Misleading Edge
Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
edited by John Brockman
Vintage Books, 2006
(272 pages, $14.00, paperback)
reviewed by Anika Smith & Casey Luskin
When sixteen leading Darwinists write essays on a crash schedule to get a book out by the end of the school year, you might suspect a sense of urgency, and indeed, editor John Brockman opens Intelligent Thought with a plea for his colleagues to defend Darwin-based civilization from “the Visigoths at the gates,” the proponents of Intelligent Design, “whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages” and who pose “the gravest of threats to the American economy.”
Brockman, a literary agent who went from pop publicist to managing popular science writers like atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, has a long history with this particular body of “preeminent thinkers,” as his book boasts. He publishes Edge: The Third Culture, an online salon where the authors claim to offer a new culture of intelligentsia who are interested in “thinking smart” and not in “the anesthesiology of wisdom.”
On this site, Brockman shared an e-mail sent to him from a Darwinian who teaches freshmen at Columbia, who was concerned that students aren’t rejecting Intelligent Design for the right reasons, but “merely because the religious and conservative stripes of ID can sometimes look a little uncool.” He and his colleagues wrote Intelligent Thought to present the public, especially students, with scientific reasons to reject Intelligent Design.
The book is published as a collection of essays from sixteen of Brockman’s Edge contributors, including Dawkins and Dennett, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, and Scott Atran, research director in anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris.
Not Scientific
Despite the promise of the subtitle, much of Intelligent Thought is devoted not to scientific but to philosophical and especially dysteleological arguments against Intelligent Design. A dysteleological argument makes certain extra-scientific, theological assumptions about the moral purposes of the designer, then asserts that life or the universe could not be the result of intelligence because nature is (allegedly) not the nature those assumptions require.
For example, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind, who discovered string theory, writes that most of the universe is “hopelessly hostile to life and uninhabitable. But here and there some small pockets happen, by chance, to be more conducive to life, and that’s where life forms.”
For Susskind, this rules out any possibility of intelligent design, because he assumes that the designer would have chosen to create a universe full of life everywhere, rather than one as hostile to life as the one we observe. Because the universe he perceives does not match the universe he thinks a designer would make, he rejects design.
Susskind’s assumption is certainly questionable in itself. To put a twist on William Paley’s metaphor, if you found a lone cell-phone in the middle of the Sahara Desert, would you conclude that it was not designed simply because its designer didn’t fill the desert with cell-phones?
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