Afarensis

Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism edited by Andrew Petto and Laurie Godfrey is a revised version of Godfrey's Scientists Confront Creationism and largely follows the same format.

The book is divided into three parts and also has a preface by Godfrey and Petto (explaining the need for the revision) and an interesting introduction by Massimo Pigliucci (on the problems with creationism). The first section, Creationism and Intelligent Design, has contributions by Ronald Numbers, Eugenie Scott, and John Cole which provide some of the political, historical and religious background of the creationism and intelligent design movements. Regular followers of the debate probably won't find anything new in these chapters, but newcomers will benefit immensely.

The second section, Scientific Perspectives, is worth the price of the book by itself. It features contributions by Stenger, Dalrymple, Lazcano, Padian and Angielczyk, Dorit, Elsberry and Brace. All of which, in their own way, are very effective critiques of various aspects of intelligent design and creationism. Dalrymple discusses various ways of dating the age of the earth, the solar system and the universe. Brace provides the paleoanthropological view of human origins. Lazcano provides an interesting overview of origin of life research. Elsberry examines the many different formulations of Dembski's "design inference" and concludes that they all fail to do what they claim.

Stenger provides a devastating critique of the work of Behe and Dembski. Here is a taste, which comes from his discussion of Dembski's definition of information:

While Dembski refers to Shannon, he does not mathematically derive the expression for information he uses from Shannon's expression - nor does he justify it by any other method. His examples, however, indicate that he does not limit himself to cases having equal probabilities within an ensemble of symbols or "events". Nor does he average the probabilities over the ensemble. In fact, his so called information is just another way of writing the probability p of an event in logarithmic form. [emphasis mine - afarensis]

Ouch! That has got to hurt! No less so, though, than when Stenger points out that Dembki admits that information can degrade, which is in flat contradiction to Dembski's "Law of Conservation of Information".

Padian and Angielczyk's contribution is a fascinating discussion of current paleontological thinking on what "transitional" means. They point out, in a compelling and elegant fashion, that transitional features are more important than so called missing links. They use examples from phylogeny, the evolution of cetaceans, evolution of birds and the reptile/mammal transition to make their case. They also look at the standard creationist and neo-creationists views of the fossil record. One of the things that emerges from this discussion is that creationists really don't understand cladistics. Padian and Angielczyk also take on irreducible complexity:

On more theoretical grounds, biochemist Michael Behe...cannot accept evolutionary transitions, and his major reason seems to be the problem of "irreducible complexity," which reforms the old creationist notion that a complex structure with a complex function is useless when atomized into its parts, and the assembly of such parts in stepwise, always functional fashion is inconceivable. Fortunately, new discoveries, advances, and techniques tend to make today's "irreducible complexity" tomorrow's understood complexity. [emphasis mine - afarensis]

Dorit looks at biological complexity and examines the different ways the word complexity can be used in modern biology. He discusses complexity of cause, outcome, structure, and organization and provides clear examples and explanations of each. He also points out how intelligent design advocates capitalize on the different meanings by using them interchangeably and frequently redefining the term to suit their argument. Dorit ends with:

In a narrow and unexpected sense, anti-evolutionists are right: Complexity is a profoundly stimulating problem for the sciences. Where they are wrong - deeply, misguidedly, anti-intellectually wrong - is in their conviction that because we do not have all the answers, we must be on the wrong track. Difficult questions - not pat answers - are what gets us up in the morning. Anything else is simply not worth the trouble.

Part three is called "Understanding Science". In this section there are contributions by Pennock, Johnson, Plavcan, Kehoe, and Petto and Godfrey. These contributions revolve around methodological issues such as methodological naturalism, what is science and how does it work, creationist logic, and the reasons for teaching evolution. Plavcan's contribution, The Invisible Bible: The Logic of Creation Science, for example, observes:

Creation science, by contrast, argues that a model is wrong if there are any contradictions at all. This same logical approach explains why creation scientists comfortably cite outdated scientific works (Zuckerman 1970; Oxnard 1975) as evidence against evolutionary theory. Truth to the creation scientist, is an absolute. As such it is self evident and unchanging. Once something has been demonstrated, it should remain externally valid and true. By the logic of creation science, once a scientific work has been published, subsequent findings that conflict with the work do not invalidate it, but rather stand as testimony to the uncertainty of the model.

Which explains Sal Cordova's reaction to the 1470 reconstruction

Kehoe's contribution, Why Target Evolution: The Problem of Authority, is quite perceptive as well. Overall, Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism is an interesting contribution to the literature. It has material for those who are unfamiliar with intelligent design and creationist arguments and material for those who are already familiar with the issue.