Darwin's Doubt: Uncovering the Explosive Origin of Animal Life and Investigating the Possibility of Intelligent Design

HugoHugo: Livro excelente porem chegou com uma orelha de burro enorme amassado e levemente rasgado empacotaram mal

Brazil on Aug 22, 2023

AmazonUserFromCanada123: I have never heard of Stephen C Meyer until this year. The logical and scientific voice for intelligent design I have been looking for. He explains things in a logical and scientific manner that can't be denied. Darwin did not have access to this kind of data in his lifetime. The genetic code, yes code, is vastly superior and far more complicated to computer code. Code requires a designer and code has a purpose.

Canada on Aug 06, 2023

DoC BiC: Stephen C. Meyer is prominent in Intelligent Design (ID) theory. He serves as Director of the Center For Science And Culture, Discovery Institute, in Seattle. A philosopher of science and former geophysicist, Meyer holds a Cambridge University Ph.D. His successful writings, including Signature In The Cell, and now this best-selling book, plus major media recurrences tag him as an ID legend in the making. Philosopher of science Robert Bishop, in his review of the book, states: “…Meyer has given what I think is the strongest argument for ID to be found anywhere.” Emeritus professor of biology Darrel Falk, in his review states, “…somewhat of a masterpiece in accomplishing their agenda,” and, “the depth of knowledge…is very impressive.” I concur with both critics.
Darwin’s Doubt derives its name from what Meyer views as Darwin’s weightiest unresolved dilemma—the inexplicability of the Cambrian explosion. The quandary has only worsened since Darwin. Whereas Signature In The Cell addressed chemical evolution theory, Darwin’s Doubt confronts biological evolution theory. Of course, Meyer considers ID to be the inference to the best explanation of it all. In...

United States on Apr 19, 2015

Lucy Skywalker: Meyer has written a groundbreaking classic. The weight of the science stands on its own merit, regardless of associations or origins. Like his nemesis Donald Prothero, Meyer has produced exquisite science, but unlike Prothero, he has produced it without recourse to adversarial language. The downside of this is that Meyer's work is weighty with words and evidence. It should have been made easier for non-experts to read: I had to work hard to be sure I'd understood it (as did even Amazon's highest-starred reviewer, Prof David Snoke). And it might even slip past people's awareness that Meyer fully supports the notion of evolution over millions of years. It is simply a key detail of evolution with which Meyer has issue, but it is a detail seen by many scientists in many relevant areas of research.

"Darwin's Doubt" takes its name from the one area of evolutionary theory in which Darwin himself expressed doubts - what is known in geology as the Cambrian Explosion. What geology shows is that after billions of years in which only sponge and single-cell fossils are found, representatives of nearly all the main groups (phyla) of animals suddenly appear, in a geological "explosion" of...

United Kingdom on May 10, 2014

Kenneth Carter: The Blind Watchmaker: A Beguiling Materialist Dream

"A wise proverb warns that it isn't what you don't know that gets you in trouble; it is what you do know that isn't so."

"It soothed us--it beguiled us--then, to hear
Once more of troubles wrought by magic spell." (1)

A Prelude Of Hermeneutical Suspicion

In this very brief essay, my primary goal will be to better explain why such contentious divisions exist between the majority of positive amazon reviewers and a minority cohort of very recalcitrant atheist reviewers regarding Darwin's Doubt. I will amply demonstrate that this divide is mostly grounded in philosophical differences(2) which have permitted little compromise; in particular, I've found it to be a volatile admixture of antithetical philosophies, combined with ventures into theodicy, and literally hundreds of irreconcilable disputes over field and genetic data. And forget about apologies or erratas as intellectual battle lines are etched in stone as evidenced by the bimodal distribution of reviews.

And so, I'll be taking a slightly different approach in my book review. As an old earth, day-age theist, I'll be writing with an eye...

United States on Jan 18, 2014

Jonathan Green: It has taken me quite a long time to read this book (all 413 pages, excluding reference material), but it was worth the perseverance! Not because the book was badly written, on the contrary, I found it superbly written - and very stimulating... The perseverance was associated with looking up the substantial amount of notes, bibliography and other allied documentation.

Somewhat like his previous book, `Signature in the Cell', Stephen Meyer has presented us with a `milestone' book i.e. one which, in my opinion, substantially places `Intelligent Design' on the scientific `map'.

The book is very well set out; in three main parts, with a logical series of chapters making up each part.

Part one - "The Mystery of the Missing Fossils"

Stephen Meyer gives a good historical background to Charles Darwin's book, `On the Origin of Species'; he even calls it a "singular achievement"..., but he swiftly moves on to describe the main problem facing Darwin's hypothesis, namely, the `Cambrian Explosion'.
Meyer also spends time introducing contemporaries of Darwin, such as Agassiz and Sedgwick (both of whom were, respectfully, leading palaeontologist and geologist of...

United Kingdom on Sep 12, 2013

Michael Larkin: If you have an inquisitive mind, you will probably have noticed you learnt as much--if not more--about a topic by examining what its critics had to say, and not only its supporters. And you will doubtless have had occasion to either become agnostic, or to adopt a contrary position to what may be portrayed as orthodoxy.

What Meyer's book is *not* about is pushing religion. In the first two parts, and the first two chapters of the third (16 of 20 chapters in all), he looks at the orthodox view of evolution, which he reports accurately. I speak as someone with a degree in zoology and a little research experience in the subject; so whilst I don't claim to be an expert, I know enough to know he's not distorting anything. At the same time, his aim is to show that orthodoxy does not explain the evidence of the fossil record with respect to the Cambrian period, nor how so many new body plans could have arisen in such a comparatively short time, with no readily identifiable pre-Cambrian precursors.

He's not alone in this view, even amongst non-ID-supporting scientists. In fact, in Chapters 15 and 16, he examines alternatives to standard neo-Darwinism (or the New Synthesis if...

United Kingdom on Jul 12, 2013