What contribution can historians, sociologists and philosophers of science make to the debate about ‘intelligent design’ (ID) – a movement which the sociologist–philosopher Steve Fuller describes in his new book as ‘scientifically credentialed creationism’ (p. 1)?

Fuller famously testified on behalf of ID in a Pennsylvania courtroom in 2005, and his latest book on the subject is bold, original and intensely thought-provoking. It is also bizarre, chaotic and not entirely reliable. The central historical idea of Dissent over Descent is that belief in the intelligent design of nature has been central to modern science, and that the ID movement thus represents a truer continuation of the scientific tradition than Darwinism. Philosophically, Fuller tries to argue that the practice of science cannot be adequately justified if purpose, design and intelligibility in nature are denied. A third, more sociological strand of the book suggests that professional bodies such as the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences are involved in peddling a narrow and dogmatic Darwinian orthodoxy under the guise of an alleged ‘scientific consensus’. These are important themes and Fuller pursues them with vigour. At its best, Fuller's writing on this subject is reminiscent of Paul Feyerabend's bracing intellectual anarchism, which provided a potent antidote to unthinking scientism. Fuller's complaints about the intellectual inconsistencies of the defenders of Darwinism, and of allies including the ‘theistic evolutionists’ who seek to combine Christian belief with Darwinian orthodoxy, are sometimes well made. But the book's merits are overshadowed by methodological and argumentative failings.

Fuller comes at his subject from endless different starting points, hurtling at it again and again from unexpected angles, and rarely developing any point in a sustained manner. The deliberately anachronistic use of ‘intelligent design’ – a term which took on its present meaning only in the 1990s – to describe the views of historical figures including Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley and James Clerk Maxwell is misleading. Chapter headings that sound quite reasonable rarely correspond with the ensuing content. Chapter 2, entitled ‘Was Darwin really a scientist?’, drifts rapidly away from this question into perplexing discussions of philosophy and theology ranging from Galileo, Nazism, vivisection and Peter Singer to medieval Islam, the Socinian heresy, Friedrich Engels and Theodosius Dobzhansky (in that order). Fascinating links could be made between all these topics, but Fuller does not offer much assistance in making them. Finally there are errors of fact and instances of unhelpful referencing. To take just one example, I was intrigued to read that ‘John Stuart Mill realised in his review of On the Origin of Species that Darwin literally denied the intelligibility of nature’ (p. 88). A footnote refers the reader to Peter Dear's book The Intelligibility of Nature, but without giving a page number. It is hard to know which section of Dear's book Fuller had in mind, since The Intelligibility of Nature contains no reference to John Stuart Mill, nor to Mill's review of the Origin (which is hardly surprising since no such review exists).

Aside from regret that an original and interesting plan has not been better executed, the overwhelming feeling that Dissent over Descent elicits is bafflement. What is Fuller up to? He describes himself as a ‘secular humanist’ but adds that he has been steeped in ‘the historical and philosophical relations between science and religion since my school days with the Jesuits’ (p. 8). The Jesuit schooling seems to come through in the surprising suggestion that we cannot understand the creation–evolution debate until we have properly understood the second-century Christian apologist Tertullian, and also in Fuller's view that ‘ID needs to reassert the specificity of the Abrahamic God as the implied intelligent designer’ (p. 231). This curious book overstates the scientific credentials of the religiously motivated ID movement, insists on the historic and continuing value of religious belief to scientific inquiry, and calls for the overturning of the First Amendment ban on religiously motivated viewpoints being taught in state-funded schools. What kind of secular humanism is that?

The six essays by leading scholars that comprise The Panda's Black Box: Opening up the Intelligent Design Controversy, edited by the historian of biology Nathaniel C. Comfort, offer plainer and more digestible fare. Comfort's introduction includes the subtle but important insight that public conflicts in this area are less between Darwinists and creationists than between vocal groups of anti-creationists and anti-Darwinists. Michael Ruse rehearses the history of ideas about design in nature, from Plato to Paley and beyond, while Scott F. Gilbert explains – rightly if somewhat self-defeatingly, given that the bulk of his chapter is about the biological evidence – that ‘the battle of evolutionary biology versus Intelligent Design is not a biological issue’ but a sociological one (p. 61). The authors do not always live up to the volume's stated intention of looking at the underlying causes of the controversy with understanding and detachment. Jane Maienschein compares the debate about ID with the controversies surrounding human embryonic stem cell research, and although she starts by stating that neither debate can be reduced to a simple contest between ‘science’ and ‘religion’, her analysis tends nonetheless to presuppose the model of a conflict between ‘reason, logic, and science’ on the one hand and ‘faith, introspection, and intuition’ on the other (and it is clear which side she thinks should usually win). In a similar vein, Comfort and Gilbert both somewhat misleadingly describe ID as an ‘anti-scientific’ movement.

The two essays that readers of this journal will probably find most useful are contributions by highly regarded historians of the legal, political and cultural aspects of evolutionary biology Edward J. Larson and Robert Maxwell Young. In essence, these essays provide briefer, more focused and less eccentric versions of the kind of analysis that Fuller's all-out polemic never quite delivers. Larson's chapter traces the dispute over the teaching of evolution in the American classroom from the 1920s to the present, explaining the religious and political motivations behind the three phases of creationism: biblical fundamentalism, ‘creation science’ and ID. The chapter includes important observations about the extension and reinterpretation of the First Amendment during the twentieth century. The legal context must be given a prominent place in any explanation of ID. The movement was spearheaded by a law professor, Phillip E. Johnson, who was determined to find a way around Supreme Court decisions barring the teaching of earlier versions of creationism. Although ID has suffered several legal setbacks at state level, Larson speculates that ‘[u]ltimately, only a Supreme Court decision may resolve the place of Intelligent Design in American public schools’ (p. 82). Young's superb concluding essay treats ID as, in the words of his subtitle, ‘a symptom of metaphysical malaise’. It is a philosophical and historical treat, building on Young's work over several decades on the nature of scientific knowledge and the significance of the analogy between artificial and natural selection in Darwin's works. It combines exemplary close readings with broader speculative insights and gets to the heart of what people feel they have lost through the ascent of Darwinism.