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The editors at the prominent science journal BioEssays recently published an editorial demanding government-mandated censorship of intelligent design. My colleagues and I had expected something like this before long. They singled out Evolution News in particular as a being in need of prejudicial treatment from the huge tech companies that dominate electronic media. If giants like Google or Facebook hesitate, then says biologist Dave Speijer, the government should "Make them."

The threat is no joke. You were aware that censors are already at work suppressing other ideas on the Internet that they don't like. Intelligent design was next in line.

What can you do to make a meaningful statement in favor of free speech? Here's an idea: Get a copy of the new book from Discovery Institute Press, Evolution & Intelligent Design in a Nutshell, the most accessible and up-to-date introduction to ID that's ever been released. It goes on sale today on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle formats.

Nothing Left Out

The five authors, led by Thomas Y. Lo, cover the range of evidence for design in under 150 pages. The origin of the universe, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, and more — there's no subject we cover at Evolution News that is left out, but it is all treated in a way that anyone can understand.

Why is it an effective counter to the bullies at BioEssays who want to shut down views that point to an underlying purpose in the cosmos?

As Dr. Lo writes in his Introduction, shuffling objective evidence of design under the rug is something that science textbooks have been doing for decades. He tells a moving story about his own journey to maturity as a scientist and as a religious believer, how his Christian faith unraveled when he was a young man, only to be regained as he realized what had been left out of his education: "cosmological evidence of creation ex nihilo" at the Big Bang, the "fine-tuning of the universe," the "truth about 19th-century German zoologists Ernst Haeckel's classic embryo drawings," the puzzle of the Cambrian event that Charles Darwin acknowledged but that the textbooks "papered over or ignored altogether."

He recalls one scientist, University of San Francisco biologist Paul Chien, whom he heard give a lecture thirty years ago. Dr Chien explained the challenge of the Cambrian explosion to standard Darwinian accounts of evolution. Today, Dr. Chien contributed a chapter to the Nutshell book that includes his own "personal stories of visiting key Cambrian fossil sites."

Opening Minds, by Design

The textbooks leave most or all of this out. In the same tradition, today's censors are bent on keeping minds closed. But they are more dangerous because of the way technology has turned social media platforms into potential bottlenecks.

So get Evolution & Intelligent Design in a Nutshell for yourself, or share it with a friend, or with a student. The book is just in time because, under an endless lockdown in many places, there's a bull market for studying at home. You might have a high school student in your household, or a college student, who would benefit from the insights and crystal-clear presentation of Lo, Chien, and their co-authors, Eric Anderson, Robert Alston, and Robert Waltzer.

Arguments for intelligent design, conveyed in weighty tomes, can be daunting for the learner seeking an introduction. As chemist Marcos Eberlin quips, evolutionists hope you don't know chemistry. Sometimes it seems that ID proponents assume that you know not only chemistry, but biology, physics, mathematics, computer engineering, and philosophy, just for starters. Thomas Lo has done a service by cutting through much detail to the core of intelligent design.

For more on BioEssays and its call for suppression, see here: