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

by Stephen C. Meyer

These vague narratives resemble nothing so much as the naming games of scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages. Why does opium put people to sleep? Because it has a “dormative” virtue. What causes new genes to evolve so rapidly? Their “hypermutability” or perhaps their ability to undergo “rapid, adaptive evolution.” How do we explain the origin of two similar genes in two separate, but otherwise widely disparate lineages? Convergent evolution, of course. What is convergent evolution? The presence of two similar genes in two separate, but otherwise widely disparate lineages. How does convergent evolution occur, given the improbability of finding even one functional gene in sequence space, let alone the same gene arising twice independently? No one knows exactly, but perhaps it was a “fortuitous juxtaposition of suitable sequences,” or “positive selection,” or “de novo origination.” Need to explain two similar genes in more closely related lineages? Try “gene duplication,” or “chimerical gene fusion,” or “retropositioning,” or “extensive refashioning of the genome,” or some other scientific-sounding combination of words.