If there's no design, why does everything appear so perfectly designed?
Randomness, mother nature, the universe. We have a lot of names for whatever put this together, and most of them do no work. No Design asks what is actually holding the world up.
There is a line running through the whole book, and everything turns on it: the difference between order that merely repeats and information that specifies. A snowflake repeats one rule. A cell stores a long, non-repeating sequence of instructions and then executes them. Energy alone can build the first. It has never been shown to build the second.
Where a popular design claim does not survive checking, this book says so and drops it. The bees do not know geometry. The golden ratio is not in the Parthenon. What replaces those claims is harder to answer, which is the point of removing them.
Signs on the Wing — We learned to fly by copying birds. Engineers reverse-engineer designs. They do not reverse-engineer accidents.
Signs in the Green — A plant has no brain and cannot move. It solves its problems by chemistry alone, and it still runs the planet.
Signs in the Beasts — Nine mammals, nine different questions. A case built on one repeated argument is weaker than it looks.
Signs in the Heavens — The verse does not ask for admiration. It asks you to inspect the sky and report the flaw you find.
Signs in the Small — DNA raises two arguments rather than one. The second, error correction, is the less familiar of them.
The Web of Life — Several of the most repeated stories about cooperation in nature are false. What survives the trimming is worth more.
The Insect World — Three of the most repeated claims about insects do not hold. Give them up and better arguments appear underneath.
Signs in the Sea — Four claims that circulate widely about the ocean are false, including one from the book this discussion draws on.
Signs in Yourself — Thirty-seven trillion cells, and the parts long dismissed as design flaws turn out to be the strongest material.
The Nearer Sky — The moon, the tides, and why restraint about claimed Quranic predictions is the stronger position.
Mathematics and Nature — Almost everything you have heard about the golden ratio is false. What replaces it genuinely puzzles physicists.
The Art of Migration — The one place in this book where irreducible complexity does not apply, and saying so is the point.
The Material World — The metals, crystals and soil were all in place long before anyone arrived who could use them.
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