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

by Stephen C. Meyer

After the 1975 Steven Spielberg film Jaws became a big hit, one small-town motel advertised “Shark-Free Pool.” Proponents of the second evolutionary scenario (gene duplication, followed by neutral evolution), envision an evolutionary pool where there are no consequences for mutational missteps—by analogy, a pool with no predators. But to extend the illustration, picture a predator-free pool the size of our galaxy. Now picture a blindfolded man dropped into the middle of it. He must swim to the far side, to the one spot on the edge of the pool where a ladder would give him a way out. He’s safe from predators, but it will do him no good. He needs direction, some way of gauging his progress, and an immense amount of time. But he has none of these and so he will arrive at the ladder in neither a hundred years, nor a hundred billion. Similarly, in the classical model of gene evolution, random mutations must thrash about aimlessly in immense combinatorial space, a space that could not be explored by this means in the entire history of life on earth, let alone in the few million years of the Cambrian explosion.