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

by Stephen C. Meyer

In 2012, a dramatic confirmation of one such prediction made by advocates of intelligent design occurred in the field of genomics. Three leading science journals, Nature, Genome Research, and Genome Biology, published a series of groundbreaking papers reporting on the results of a massive study of the human genome called the ENCODE project (short for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements).40 The conclusion: at least 80 percent of the genome performs significant biological functions, “dispatching the widely held view that the human genome is mostly ‘junk DNA.’ ”41 The discovery challenged a long held neo-Darwinian interpretation of the genome. According to neo-Darwinism, the genome as a whole should display evidence of the random trial-and-error process that gave rise to new genetic information. The discovery in the 1970s that only a small percentage of the genome contains information for building proteins was hailed at the time as powerful confirmation of the Darwinian view of life. The noncoding regions of the genome were assumed to be nonfunctional detritus of the trial-and-error mutational process—the same process that produced the functional code in the genome. As a result, these noncoding regions were deemed “junk DNA,” including by no less a scientific luminary than Francis Crick.42

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