Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed

by Douglas Axe

Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God.

Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing instead that a gaping hole has been at its center from the beginning. He then explains in plain English the science that proves our design intuition scientifically valid. Lastly, he uses everyday experience to empower ordinary people to defend their design intuition, giving them the confidence and courage to explain why it has to be true and the vision to imagine what biology will become when people stand up for this truth.

Armed with that confidence, readers will affirm what once seemed obvious to all of us—that living creatures, from single-celled cyanobacteria to orca whales and human beings, are brilliantly conceived, utterly beyond the reach of accident.
Our intuition was right all along.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Biology, Religion, Evolution, Christian, Intelligent Design

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2016

About the author

Douglas Axe was much more interested in the physical and engineering sciences than he was in biology-- until as a graduate student he began to see how life is an example of extraordinary engineering. From that point on he became intrigued by the possibility of using science to make the connection between design and biology clear. His pursuit of this science did make the connection more clear, but equally clear was the need to describe the results in terms that would make sense to everyone. His first book, Undeniable-- How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, aims to do just that.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is one wrong word in the title, 'Our'. If it was 'My' I would have no argument with the book. I'm not the thought police, believe what you like. But by 'Our' he means all of us, and as a conspiracy theorist, he means we are all deluded or ignorant and need educating, hence the book.

Intelligence doesn't seem to have anything to do with logical ability if the person is brainwashed at an early age. They then suffer from confirmation bias. The best reinforcer of confirmation bias is not facts, but other people. Once something becomes a cult or a movement - anti-vaccination, intelligent design, flat earth, any congregation or alliance really, they feel safe in their beliefs and in their social position in the world. Believing in one conspiracy theory very often means, that they give credibility to others too. It's a kind of comorbidity from the view of the more rational among us.

Yippy search engine is owned by a very clever man, Richard Granville (I know him as Rich, both name and status. I'm name-dropping because of Jim's excellent review). He believes the world is soup-bowl shaped with a 40' ice wall surrounding it, and that the sun and moon are 46 miles up and the moon landing never happened.

He's a devout Christian but doesn't go to church because he feels that they are really just money men and gave up women to be devoted to his dog! He's also an outspoken member of QAnon which is a right-wing conspiracy theory group - much like all the others but perhaps a bit more modern and with the almost ubiquitous anti-Semitism taken out. (Rich thinks anti-Semitism is illogical, as is racism which they are, but fails to see that all of his own theories are as well). All conspiracy theorists, intelligent design-ers and fundamentalists think that non-believers are deluded or ignorant and need to be educated. Come to think of it, that's the position and purpose of missionaries too!

What do intelligent-designers and creationists (two peas in a pod) make of dinosaur bones and carbon-dating? Rich is a very generous and humble man, he's kind and has a great sense of humour. But it his wacky conversation that makes him a wonderful dining companion. We were all living on boats in Marco Island marina when I knew him (he still is) unfortunately I moved away, before another chatty dinner where I could ask him about dinosaurs.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious book, and glorious on multiple levels. Axe writes engagingly, he knows his science up and down, and he blows no sunshine. Really good.

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

A friend of mine, one of the nicest guys I've ever met, is a Christian fundamentalist. I gave him some books on science & he gave me this one. I really didn't want to read it & haven't fully, although I've skimmed through parts of it over several months. I couldn't take reading too much at a time, though. It's illogical crap that pretends to be a scientific treatment of Intelligent Design.

It turned me off right from the start with name-dropping ("I know him as Alan." Why should I care?) & went downhill from there. Basically it states that since we intuitively know that complexity requires design, our intuition must be right. This is known as "The Watchmaker Argument" & is supposed to prove that our world must be designed. This is the same old idiocy that ID & Creationists have always spouted. Our 'intuition' tells us Terra is firma & the center of the universe, too. It's wrong. Almost every paragraph seemed to contain such ridiculous pronouncements & illogical twists.

I never found where there was an explanation of how 'God' (This is unapologetically Christian.) came into being. Surely if we & our world are too complex to have arisen by chance then a creator must be even less likely by orders of magnitude. Why isn't this addressed? (If it is & I missed it, please tell me where.) How can anyone think this is rational?

Books like this rely on preaching to the choir, a closed minded way of looking at the universe. Here's a meme that sums it up well:


Here's a good review of this book.
https://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblo...

Not recommended at all in any format.

Update 20Dec2019: There are over 50 comments for this review & one in particular should be recognized. Luffy posted a link to the debunking of "The Watchmaker Argument". It's short & excellent.
Other items:
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design is an excellent book on the subject.
- Belief without evidence is always morally wrong is an excellent article.
- The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True is a short primer on scientific basics. Highly recommended for all from 10 years old & up.
-------------------------

Standard Disclaimer
Look at what shelves this book is on. If it is 'did-not-finish' then I tried it & didn't like it. No, I do not have to finish a book to give it a star rating or a review. If you don't like that, tough. Have a nice day.

If the book is on my 'do-not-read' shelf then it was shoved under my nose or something about it made me think I might want to read it. I did some research & found that it was crap. I'll post why I think so & might even rate it with 1 star if it is really bad. If you disagree & want to discuss in the comments, you need to prove that it isn't with solid evidence. That means peer reviewed science, not anecdotes, opinions, or sites that are biased. Read the Debunking Handbook which is available for free here & follow its guidelines for providing proof. I'm willing to look at good evidence. I've been wrong before.

Comments that don't adhere to the above will be deleted. We're not going to change our minds if you just want to troll. If you repeatedly troll, your comment will be flagged & support will spank you. I may block you, too.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a word I tend to over use a lot to describe books and that is..."interesting".

Well, this book is interesting. As Christians (and for that matter most Theists) we tend to spend (in my opinion of course) way too much time debating an argument usually stated as "evolution vs. creation". The problem is (as I'm sure most should realize) that's a false dichotomy. The Bible teaches creation but doesn't go into "how" God chose to create. The creation in Genesis is told in a way so as to be understandable to a hunter gather society, a herder society or (indeed) a modern society. The Bible isn't a scientific text but a book of wisdom, teaching, history but most of all the story of God's plan for us and the provision He has made.

So, this book is very interesting in it's presentation of evidence. I'd say theists and atheists alike might find it...well, interesting.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Douglas Axe is a heretic. He's a molecular biologist who did his doctoral work at Caltech and went on to postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge. As such, he can't be dismissed as some uneducated Bible thumping Luddite.

Axe is arguing that evolutionary science is closed to any other explanations for the origin and development of life despite the inadequacies of natural selection to explain how life began and how natural selection is able to result in entirely new life forms.

Advocates of Intelligent Design are like the ugly step child. On the one hand the pro-evolution community dismisses them as creationists. On the other hand there are many people that believe the Bible says the earth is 6,000 years old, so that is good enough for them. They don't like ID'ers either because they seem to reject the correctness of the literal Bible. Axe can expect poor reviews from both these camps, but for those who are not already set in their beliefs, the book is a great read.

Axe's main theme is that when something appears to be designed, it is likely to be designed. He gives examples of how we can view small segments of written pages vs jumbled letters or photos vs jumbled pixels and from these small segments it is easy to see which is designed and which is not. Because life at the basic building blocks level also displays elements of design, it follows that a designer is involved.

Axe's position is that the biological sciences community is adamant to defend Darwinism even when advances in science prove Darwin to be more wrong than ever. He points out that others who make the same criticism of Darwinism as he does are still welcome in the church of evolution because they propose new ideas that also build on undirected evolution.

Critics of Axe are upset because he openly professes to be a believer in the Christian God. As if that were a bad thing. I guess it is a bad thing, at least if you are an evangelizing atheist with a mission to tear down religion and replace it with Godless science. Axe even gives an example of a scientist who used the "G" word in an article and the publication received complaints and had to withdraw its approval, even though there was no criticism of the contents of the article itself.

Axe's belief system should not discredit his science. A scientist who wants to cure cancer would not be criticized for his position or have his views questioned. Axe should be given the same level of recognition.

Critics of ID are fond of saying that it is not science because it doesn't get published in peer reviewed papers. This can largely be explained by the wall put up by the defenders of Darwiniac dogma. Nobody is allowed to criticize the establishment viewpoint. It would be easier to believe that the New York Times would hire Rush Limbaugh as their editor. Don't expect that to happen.

In the meantime, readers can consider Axe's well argued pro-design book and come away with a logical understanding of why design is a more likely explanation for our existence than the blind chance that evolution is build on.

I recognize that I have higher than normal interest in this subject. As a student of history, I see the rise of acceptance of evolution has coincided with a lowering of cultural standards. After all if evolution proves that there is no God and no scriptural right and wrong then you are excused to create your own morals, or lack of them. I wrote my play Inherit the Wind Overturned by Design back in 2009 as a vehicle to contrast the positions of ID and evolution in an entertaining format so people can consider the argument for the ID position. Those interested in the ID subject should enjoy the contrast to the popular 1950's era play it satires.

Quotes I liked from the book:

Evolution seems to be an inadequate replacement for knowledge. Indeed, if our design intuition holds true, nothing is an adequate replacement for knowledge.

Dan Tawfik hit the nail on the head: Nothing evolves unless it already exists. (p 97)

With respect to the invention of living things, then, a commitment to materialism is a commitment to accidental explanation, and a commitment to accidental explanation is a commitment to coincidence, and a commitment to coincidence is a commitment to the power of repetition. (p 103)

Blind causes are so fundamentally unlike insight that any instance of them looking insightful would be coincidental. Coincidences do happen, of course, but we know from experience that major ones are much more rare and therefore more surprising than minor ones. (p 152)

The implications for invention are clear. If the invention of a working X is a whole project requiring extensive new functional coherence, then the invention of X by accidents of any kind is physically impossible. Why? Because for accidental causes to match insight on this scale would be a fantastically improbable coincidence and our universe simply can't deliver fantastically improbable coincidences. (153)

Natural selection happens only after cells are arranged in ways that work to keep the organism alive, so selection can hardly be the cause of these remarkable arrangements. Darwin's simplistic explanation has failed, and the millions who have followed him have nothing but his outdated assumption to stand on. (192)

Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries "Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest." (220)

[James R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Axe ably dismantles the "don't believe your lying eyes" arguments of neo-Darwinists. Using unassailable mathematics and logic, as well his own groundbreaking discoveries in microbiology and evolutionary statistics, he will silence all but the ideological and sometimes dishonest Darwinists who show themselves to be the real enemies of science. Read it! A very important book. Like riding the crest of a wave sweeping away a disproven, bankrupt paradigm that has dominated and numbed minds for a century.

[Barton Jahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 2016, this is one of the best books I have read on Intelligent Design…as an explanation for the vast diversity we see in the natural world…having very original thinking and excellent writing.

Douglas Axe is a PhD in biochemistry, and worked in the prestigious Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge in the U.K….which has produced several past Nobel Prize winners and landmark scientific discoveries.

There Dr. Axe devised and worked on experiments that revealed the extreme low probability…more accurately the impossibility…of random changes to alter the outside perimeter of water attracting or repulsing amino acids in folded, functional proteins…to produce new, different functional proteins…and thereby creating random, unguided genetic change at the molecular level.

The results were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Molecular Biology in August 2000…and showed that random genetic variation at the protein level…at the microbiological level of viable protein production within living cells…to produce the type of variant traits in living things that natural selection could choose…to support the theory of Darwinian macroevolution…was essentially mathematically impossible.

Dr. Axe describes all of this in clear and understandable language…with some innovative and novel examples to frame the arguments such as “oracle soup” and the human natural inference to recognize design versus accident.

This book also contains some fascinating human-interest challenges as the author describes bucking-up against the accepted wisdom of the contemporary scientific establishment…the classic case in science of new ideas based upon new data…which upsets the current thinking…repeated innumerable times in the past 400 to 500 years of the Scientific Revolution.

I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the critical, cultural debate between Intelligent Design and Darwinian macroevolution.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have heard about this book and author for a while, and was pleased to finally be able to read it.  As someone who is generally familiar with the work of Intelligent Design philosophers of science [1], I found a lot of this book to be quite familiar.  This familiarity was in no way a bad thing, but rather it was like the familiarity of home and hearth, of a good friend talking about his own life and bringing complicated matters into a more straightforward language, about someone with genuine populist appeal when it came to scientific elitism and the way that people are often viewed as being unable to grapple with the heart of the philosophy of science.  This is an insightful work, and likely one that is deeply unpopular in certain audiences, but it manages to combine the best of research on no free lunch theorems related to blind searches with an appreciation for the scientific insight of ordinary people.  Coming in at a bit under 300 pages as well, it is the sort of book that could easily and profitably be read by someone interested in science who wants encouragement on bucking the system.

The contents of this book are presented in a winsome and appealing manner.  The author talks about the big questions of science and about whether our intuition can be trusted when we look at creations of undeniable insight and ingenuity.  In discussing scientists as ordinary humans and science as an ordinary human activity, the author shows how internal conflict is often present in relating to science.  Examining the heroic nature of salmon and the bioengineering demonstrated by even the smallest and simplest bacteria.  In discussing common science (as opposed to common sense), the author seeks to rehabilitate the role of sanity checks by ordinary people in the scientific conversation, where contemporary scientists  are often unwilling to have their efforts held accountable to ordinary people without large amounts of higher education.  Throughout the book the author discusses matters such as the distinction between the target space and the possible space and probability with a great deal of skill.  He also talks about his own life and his own experience with awkwardness.  There is a lot of beautiful prose to be found here too, which many readers ought to appreciate.

There are some books which are written to an audience of people who already support a given worldview, and some books which try to engage enemies in polemical discussions.  This book does neither, though, and appears to have been written with a general audience in mind to bring them into a conversation that they may not be aware of.  The author is careful to point out that design inferences can show a great deal of personality behind the creator of the elegant machinery of life and how this makes people uncomfortable who do not want to accept the authority of that creator.  The author wishes to bring a sense of wonder and humility into a view of origin life disputes where little wonder and humility has been shown by those who wish to impoverish life by denying the reality of the mental world of ideas and concepts that we use to understand both what is outside of us as well as what is inside of us.  As a touching example of works that are written well and with undeniable popular appeal, this book is certainly one that deserves to be read among the classics of its genre, not least because it is written by someone who accepts their own humanity and the humanity of those with whom he finds himself in opposition.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

[Andrew George · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you're a Christian who doesn't want to be intellectually challenged, but rather just pat yourself on the back because ~a real scientist says evolution isn't real~, then this is a great read for you. Sleep soundly little one, your imaginary friend loves you and you'll get to live forever.

Really though, this guy makes the same logical errors in his thinking about evolution and causality that I did (as a Christian raised child) in high school. It's hard to articulate, but it's something like thinking of the world as it is now as the way things must be. It's similar to when people use the example of ice being less dense than water, and how that allows fish to live in lakes since the ice rises instead of falling and crushing them. That's not the sign of a creator that specifically made ice and water work a certain way just for fish in lakes: if ice sank and crushed fish in lakes, fish just would've never been able to live in lakes! (Not to mention if ice were to be more dense than water in this imaginary world, it wouldn't wait until an entire sheet of it had formed to sink, that would be like a Looney Toons cartoon. As soon as any amount of ice formed, even just a very small crystal, it would drop to the bottom of the lake, like snow in air, and also like how snow doesn't crush humans, it wouldn't crush fish. Perhaps in that imaginary world, people who believe in God would say "if ice floated to the top, all the fish would get pushed up into the air and die! This is proof God exists!")

I want to again illustrate this idea of being unable to grasp the logic of evolution. The book uses some example of getting monkeys to give a moon lander the perfect coordinates to get to the moon. It states the odds of this are so low, it could never happen! The author again gives an example of how he's working backwards with the assumption that we must get to where we are now, which is not how evolution works. If the monkeys are sending random coordinates, any other coordinate in space would be just as unlikely to be hit as "the perfect coordinates for the moon". Humans want to go to the moon. Evolution does not want to go to the moon. Evolution does not have targets, or goals. Evolution didn't sit down millions of years ago and have a think, and then say "I want to make maple trees, and Jim and Karen in Iowa!". Let's take another aspect of this lunar lander example. I don't know the exact math, but if you sent out enough lunar landers randomly from earth, let's say a billion, *and their passengers did not know about each other*, all of them would die in space except the ones that land on the moon. Those living ones would then say "wow, there's no way we landed here by chance! Out coordinates must have been intelligently chosen!". And they would be completely wrong.

Now it sounds crazy to have a billion moon landers sent out, but your body is made of trillions of cells, and you're small compared to a tree, or a field of grass, or an ocean full of plankton, and every tree and mushroom and bush is releasing thousands of berries, or millions of seeds, or billions of spores throughout its lifetime, and each cell contains its own copy of DNA that had to be replicated for it, DNA replication is a process that sometimes has errors.

And if you're hung up on the first form of life, think of how you have 10s of trillions of cells, and a single cell contain 10s of trillions of atoms. Now think of an ocean full of those molecules for billions of years. You really just can't because the scales are out of our grasp.

Go watch some examples of Conway's Game of Life, then think of that in the scales I just described. Or watch the many videos on YouTube of machine learning algorithms that evolve to do things such as walking, simply by trying random things and then slightly mutating the best results.

Or, you can read this crappy book.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good book in that he makes evolution look risible. He goes through the actual statistical likelihood of chance inventing things, and we find out that evolutionists are like Jim Carey in exhibit A below.

This is a great book in that he shows that the greatest arguments against evolution can readily be understood by anyone, and can be confidently rested upon even when someone hits you with an authoritarian bluster-blast. Additionally, he takes his argument full circle explaining why these arguments also point strongly in the direction of there being a personal God. Axe has done very well indeed.

Exhibit A:
https://www.livememe.com/m7j41wh/so-y...

[Taveri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Douglas Axe makes the same mistake Hugh Ross makes in his book "The Creator and the Comsos" (review here > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...) and other Intelligent Design (ID) advocates.  Much of the book is spent on showing how life statistically can't be through mutations then Whammo! on page 234 he ascerts that because it is designed it has to be account of God.  "improbabilty of life having happened by accident that it declares God's presence and involvement in our world"

He relies on the dichotomy (also favoured by Evolutionists) that there are only two considerations: two-dimensional perspectives in a five (or more) dimensional universe.  Just because there is evidence (proof) that there is design does not mean it is the biblical God (at least Ross provides some Chapters and Verse).  There may be many designers and even designers of designers and different designers through time and a multitude of designers at the same time.  The multitude and various lifeforms and transitions through time suggest this is so.

Axe does say (page 253) "that life could only be the handiwork of God, or somelike him." but he doesn't elaborate or explore that - he may not as well as have said it.  What makes the design so compelling it can only be by a God?

On Page 262 Axe includes a schematic about the "New Road" (also on page 137) and "Old Road".  The New Road shows a component for Conception and Methodical Construction (vs no Conception and Accidental Construction).  [I agree with the Conception and Methodical Construction phase but Why would God need a Conception Phase and Construction component > why not just go to Operation (component)?]

Other things i got out of the book (or i found better articulated) included:

P3 > students were expected not only to know current thinking ...but also to accept it without resistance [I encountered that in Archaeology as well as Economics - professors couldn't grasp we are always in transition]

P6 those rare people who oppose the stream are the ones to watch

P48 ID and Creationism are different in their methods and starting assumptions.  Creationism starts with a commitment to a particular understanding of Genesis and aims to reconcile that with scientific data.  ID shows how the principles of science compel us to attribute life to A purposeful Inventor (God, through a jump required through something beyond the essentials of science) [sounds hoakum pokum]

P73 Orcas are smart enough to know they're being watched and gregarious enough to show off [where is his science for that claim?]

P97  Evolutionary theory ascribes inventive power to natural selection alone.  However, because selection can only home in the fitness signal from and invention after the invention already exists, it can't actually invent.

P162 Functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and therefore physicaly impossible.

P168 More than any human invention, photosynthesis is an ingenious exploitation of the natural regularities of the universe. [implies (of at least) two different levels of invention]

P169 Three dozen genes in the cyanobacterial genome are dedicated to the photosystem: a dozen for encoding the protein components and two dozen more for encoding the enzymes needed to manufacture the cofactors.  The whole assembly is massive in molecular terms... fifteen million could fit in a single pixel of an iPhone

P181 Of the possible genes encoding protein chains 153 amino acids in length, only about one in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillio trillion is expected to encode a chain that folds well enough to perform biological function! 

P182 Protein folds are ingenious inventions.  One of the great surprises is how many unique genes ... are present in each life form [nice to have this confirmed]

P183 For example sixteen cyanobacteria share a common set of 660 genes and nearly 14,000 are unique to individual strains > that is an average of 869 unique strains per strain.  They are more genetically different than alike (despite looking alike). Every taxonomic group studied so far contains 10-20% genes that are one-offs - unlike any gene found elsewhere.  The proteins these genes encode are one third genuinely new.

P202 to find one seven letter word randomly (through a computer program) ended up generating 14,000 pages of nonsense [if genes were generated randomly there would be a lot of debitage]

P214 Nothing evolves unless it already exists.

P220 Natural Selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest. [De Vries quote > simpler than P97 one]

P272 If genomes are really like operating systems then the thought of them carrying the blueprints for building the bodies of their possessors is wrong as the thought of the iPhone operating system carrying the plans for the iPhone itself [the author was really into iPhones]  

P273 For an iPhone5 to be converted into an iPhone6 by upgrading its operating system is categorically impossible [therefore] modern life can't be the product of accidental mutations - implying it can't be the product of mutations at all. [Amen.]


Typed using EasyKeyB

[Benjamin Uke · Rating 1 out of 5]

Summary: bad religion, bad science, bad philosophy, and pretentious.

"...Instead of merely following expert debates, non-experts should expect important issues that touch their lives to be framed in terms of common science. Once they are, everyone becomes qualified to enter the debate. This doesn't apply to intrinsically technical subjects, of course, but the matters of deepest importance to how we live are never intrinsically technical. (p. 62-63)"

This internal logic of an “intrinsically technical” loophole is doing a lot of work here. One suspects it is only evolutionary biology gets harassed because some "feel" deeply that it is wrong. The author even starts the book claiming he was professionally declared a heretic and a martyr to his beliefs...


Image unrelated for legal reasons

Science, of course, is one long assault on our common sense and feelings. Excuse me, common science.
Science tells us we live on a giant sphere that rotates at more than a thousand miles per hour. Is that how it "feels" to you?
Science tells me that the continents are moving around, and that hydrogen and oxygen, both gasses at room temperature, come together to form water. It tells me that sodium, which explodes, and chlorine, a deadly poison, come together to make tasty table salt. Science tells me that time slows down when I move real fast, and it tells me things about atoms that are an affront to basic sanity, let alone common sense. I guess those subjects are just too technical for the author, being unable to admit the world is more weird and wonderful than his feelings will permit.

Evolutionary biology bears results from from paleontology, genetics, anatomy, ethology, mathematics, embryology, and many other fields. People study for years to become experts in any one of these disciplines, but here the author comes to tell them they wasted their time. Turns out it is all so simple and non-technical that any geriatric on the street can figure it out with home-spun wisdom. The implicitly author claims all scientific knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience but by 'feeling' at it.

No one has “intuitions” about what can happen in billions years of evolution by natural selection. Nothing in our daily experience is remotely relevant to understanding what science reveals about the history of life on Earth. Religion asks 'why' science focuses on the technical 'how'. Even then, serious scientists and religious theologians respect the distinction for obvious reasons.

[image error]

Thomas Acquinas made a point of distinguishing it from mechanical 'lesser' reasoning while noting using it for earthly situations and logic was an act of bad faith. Modern fundamentalists are behind the middle ages.

(Note, psychology offers up the only exception for intuition: the unconscious can contain underlying thoughts and memories which can surface to the conscious mind, but that is not the authors definition of intuition, because the concept of the unconscious is within the realm of science.)

These appeals to feelings and intuition are commonplace throughout the book. Axe lectures us that the simplest biological processes are way beyond the puny contrivances of human engineers. Axe is all about parlaying our everyday experiences into grand conclusions about the history of life on Earth. Why then should I not conclude that intelligence is fundamentally incapable of accomplishing anything?

With natural selection he refuses to accept the small-scale evidence of what has been observed in the field and the lab and the large scale evidence for common descent and for the evolutionary origins of those complex systems he goes on about. Does this author engage it intelligently? No. He dismisses it out of hand.

Axe's argument is like saying that since moles make molehills, mountains are evidence for giant moles. Many find evolution by natural selection hard to believe, though I've never considered “intuition” or 'feelings' aren't what science is about. If it were purely theological, I would respect the book, however it pretends to be scientifically legitimate in disengenuine bad faith.

tl;dr the book has
Bad logic
bad philosophy
bad science
its pretentious, poorly written, founded on poor logic, and entitled.

It's been a while since a book made me actively irritated, and I saw reviewed a book about a slavery whataboutism.

[Simon Mee · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book intends to offer reassurance for the already convinced. Scientists are human, the technical details don't matter, and you can intuit the correct answer via "common science". No need apparently either to look at the fossil record, gene histories or even life in general really. Neo Darwinism is atheism, materialism, scientism, a cult enforced against ones "intuition". There are murmuring of a conspiracy but the details (and rationale) remain undeveloped, with out of context quotes of Darwin, Crick and others offered as scraps of evidence.

This book is hard to follow. Paragraphs, even chapters are devoted to noise finding robots, pool cleaning robots, pixelated images and contrived thought experiments. In one of the few times the author actually bothers with the subject of life, his experiences watching orcas and salmon sound exciting in themselves but to him they mean nothing without some higher meaning. Yet somehow is the Darwinian view of life that is impoverished.

As I understand what is being criticised about evolution:

1. Natural selection is not an inventor, it selects things that already exist
2. Repetition (i.e. different mutations) could theoretically lead to things that are favoured by natural selection, but the numbers required to come up with a favourable mutation are fantastically large.

An example of 2. is the chances of a monkey coming up with instructions to send to the Apollo 13 capsule. Whether evolution ever expected life to do something so fantastically improbable isn't dealt with other than a very weak statement that stepping stones are just as impossible as the finished product. Of course the chances of an intelligent designer is never subject to numeration, as the theistic realm remains beyond scientism (except that once you accept the designer, scientific advances will be unlocked, in some unspecified way). The relationship between 1 and 2 and how they drive each other receives no discussion of note.

The author has clearly advanced his positions in other forums before and received pushback. In certain cases he uses this book to counterpunch, for example, in the discussion of the giant panda's thumb. Unfortunately for him his counter punches are weak. As a later example, in criticising the view of evolution as being driven by environmental conditions, he holds that is equivalent to saying life is noncommittal to the point of incoherence. There is no basis for this criticism, other than it just doesn't feel right to his viewpoint. To him there is an inherent tension between the view that evolution involves life wandering from one variation to the next and the deeper immovable "perfection" of life (defined as perfection by himself). Even conceding his view on perfection, he conflates two different things. Each individual life does not vary due to evolution over its life. An orca today will be an orca tomorrow.

I am not a scientist, but the author is not a behavioural psychologist. No insight is presented into how we develop a way of interpreting the world, only that our intuition leads us to the right answer. The most interesting mental aspect is the author's own dogmatic view from the beginning of his studies, and ensnarement in what seems to be some fairly petty in-house politics. Scientism is bad but, when he does his science, it is irrefutable evidence of the impossibility of evolution. The author explicitly states there is as much to be gained by providing a more satisfying view of life as proving Darwin wrong.

I am on weak ground in reviewing his scientific work on proteins. I note at least one article of his published in an intelligent design friendly journal about the evolutionary potential of proteins has been criticised as asking the wrong question. Further, research continues to move, with a countervailing opinion to his published just this month. These chapters are quite technical considering he is advancing common science for a layperson, beefing up his argument with a narrow focus on his area of specialty.

The author does not develop a fully fledged theory of intelligent design in this book, though I'm not sure I could hold on to work through another convoluted analogy purporting to explain it. This book is very much God in the gaps.

[Vercig09 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was intrigued that a book about intelligent design had such a good rating, so I read it. It was a first such book that I read, since I don’t believe in intelligent desing, and so I was hoping to learn the arguments.
I was dissapointed in the book, for various reasons. For one, actual science-related talk is a small part of the book. The rest is a bunch of rants about various things, but actual details are not the central focus. I think that if you have a theory you want to explain, you should talk about the theory, and not complain about the “system”, or talk bad about the opposing theory without specifying details. “The blind watchmaker” is a book about evolution by Dawkins that is mentioned a lot here, has a number of chapters, where each chapter talks about the specific part of the theory, basically always keeping an eye on the science.
The second problem I have with the book is that it doesn’t present evolution correctly. If you want an example, he says that evolution presents mutations as being completely arbitrary, without mentioning the second, important part, that nature selects the best changes, as those are the ones that get to reproduce. I’m not nitpicking here, this makes the difference between “random” and actual sense. No evolutionary biologists thinks that mutations and just random and thats it.
I also don’t think is brings new intelligent design arguments. A couple versions of “watchmaker analogy” are given with a pool cleaning robot, and computers, and are bad just because they are not presenting the vase correctly. In those analogies, the robot and the computer don’t evolve through time, so why would evolution be relevant?
I also want to point out the hypocrisy of calling out the evolutionary biologists for blindly following a theory without looking at the facts.
The final argument, and the one that made me write this review, is that is calls on the believers in ID to unite against the ‘enemy’, creating a divide. Was that really necessary? What did that bring?
There are other things, but I don’t think enyone got even to here, so I’ll stop.
Wase of time.

[Ali Ashkanani · Rating 3 out of 5]

يطرح الكاتب بعض الأسئلة المستحقة حول نظرية التطور, يبرهن بشكل دقيق كيف أن بعض الأحماض الأمينية لا يمكنها التطور فكيف بالإمكان تطور ما هو أعقد وأكبر.

من الأسئلة الجميلة التي يطرحها هي, هل يعرف الإنتخاب الطبيعي إلى أين يذهب؟ وإن كان لا يعلم حتى يصل إلى هذا الحد فنحن ندخل بضمن الاحتمالات المليارية التي تقترب من المستحيل, مما يسقط هذا الرأي.

يتهم الكاتب المجلات العلمية المحكمة بالتحيز ضد فكرة وجود المصمم الذكي, وواد الأبحاث العلمية التي تسير بهذا الإتجاه.

يستحق القراءة وأنصح نفسي ومن يقرأه بالبحث من ورا�� الكاتب خصوصا من المعارضين. عاب الكتاب بعض الملل بسبب الكلام التقني البيولوجي أحيانا, وبعض التكرار والكلام الإنشانئي تارة أخرى,

[Hasanul Banna Siam · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book deals much more with "common science' than with Biology; this is exactly what disappointed me. To refute an established idea of Biology, it is better to come up with Biology, and lots of Biology.

I do admire writer's effort to express his idea, but the book contains so many repetitions of the same thing, which at some points may become boring. Also, there are times when writer gave unnecessary details which took the reader's mind out of context.

I learnt a few new things though, but it didn't enjoy the book that much.

[J.J. Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing, but one needs at least a college freshman understanding of Biology to grasp this work written for laymen. That said, I immensely enjoyed the listen on audio book, and I'd highly recommend it for those interested in the subject.

[Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written, charitable approach, great analogies.
Are evolutionists blindly missing obvious and intuitive biological evidence for design? This book provides a flood of truly scientific yet down-to-earth support for an affirmative answer.
My favorite part was the very honest insight provided into current scientific understandings of protein formation, mental activity, and DNA. We humans know surprisingly little and miss surprisingly much—and we tend to assume the opposite.
Refreshing read against the backdrop of a world that is perfectly fulfilling 2 Peter 3:3-6. (Denying Christ's return, creation, and the flood.)

[Taylor Rollo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and appreciated its take on the debate surrounding evolution and intelligent design. It is obvious by the title that Dr. Axe takes the view that life is designed, which I do as well, but his argument for it is much different from many other books.

Most other books attempt to reinterpret data that is used to argue for evolution and show that it does not support evolution. There is a place for that, but as I have told the many college students to whom I teach about science and Christianity, competing interpretations of evidence can easily become a never-ended debate. Instead, I think it is helpful to move beyond interpretations of evidence to the level of worldview: naturalism/materialism vs. theism (particularly Christian theism). This is kind of what Axe does, though I do not recall him ever actually using the term "worldview."

Axe starts by noting that there is a conflict within all of us between our "design intuition" and what much of the scientific academy wants us to believe: that it was not designed but happened accidentally by natural selection. Our intuition from when we are born and from every other part of our lives makes us think that life is designed because of the complexity that seems to be inherent in it, but scientific authority tries to push us to believe that it could not be designed it must have evolved. He even quotes Francis Crick's famous words that tell us that no matter how designed it looks, we must remember that it was evolved. This "design intuition" really does work forever other part of our lives: when we see a pile of sticks arranged for a fire, we assume that it was designed that way, not that they fell at random that way. Axe gives several good examples that are more detailed.

He then spends the bulk of the book talking about the capabilities of natural selection as an "inventor" of that complexity that we see. He shows through rigorous argument based on probability (with a number of illustrations and examples) that natural selection may be an okay "fiddler" (tinkering with biological components that already exist) but a terrible, indeed abysmal, inventor (i.e. natural select cannot make new biological components, even if we try to imagine them being assembled in tiny increments. He sights a lot of data from his own research, which is in protein analysis, showing that the complexity of proteins cannot be invented by natural selection, and that is one of the smallest units of "busy wholes" (what he calls life forms).

The bulk of his book is taken up in that argument. What I think is most helpful about it is that, again, he is not trying to present competing interpretations of evidence but showing the paucity the most basic naturalistic driver of evolution: natural selection. If that breaks down, then the rest of the evolutionary argument does as well and so does naturalism, for natural selection cannot drive change in species, then there is nothing else for naturalism to fall on. He even cites atheists like Thomas Nagel (one of my favorite atheists, and I would review his book "Mind and Cosmos" but Alvin Plantinga has already done an excellent job of that: https://newrepublic.com/article/11018.... By the way, this book by Nagel is worth reading, for I believe it is one of the most important books of the last 50 years) who agree with the failings of naturalism to explain complex coherent biology, but these atheists still hold out for something else besides theism, though they have nothing to offer right now. This method that Axe uses is far more helpful, I think, than trying to target little bits of evidence. He shows how naturalism does not hold because its Achilles heal--natural selection--does not work.

In later chapters, he talks about alleged proofs of natural selection working, and he gives the reader a test that he calls the "hat test," based on a magician's hat. These chapters are helpful for handling rebuttals, but not necessarily crucial.

Finally, I love how he ends this book (and he throws this in throughout the book as well): he talks about the the bias of the scientific academy. He brings out how naturalism as a worldview has been smuggled into the sciences as if one must be a naturalist to practice science. That leads to a religious bias within the community that attempts to suppress decenters of the doctrine. When someone starts to support design instead of evolution (or even as a part of it), they are immediately branded a heretic and expelled from the community for violating the doctrine of naturalism, but it has nothing to do with science at all! He demonstrates throughout the book and again at the end that scientists are human, like we all, so we should not have a "Utopian view" of science that it is some kind of unbiased exercise. And, we should not be hard on the academy for their biases, for we all have them, but we should still expose them and speak out against them.

Overall, I love this book. I gave it four stars, which is rare for me (check out my list). I will also be adding it to the top of my recommended reading list when I teach on science and Christianity. In fact, I will probably use some of it in my lectures.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do we think about evolution? What do we make of it? Do I need to get a degree in biology just to join the discussion? While Douglas Axe is a biologist, and therefore has all the credentials necessary to enter into the conversation, Axe makes the case that common science is sufficient for assessing the claims of modern evolutionary theory. I want to highlight four things that were significant for me from Axe's book.

First, scientists are no different from people in other fields; some are people of integrity and others are people in it for their own gain. Just because scientists say something is true doesn't mean that we must believe it. We need to weigh the argument itself and understand how the scientist came to those conclusions. Second, a basic understanding of the world, common science, is typically sufficient to come to a reasonable conclusion about many claims of evolution. We understand that things don't just work together for the accomplishment of larger goals without some direction. Different teams at a manufacturing plant don't turn out functional widgets by chance, but because minds are directing the processes of each team to work together as a functional whole.

Third, when evolutionary scientists are honest, they will admit that evolution doesn't explain the arrival of the diversity of life, not even in theory. "Nothing evolves unless it already exists" (pg 97 and elsewhere). Fourth, the chance of natural changes/mutations giving rise to new proteins or proteins with entirely new and different functions is functionally zero. Yet, we are asked to believe that not just proteins but entire organisms developed by this method. It doesn't take a PhD in biology to realize that this is a claim that goes against everything we observe in life and would need sufficient evidence to prove. Such evidence is not only lacking, but is impossible, even in theory.

While Axe gets into the details of molecular biology at times, he never gets too deep for a layman to drown. And he keeps coming back to common science and basic thinking to ground the conclusions. He makes a strong case that evolution is not simply lacking evidence, but goes against what we know to be true from so much other evidence.

He concludes with a discussion of the meaning and significance of his conclusions. If we start with the belief that all of life is a random process, then the limit of our investigation is to the question of "How?"; it makes no sense to ask, "Why?". But if we follow the evidence and recognize that there is a design pattern to life, then our investigation also gets us to the "Why?", as we recognize purpose and meaning. Science goes so much deeper when we are allowed to ask the right questions.

[Gordon Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're interested in design arguments from an Intelligent Design perspective, I highly recommend this book.

[زينب · Rating 2 out of 5]

Apparently anyone can write a book. Just extend an idea that could be explained in one chapter (two at most) and make a book out of it.

[Don Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and important book addressing the practical impossibility of evolution. Very readable for the non-specialist---like myself.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Smart as an Axe, sharp as a Douglas, here's the "undeniable" proof.

[Brian Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Finished reading October 25, 2017. Read some parts again in November 2018.]

Douglas Axe is a biologist and the director of Biologic Institute, part of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. His book, Undeniable, is his effort to show that life is designed. Chapter 1 is titled “The Big Question.” The big question that atheists and theists should ask is, “What is the source from which everything else came?” Or, “To what or to whom do we owe our existence?” (9). Knowing where we came from tells us who we are and how we ought to live.

Chapter 2 is "The Conflict Within." To explain the unlikelihood of an impersonal, unintelligent process creating information, he uses an illustration. He asks his readers to imagine “oracle soup,” which is just like alphabet soup, except that the letters of oracle soup somehow arrange themselves to reveal instructions for “building something new and useful, worthy of a patent” (16). Of course, no one would believe such a thing existed. Yet Darwin and his followers expect us to believe something similar about the origin of life, that it emerged from a primordial soup. That mineral water could generate genetic information and molecular machines is just as credible as believing that oracle soup could give us engineering instructions spelled out in pasta letters.

The reason we don’t believe in "oracle soup" is because we have a “universal design intuition,” which he defines in this way: “Tasks that we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only be someone who has that knowledge” (20). In other words, we all recognize that certain tasks require an intelligent agent. Yet we’re told that far more complex things such as animals are generated without anyone making them. Our design intuition is opposed to such ideas.

In Chapter 3, “Science in the Real World,” Axe presents his readers with some technical information regarding proteins. He acknowledges that skepticism regarding Darwinism has been expressed by others, including scientists who, back in the 1960s, realized the improbability of random mutations creating new and useful genetic information. Characters—whether numbers and letters in a computer code, letters of the alphabet, or chemicals bases—are not arranged in specific, functional sequences by accident.

To show why the sequencing of characters matters, Axe discusses proteins, “the molecules responsible for most of the cellular activities of life” (27). Proteins consist of a long chain of amino acids, which are like characters in a language or code. Proteins are constructed out of arrangements of twenty different amino acids. A functional protein folds into a three-dimensional structure. The right sequence is crucial to the construction of a protein so that it folds into the right shape. Without folding into that proper shape, it will not function correctly. How do cells know how to construct these proteins? “Each protein molecule is constructed by linking amino acids according to sequence instructions carried by a gene” (30). In other words, DNA contains the instructions to build proteins. DNA consists of different arrangements of four chemical bases (represented by the letters A, C, G, and T). The genetic code consisting of specific arrangements of those bases provides the instructions for linking the twenty different amino acids into specific chains that build functional folding proteins. The issue of genetic code raises an important question: “How did the various forms of life acquire these necessary genes in the first place?” (30).

Axe’s own work proved that very specific information is required to produce proteins. According to him, “A prevalent idea at the time [1999] was that proteins were not particularly fussy about the sequence of amino acids along their chains, and even less fussy about the identities of the amino acids that end up on the outside of their folded structures” (33). Axe demonstrated through experiments on enzymes (proteins that perform chemical transformations) that this idea was wrong. Axe showed that if the exterior structure of enzymes was changed in small ways, the enzyme became inactive. He published a paper on his experiments in the Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB) in 2000.

Though Axe was successful, his work encountered resistance. He explains how he presented his work to Max Perutz, who had won a Noble Prize for his work on the discovery of protein structures. Perutz did not agree with Axe’s findings though he couldn’t dispute them. This interaction taught Axe an important lesson: scientists are humans who have flaws and blind spots like the rest of us.

In Chapter 4, “Outside the Box,” Axe continues to describe his work on proteins. When he published his 2000 JMB paper, he was working at the Centre for Protein Engineering (CPE) in Cambridge. Another leader at the CPE left her post abruptly; later, it was revealed there were significant problems found in a paper that she had published in Nature. She had supposedly shown that an engineered enzyme could work as well as the natural one. It turns out that what she thought was the engineered protein was actually the natural protein. Axe suggests the mistake was made because his colleague was looking for a certain result and was unwilling to do the hard work to confirm that her findings were true. “Harm comes to science not by people hoping to find a particular result but by people trying to suppress results that go against their hopes” (45).

Continuing to weave autobiography with comments on science and the scientific community, Axe explains how his association with the Discovery Institute, known for its work on Intelligent Design (ID), got him into trouble. This association was the reason why he was dismissed from the CPE in 2002. Critics of ID assume that the movement is nothing but creationism in disguise. Yet Axe explains that creationism and ID are different. “Creationism starts with a commitment to a particular understanding of the biblical text of Genesis and aims to reconcile scientific data with that understanding. ID, on the other hand, starts with a commitment to the essential principles of science and shows how those principles ultimately compel us to attribute life to a purposeful inventor—an intelligent designer” (48). Attempts to identify that designer are beyond the realm of science. Yet even the implication that God is the designer drives people to dismiss ID and suppress any findings that would support it. All scientists have agendas; the agenda of the scientific consensus, Axe suggests, is an atheistic one.

In Chapter 5,“A Dose of Common Science,” Axe proposes what he calls “common science.” Most people are not equipped to handle technical arguments; therefore, a nontechnical argument for design is needed. The fact is that all of us engage in basic, or common, science. We make observations. We classify objects. We process data. Thus, we all “do science,” even on a basic level. Though some of us might struggle with technical explanations, the findings of scientists should be open to public scrutiny. Scientists are not beyond reproach. “The community of professional scientists is a reliable source for uncontroversial facts, but as we have seen and will continue to see, this community has a habit of stepping well outside that boundary—or, at least, scientists claiming the authority of this community do” (64)

Axe begins to describe design in Chapter 6, “Life Is Good.” Attempting to keep his terminology simple and clear, he discusses “busy wholes” and “whole projects.” A whole is something that is itself complete. A “busy whole . . . is an active thing that causes us to perceive intent because it accomplishes a big result by bringing many small things or circumstances together in just the right way.” A “whole project” is that “big result” (68). Axe uses a pool-cleaning robot as an example of a busy whole. The project of cleaning the pool is the whole project. He says that we recognize that this project requires knowledge. The robot doesn’t know anything. But we understand that the robot is the result of another whole project, “the design and manufacture of a working pool robot” (70). And that whole project required knowledge and intent on the part of many human beings. The whole project of designing and manufacturing that robot can even be broken down into many subprojects, each of which ultimately require knowledge and intent.

Axe claims that we can recognize design in life, and that design is brilliant. Some try to “downgrade the high view” of life by looking for faults (77). However, engineers do not seem able to come up with better designs than what we find in nature. Others, seeing the brilliant design in nature, hope that a Darwinian theory will explain how evolution generated what appears to be designed. Yet evolutionary theory maintains that natural selection is continually improving organisms. How can that be true if what we find in animal life appears to be complete and impossible to improve upon? Axe believes that “followers of Darwin seem to be faced with the dilemma of deciding whether to believe their theory or their eyes” (79).

Returning to proteins, Axe says that explaining their origins is a “monumental challenge.” Demonstrating how mutations and natural selections could result in new structures of proteins is “the more extreme challenge,” but even the “less extreme challenge” of demonstrating how a functional protein could change functions is seemingly impossible (81). Axe and his colleague, Ann Gauger, demonstrated through experiments that one enzyme could not evolve to take on a new function in billions of years. Darwinian theory cannot explain the origins of proteins or why proteins cannot further evolve.

In biology, we see that many parts come together in specific ways to produce important tasks. This is the result of design. Axe explains how this works in Chapter 7, “Waiting for Wonders.” “When we see working things that came about only by bringing many parts together in the right way, we find it impossible not to ascribe these inventions to purposeful action, and this pits our intuition against the evolutionary account” (87).

To help us see how this works, Axe asks us to imagine a “noise-seeking robot” tasked with detecting a certain level of sound emitted from a football game. The robot needs to find a football game, not just any loud sound. If the robot is dropped on some random point on Earth, what are the chances of it finding a football game? He estimates that the chances of the robot being in a position to “hear” a football crowd are about one in a hundred thousand (91). One can only hope that given enough time, the robot would home in on a football game.

Natural selection is a bit like that robot, though it operates not within geographic space, but with the “genetic space” of possible genomic sequences. The signal being detected in this case is not noise but fitness. Evolutionary theories posit that when a genome produces greater fitness, that species “moves” toward that target. However, natural selection does not create that target. In other words, natural selection cannot produce genes that produce fitness. Natural selection can only act upon a fitness that already exists. As Axe explains, “the very logic of natural selection assures us that the power of invention resides elsewhere. And because evolutionists have never agreed on what this elsewhere is, the gaping hole that has always existed in the middle of evolutionary theory is still there” (96–97).

Though natural selection cannot invent, it can “fiddle.” It can help make small adjustments in biological systems. Axe illustrates this concept with information from his own experiments on an enzyme that protects bacteria. He found that even a small amount of mutations will cause a gene to fail to produce functional proteins, as evidenced in an experiment involving the amino acid tryptophan (108–109).

In Chapter 8, “Lost in Space,” Axe wonders “whether some things might be so hard to find by aimless wandering that we should consider their accidental discovery to be impossible” (113, original emphasis). The search for something specific is an “egg-hunt search,” similar to finding a hidden Easter egg. These searches have certain characteristics: there is something definite to be found, there is a well-defined space in which the search is conducted, and they proceed without assistance. Such an unguided search is also called a “blind search” (114–115).

In this chapter, Axe uses some complicated illustrations to point out how blind searches through space (whether geographical or informational, as it were) are not likely to hit a specific target. A minor critique here is that Axe's illustrations are often harder to follow than the actual science he presents.

Axe further explores design in Chapter 9, “The Art of Making Sense.” Speaking of human inventions, he identifies a property that makes them perform well, something called “functional coherence.” To put it simply, whole inventions consist of components, which in turn consist of subcomponents, which are constructed of elementary parts. Each part is ordered and arranged to contribute to the whole. He defines functional coherence as “the hierarchical arrangement of parts needed for anything to produce a high-level function—each part contributing in a coordinated way to the whole” (144). All languages have functional coherence: letters are arranged into words, which are arranged into sentences, which are arranged into paragraphs, and so forth. Random, accidental, or even law-like processes cannot arrange letters into words and into sentences to produce meaningful communication.

In Chapter 10, “Coming Alive,” Axe moves from human inventions to life, which “occupies a category that is unquestionably above human invention” (165, original emphasis). Axe focuses on something modest, cyanobacteria, single-celled organisms capable of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a process that converts light into chemical energy. Part of cyanobacteria’s photosynthesis apparatus is called photosystem I. Axe figures that three dozen genes in the cyanobacterial genome code the protein and enzymes needed for this system. The whole assembly is just twenty-two billionths of a meter in diameter. This complex system “depends on an extensive hierarchy of lower functions” (171). Here, we have evidence of design in what amounts to pond scum.

The probability of genes encoding a functional folded protein are incredibly small. “Of the possible genes encoding protein chains 153 amino acids in length, only about one in a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion is expected to encode a chain that folds well enough to perform a biological function!” (181, original emphasis). That is just one protein. Consider that proteins are at the base of a hierarchy of lower functions, which must be arranged in the right way to produce a whole organism with top-level function. “The fact that mastery of this basic step is completely beyond the reach of blind evolution is therefore evolution’s undoing” (184).

In Chapter 11, “Seeing and Believing,” Axe asks if he has overlooked any facts that might not fit into his design hypothesis. After all, past scientists have been quite wrong. Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist and early supporter of Darwin’s theory, believed that bacterial species lacked organs and were little more than a bit of slime. He was completely wrong, as the complexity of cyanobacteria shows us. Even Richard Dawkins acknowledges that cells thrown together at random over billions of years will not make anything that is alive.

At the beginning of Chapter 12, “Last Throes,” Axe quotes Darwin himself, who once remarked, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down” (216). While Darwin did not believe he could find such a case, those committed to ID like Axe have shown the physical (thought not logical) impossibility of such evolution. Yet ID is often rejected out of hand because of its theological implications. Even so, people have noted the “gaping hole” in Darwin’s theory (and Neo-Darwinian theories) over the years. If the mechanisms of evolution cannot innovate new proteins, we have no reason to believe it created new types of cells, organs, and life forms. Instead of embracing this conclusion, scientists committed to evolutionary theory posit untestable hypotheses, such as the multiverse theory or the idea that evolution perfected life forms in the past so that modern forms of life are no longer evolving. Such ideas are taken on faith, not evidence.

Speaking of faith, Axe believes that theological implications are impossible to ignore.
"If we try to avoid God by supposing all the necessary elements for each evolutionary step just happened to be at the right place at the right time, against all odds, then we only push his creative work back from the creatures themselves to the circumstances that brought them about. If we try to avoid God by supposing life came to earth from outer space, we only push his actions to another planet or another galaxy" (233–234). The same is true of if we claim that life originated from laws of physics. Who made the laws of physics capable of yielding amazingly complex biological inventions? Even the multiverse theory cannot escape the idea that of God.

In Chapter 13, “First World,” Axe argues for the primacy of personhood, which includes consciousness, thinking, reasoning. Materialists believe that things are primary, as opposed to theists, who believe that thinkers—particularly one Thinker, God—is primary. How could something impersonal create thinking persons?

The final chapter, “New School,” serves as a conclusion to the book. Axe again states that high-level function (or functional coherence) is not produced without a thinker who imagines a certain arrangement of parts and then acts to put them together. This kind of arrangement doesn’t happen by chance. We know that human inventors created computing machines, yet the brain is far more sophisticated than computers. By clinging to materialistic and atheistic assumptions, scientists have cut themselves off from understanding life and its design.

I believe that the theory of Intelligent Design is correct. I support Axe and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute. However, this book should have been organized better. It felt like the parts of chapters were not ordered and arranged well. In other words, the book could have been designed better so that its subtopics were grouped in better ways. Additionally, some of Axe’s illustrations were not that clearly. Ironically, I tracked the actual scientific explanations better than this pixelated image illustration. This book’s intended audience is lay people, not scientists. It would have behooved Axe to come up with more compelling, easily-understandable illustrations.

I also wonder if Axe is being disingenuous about ID. He says that ID is a scientific theory that posits an intelligent designer. Science cannot identify that designer. That is fine and good. However, Axe later invokes the name of God. There’s nothing wrong with that, but he should have explained when he was leaving the realm of science.

Despite those criticisms, I believe Undeniable is an important book. I would encourage those interested in ID to read Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt for a more in-depth argument.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was life-changing, although I disagree with most of the specifics. To me, there are some gaps that seem like they can not be crossed in multiple jumps, and the likelihood of everything happening at once seems too small.

I'm not a biologist, but it does seem like many of the things he says are impossible could happen if they are tried often enough for long enough.

I also don't make the jump that just because something is guided it doesn't mean that there is an omnipotent omnipresent omniscient God.

I tie this in with Philip goff's book Why, which has led me to something like Panpsychism

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I made the mistake of mostly listening to this one. I know better. I do better reading a hard copy of non fiction books. This one was packed with a lot of technical information that doesn’t translate well in audio, and honestly the scientific level was beyond me. The overall message was good and I will probably try to tackle this one again in the future...in print.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very helpful book, though I found that Axe's way of saying things was at times hard for me to follow. (His mind seems to work differently than mine.) The book's chief point is that we all possess an intuition of design, and readily are able to detect when something is designed when we see it. He goes on to demonstrate that many scientists who deny that the natural world is designed nevertheless acknowledge that it gives the "appearance of design," and that when looking at the natural world we need to keep reminding ourselves "that it is not designed." Of course, intuitions are not always correct, which is the point such scientists are making, so Axe's project in this text is not only to call attention to the power our design intuition related to the natural world, but also to ask whether that intuition is justified.

As an engineer and molecular-biologist Axe seeks to demonstrate that our intuition of design related to the natural world is, in fact, reliable. He assures his readers that one need not be a professional scientist to be able to assess the crucial questions at stake. He points out that everyone employs what he calls "common science" everyday, and makes reliable judgments based on such common science. He does delve into some fairly involved molecular-genetic discussions at times, as well a some probability mathematics to demonstrate the impossibility of many features in biological life developing by mere chance. He and his colleagues have done significant original research in these fields. It is at this point that the non-professional, if he or she is not at least casually acquainted with the subject matter, may feel lost. As a non-scientist, I've read a good deal on related subjects, and seen/listened to a number of lectures and debates, yet even for me Axe's more involved scientific discussions were a bit challenging to follow at times. But as one person I heard recently pointed out, if we never read anything that stretches our current understanding, we'll never learn anything new.

Axe points out that the common response by evolutionists to the probability problem by defaulting to the explanation that natural selection overcomes the probability obstacle is irrelevant. According to Axe, only those things which already exist can be selected to survive. But the probability of those many things at the molecular level ever having come into existence is simply beyond reason. According to Axe, natural selection simply cannot select for things that could not have come into existence in the first place in the time allowed by the most generous estimations of the age of the universe or age of the earth.

I found Axe's approach of drawing people's attention to the design intuition, and then working to validate that intuition, refreshing. I hope to weave that insight and approach into my own interactions with people and my teaching. His writing style is very personable, and humble.

I don't feel that Axe fully achieved what I understood to be his intent of making this book fully accessible to those not already well informed about the biological issues in question. Though I view myself as a non-professional who is reasonably informed about these issues, I nevertheless was quite challenged at several points to understand some of his discussions. Regardless, the book was well worth the effort, and though some parts were hard to grasp, the vast majority of the book was easily understandable.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good look at the mathematical and logical absurdities of darwinian evolution. Axe argues that progressive evolution implies a purpose beyond mere survival, and purposes require intent, aka someone to intend them. Further, the possibilities merely of proteins mutating, surviving, and passing on their new traits to the next generation are so small as to be mathematically impossible many times over.

The "intuition" of the subtitle is an interesting argument. Sort of like taking an Occam's razor approach--if it seems designed by a sentient being, it probably is (he gives the example of sitting down and seeing your alphabet soup spelling out complete sentences. You're going to suspect your wife, not random chance). And forget merely arranging letters in a certain order--what about the incredible spectrum of life that we see today? Don't try the "multiverse" theory--Axe shows that such a theory doesn't actually solve any of these probability issues.

Axe works hard to show his credentials and convince his readers, but ultimately his goal is to get his readers to trust themselves, their own intuition. Even the children of atheist evolutionists tend to think this world is designed; "educators" and other have to drill this intuition out of them. And none of this for the better.

[Cliff Keller · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the last 30 years the house of cards that serves up Darwinian selection, UNGUIDED Darwinian selection, to account for more complexity than Darwin—or anyone in Darwin's age—could have imagined, has collapsed. Any Darwinist with the courage to confront the mounting molecular biology data that points to design in the human genome will be forced to either run from or confront the truth. Complex, top-down systems do not evolve randomly.
Axe cites American philosopher (and atheist, by the way) Thomas Nagel, who says in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012), that the standard neo-Darwinian view flies in the face of common sense. Physics cannot account for Mind. Nor, apparently, can it account for bodies.
Axe, who is no lightweight in biology, says in his book, ...
"For me there is no debate. The scientific facts are in complete harmony with the universal design intuition. The work my colleagues and I have done on proteins has completely resolved the internal conflict—for me."
Amen. We did not evolve at random. Axe presents a solid scientific explanation in relatively plain language to make his case.