“Undeniable”

As some of you have noticed, I’ve recently quoted from a book by the molecular biologist Douglas Axe, entitled Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (New York: HarperOne, 2016).  I read it last week.  I thought it quite interesting.

Dr. Axe, whose scientific credentials seem to be solid — undergraduate work at Berkeley, a Ph.D. from Caltech, postdoctoral research at three laboratories in Cambridge, England — contends that random neo-Darwinian mutations cannot account for observed biological reality.  (For a sympathetic summary, see here.)  His book isn’t always entirely easy, but it’s quite nontechnical.

I would be interested in substantive responses to Dr. Axe’s argument.  Particularly in responses from people with expertise in the field, and especially so from qualified folks who aren’t a priori so rigidly opposed to his position that their conclusions are already scripted for them by prejudice.  People who’ve actually read the book and understood his logic.  I’m not particularly eager to be called names or for Dr. Axe to be called names, or to read impassioned jeremiads against the sheer concept of intelligent design in biology, or to be told that Dr. Axe rejects science or that I reject science, or to be condemned for the dangerous and damnable heresy of having dared to read such a book in the first place.

I regularly read Marxist books, feminist books, Muslim books, Catholic books, Jewish books, atheist books, Freudian books, even evangelical Protestant books, and I’ve profited enormously from reading them.  Unlike at least a few atheist critics who’ve written to me about this, I subscribe to no faith that deploys an Index Librorum Prohibitorum against potential dissenters.