Over the coming days I’ll recommend some promising books for that difficult certain someone on your gift list—the know-it-all son-in-law, the besieged college student, the intellectually deprived expat in Mexico. Maybe it’s even a stealth purchase for yourself!
Let’s start with “Mike Gene’s” book, The Design Matrix.
One of the most interesting figures in the intelligent design debate is the maverick theorist "Mike Gene," who runs the webpage www.idthink.net, and contributes commentaries at the group blog Telic Thoughts.
Mike Gene is a pseudonym, used by its author to focus the attention of his readers on the content of his arguments, and the scientific evidence -- and not on the
personality, academic training, or background of "Mike Gene" himself. That's a healthy attitude to have in a debate all too often dominated by ad hominem attacks and motive-mongering. It also presumably protects Mike Gene from attacks by Darwinist colleagues. We have seen what they can do to dissenters, haven’t we? For the record, I don’t know who “Mike” is.
The Design Matrix, regardless, is Mike’s long-awaited book, released in time for the shopping season by Arbor Vitae Press. As befits his independent nature, Gene's approach in the book cannot be placed in any familiar category -- and that makes the work deeply fascinating and refreshing.
For those who have grown weary of apparently entrenched arguments, The Design Matrix is full of surprising insights and examples. Might the process of evolution itself, for instance, have been designed to bring about novelty and complexity? Mike Gene's answer to that question is loaded with potentially fruitful
(scientific) implications. Why has the frequency of the term "molecular machines" increased so dramatically in the scientific literature over the past few years? And so on.
Treat your gift-recipient (and yourself) to an intellectual journey along new and largely unexplored paths, in The Design Matrix.
