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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Frazzetta’s concerns about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism, like Eden’s, turned on the growing appreciation of the nature and importance of genetic information. Though biologists then (as now) didn’t fully understand how genetic information in DNA correlates or “maps” to these higher-level complex morphological structures, by 1975 they did know that many hundreds of genes can be involved in coding for a single complex integrated structure. Thus, altering the anatomical structure of the mammalian ear or the vertebrate eye, for example, would involve altering the genes that code for its constituents, which implies, most implausibly, that multiple coordinated mutations would occur virtually simultaneously.