Evolution and Intelligent Design

Web sites of interest

• National Center for Science Education
• AAAS Evolution Resources
• The Talk.Origins Archive A great source of material on evolution
• Gould and Lewontin's Article criticizing adaptionist Darwinian thinking
• The World of Richard Dawkins
• Behe's Empty Box This is a terrific source of material about evolution.
• Darwin Under the Microscope (Michael Behe)
• Darwin's Metaphor - Does Nature Select?
• Why do neoconservatives doubt Darwin? (Ronald Bailey, ReasonOnline 7/97). Also note the letters written in response to this article.
• Article against evolution as anti-theistic (Clement A. Butel)
• Interesting articles and letters on evolution in the Boston Review. If nothing else, these vitriolic exchanges between committed evolutionary thinkers clearly show that they do not march in lock-step.

Books

• Daniel Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon & Shuster, 1995, 586 p.
  This is a fabulous book about evolution, one of the best I have ever read. Dennet relentlessly and remorselessly drives home the central truths of natural selection and its power as a universal principle. Note, however, the responses to his book in the Boston Review, in which several authors excoriate Dennett for claiming too much for natural selection at the expense of other mechanisms.

• Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, W.W. Norton, 1996, 340 p.
  Dawkins' latest book on evolution.

• Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

• Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

• Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, Stanford Univ. Press, 1990, 198 p.
  A good short book explaining evolution and the evidence in favor of it.

• Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box
  Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, argues that cell structures and chemical pathways are too complex and interdependent to have evolved to their current state because the intermediate steps would not have been viable. He calls this notion "irreduceable complexity". Biologists don't buy the argument, and in fact have shown how complicated, interdependent chemical steps could evolve by a step-wise process. Behe's appeal is mainly to Christian groups. I heard him speak at the Christian-based Veritas Forum in 1997 at the University of Florida, where he was warmly received.

• Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (2nd Ed.), Intervarsity Press, 1993, 220 p.
  Johnson, a legal scholar at Berkeley, has been a forceful opponent of evolution for several years. This is his most famous piece on the topic.