Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

Gilbert and his colleagues have tried to solve the problem of the origin of form by invoking mutations in genes called Hox genes, which regulate the expression of other genes involved in animal development—an approach that I will examine in Chapter 16.41 Notwithstanding, many leading biologists and paleontologists—Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Günter Theissen, Marc Kirschner, and John Gerhart, Jeffrey Schwartz, Douglas Erwin, Eric Davidson, Eugene Koonin, Simon Conway Morris, Robert Carroll, Gunter Wagner, Heinz-Albert Becker and Wolf-Eckhart Lönnig, Stuart Newman and Gerd Müller, Stuart Kauffman, Peter Stadler, Heinz Saedler, James Valentine, Giuseppe Sermonti, James Shapiro and Michael Lynch, to name several—have raised questions about the adequacy of the standard neo-Darwinian mechanism, and/or the problem of evolutionary novelty in particular.42 For this reason, the Cambrian explosion now looks less like the minor anomaly that Darwin perceived it to be, and more like a profound enigma, one that exemplifies a fundamental and as yet unsolved problem—the origination of animal form.