I mentioned a few days ago that Stephen Meyer's new book Darwin's Doubt is about to be released [see Two Books on the Cambrian Explosion]. I'm planning to read it as soon as I can get a hold of a copy—probably sometime in August in Canada.
You are all going to have to read this book because, according to Casey Luskin, it is "going to be another landmark for the ID movement" [Three (or Four) Reasons Everyone Should Read Darwin's Doubt]. Luskin has read it. Here are his three reasons why the book is important and worth reading.
I know that it's a bit annoying to have to read all this hype when the book won't be available for several months. The Intelligent Design Creationists want you to know that any criticism of what they are saying about the book is unethical unless you've read it yourself. However, it's not the least bit unethical for them to make outlandish claims about what's in the book months before we can verify whether those claims are correct.
- Arguments for intelligent design in the Cambrian explosion have certainly been made before. But Darwin's Doubt will be by far the most in-depth and mature development of those arguments to date, addressing in detail many ideas and rebuttals and theories advanced by evolutionary scientists, and showing why the theory of intelligent design best explains the explosion of biodiversity in the Cambrian animals.
- When published, Darwin's Doubt will be the single most up-to-date rebuttal to neo-Darwinian theory from the ID-paradigm. In this regard, one exciting element of Darwin's Doubt is that Meyer reviews much of the peer-reviewed research that's been published by the ID research community over the last few years, and highlights how ID proponents are doing relevant research answering key questions that show Darwinian evolution isn't up to the task of generating new functional information.
- As many ENV readers already know, we now live in a "post-Darwinian" world, where more and more evolutionary biologists are realizing that neo-Darwinism is failing, so they scramble to propose new materialistic evolutionary models to replace the modern synthesis. (These models include, or have included, self-organization, evo-devo, punc eq, neo-Lamarckism, natural genetic engineering, neutral evolution, and others.) In this regard, Darwin's Doubt does something that's never been done before: it surveys the landscape of these "post-neo-Darwinian evolutionary models," and shows why they too fail as explanations for the origin of animal body plans and biological complexity.
This is creationist ethics. It's not supposed to make sense.
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