Book Review: Paley's New Clothes:
Abstract
Evolutionary Psychology human-nature.com/ep – 2004. 2: 195-199 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Book Review Paley’s New Clothes A review of God, the Devil, and Darwin by Niall Shanks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sean J. Cunningham, Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, Wa. 98195, USA. Email: scooniep@u.washington.edu. A new creationist offshoot, euphemistically dubbed “Intelligent Design” (ID) by its progenitors, has emerged on the political scene in recent years. Unlike its tactless counterparts (e.g., “Young Earth Creationism”), whose blatant religiosity has spelled almost certain demise, this insidious branch remains publicly agnostic about the nature of the “Intelligent Designer,” and is successfully framing ID as a bona fide scientific alternative to Darwinism. Although it constitutes little more than a souped- up version of theologian William Paley’s classic “argument from design,” the woeful state of America’s scientific literacy has us falling for the ruse. Indeed, the Intelligent Design movement has recently infiltrated several state legislatures, and even tallied its first substantial victory in Ohio (American Institute of Biological Sciences, 2004), where ID devotees were highly influential in convincing the state to require “critical analysis of evolution” as a part of its new public school science curriculum. Although this stops short of a legal mandate to