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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Many paleontologists and evolutionary biologists now concede that the long-sought-after Precambrian fossils, those necessary to document a Darwinian account of the origin of animal life, are missing.4 Scientists are especially candid about this when addressing each other in the technical peer-reviewed literature. Often, however, defenders of evolutionary orthodoxy raise another possibility—that the common ancestor of the Cambrian animals has been documented after all, not by fossil evidence, but by molecular or genetic evidence of what they call a “deep divergence” of animal life. In making such claims, these biologists clearly privilege molecular evidence over evidence from the fossil record. Proponents of deep divergence don’t deny that the fossil evidence has come up short. Instead, they adopt one of the versions of the artifact hypothesis to account for that missing evidence. They then argue that there was no “explosion” of animal forms in the Cambrian, but rather a “long fuse” of animal evolution and diversification lasting many millions of years leading up to what only looks like an “explosion” of animal life in the Cambrian, but this evolutionary history was hidden from the fossil record. Indeed, they argue that molecular evidence establishes a long period of undetected or cryptic evolution in Precambrian times, beginning from a common ancestor some 600 million to 1.2 billion years ago, depending upon which study of the molecular genetic data they cite. If correct, ...