About

I am the author of The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues. This blog will build on the various themes that are outlined in my book.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I — The Way

Chapter 1: Lessons from a Vanishing Face

Chapter 2: The Explanatory Continuum

Part II — The Clues

Chapter 3: Echoes of Technology

Chapter 4: Error Correction Runs Deep

Chapter 5:: Welcome to the Machines

Part III — The Challenges

Chapter 6: Ducks and Rabbits

Chapter 7: Designing Evolution

Part IV — The Matrix

Chapter 8: Analogies and Discontinuities

Chapter 9: Rationality and Foresight

Chapter 10: The Design Matrix Unleashed

If you have not read the book, here are some of the reviews:

Review of Mike Gene, The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues (Arbor Vitae Press, 2007).- Dr. James F. McGrath

Other design proponents have (rightly) been accused of claiming scientists are ignorant about things that they understand or are working on understanding. Gene, to his credit, focuses his attention on things that are genuinely mysterious, on questions that are truly unanswered (p.288). Whether they are answerable in other terms is an open question, and one that must be fully explored. But Gene is not twisting evidence to make it seem to support a conclusion drawn in advance. For this he is to be applauded, and deserves to be taken seriously, even if in the end one draws a different conclusion than he does. For, unlike other design proponents, Gene invites you and encourages you to weigh the evidence for yourself and draw your own conclusion.

And Now for Something New – Steve Petermann

For some time now I have thought that the debate surrounding ID had grown stale. It seems that the ideas and arguments concerning intelligent design were just being recycled over and over again. That has changed. I just finished reading Mike Gene’s new book The Design Matrix and it is chock-full of interesting information, ideas, and approaches to the design question.

The Design Matrix – Tom Gilson

The way that he supports ID is refreshingly unique, however. He doesn’t argue for a conclusion of Intelligent Design at all. He argues more modestly, for a suspicion of Intelligent Design. He would have a beef with dogmatists on either side of the issue. Quite helpfully he distinguishes between the strong evidence required for conviction by a court of law, and evidence required by an investigating detective. A detective arrives on the scene with nothing but questions. His first objective is to move toward reasonable suspicions. A little hint there, a vague clue there: these things can move him toward a theory of a crime; and from there he can begin to look for more definite signs. Eventually, much further down the road, proof may come. Mike Gene believes we should recognize ID is in the developing suspicion stage: there is no hard scientific proof of design, but there are hints and clues that raise a most reasonable suspicion, and which can lead to a search for more definite signs.

Reviewed by U. Mohrhoff in AntiMatters

I must say, in conclusion, that I rarely, if ever, read a book about evolution that was (i) so thoroughly and honestly scientific — significantly more so than many Darwinist screeds — and (ii) so utterly thought-provoking.

The Problem of Design

Teleology is taboo in modern science. It’s not hard to see why: purpose implies design, design implies a designer, and a designer is exactly what the predominantly atheistic scientific community does not want to admit. But yet, we use telic language–specifically the language of engineering–to describe concepts in biology all the time. Is it just because we know of no better way to describe systems than by analogy to those that we ourselves have designed? Or is there something deeper to the compelling similarity between “molecular machines” that we discover inside the cell and machines that we use every day? It is such questions that drive Mike Gene’s brave new book: The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues, which aims to refocus the neverending debate over purpose in nature away from the black-and-white arguments of days past into a careful investigation of the actual evidence.