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

by Stephen C. Meyer

If at any time from birth to reproduction the right mutation or combination of mutations accumulate in the DNA of cells involved in reproduction (whether sexual or asexual), then information for building a new protein or proteins will pass on to the next generation. When that new protein happens to confer a survival advantage on an organism, the genetic change responsible for the new protein will tend to be passed on to subsequent generations. As favorable mutations accumulate, the features of a population will gradually change over time. Clearly, natural selection plays a crucial role in this process. Favorable mutations are passed on; unfavorable mutations are weeded out. Nevertheless, the process can only select variations in the genetic text that mutations have first produced. For this reason, evolutionary biologists typically recognize that mutation, not natural selection, provides the source of variation and innovation in the evolutionary process. As evolutionary biologists Jack King and Thomas Jukes put it in 1969, “Natural selection is the editor, rather than the composer, of the genetic message.”6 And that was the problem, as the Wistar skeptics saw it: random mutations must do the work of composing new genetic information, yet the sheer number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid combinations (i.e., the size of the combinatorial “space”) associated with a single gene or protein of even modest length rendered the probability of random assembly prohibitively s...