Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [81]
6. Donald R. Prothero, “The Fossils Say Yes,” Natural History (November 2005), pp. 52–56.
7. Isaac Newton (Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Andrew Motte, trans.), Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 273. Originally published in 1789.
8. In his foreword to Niall Shanks’s book God, the Devil, and Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Richard Dawkins poignantly spelled this out in a clever fictional dialogue between two scientists. “Imagine a fictional conversation between two scientists working on a hard problem, say A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley who, in real life, won the Nobel Prize for their brilliant model of the nerve impulse,” Dawkins begins.
“I say, Huxley, this is a terribly difficult problem. I can’t see how the nerve impulse works, can you?”
“No, Hodgkin, I can’t, and these differential equations are fiendishly hard to solve. Why don’t we just give up and say that the nerve impulse propagates by Nervous Energy?”
“Excellent idea, Huxley, let’s write the Letter to Nature now, it’ll only take one line, then we can turn to something easier.”
9. For an extensive list of books by Intelligent Design creationists, and of books critical of Intelligent Design theory, see the bibliography.
10. Stephen Hawking, “Quantum Cosmology,” in Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 89–90.
11. John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. vii.
12. Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
13. Michael Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: Free Press, 1998).
14. John Barrow and John Webb, “Inconstant Constants,” Scientific American (June 2005), pp. 57–63.
15. Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, “The String Theory Landscape,” Scientific American (September 2004).
16. Victor Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1995). Victor Stenger, “Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us?” in Matt Young and Taner Edis (eds.), Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
17. See Andrei Linde, Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology (New York: Academic Press, 1990); Quentin Smith, “A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our Universe,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy No. 68 (1990), pp. 22–43; Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1997). For an elegant summary of this field see James Gardner, Biocosm (Maui, Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003).
18. Stephen Hawking, “The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday Symposium,” Lecture at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, United Kingdom, January 11, 2002.
19. Stephen C. Meyer, “Word Games: DNA, Design, and Intelligence,” Touchstone Vol. 12, No. 4 (1999), pp. 44–50.
20. Voltaire quoted in B. R. Redman (ed.), The Portable Voltaire (New York: Penguin, 1985).
21. William Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
22. William Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
23. William Dembski, “The Intelligent Design Movement,” Cosmic Pursuit, 1998. Available online at http://sapiensweb.free.fr/articles/2-dembski.htm.
24. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of