Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism - Hardcover

`A rich mine of often-overlooked information, personal interpretations of the history of science that are provocative and sometimes astonishing, and a sceptical sociologist's view of the grand narrative that science, and especially the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is apt to claim for itself.' -- Keith Ward, Times Higher Education `The richness and complexity of argument defy critical summary.' -- Keith Ward, Times Higher Education `Fuller's account of Biblical literalism also looks unlike what anyone else means by it. He says literalism is not a plain descriptive account or 'fixed doctrine', but an 'act of communication' demanding a personal response. But in biblical hermeneutics, this is just what is opposed to 'literalism'. So his positive view turns out to be idiosyncratic and possibly misleading - what he defends is rarely what the people he defends think.' -- Keith Ward, Times Higher Education `He achieves his aims of forcing readers to re-examine the terms of the evolution versus intelligent design debate, to see how ID-type views have driven scientists in the past, and to question a view of science as "a unified mode of inquiry with a uniquely progressive character." Even should the book fail to convince, it will certainly not fail to stimulate.' -- Keith Ward, Times Higher Education `Bold, original and intensely thought-provoking.' -- Thomas Dixon, Cambridge Journals

If you think Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is merely the respectable face of Christian fundamentalism, and Evolution the only sensible scientific world-view, think again...IDT has driven science for 500 years. It was responsible for the 17th century's Scientific Revolution and helped build modern histories of physics, mathematics, genetics and social science. IDT's proponents take literally the Biblical idea that humans have been created in God's image. This confident, even arrogant, view of humanity enabled the West to triumph in the modern era. Evolution, on the other hand, derives from more ancient, even pagan, ideas about our rootedness in nature and the transience of all life forms. It has been always more popular outside the West, and until Darwin few evolutionists were scientists. What happened to reverse these two movements' fortunes? Steve Fuller's brilliant revisionist history is essential reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of science's most vociferous debate.