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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Some of these mutational mechanisms also depend upon sophisticated preexistent molecular machines such as the reverse transcriptase enzyme used in retropositioning or other complex cellular machinery involved in DNA replication. Since building these machines requires other sources of genetic information, scenarios that presuppose the availability of such molecular machines to assist in the cutting, splicing, or positioning of modular sections of genetic information clearly beg the question. Overall, what evolutionary biologists have in mind is something like trying to produce a new book by copying the pages of an existing book (gene duplication, lateral gene transfer, and transfer of mobile genetic elements), rearranging blocks of text on each page (exon shuffling, retropositioning, and gene fusion), making random spelling changes to words in each block of text (point mutations), and then randomly rearranging the new pages. Clearly, such random rearrangements and changes will have no realistic chance of generating a literary masterpiece, let alone a coherent read. That is to say, these processes will not likely generate specificity of arrangement and sequence and, therefore, do not solve the combinatorial search problem. In any case, all such scenarios also beg the question. There is a big difference between shuffling and slightly altering preexisting sequence-specific modules of functional information and explaining how those modules came to possess information-rich seque...