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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Behe showed that the problem of coordinated mutations was particularly acute for longer-lived organisms with small population sizes—organisms such as mammals or, more specifically, human beings and their presumed prehuman ancestors. Behe estimated, based upon relevant mutation rates, known human population sizes, and generation times, the time required for two coordinated mutations to occur in the hominid line. He calculated that producing even such a modest evolutionary change would require many hundreds of millions of years. Yet, humans and chimps are thought to have diverged from a common ancestor only 6 million years ago. Behe’s calculation implied that the neo-Darwinian mechanism does not have the capacity to generate even two coordinated mutations in the time available for human evolution—and thus does not explain how humans arose. Here the story gets really interesting. Soon after the publication of The Edge of Evolution, two Cornell University mathematical biologists, Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, both defenders of neo-Darwinism, attempted to refute Behe’s conclusion by making their own calculations. Their paper, “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution,” also applied a model based upon population genetics to calculate the amount of time necessary to generate two coordinated mutations in the hominid line. Although they calculated a shorter waiting time then Behe did, their result neverthe...