A friend of mine emailed me the following quotes from Mike Gene’s new book THE DESIGN MATRIX, available from Amazon.com here.
“The vast majority of scientists do not view Intelligent Design as science and I happen to agree with them.” (pg. xi)
“I should make it explicitly clear from the start that I did not write this book to help those seeking to change the way we teach science to our kids. I do not argue that design deserves to be known as science. At best, Intelligent Design may only be a nascent proto-science and thus does not belong in the public school curriculum. Nor does this book argue that evolution is false and deserves to be criticized in the public school curriculum. If the truth is to be told, I oppose such actions.” (pg. xi)
“Unlike the Face on Mars, the biotic face of design remains at the highest relevant resolution.” (pg. 17)
“If living processes are the products of design, it comes as no surprise that so much of biology is more akin to the study of engineering than to chemistry or physics. … Biology, and the language of biology, is not behaving in a manner similar to the relate sciences of chemistry, physics, geology, meteorology, etc.” (pgs. 58, 60)
“the concept of design can be useful as a research guide.” (pg. 83)
“We do not normally infer non-teleological causes when confronted with machinery … The existence of a machine is not something we would expect, or predict, from non-teleological causes. A non-teleological perspective that is confronted with the reality of molecular machines reacts by insisting non-teleological causes could possibly explain their origin. But this is not the way the inferential winds are blowing.” (pgs. 97-98)
“molecular machines conform to a rigorous definition of machine.” (pg. 102)
“[C]ooption and preadaptation do not necessarily follow from random variability culled by maximizing fitness. Cooption and preadaptation are phenomena that follow from the architecture of life itself. … In contrast, it is very difficult to imagine front-loaded evolution without multi-functionality, gene duplication, cooption, and preadaptation, as these are just the type of mechanisms that one would use to unmask secondary designs buried in primary designs. In fact, the hypothesis of front-loaded evolution predicts the existence of such mechanisms of evolution. Life itself, and its stem parts, was designed such that cooption and preadaptation would be made available to Darwinian evolution.” (pg. 178-179)
“the truth of any design inference does not entail that we should be able to uncover independent evidence of the designer.” (pg. 189)
“[T]he hallmark of evolution is the modification of pre-existing parts. What if we find structures that lack this hallmark? What if we find something that does not appear as a modification of a pre-existing structure? This would hint of that ‘clean sheet of paper’ and count against borrowing. With this criterion, we may not only have something that helps us better assess our design suspicion, but we may actually have a clue to help distinguish between front-loading and intelligent intervention.” (pg. 210)
“When we are dealing with molecular machines, (which are composed of functionally indivisible parts), many of the most well documented examples of Darwinian evolution become irrelevant. None of these data amount to evidence that irreducibly complex machines likewise evolved through Darwinian mechanisms. This is a significant point.” (pgs. 214-215)
“If the machine evolved through cooption, we would then expect to find remnants of this evolution in the form of simpler precursors, a myriad of permutations, and functions existing apart from the irreducibly complex system. If, however, the machine did not come into existence through cooption, we would expect to find the system to be composed of largely system-dependent parts, with little or no evidence of any precursor states that predate the machine in question.” (pg. 232)
“Good planning not only requires the use of reason and knowledge, but it also involves an element of foresight. Foresight, which is essentially rationality applied to prediction, is something the blind watchmaker cannot possibly have.” (pg. 254)