Inquirer reviews …

… 'Pretty Little World': The pleasures and perils of Philly alt-families.

… Patricia Cornwell reopens Jack the Ripper case.

… Joan Didion's 'South and West': Unfinished, but glimpses of brilliance.

… 'Bacteria to Bach': Where mind came from - and why it's an illusion.

"A process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things," he writes in a sentence that rewards rereading.

Really? A single reading should make it plain that this is assertion, not demonstration. Also, the intelligent designer business is a red herring. As Msgr. Ronald Knox pointed out decades ago, the problem with the argument from design is that it gives the impression that the world  was made for our convenience. The mystery at the heart of being is the order that it manifests at every level. And we have no experience of order absent a mind doing the ordering and a mind discerning it.