front cover of Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails)
Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails)
Matt Young and Paul K. Strode
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails) is an impassioned argument in favor of science—primarily the theory of evolution—and against creationism. Why impassioned? Should not scientists be dispassionate in their work? “Perhaps,” write the authors, “but it is impossible to remain neutral when our most successful scientific theories are under attack, for religious and other reasons, by laypeople and even some scientists who willfully distort scientific findings and use them for their own purposes.”

Focusing on what other books omit, how science works and how pseudoscience works, Matt Young and Paul K. Strode demonstrate the futility of “scientific” creationism. They debunk the notion of intelligent design and other arguments that show evolution could not have produced life in its present form.

Concluding with a frank discussion of science and religion, Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails) argues that science by no means excludes religion, though it ought tocast doubt on certain religious claims that are contrary to known scientific fact.
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front cover of Why Intelligent Design Fails
Why Intelligent Design Fails
A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism
Matt Young and Taner Edis
Rutgers University Press, 2004

Is Darwinian evolution established fact, or a dogma ready to be overtaken by "intelligent design"? This is the debate raging in courtrooms and classrooms across the country.

Why Intelligent Design Fails assembles a team of physicists, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and archaeologists to examine intelligent design from a scientific perspective. They consistently find grandiose claims without merit.

Contributors take intelligent design's two most famous claims--irreducible complexity and information-based arguments--and show that neither challenges Darwinian evolution. They also discuss thermodynamics and self-organization; the ways human design is actually identified in fields such as forensic archaeology; how research in machine intelligence indicates that intelligence itself is the product of chance and necessity; and cosmological fine-tuning arguments.

Intelligent design turns out to be a scientific mistake, but a mistake whose details highlight the amazing power of Darwinian thinking and the wonders of a complex world without design.

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