Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist with, as you can see from his writing on other subjects, a gift for outspoken common sense. What about in his own field of expertise? Less so there. The other day on X he posted,
What is keeping you from accepting evolution?
IMO the evidence for it is just so overwhelming I don’t understand how anyone can doubt it.
I responded by asking, “Have you read any of Stephen Meyer’s books on this?” No answer. Our Center for Science and Culture colleague Nathan Jacobson asked Wright, “Please define what exactly you mean by ‘evolution.’… In your view, what is the strongest piece of evidence [for it]?” Again no answer.
A Compelling New Avenue
Here’s another avenue, a very compelling one, for responding to Dr. Wright and other evolutionists. It’s a forthcoming book from Discovery Institute Press, now available for pre-order, Ultimate Engineering: An Engineer Investigates the Biomechanics of the Human Body. The author is Stuart Burgess, Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Bristol, and he’s got some amazing endorsements. Beautifully written and powerfully argued, the book poses what is in the end a simple challenge: evolution prompts us to expect in our bodies a grab bag of botched experiments conducted by blind, purposeless natural groping.
As Burgess writes, “Why do evolutionary theorists so often anticipate bad design? Because the evolutionary mechanism — as understood by both Darwin and by modern evolutionary theorists — is highly constrained.” He observes, “The most severe constraint on evolution is that of incremental change, which prevents it from producing systems that require many parts to originate simultaneously.”
Hundreds of Errors?
But what evolutionist Nathan Lents calls in his book Human Errors — those “hundreds of design flaws,” as Burgess summarizes — is not what we find: the human body is a stunning masterpiece that comes as close to perfection as it could. Certainly, like all technology, it degrades with misuse, with accidents, and with time. So will the computer I’m writing this on, and the car I drive. But the body in its pristine state outclasses all the technology that humans have ever devised. That comports with the expectations of intelligent design, not of evolution. In a book that will prove to be a landmark for ID, Stuart Burgess shows how.