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

by Stephen C. Meyer

When evolutionary biologists plug estimates for these factors into the equations of population genetics, their calculations seem to imply that standard evolutionary mechanisms could generate significant amounts of evolutionary change in many groups of organisms—even enough to build complex systems. As long as mutations generate a continuous supply of new traits, any system, however complex, can be built one trait at a time—trait upon trait—via the creative power of natural selection. Or so the story goes.

According to Salisbury’s calculations, “The mutational mechanism as presently imagined could fall short by hundreds of orders of magnitude of producing, in a mere four billion years, even a single required gene.”

To overcome this improbability, Maynard Smith proposed a model of protein evolution. While admitting that the origin of the first proteins remained a mystery, he suggested that one protein could evolve into another as the result of small incremental changes in amino-acid sequences, provided each sequence maintained some function at each step along the way.

In other words, the kind of mutations the evolutionary process would need to produce new animal body plans—namely, beneficial regulatory changes expressed early in development—don’t occur. Whereas, the kind that it doesn’t need—viable genetic mutations in DNA generally expressed late in development—do occur. Or put more succinctly, the kind of mutations we need for major evolutionary change we don’t get; the kind we get we don’t need.

Wow

For example, early embryo development in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster requires the regulatory molecules Bicoid and Nanos (among others). The former is required for anterior (head) development, and the latter is required for posterior (tail) development.19 In the early stages of embryological development, nurse cells pump Bicoid and Nanos RNAs into the egg. (Nurse cells provide the cell that will become the egg—known as the oocyte—and the embryo with maternally encoded messenger RNAs and proteins.) Cytoskeletal arrays then transport these RNAs through the oocyte, where they become attached to specified targets on the inner surface of the egg.20 Once in their proper place—but only then—Bicoid and Nanos play critical roles in organizing the head-to-tail axis of the developing fruit fly. They do this by forming two gradients (or differential concentrations), one with Bicoid protein most concentrated at the anterior end and another with Nanos protein most concentrated at the posterior end. Insofar as both of these molecules are RNAs—that is, gene products—genetic information plays an important role in this process. Even so, the information contained in the bicoid and nanos genes does not by itself ensure the proper function of the RNAs and proteins for which the genes code. Instead, preexisting membrane targets, already positioned on the inside surface of the egg cell, determine where these molecules will attach and how they will function. These membrane targets provid...

How complex even for a simple thing.

Genetic mutations are simply the wrong tool for the job at hand.

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

In both of his examples Kauffman presupposes significant sources of preexisting information.

Even so, Kauffman’s proposal begs the most important question: What produces the new Cambrian body plans in the first place? By invoking “long-jump mutations,” he identifies no specific self-organizational process that can produce such changes.

In the first place, Newman obviously presupposes the existence of a “developmental genetic toolkit,” that is, a whole set of genes, including regulatory genes, that help to direct the development of animal body plans.

Otto Schindewolf (1896–1971) that “the first bird hatched from a reptilian egg” and, thus, in Goldschmidt’s words, “that the many missing links in the paleontological record are sought for in vain because they have never existed.”

!

Whereas neo-Darwinism envisions new form arising as the result of slow, incremental accumulations of minor mutations, evolutionary developmental biologists argue that mutations affecting genes involved in animal development can cause large-scale morphological change and even whole new body plans.

provided, again, that the mutational intermediates are neutral in their effects.

Key prerequisite

In essence, he claims that his population genetics–based mathematical model shows that purely random mutations and genetic drift can generate extremely complex adaptations in realistic waiting times—that his neutral evolutionary theory solves the problem of complex adaptations and long expected waiting times discussed in Chapter 12. But some things are just too good to be true, and it turns out that Lynch and Abegg made a subtle but fundamental mathematical error in coming to their conclusion. Appropriately, perhaps, the first person to demonstrate that Lynch’s incredible claim was problematic was Douglas Axe.

Lol

Where does the programming come from

The theory of intelligent design does not reject “evolution” defined as “change over time” or even universal common ancestry, but it does dispute Darwin’s idea that the cause of major biological change and the appearance of design are wholly blind and undirected.

Key admission

Yet a precedent comes very readily to mind, an intimately familiar one for us all. At present no one has any idea how our thoughts—the decisions and choices that occur in our conscious minds—affect our material brains, nerves, and muscles, going on to instantiate our will in the material world of objects. However, we know that is exactly what our thoughts do. We have no mechanistic explanation for the mystery of consciousness, nor what is called the “mind-body problem”—the enigma of how thought affects the material state of our brains, bodies, and the world that we affect with them. Yet there is no doubt that we can—as the result of events in our conscious minds called decisions or choices—“will into existence” information-rich arrangements of matter or otherwise affect material states in the world.

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

Key

When scientists decide by fiat that intelligent

Key for parents to teach from the beginning

When we got to the top of the mountain, I was unprepared for the impact the fossils would have on me. I had seen many fossils before, of course. But seeing these fossils—marine animals from the dawn of animal life at the top of a mountain with their beautifully preserved appendages and organs—rendered the idea of the “Cambrian explosion” a good deal less theoretical for me than it had been. These complex sea creatures, now brushed by the thin air at an elevation of 7,500 feet in the middle of the Canadian Rockies, had apparently arisen suddenly, almost from nothing by way of ancestral forms, in the sedimentary record. Everything about them cried out for a story—a big story. It set my mind and imagination racing (see Fig. 20.1).

No way this was a slow event