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

by Stephen C. Meyer

The neo-Darwinian focus on mathematical modeling helps to explain why mainstream evolutionary biologists haven’t worried about the problem of the origin of new genes and proteins or the problem of combinatorial inflation, discussed in Chapters 9 and 10. Many contemporary evolutionary biologists, like the founders of population genetics, assumed that some mechanism for building new genes already existed. Indeed, they assumed that new traits (and the genes for building them) can arise as the result of even single mutations (or a series of such mutations that each confer a small, incremental, selectable advantage). Thus, the mathematical expression of neo-Darwinian theory seemed to certify the plausibility of even large-scale evolutionary changes—again, provided these changes could occur one mutation at a time. But what if there are systems in living organisms that cannot be built one mutation at a time, and instead must be built by simultaneous coordinated changes?