arch moved backward into the chest, becoming the aorta. As it did so, the  nerve that looped around it was constrained to move backward in tandem.  Natural selection could not create the most efficient configuration because  that would have required breaking the nerve and leaving the larynx without  innervation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Look deeper and you find evidence for evolution buried in our DNA. Our  genome is a veritable farrago of nonfunctional DNA, including many inactive  \"pseudogenes\" that were functional in our ancestors. Why do humans, unlike  most mammals, require vitamin C in their diet? Because primates cannot  synthesize this essential nutrient from simpler chemicals. Yet we still  carry all the genes for synthesizing vitamin C. The gene used for the last  step in this pathway was inactivated by mutations 40 million years ago,  probably because it was unnecessary in fruit-eating primates.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Is this really the best an \"intelligent\" designer can do? IDers claim that  arguments for evolution based on inefficiencies or vestigial structures are  unscientific because they supposedly include an unjustified theological  assumption that a designer would not create such structures. But IDers are  missing the point here. The evolutionary argument is that these  imperfections and inefficiencies make sense only if one assumes that  evolution has occurred! They comport with creationism only if you believe  that the creator deceptively designed all organisms to delude us into  thinking that they had evolved.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And finally, what of biogeography? This yields some of the most powerful  evidence for evolution. It was Darwin's genius in the Origin to show that  the distribution of plants and animals made sense only by assuming that  species had evolved and split into additional species. Let's take his  argument about the wildlife of oceanic islands-islands that, like the  Galápagos and Hawaii, were never connected to continents but arose, bereft  of terrestrial life, from beneath the sea. Compared with continents or  continental islands, these islands have bizarrely unbalanced flora and  fauna-unbalanced in that they are missing or impoverished in many types,  while others (especially plants, insects, and birds) are present in  profusion, consisting of clusters of numerous similar species \"radiations.\"  Hawaii, for example, has no native terrestrial mammals, reptiles, or  amphibians but has large radiations of fruit flies and silversword plants.  One third of the world's 2,000 species of fruit flies are found on the  archipelago, although it makes up only 2 percent of the land on Earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Moreover, the animals and plants inhabiting an oceanic island are most  similar to those species found on the nearest mainland, often despite great  differences in habitat. Darwin's clinching point was this: The kinds of  wildlife commonly found on oceanic islands are those that could get there  easily, carried by winds, ocean currents, or other animals. Clearly, novel  species on oceanic islands descend from those that were able to colonize  from the nearest mainland and subsequently evolved and speciated on the  islands. Only unplanned evolution makes sense of all these observations of  island biogeography. No theory of design or creation even begins to explain  them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Darwin had strong evidence for evolution but no direct evidence for natural  selection as the process by which it occurs. He relied on logical  argument-the existence of variation in populations and its influence on  reproductive success, from which natural selection followed inevitably-and  on analogy with the artificial selection used by breeders to produce forms  as diverse as Chihuahuas and St. Bernards from wolves, and cauliflower and  Brussels sprouts from wild cabbage, within a mere 1,000 years or so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But vast amounts of evidence have accumulated since Darwin's time.  Biologists have now observed hundreds of cases of natural selection,  beginning with the well-known examples of bacterial resistance to  antibiotics, insect resistance to DDT, and HIV resistance to antiviral  drugs. Natural selection accounts for the defense of fish and mice against  predators via camouflage and for the adaptation of plants to toxic minerals  in the soil. And the strength of selection observed in the wild, when  extrapolated over long periods, is more than adequate to explain the  diversification of life on Earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Neo-Darwinian evolution passes with flying colors the test of a scientific  theory as an explanatory framework for wide-ranging evidence. What a  remarkably elegant theory it is, and what a vast body of evidence it  explains! It makes sense of data from fields as diverse as paleontology,  biogeography, embryology, anatomy, and molecular biology. The geneticist  Theodosius Dobzhansky famously declared, \"Nothing in biology makes sense  except in the light of evolution.\" One might add that nothing in biology  makes sense in the light of intelligent design.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But can neo-Darwinism make predictions? And is it falsifiable? Yes, and yes  again. As a historical science, it cannot be expected to predict the future.  But it can, nevertheless, make powerful predictions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Darwin himself made predictions from his theory. The age of the earth was  unknown in his time, but he predicted that it would be old, to allow time  for evolution to produce the existing diversity of life. We now know that  Earth is 4.6 billion years old. He also predicted that if plants on oceanic  islands were descended from those on continents, the seeds of continental  plants should be able to survive prolonged immersion in seawater, and he  confirmed this prediction with experiments described in the \u003ci\u003eOrigin\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Developments in biology after Darwin have served to confirm other  predictions of evolutionary theory: For example, in order for natural  selection to operate, there must be plenty of heritable variation in wild  populations of plants and animals. We now know the source of this variation  (a problem that baffled Darwin): mutations in DNA. Research in the past  century has uncovered ample genetic variation for nearly every trait in  every species studied.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    We also now understand that natural selection involves the differential  reproduction of genes. That means there should be examples of selection that  benefit the genes themselves and not their carriers. Recent studies have  thoroughly confirmed this prediction. In the production of eggs and sperm,  for example, there is normally a 50 percent probability of each of our two  gene copies going into each gamete. But there are some \"selfish genes\" that  kill their partners and so get overrepresented in eggs and sperm. This  observation does not follow obviously from the view that organisms were  intelligently designed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1 The Wedge Document, an internal memorandum of the institute, was leaked to  the Internet in 1999 and later acknowledged by the institute as authentic.  It can be found at   http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/CapeCanaveral\/Hangar\/2437\/wedge.html. It states:  \"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms,  those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced  that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That  source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view  the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is  intended to function as a 'wedge' that, while relatively small, can split  the trunk when applied at its weakest points . . . Design theory promises to  reverse the stifling dominance of the materialistic worldview, and to  replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic  convictions.\"","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302267703525,"sku":"NP9780307277220","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307277220.jpg?v=1767730103","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/intelligent-thought-isbn-9780307277220","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}