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

by Stephen C. Meyer

In 2009, in honor of the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, a piece of artwork was created to adorn the ceiling of an exhibit room at the Natural History Museum in London. A paper in the journal Archives of Natural History noted that the inspiration for the artwork, titled “TREE,” came from a diagram that Darwin had sketched in one of his notebooks—a diagram that later came to be known as the “tree of life” (see Fig. 2.11a). One BBC radio program called the TREE exhibit the “Darwinian Sistine Chapel.”1 Another article in Archives of Natural History, a journal published by the University of Edinburgh, remarked that, “TREE celebrates Darwinian evolutionism” and “secular science and reason.”2