Matt Young (2)

It can be difficult to review and rate a book like this, written specifically for scientists. Perhaps a non-scientist would be better equipped to say it it was too technical, too boring, too convoluted. As a scientist, I am ill-equipped to make those judgements, but since they state up front that this book is written specifically for scientists, perhaps it doesn't matter. Anyway, this book attempts to deal with the scientific claims for intelligent design, and in doing so, it gets down into the stuff that sounds really sciencey to lay people - the math. The authors pick apart the equations, the claims for physics, the anthropic principle, and they don't leave much standing. Still, I didn't find the book particularly satisfying, at least not as much as I should have. Perhaps it's the chapter on probablity, which started off so promising, but lapsed into a dull discussion of computer information that might have added something to a conversation dealing with computers, but is really just so much hand-waving and window dressing when it comes to biology, Yes, I understand that this argument is about the ability to create novel information, and deliving into information theory is important. But this argument was well dealt with in the part of the chapter around that bit, and for the most part, this particular portion mostly sounded like showing off. Perhaps this book was less satisfying because there was very little about the biology, which is what evolution is, anyway, and more about things that are mostly arguments around the edges. All together too much time was spent on the No Free Lunch theorems, which again were dispensed with relatively shortly, and then there was a lot of extraneous material that either had been dealt with elsewhere in the book or was not terribly relevant to the argument. In the end, the thesis of the book came down to one simple statement: as of now, the ID proponents have not presented one shred of evidence to support their contention that the universe requires a designer. I suppose, though, that argument wouldn't make a publisher consider selling your book. The book could have been better, should have been better, but overall, it wasn't bad. Many of the flaws of the book, other than the unnecessary padding, flow inevitably from the incoherence of the Intelligent Design arguments. Recommended for scientists only (I don't need to show this one to a lay man to realize it's probably more than most people will want to sit through. We love to talk science to each other, and sometimes we forget that the people looking on might be a bit lost.)… (mehr)