Product Description

If you think Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is merely the respectable face of Christian fundamentalism, and Evolution the only sensible scientific world-view, think again...IDT has driven science for 500 years. It was responsible for the 17th century's Scientific Revolution and helped build modern histories of physics, mathematics, genetics and social science. IDT's proponents take literally the Biblical idea that humans have been created in God's image. This confident, even arrogant, view of humanity enabled the West to triumph in the modern era. Evolution, on the other hand, derives from more ancient, even pagan, ideas about our rootedness in nature and the transience of all life forms. It has been always more popular outside the West, and until Darwin few evolutionists were scientists. What happened to reverse these two movements' fortunes? Steve Fuller's brilliant revisionist history is essential reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of science's most vociferous debate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256463 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Times Higher Education, Book of the Week, July 2008
'A rich mine of often-overlooked information, personal interpretations of the history of science that are provocative and sometimes astonishing.'

Times Higher Education, Book of the Week, July 2008
'The richness and complexity of argument defy critical summary.'

About the Author
Steve Fuller has appeared on Radio 4's 'Today', Radio 3's 'Nightwaves' and Channel 4's 'Trial of the 21st Century'. He has written for the Independent, the New Scientist and the New York Times, among others. Fuller is also Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating but Surreal Take of Evolution-Creation Debate
A lot of books have been published about the evolution-creation controversy but this has got to be the most original and, in many ways, most outrageous. Fuller has been always known for his rather perverse take on things and people (esp. Thomas Kuhn, who also comes in for a whipping here) but this tops them all. Fuller is basically arguing that `Science' in the philosophically robust sense of a unified sense of reality (the kind of thing physicists still go on about) requires a belief in the privileged place of humans in the universe. This belief is by no means self-evident but requires a belief that we have some privileged relationship with whomever was responsible for the universe's creation. In this respect, Fuller argues that a belief in `intelligent design' in some broad sense - and he's not afraid to talk about God in this context -- is needed to do science. Once you accept this point, as many philosophers and scientists have, then Darwin's theory of evolution with its strong emphasis on chance-based processes starts to look strange. And I suppose that's really the point of this book, to make Darwin and Darwinism look strange. There are some truly mind-blowing moments here, including a sustained comparison between evolution and astrology in its scientific heyday (about 500 years ago). Fuller also does a good line on nasty remarks, calling modern evolutionary theory `genetically modified Darwinism' and the blog Panda's Thumb, `Darwin's brownshirts'. He even spends time pouring scorn on theistic evolutionsists like Francis Collins and Kenneth Miller, whom he regards as intellectually superficial. Fuller also makes the interesting point that no good science has ever come from atheism, and that one can go on arguing about the merits of evolution and creation without affecting the day-to-day work of science.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know?
This is quite a brilliant, albeit somewhat mad book that is designed to aggravate everyone in this already fraught debate. The best thing about it is that gives `intelligent design' an intellectual scope and reach that matches that of `evolution'. There is a tendency to reduce ID to whatever the Discovery Institute is up to this week. In fact, this book doesn't really focus on that aspect of ID. It's more about why we do science in the first place, and the striking fact that so much of the history of biology is full of Christians.

The book is also rhetorically risky. Fuller openly talks about ID as creationism, and focuses on the biblical religions as really the only ones relevant to science. He even calls for theologians to get more actively involved in the debate. Yet he doesn't regard this anti-science at all. On the contrary, he seems to think that a long-term belief in Darwinian evolution will make science extinct! Readers can make what they will of this suspicion.

Caution: This book recently got a hammering in the Guardian (12th July) but the reviewer, a videogames expert, didn't seem to have read it - or at least didn't understand it. Predictably several anti-ID blogs - and anti-Fuller blogs (they only partially overlap!) - piled in. The funny thing is that none of these people seem to have read the book either. Some even revelled in that fact. So judge for yourself.

Interesting- but not quite sure what the message is
This is a fascinating book. It certainly makes you think...but only in patches.

I'm struggling to summarise its message here, and I think that's maybe the problem with it. It covers a wide range of ideas, and has interesting and new light to shine on many currently vexed issues. It makes a strong case that a belief in god (as an organising power in an organised/ comprehensible universe)is actually a prerequisite for making science worthwhile beyond local economic or technological purposes.

There's more to be said on the issues Fuller raises, but this book opens us up to new possibilities, and different viewpoints.

It's not the easiest read, but it's one of few books I think may be worth a second reading to understand its ideas more clearly.