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.
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 …
We associate light with the radiant beams that make the world visible to us. But the visible spectrum is only a tiny percentage of an electromagnetic spectrum that extends unimaginably far in both directions. And, as biologist Michael Denton carefully documents, that tiny band of visual light is crucial to life on Earth. In Children of Light, Denton elucidates the miraculous convergence of properties on the tiny band we call the visible spectrum that has allowed intelligent life to flourish on Earth. Follow the journey of light as it beams down from our Sun, through the protective blanket of our atmosphere, to the Earth. Once here, it powers photosynthesis and unlocks the oxygen needed for life. It allows the high-acuity vision that led us to civilization and technology. Light is just one more part of the epic story of our fine-tuned universe, fit for us to flourish here and come to understand it. This book is the third book in the Privileged Species series, which also includes The Wonder of Water and Fire-Maker.
