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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Axe developed a refined population-genetics mathematical model to calculate various waiting times. His results roughly confirmed the previous calculations of Behe and Snoke. He found, for example, that if he took into account the probable fitness cost to an organism of carrying unnecessary gene duplicates (as was necessary to give the evolution of a new gene a reasonable chance), that the probable waiting time for even three coordinated mutations exceeded the duration of life on earth. He therefore effectively determined an upper bound of two for the number of coordinated mutations that could be expected to occur in a duplicate gene during the history of life on earth (taking into account the negative effects of carrying gene duplicates in the evolutionary process). He also calculated six coordinated mutations as an upper bound, neglecting the fitness cost of carrying gene duplicates. Nevertheless, in their experiments, he and Gauger could not induce a functional change in a single gene with more than six coordinated mutations. So, even that more generous—and, again, unrealistically generous upper bound—does little to render the co-option hypothesis credible. Indeed, Axe and Gauger’s experiments showed that the smallest realistically conceivable step exceeded what was plausible given the time available to the evolutionary process. In their words, “evolutionary innovations requiring that many changes . . . would be extraordinarily rare, becoming probable only on timescales ...