Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #774456 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Synopsis
The Intelligent Design Movement is making both social and scientific inroads into the established "religion" of our culture - scientific naturalism. At its core is a group of professionals and academics who are skeptical of Darwinian macroevolution. The "Darwinian paradigm crisis" that is emerging is of critical importance because it raises questions about the origins of life and probes the deepest levels of what it means to be human. "Doubts About Darwin" presents a historical study of the rapid emergence of this movement by tracing key events, personalities, and sociocultural factors. Author Thomas Woodward poses the crucial question: How do scientists (and the public at large) come to be persuaded that they are in possession of solid scientific knowledge, and what effect do their "stories" have on their beliefs?

Customer Reviews

The ID movement in a nutshell
The philosophical and material problems of C. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection were exposed comprehensively by Mivart in 1871, but in spite of this the Darwin myth has survived to the present day as the dogma in biology. Many working scientists have pointed out that neo-Darwinism is a busted flush but it has taken outsiders with a religious approach to really put the cat among the pigeons. Woodward focuses on the main protagonists of this movement and although he is sympathetic to their cause, he gives a reasonably balanced account of the movement and its aims. The key to their success has not been good science or the nature of their criticisms, but rhetoric, (the ways in which arguments are presented), and the organisation of the movement and how it disseminates its views to influential persons. The replies from the leading modern neo-Darwinians reflect that of Huxley in 1871, but this time the odds are stacked against them in ways that Woodward makes very clear. If biology (and science in general) are to meet and defeat this challenge they would do well to study the methods of the ID movement as described here and learn some important lessons - not least that falling back on one dogma (chance and gradual change) to defeat another will not reveal the true processes that lead to macro-evolution. Woodward also suffers from the fallacy that neo-Darwinism equals evolution when this is not the case, but he shows how well the ID movement is exploiting this misconception. This is in places a rather dry text but it should be read by any serious scholar of evolution or by those involved in opposing ID and its religious undertones in science.

Ultimately disappointing
I approached this book with the intention of getting a pro-ID history. It's good at being pro-ID, but it's not a great history.

If Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross' book Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design can be criticised it is because the history it weaves is very much a Wedge-centric approach. Woodward's book is very much the opposite. It's focus is squarely on Michael Denton, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe and William Dembski. It also briefly mentions David Berlinski, Johnathon Wells, Paul Nelson and Stephen Meyer in that order. What is missing is far more evident: there is no discussion of how the Intelligent Design movement found their institutional home at the Discovery Institute, nor the formation of the organisational structure of the movement. There is no mention of Dembski's International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID), nor of the Access Research Network, the multiple blogs and websites that have been started up to push Intelligent Design. What about the supporting cast: Alvin Plantinga, J. Budzizsewski, Rob Koons, Rob Kaita, Dean Kenyon, Scott Minnich, Jay Wesley Richards, Jed Macosko. The list goes on and on.

Little or no mention is made of the 'movement' representatives - the people who pick up the Design ideas and promulgate them to the people. No mention of people like Nancy Pearcey or John G. West. According to a talk given by Dembski, once you've got Behe's ideas about irreducible complexity and his ideas about specified complexity/design inference/explanatory filter sorted out, you've also got three other components of the ID strategy: a fresh face, the disconnect between high and low culture and a burgeoning research community. The fact that public relations, according to Dembski's five criteria, makes up as much of the Intelligent Design movement as does their (pseudo-)scientific ideas is certainly something that deserves commentary.

Do not get me wrong. I think that having a decent historical study of the ideas, means and purposes of both the movement and it's critics is a useful thing. And in some cases Woodward's work does satsify this need. He also just about manages to satisfy the central aim of his thesis ("The narrative of the movement itself functions as the central integrating and motivating factor of all the rhetorical projects that the movement is pursuing", p. 24), but he doesn't manage to actually provide a history of the movement. For that you should still consider Forrest and Gross, whatever you think of their conclusions, as the best historians of the movement. I have seen Forrest and Gross criticised for the overreaching rhetoric and also for a few pesky things like getting phone numbers wrong. But few of the critiques actually point to any factual errors or glaring omissions.

All in all, this book makes interesting and useful reading for those with an interest in the movement, regardless of one's opinion. By it's omissions, it falls short of what I hoped would come from such a study, and I cannot, in good conscience, reccomend it as a historical guide. It works, at best, as a supplemental tome to an understanding already built up from other sources. All in all, a disappointing book.

A potted history of the challenge to dogmatic Darwinism
Thomas Woodward does an excellent job to trace the history of the Intelligent Design movement in one book. He covers the theory, the science, and most importantly the strategies of the 4 main proponents of Design: Michael Denton, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe and William Dembski.
The book made me log on to the net, and try and find out what these 4 were doing now, and to order the 4 core books setting out their case.
At times the language dealing with the rhetorical strategy and theory is a little academic, but it's worth the effort to get through that, and does become easier after the first few chapters.
Darwinists - read this if you dare!