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.”
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 …
According to Michael Denton, the cosmos is stunningly fit not just for cellular life, not just for carbon-based animal life, and not even just for air-breathing animals, but especially for bipedal, land-roving, technology-pursuing creatures of our general physiological design.
Darwin’s Black Box thrust Michael Behe to the forefront of the intelligent design movement. The Lehigh University biochemist has haunted the dreams of Darwinists ever since. Each of his three books sparked a firestorm of criticism, in everything from the New York Times and the journal Science to the private blogs of professional atheists. Over the years, Behe has had a delightful time rebutting each attack, and now his responses are collected in a single volume entitled A Mousetrap for Darwin. The book’s title alludes to Behe’s homey illustration for his idea of irreducible complexity. A mousetrap with a missing part doesn’t work just a little worse. It doesn’t work at all. The same goes for the bacterial flagellum pictured on the …
The Miracle of the Cell provides compelling evidence that long before life emerged on our planet, the design of the carbon-based cell was foreshadowed in the order of nature, in the exquisite fitness of the laws of nature for this foundational unit of all life on Earth. Nowhere is this fitness more apparent than in the properties of the key atomic constituents of the cell. Each of the atoms of life — including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, as well as several metal elements — features a suite of unique properties fine-tuned to serve highly specific, indispensable roles in the cell. Moreover, some of these properties are specifically fit for essential roles in the cells of advanced aerobic organisms like ourselves. Author Michael Denton is a Senior Fellow with Discovery …
Conventional wisdom holds that the murder rate has plummeted since the Middle Ages; humankind is growing more peaceful and enlightened; man is shortly to be much improved — better genes, better neural circuits, better biochemistry; and we are approaching a technological singularity that well may usher in utopia. Human Nature eviscerates these and other doctrines of a contemporary nihilism masquerading as science. In this wide-ranging work polymath David Berlinski draws upon history, mathematics, logic, and literature to retrain our gaze on an old truth many are eager to forget: there is and will be about the human condition beauty, nobility, and moments of sublime insight, yes, but also ignorance and depravity. Men are not about to become like gods. Plaudits Polymath …
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.
About the Book From roaring waterfalls and crashing waves to gentle rain and billowing clouds, water pervades our planet’s majestic biosphere. It is easy to take for granted. But this ever-present substance is amazingly fit in a myriad of ways to sustain life on Earth, especially human life. Its unique properties allow it to fill many roles throughout the biological world, from forming the matrix of our cells, to regulating the temperature of our planet. In The Wonder of Water, biologist Michael Denton delves deep into this grand, untold story and explores how water is specially equipped to allow life to flourish on our blue planet. Find more information on The Privileged Species book series and companion documentaries at www.PrivilegedSpecies.com. About the Author Michael …
About the Book In 2000, biologist Jonathan Wells took the science world by storm with Icons of Evolution, a book showing how biology textbooks routinely promote Darwinism using bogus evidence — icons of evolution like Ernst Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings and peppered moths glued to tree trunks. Critics of the book complained that Wells had merely gathered up a handful of innocent textbook errors and blown them out of proportion. Now, in Zombie Science, Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Science has enriched our lives and led to countless discoveries. But now, Wells argues, it’s being corrupted. Empirical science is devolving into zombie science, shuffling along unfazed by opposing …
From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. In Fire-Maker, biologist Michael Denton explores the special features of nature that equipped humans to to harness the powers of fire and remake their world. This book is a companion to the documentary of the same name, available at …
More than thirty years after his landmark book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), biologist Michael Denton revisits his earlier thesis about the inability of Darwinian evolution to explain the history of life. He argues that there remains “an irresistible consilience of evidence for rejecting Darwinian cumulative selection as the major driving force of evolution.” From the origin of life to the origin of human language, the great divisions in the natural order are still as profound as ever, and they are still unsupported by the series of adaptive transitional forms predicted by Darwin. In addition, Denton makes a provocative new argument about the pervasiveness of non-adaptive order throughout biology, order that cannot be explained by the Darwinian mechanism. Evolution: Still …
Is most of our genome garbage? A number of leading proponents of Darwinian evolution claim that “junk DNA”—the non-protein-coding DNA that makes up more than 95% of our genome—provides decisive evidence for Darwin’s theory and against intelligent design, since an intelligent designer would not have littered our genome with so much garbage. In The Myth of Junk DNA, biologist Jonathan Wells exposes their claim as an anti-scientific myth that ignores the evidence, relies on illegitimate theological speculations, and impedes biomedical research. Far from consisting mainly of junk, the genome is increasingly revealing itself to be a multidimensional, integrated system in which non-protein-coding DNA performs a wide variety of essential biological functions. If anything, the …
