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

by Stephen C. Meyer

In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I explained why the problem of fossil discontinuity exemplified by the Cambrian forms has, since Darwin’s time, only intensified. Yet clearly a more fundamental problem now afflicts the whole edifice of modern neo-Darwinian theory. The neo-Darwinian mechanism does not account for either the origin of the genetic or the epigenetic information necessary to produce new forms of life. Consequently, the problems posed to the theory by the Cambrian explosion remain unsolved. But further, the central problem that Darwin set out to answer in 1859, namely the origin of animal form in general, remains unanswered—as Müller and Newman in particular have noted.