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

by Stephen C. Meyer

One of the first prominent evolutionary biologists to consider the possibility that building new genes and proteins might require multiple coordinated mutations was John Maynard Smith. Maynard Smith worked as an aeronautical engineer during World War II, but then took up the formal study of evolutionary biology after the war. He eventually helped to found the University of Sussex, where he also served as a distinguished professor of biology until the mid-1980s.13 In 1970, Maynard Smith wrote an article in Nature responding to an earlier article by Frank Salisbury, a biologist from Utah State University. Salisbury had raised questions about whether random mutations could explain the specificity of the arrangement of nucleotide bases necessary to produce functional proteins. Salisbury worried, following discussions at Wistar, that the probability of random mutations generating functional arrangements of bases or amino acids was prohibitively low. According to Salisbury’s calculations, “The mutational mechanism as presently imagined could fall short by hundreds of orders of magnitude of producing, in a mere four billion years, even a single required gene.”14