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

by Stephen C. Meyer

After 1953, biologists no longer conceived of the gene as an abstract entity. Watson and Crick showed that the gene had a definite locus and structure and that individual genes contain hundreds or thousands of precisely sequenced nucleotide bases, each functioning as digital characters in a larger instruction set. Consequently, biologists changed their understanding of mutations as well. Biologists came to understand mutations as something like typographic errors in long strings of digital code. As a result, many scientists began to realize that individual mutations were unlikely by themselves to produce new beneficial traits. Some scientists realized that mutations were instead overwhelmingly more likely to degrade the information contained in a gene than to produce a new function or trait, and that the accumulation of mutations would eventually and typically result in the loss of function.