No Design: A Free Book on the Evidence for Design in Nature

About the book

The argument, and the objections to it

Randomness. Mother nature. The universe. We have plenty of names for whatever assembled all this, and most of them do no real work. No Design asks a simpler question: what is actually holding the world up?

One line runs through the whole book. Order that merely repeats is not the same as information that specifies. A snowflake repeats a single rule. A living cell stores a long, non-repeating sequence of instructions and then carries them out. Energy alone builds the first. It has never been shown to build the second.

Thirteen chapters follow that line from the two metres of DNA folded inside one of your cells out to the constants that let a universe hold together at all.

Where a popular design claim does not survive checking, this book says so and drops it. 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.

The evidence in numbers

Signs written into creation

Four measured facts from biology and physics. Sit with each one for a moment.

3 billion

Letters of DNA

Read the human genome aloud at one letter per second, without pause, and you would not finish for about ninety-five years.

2 metres

Of DNA per cell

Stretched out it reaches about two metres, then packs into a nucleus a few thousandths of a millimetre across and stays readable, copyable and repairable.

~30

Constants under constraint

Strengthen the force binding atomic nuclei by two percent and hydrogen fuses away in the universe’s first minutes. No hydrogen means no water.

23.5°

A tilt the moon holds

Earth’s axis leans about twenty-three and a half degrees and a large moon keeps it there. Mars has no such anchor, and its axis swings.

Inside