Productive Evolution: On Reconciling Evolution with Intelligent Design

✍ Scribed by Nicholas Rescher

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 137
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A doctrine of intelligent design through evolution is not going to find many friends. It is destined to encounter opposition on all sides. Among scientists the backlog of evolution will have little patience for intelligent design. Among religiousists, many who form intelligent design have their doubts about evolution. In the general public’s mind there is a diametrical opposition between evolution and intelligent design: one excludes the other. This book will argue that this view of the matter is not correct, and that in actuality one can regard evolution itself as a pathway to intelligent design. We would do well to go beyond The Origin of Species and—taking as our guide such works as W. Wentworth Thomson’s On Growth and Form acknowledging that evolutionary adaptation can result in solutions of a sort that intelligence could readily ratify. Accordingly, what the present book seeks is a naturalization of Intelligent Design that sees such design as itself the result of natural and evolutionary processes.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
PREFACE
Chapter One: EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES
Chapter 2: HOMO SAPIENS AND THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE
Chapter Three: AMPHIBIOUS MAN: THE EVOLUTION OF IMAGINATION
Chapter 4: THE CULTURAL EVOLUTION OF COMMUNAL PRACTICES IN INQUIRY
Chapter 5: RATIONAL SELECTION: THE CASE OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Chapter 6: MIND/MATTER COORDINATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE WILL
Chapter 7: EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Chapter 8: MEETING THEOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION
Chapter 9: MEETING SCIENTISTIC OBJECTIONS TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN
References
Name Index