...Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, writes of the way living things emerged from the seas and describes the recently discovered fossil specimen of that first terrestrial explorer. Paleontologist Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, lays out the forensic evidence of pre-human descent. Nicholas Humphrey, a professor at the Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, muses on how natural selection might have produced human consciousness. Steven Pinker, the Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist, holds forth on the evolution of ethics. Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser discusses the proper role of evolution in the science curriculum.

Several essayists worry that the passions stirred by the intelligent design debate go well beyond the natural tension between science and religion. They suspect that baser political motives are at work in a strategy crafted to discredit science itself as an independent auditor of political claims about global warming, stem-cell research, pollution and high-tech military systems. ...

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