This breakthrough book has been a great read. It explores how our design intuition when applied to nature is valid and how everyone can feel confident that those intuitions (having been sharpened you the points enumerated in the book) are correct. He shows us examples of design in nature and helps us to understand why.
Can alphabet soup, when the lid is removed from the pot, reveal complete instructions for building something new and useful? Clearly no. Well that illustrates the problem of the Neo-Darwinian explanation for the emergence of life from a primordial soup (or really any proposal of how the first life could've come about). This brings Axe to the principle of the Universal Design Intuition: "Tasks that we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge." This, he asserts, "...[is] the common human faculty by which we intuit design." His purpose thenceforth is to show that this intuition is reliable and provides a solid refutation to Darwinian explanations for life.
Axe shows us that the are many more possibilities than are likely to play out in reality. Why? Because our universe is bound by finite probabilistic resources. Darwinism appeals to blind searches to achieve certain outcomes. But he shows that appeals to chance severely downplay the likelihood of such a outcome taking place in reality.
Living things are exquisite wholes - an intricate interplay of overlapping levels of function - they are functionally coherent. Axe uses this fact to show why blind processes (required by Darwinism) fail in achieving the level of complexity present in living systems. "What enables human inventions to perform so seamlessly?" Axe asks. It is a thing called "functional coherence" - which, as Axe writes, is "the hierarchical arrangement of parts needed for anything to produce a high-level function - each part contributing in a coordinated way to the whole." He then goes on to show how this functional coherence "makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physically impossible."
He provides fascinating examples of biological systems, such as the Cyanobacteria & the Mammalian eye and shows us a basic overview (to go much deeper would require a book length treatments) of their intricate functional hierarchy. Axe writes, "unlike human inventions, living inventions are all-or-nothing wholes. Every cell in every body sustains both the body and is sustained by the body. Life is never anything but whole." Truly, this is mind boggling complexity.
This point I loved, to quote Axe, "each new form of life amounts to a new high-level invention, the origin of the thousandth new life form is no more explicable in Darwinian terms as the origin of the first." As an example, even if we were to suppose the first insect has been formed by chance, all the countless insects that differ substantially from the first would still be new top-level inventions - a great many of these components would have to be reworked to suit each new insect. This would have to be a "staggering feat of re-engineering in itself, to say nothing of that great new variety of new components that would have to be invented by scratch." A point downplayed by Darwinists.
Axe also shows us how we can use a practical tool, a "magicians hat" for analysing some of the fantastic claims made by Darwinists.
He shows how we can attribute this complexity, our design intuition, to an intelligent designer! In all, a great book! Highly recommended!
5/5
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