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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Moreover, any doubts that at least some biologists have begun to embrace a post-Darwinian perspective should have been laid to rest in the summer of 2008, when sixteen influential evolutionary biologists met for a private conference at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria. The scientists, whom the science media later dubbed the “Altenberg 16,”3 met to explore the future of evolutionary theory. These biologists had many different, and sometimes conflicting, ideas about how new forms of life might have evolved. But all were united by the conviction that the neo-Darwinian synthesis had run its course and that new evolutionary mechanisms were needed to explain the origin of biological form. As paleontologist Graham Budd, who was in attendance, explained, “When the public thinks about evolution, they think about [things like] the origin of wings. . . . But these are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about.”4

More honesty at the higher levels that seldom reaches downward