Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21809 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Customer Reviews

New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Scientific Naturalism
In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compelling facets of the Intelligent Design case- that of biological information in DNA. Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative.

Meyer's historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.

Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of 'turning point' historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.

Meyer fleshes out a cohesive argument for intelligent design garnering support from an extensive body of molecular evidence and expert commentaries. His review of the `chicken and egg' paradox, as relates to the integral interdependencies of molecular systems such as transcription and translation, highlights once more why it is that evolutionary `pie in the sky' assumptions are powerless to explain the origins of critical life processes. Meyer then goes on to boldly entertain the idea that intelligent design presents us with the only causally adequate explanation for the origin of biological information and spends much of the remainder of his book tying together substantial evidence in support of his position.

Following in the footsteps of fellow ID advocate William Dembski, Meyer has done us all a great service by showing how the chance assembly of a 150 amino-acid protein pales in front of the available probabilistic resources of our universe. In other words, we are stopped dead in our tracks by a probabilistic impasse of the highest order before we have even begun assessing the geological plausibility of competing origin of life scenarios.

The scientific method commits us to finding the best explanation for the phenomena we observe. Drawing from the opinions of NIH biologist Peter Mora, Meyer shows us how the chance hypothesis- that purports to explain how life arose without recourse to design or necessity- has been found wanting particularly in light of the ever-growing picture of the complexity of the cell. A debate-clincher in Meyer's expose comes from his comprehensive summarization of the bellyaches associated with chemist Stanley Miller's controversial spark discharge apparatus.

In Signature In The Cell Meyer builds on Dembski's cornerstone case and uses a seemingly non-ending supply of illustrations to firm up his own supportive arguments. One can only imagine how Darwin might have felt coming back to find intelligent design legitimized through his own Vera Causa criterion. My hunch is that he would have applauded the current state of debate.

Very well written
I have really enjoyed reading this book.

It is an account of Meyers intellectual journey and why he is convinced of ID.
Sometimes books like this can be difficult to read. This one is not. I found it very enjoyable and his insights facinating.

I have to say that I find his arguments for ID pretty convincing.
I am assuming the one star reviewers either read a different book or maybe (but this couldn't be true could it) have an agenda and a difficult position to defend.

Look out for more so called "junk DNA" turning out to do important things as we learn more...

If you are interested in ID this is a great read.
If you are still making your mind up this is one of the better books on ID.
If you are against ID - then maybe don't bother it will just annoy you, as it's a good well argued reason to accept ID.

Sterling Example of Mendacious Intellectual Pornography from Stephen Meyer
In his rather tendentious, often dull, treatise on behalf of Intelligent Design and its potential implications for resolving the mystery of the origin of life, Stephen Meyer has written yet another manifesto of the kind we've come to expect from Meyer and his fellow Discovery Institute colleagues; one that is long on style and rather short on substance. In "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design" Meyer contends that Intelligent Design is a better scientific alternative than modern evolutionary theory in explaining the origin of life, and perhaps most notably, offers a series of testable hypotheses in a technically-minded Appendix that could establish Intelligent Design as a viable scientific theory capable of making many important predictions and discoveries in all aspects of biology, especially, for example, in molecular biology and epidemiology. Of course this merely begs the question as to why Intelligent Design advocates like Meyer have waited more than twenty years to proclaim Intelligent Design as a "theory" capable of ushering a scientific revolution as notable as those wrought by Newton's Classical Mechanics, Einstein's theories of Relativity, and Planck's Quantum Mechanics. Where have you been Stephen? Why have you kept us waiting so long for your earth-shattering discoveries that should demonstrate to anyone why Intelligent Design is a better, more comprehensive, explanation than modern evolutionary theory in accounting for the history and current composition of Planet Earth's biodiversity?

Despite ample claims to the contrary, Meyer's book is merely an intellectual exercise in smoke and mirrors, aimed at an audience which is either sympathetic to the preposterous claims made by Meyer and his colleagues at the Seattle, WA-based Discovery Institute (more aptly named "Dishonesty Institute" for reasons that will become all too clear shortly) or so impressed with Meyer's condescending comments about the flaws in "Neo - Darwinian" thought that he must of course be absolutely right. Meyer contends that the most important task for modern evolutionary theory is to discern how - and even why - life originated on Planet Earth. Really? That's a ridiculous assumption on Meyer's part, when Darwin - and later, his younger colleague and rival, Wallace - were more interested in discerning what Darwin referred to as the "mystery of mysteries", in trying to understand how, under natural laws, species undergo "transformations" or rather, "transmutations", yielding a biosphere truly teeming with life. While the very question of the origin of life is quite an interesting and an important one; it is nonetheless a question more appropriately addressed by chemists, biochemists and geochemists, among others, not by evolutionary biologists (As a former evolutionary biologist myself, I was interested primarily in understanding the patterns and the underlying processes responsible for the rich history of life that is well documented in the Phanerozoic fossil record (approximately the last half billion years) and in the molecular biological evidence found in genomic sequence data. I frankly couldn't care less whether Yahweh, Mother Goose or the Klingons were somehow responsible for creating life on Planet Earth.).

To help make his case, Meyer relies on the construction of "straw men" by claiming that there are really profound differences between historical sciences like biology and geology with other "experimental" sciences such as chemistry and physics. As a historian and philosopher of science - and as a former geophysicist too - Meyer should know better. There are many notable instances whereby well-conceived experiments have yielded important results confirming long-established scientific principles (or even challenging them) in biology and geology. Our understanding as to how Natural Selection does act on populations has been greatly enriched by such classic experiments as microbiologist Richard Lenski's ongoing two decade-long laboratory experiment on strains of E. coli - the bacterium found within the human gut - and by evolutionary ecologist John Endler's classic field experiments on pigmentation in Trinidad guppies. In the 1960s, ecologist Daniel Simberloff - then a graduate student of E. O. Wilson - confirmed via his field experiments several of the important predictions made by Wilson and ecologist Robert MacArthur in their theory of island biogeography.

So should we accept Meyer's proposition that Intelligent Design is a valid scientific theory simply because it produces testable hypotheses? What hypotheses? For example, he asserts on Page 489, "Design hypotheses envisioning discrete intelligent action also predict a pattern of fossil evidence showing large discontinuous or `quantum' increases in biological form and information at intervals in the history of life. Advocates of this kind of design hypothesis would expect to see a pattern of sudden appearance of sudden appearance of major forms of life as well as morphological stasis." Moreover, he claims "...they would also predict a `top-down' pattern of appearance in which large-scale differences in form (`disparity' between many separate body plans) emerge suddenly and prior to the occurrence of lower-level (i.e., species and genus) differences in form. Neo-Darwinism and front-loaded hypotheses expect the opposite pattern, a `bottom-up' pattern in which small differences in form accumulate first (differentiating species and genera from each other) and then only much later building to the large-scale differences in form that differentiate higher taxonomic categories such as phyla and classes."

Granted, life would be a lot simpler for paleontologists and paleobiologists if they heeded Meyer's most generous advice. We wouldn't have to worry about long-term persistence of ecological communities replete with morphological stasis of their constituent taxa over considerable spans of geological time or those unfortunate "accidents" known as mass extinctions which have "reshuffled the deck" that is Earth's biodiversity not just once, but at least seven times over the past five hundred fifty-odd million years. After each of these "accidents" we do see eventual recovery of the Earth's biosphere via the "bottom-up" pattern that Meyer so clearly disdains. What we don't see however, is any indication of some Intelligent Designer(s) acting to ensure some kind of restoration of our planet's biodiversity. All the patterns seen in the fossil record are due to natural laws and processes acting on populations of organisms, not through the direct intervention of Intelligent Designer(s) like Mother Goose, Yahweh or the Klingons.

But what more can we expect from someone like Stephen Meyer or his peers and colleagues at the Discovery Institute? For more than twenty years they have refused to engage meaningfully with the mainstream scientific community, acting under the well-established rules of peer review and journal publication that have been the cornerstones of scientific research and publication for nearly two centuries. Instead, they have resorted to substantial omissions and gross distortions of published scientific data, harsh attacks upon their critics, including censorship (which, for example, Meyer's friend Bill Dembski tried unsuccessfully with one of my previous Amazon.com reviews critical of Intelligent Design two years ago), and, in one rather notorious instance, outright theft. And while Meyer may insist that his infamous article on the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" published in a most obscure Washington, DC science journal is a classic case of a "Darwinist" witch hunt, the sad fact remains that no Intelligent Design advocate has ever published a scientific paper in which one or more key predictions of Intelligent Design were ever substantiated. Nor will such a paper ever be published, since Intelligent Design has never demonstrated that it is indeed a viable, scientific, alternative to modern evolutionary theory. Instead, the dubious, often scandalous, conduct exhibited by Meyer and his Discovery Institute colleagues should demonstrate to any truly objective reader of their work that they are not genuine scholars, but instead, mendacious intellectual pornographers merely interested in disseminating their religiously-derived "scientific" mendacious intellectual porn. I will concede that Meyer is uncommonly good, but he's uncommonly good as both a shill for the Dishonesty Institute and as a mendacious intellectual pornographer pretending to be a credible historian and philosopher of science.