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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Their results were unambiguous. They found that they could not induce, with either one or a small number of amino acids, the change in function they sought. In fact, they found that they could not get Kbl2 to perform the function of BioF2, even if they mutated larger numbers of amino acids in concert—that is, even if they made many more coordinated mutations than could plausibly occur by chance in all of evolutionary history. Although their attempts to convert Kbl2 to perform the function of BioF2 failed, their experiment did not. It allowed them to establish experimentally for the first time that the co-option hypothesis of protein evolution lacks credibility—simply too many coordinated mutations would be required to convert one protein function to another, even in the case of extremely similar proteins. That implied that generating new genes and proteins would require multiple coordinated mutations, and thus, the waiting times that Behe and Snoke had calculated do present a problem for neo-Darwinian theory.