Intelligent Design

Biology’s Big Bang: The Cambrian Explosion

Paul Chien
August 15, 2024
Darwinian evolution predicts the gradual emergence of new life forms in the history of life. But the fossil record tells a different story. Journey with Professor Paul K. Chien to Chengjiang, China, and the world’s most extraordinary Cambrian fossil site. As he shows, this fossil site (along with many others around the world) points not to gradual evolution but to the sudden appearance of entirely new animal body plans. The best explanation? Intelligent design. About the In a Nutshell Series This series of booklets was created to help Discovery Society members educate themselves about the basic arguments for intelligent design and the critiques of Darwinian evolution. Each booklet presents the content of one chapter of Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. To help you …

Evolution’s Irreducible Complexity Problem

Robert P. Waltzer
August 15, 2024
Join professor of biology Robert Waltzer as he shows how some evolutionists play a bait-and-switch game. They give examples of microevolution, such as changes in the average beak size of Galapagos finches, and then act as if this proves macroevolution—that is, the evolution of entirely new body plans in the history of life. Not so fast, Waltzer says. An insurmountable obstacle stands in the way of large-scale evolutionary change: irreducible complexity. What’s more, your own body is actually an irreducibly complex system of irreducibly complex systems, pointing strongly to intelligent design. About the In a Nutshell Series This series of booklets was created to help Discovery Society members educate themselves about the basic arguments for intelligent design and the …

Factories that Build Factories

Eric H. Anderson
August 15, 2024
Evolutionists acknowledge that without a self-replicating entity, the Darwinian process has nothing to work with. So how could mindless chemicals have built the first self-replicating entity to kickstart Darwinian evolution? As design theorist Eric Anderson explains, evolutionists suggest that something simple—like a self-replicating molecule—kickstarted the origin of life on Earth. But is that idea realistic? As it turns out, engineers are trying to build a self-replicating machine, and while they are nowhere close to succeeding, their efforts reveal that even the simplest self-replicating system must be unimaginably sophisticated. Mindless processes aren’t up to the task. What’s required is a most intelligent designer.  About the In a Nutshell Series This series of …

The Origin of Life and the Information Problem

Eric H. Anderson
August 15, 2024
The realization in the twentieth century that even the simplest cells are packed with software tells us something profound about the origin of life. Design theorist and computer programmer Eric Anderson relates the exciting history of the discovery of DNA and shows how the dance of this digital information in each of our cells points insistently away from blind evolution. About the In a Nutshell Series This series of booklets was created to help Discovery Society members educate themselves about the basic arguments for intelligent design and the critiques of Darwinian evolution. Each booklet presents the content of one chapter of Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. To help you delve deeper into each subject, we have included in each book a list of recommended resources …

The Big Bang and the Fine-tuned Universe

Robert A. Alston
August 15, 2024
In easy-to-understand language, former NASA special projects engineer Robert Alston tackles cosmology’s profoundest questions: Where did the universe come from, and how were its laws and constants finely tuned to allow for life? From Albert Einstein’s biggest blunder to the perfect parameters that allow fragile life to persevere, this mini-book explores how astronomy and physics point to a cosmic architect. About the In a Nutshell Series This series of booklets was created to help Discovery Society members educate themselves about the basic arguments for intelligent design and the critiques of Darwinian evolution. Each booklet presents the content of one chapter of Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell. To help you delve deeper into each subject, we have included in …

Unnatural Death

Richard Weikart
August 5, 2024
In this wide-ranging history of euthanasia and assisted suicide, historian Richard Weikart takes us from the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans to the contemporary scene — where the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death. How did we reach this place? Unnatural Death answers this question by tracing a complex and fascinating history of ideas, attitudes, and legal wranglings stretching from Socrates to Peter Singer and beyond.

The Farm at the Center of the Universe

Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt
May 21, 2024
Why did Isaac’s father have to die so young? Isaac’s older cousin Charlie — a science teacher — says he knows why. Nature is pitiless. There’s no God. No afterlife. Just atoms in the void and the struggle for survival. Charlie says a week at their grandparents’ farm, seeing animals get killed and eaten, will prove it. But at the farm, both of them get more than they bargained for. And soon Isaac finds himself caught in a battle of wits between two men, and facing a choice he alone can …

The Big Bang Revolutionaries

Jean-Pierre Luminet
April 23, 2024
Hubble and Einsten are often credited, but the real heroes of the Big Bang revolution are the Russian Alexander Friedmann and Belgian priest Georges Lemaître. The Big Bang Revolutionaries amends the record, telling the remarkable story of how these two men, joined by the mischievous George Gamow and in the face of conventional scientific wisdom, offered a compelling view of a singular creation of the universe in what Lemaître termed a “primeval atom.”

Darwin’s Bluff

Robert Shedinger
February 12, 2024
In this fascinating piece of historical detective work, Robert Shedinger draws on Darwin’s letters, private notebooks, and an unfinished manuscript to piece together a puzzle and reveal an embarrassing truth: Darwin never finished his sequel to The Origin of Species because in the end he could not deliver the empirical evidence he promised would validate his theory.

The Design Inference

William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert
November 16, 2023
A landmark of the intelligent design movement, The Design Inference revolutionized our understanding of how we detect intelligent causation. Originally published twenty-five years ago, it has now been revised and expanded into a second edition that greatly sharpens its exploration of design inferences.

Science After Babel

David Berlinski
June 5, 2023
Polymath and raconteur David Berlinski is at it again, challenging the shibboleths of contemporary science with his inimitable blend of deep learning, close reasoning, and rapier wit. In Science After Babel he reflects on everything from Newton, Einstein, and Gödel to catastrophe theory, information theory, and the morass that is modern Darwinism. The scientific enterprise is unarguably impressive, but it shows no sign of reaching the empyrean heights it seemed to promise a century ago. “It resembles Bruegel’s Tower of Babel,” Berlinski says, “and if it suggests anything at all, it suggests that its original plans have somehow been lost.” Science endures. Scientism, it would seem, is guttering out. Plaudits Many will read this book for the close, elegant …

Darwin Comes to Africa

Olufemi Oluniyi
February 21, 2023
Charles Darwin fathered not just a scientific theory, but a toxic social ideology that fueled racist colonial policies in Africa. In this sobering book, African scholar Olufemi Oluniyi traces the insidious impact of Darwinian ideas on British imperial policies in Northern Nigeria. Drawing on official documents, public statements, and well-attested historical events, Oluniyi documents how concepts such as evolutionary racism and survival of the fittest were systematically used to demean black Africans, consigning some people to a status of permanent inferiority. Rejecting Social Darwinism, Oluniyi makes a compelling argument for the equality of all human beings, and for recognizing Africa’s many seminal contributions to the history of human civilization. Praise Ideas rule the …

Your Designed Body

Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman
November 22, 2022
Consider your body. Every day it must solve hundreds of hard engineering problems simultaneously, or else you’ll die. While you’re going about your daily business, your body stores, retrieves, translates, and manages software for thousands of proteins, switches, setpoints, thresholds, feedback loops, coordinate systems, counters, and timers. It disassembles thousands of different complex molecules, converts them into their building blocks, absorbs the building blocks, then reassembles them into the legions of chemicals and proteins that keep you going. Your body also safely transports hazardous chemicals to where they’re needed, without spilling them in places where they’d do harm, and employs them as it orchestrates thousands of complex processes and movements, some nearly …

Darwinian Racism

Richard Weikart
February 1, 2022
To hear some tell it, Adolf Hitler was a Christian creationist who rejected Darwinian evolution. Award-winning historian Richard Weikart shows otherwise. According to Weikart, Darwinian evolution crucially influenced Hitler and the Nazis, and the Nazis zealously propagated evolutionary theory during the Third Reich. Inspired by arguments from both Darwin and early Darwinists, the Nazis viewed the “Nordic race” as superior to other races and set about advancing human evolution by ridding the world of “inferior” races and individuals. As Weikart also shows, these ideas circulate today among white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who routinely use Darwinian theory in their propaganda to advance a racist agenda. Darwinian Racism is careful history. It is also a wake-up …

Animal Algorithms

Eric Cassell
November 1, 2021
How do some birds, turtles, and insects possess navigational abilities that rival the best manmade navigational technologies? Who or what taught the honey bee its dance, or its hive mates how to read the complex message of the dance? In Animal Algorithms, Eric Cassell surveys recent evidence and concludes that the difficulty remains, and indeed, is a far more potent challenge to evolutionary theory than Darwin imagined.

Taking Leave of Darwin

Neil Thomas
August 2, 2021
University professor Neil Thomas was a committed Darwinist and agnostic — until an investigation of evolutionary theory led him to a startling conclusion: “I had been conned!” As he studied the work of Darwin’s defenders, he found himself encountering tactics eerily similar to the methods of political brainwashing he had studied as a scholar. Thomas felt impelled to write a book as a sort of warning call to humanity: “Beware! You have been fooled!” The result is Taking Leave of Darwin, a wide-ranging history of the evolution debate. Thomas uncovers many formidable Darwin opponents that most people know nothing about, ably distills crucial objections raised early and late against Darwinism, and shows that those objections have been explained away but never effectively …

Canceled Science

Eric Hedin
February 27, 2021
Eric Hedin was enjoying a productive career as a physics professor at Ball State University when the letter from a militant atheist arrived and all hell broke loose. The conflict spilled first onto the pages of the local newspaper, and then into the national news. The atheist attack included threats from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which targeted Hedin after learning his Boundaries of Science course exposed students to an evidence-based case for design and purpose in cosmology, physics, and biochemistry. Canceled Science tells the dramatic story of the atheist campaign to cancel Hedin’s course, reveals the evidence the atheists tried to bury, and explores discoveries that have revolutionized our understanding of the nature and origin of matter, space, and even time …