Professor Michael Behe invites us to review the sweep of his argument for intelligent design, as he has presented it in his books and other publications. This is, from top to bottom, an empirical argument, as he points out. It can only be fairly evaluated on empirical not religious grounds.

As Charles Darwin conceived it, evolution posits a racial hierarchy. In any hierarchy, someone has to be at the bottom. According to Darwin, that place was occupied by Africans. This was the scientific consensus of its day. “Listen to the scientists,” I imagine that 19th- and 20th-century racists might have instructed us. In the multiple award-winning Human Zoos, Dr. West unearths a forgotten but instructive chapter in that painful history.

Engineers of all types are focused on how to get things to work. They need to pull together all that is known about materials and properties, and organize them to perform a function. They need to meet design requirements. Engineers are trained to see design and judge good design.

The once self-evident truth of human exceptionalism is under intensifying attack. Indeed, one of the tragic trends in thinking about evolution has been to blur the distinction between humans and animals. History warns us not to regard this lightly.

Jerry Coyne is completely wrong about free will. Physical determinism, on which he bases his denial, is known scientifically to be untrue. Furthermore, if we were not free and our thoughts and actions were wholly the result of the chemistry and physics in our brains, then our opinions would have no truth value—chemical reactions are neither true nor false. Denial of free will based on physical determinism is bad science and self-refuting to boot.