I have some exciting news: my book on intelligent design (from NYU Press) has both a cover and a plan for release in September 2025.
I love the way the cover came out.
This William Blake image of Isaac Newton had been in the back of my mind the entire time I wrote the book, and I had always hoped that I’d be able to use it for the cover.
The book is a historical overview of the intelligent design movement, and antievolutionary ideology that emerged in the 1980s-90s and then largely faded from view after a catastrophic court case in 2005. Designer Science is a historical overview, however, not an attempt at refutation (or support), so my interest was not in critiquing the movement as much as chronicling it and trying to understand it. Many of ID’s critics characterized them as duplicitous or scheming, which I do not think is fair.
That said, I am coming at the story as an outsider. I dislike labels, but theistic evolution is the best term to apply to me.
Part of the reason I chose this cover image is because it represents, I think, some of the fatal flaws in ID as a program. Blake was a bit of a reactionary when it came to science, but there’s something deeply compelling about the way he depicted Newton here—bent over unnaturally, scouring the earth for clues about science, and thereby missing the totality of the picture. And, indeed, Blake disliked the way Newton saw the world as a machine.
These criticisms are applicable to ID, too.
But the story I tried to tell is one that charts ID’s emergence and departure from creationism, its attempt to position itself as an alternative to evolution (which mostly focused on criticizing Darwin, deploying ideas like irreducibly complexity and specified complexity), its political alliance with American conservatives of all stripes, its defeat at Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005 and the subsequent blowback from both the New Atheism and theistic evolution, and finally its descent into paranoia and conspiracy theorizing in the years after the court case.
I have written up a fuller essay about it on my website, which you can find below if you are interested:
A Full Write-up of Designer Science
I’ll keep you apprised of the book’s developments, and I am looking forward to its release.