Signature in the Cell by Stephen C Meyer
This one is on my must-read list. It is 600 pages giving the most comprehensive arguments for Intelligent Design.
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Permalink Reply by Nicholas Weeks on
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Meyer's summary:
"The central argument of my book is that intelligent design—the activity of a conscious and rational deliberative agent—best explains the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell. I argue this because of two things that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which following Charles Darwin I take to be the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate— explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question."
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Some more of Meyer responding to criticism of his book (from the site for the book):
"As I show in Signature in the Cell, the chemical structures of DNA and RNA allow them to store information precisely because chemical affinities between their smaller molecular subunits do not determine the specific arrangements of the bases in the DNA and RNA molecules. Instead, the same type of chemical bond (an N-glycosidic bond) forms between the backbone and each one of the four bases, allowing any one of the bases to attach at any site along the backbone, in turn allowing an innumerable variety of different sequences. This chemical indeterminacy is precisely what permits DNA and RNA to function as information carriers. It also dooms attempts to account for the origin of the information —the precise sequencing of the bases— in these molecules as the result of deterministic chemical interactions."
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Here is video of the author introducing his book: (go to 7:30 to skip the intros)
http://www.heritage.org/Events/2009/06/Signature-in-the-Cell-DNA-Ev...
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I found a good introduction to the idea of Intelligent Design, as written up by Meyer before he wrote the book. This paper is the basis of the Prologue in the book.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?comman...
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