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

by Stephen C. Meyer

3 Or as Frazzetta himself observed, “I thus find it difficult to envision a smooth transition from a single maxilla to the divided condition seen in bolyerines.”4 Yet because the intermediate forms would not be viable, building a bolyerine jaw would require all the necessary parts—the jointed maxilla, the adjoining ligaments, and the necessary muscles and tissues—arising together. Yet the problem for neo-Darwinian theory, Frazzetta realized, extended well beyond the anatomical peculiarities of rare snakes. As a young evolutionary biology professor, he had studied complex features in a wide variety of species. He knew that almost any biological structure of interest—the inner ear, the amniotic egg, eyes, olfactory organs, gills, lungs, feathers, the reproductive, circulatory, and respiratory systems—possesses multiple necessary components. To change such systems requires altering each of the many independent parts upon which their functions are based. This cannot be done willy-nilly. For example, changing any of the three bones of the mammalian inner ear—the incus, stapes, or malleus—will perforce require corresponding changes in the other bones and in other parts of the ear as well, such as the tympanic membrane or the cochlea. Complex biological systems depend for their functions on tens or hundreds of such independent, yet jointly necessary parts. As the number of necessary components increases, the requisite number of coordinated changes increases too, rapidly driving u...