The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 288 pages
• Published by: Regnery Publishing, Inc. August 21, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1596980133
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1596980136
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Description
You think you know about Darwinism and intelligent design, but did you know: *There is no overwhelming evidence for Darwinism; *Intelligent design is based on scientific evidence, not religious belief; *What many public schools teach about Darwinism is based on known falsehoods; *Scientists at major universities believe in intelligent design; *Scientists who question Darwinism are punished --by public institutions using your tax dollars. Battle-hardened veteran with doctorates in biology and theology sets the record straight in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwin and Intelligent Design.

Back Cover Copy
Why Darwinism—like Marxism and Freudianism before it—is headed for extinction

In the 1925 Scopes trial, the American Civil Liberties Union sued to allow the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools. Seventy-five years later, in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the ACLU sued to prevent the teaching of an alternative to Darwin’s theory known as "Intelligent Design"—and won. Why did the ACLU turn from defending the free-speech rights of Darwinists to silencing their opponents? Jonathan Wells reveals that, for today’s Darwinists, there may be no other choice: unable to fend off growing challenges from scientists, or to compete with rival theories better adapted to the latest evidence, Darwinism—like Marxism and Freudianism before it—is simply unfit to survive.

Wells begins by explaining the basic tenets of Darwinism, and the evidence both for and against it. He reveals, for instance, that the fossil record, which according to Darwin should be teeming with "transitional" fossils showing the development of one species to the next, so far hasn’t produced a single incontestable example. On the other hand, certain well-documented aspects of the fossil record—such as the Cambrian explosion, in which innumerable new species suddenly appeared fully formed—directly contradict Darwin’s theory. Wells also shows how most of the other "evidence" for evolution— including textbook "icons" such as peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, Haeckel’s embryos, and the Tree of Life—has been exaggerated, distorted . . . and even faked.

Wells then turns to the theory of intelligent design (ID), the idea that some features of the natural world, such as the internal machinery of cells, are too "irreducibly complex" to have resulted from unguided natural processes alone. In clear-cut layman’s language, he reveals the growing evidence for ID coming out of scientific specialties from microbiology to astrophysics. As Wells explains, religion does play a role in the debate over Darwin—though not in the way evolutionists claim. Wells shows how Darwin reasoned that evolution is true because divine creation "must" be false—a theological assumption oddly out of place in a scientific debate. In other words, Darwinists’ materialistic, atheistic assumptions rule out any theories but their own, and account for their willingness to explain away the evidence—or lack of it.

Darwin is an emperor who has no clothes— but it takes a brave man to say so. Jonathan Wells, a microbiologist with two Ph.D.s (from Berkeley and Yale), is that brave man. Most textbooks on evolution are written by Darwinists with an ideological ax to grind. Brave dissidents—qualified scientists—who try to teach or write about intelligent design are silenced and sent to the academic gulag. But fear not: Jonathan Wells is a liberator. He unmasks the truth about Darwinism— why it is wrong and what the real evidence is. He also supplies a revealing list of "Books You’re Not Supposed to Read" (as far as the Darwinists are concerned) and puts at your fingertips all the evidence you need to challenge the most closed-minded Darwinist.

Reader Reviews
Those who cling to Intelligent Design will surely do so with their dying breath, yet for all of their efforts, time and again it has been shown to be no more "scientific" than the biblical geologists who now prefer to be known as the "young earth movement." Despite ID advocates claims to the contrary both begin with the bible and then try to project backwards into the natural world. While as with all of the "Politically Incorrect Guides" Wells's book is on occasion amusing, it still is basically a polemic, and not even a particularly good one as it simply ignores all the contrary evidence rather than seeking to arm his readers with any kind of serious refutation of the facts. Where to begin? As with all ID, Wells makes arguments that appear cogent and work well, but only in monologue. Let's examine them one at a time. Like his fellow travelers, Wells makes much of "irreducible complexity" - the notion that certain biological structures are so complex that they would fail to function without all of their constituent parts. Towards this he cites the bacterial flagella, an organ for locomotion, and in a bit of rather gross dishonesty quotes one of the world experts on the flagella on its complexity as evidence for ID. Of course, had he not been selective, he would also know that evolutionary biology has already located flagella-precursors which are less complex - and serve other purposes - as evidence how, far from coming into existence whole and assembled, it evolved from earlier structures. Time and again, Wells follows the same model - offering incomplete or misleading data rather than actually giving his readers the best of what evolutionary biologists have to offer. In another example he claims gaps in the fossil record of the intermediate steps between species. This does his readers a disservice for not only have many of these intermediate fossils been found, but they been found in the places predicted by evolutionary scientists. In one of the great larks of the book, he asserts that ID is in fact not creationists and that evolutionary biologists are seeking to silence its critics because it can't engage them. Again this is wrong in two counts. In the now famous Dover PA case the two sides squared off and according to the judge, a Christian Bush appointee, found that ID was not scientific, nor did it follow the scientific method. More damning still, in discovery plaintiff lawyers found a "transitional fossil" in the archives of the publisher of the main ID text book "Of Pandas and People" where following a court decision outlawing the teaching of creationism the publisher had simply done a find/replace in the text for "creationism" and "creator" for "intelligent design" and "designer." In other words one might very easily say that the evidence indicates that ID is simply a redressed version of creationism. Of course one might go into great lengths as to why ID is not in fact science, all of which Wells skates by with much verbiage but little evidence. Science does not allow for negative arguments. Moreover, science depends on performing repeatable experiments that provide evidence in favor of a hypothesis. Instead ID is "god of the gap" argument, which looks for holes, real or imagined, and then says, "see that must be the designer." While this book will offer something to those who already agree with its thesis and enjoy saying "Amen" as they read, it will add nothing to science nor the debate. Likewise I very much doubt that anyone will use intelligent design as a basis for developing new drugs to help fight the new diseases which are evolving all the time.