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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Many defenders of the Darwinian picture of the history of life seemed to assume that the discovery of any alleged Precambrian animal forms, however implausible as ancestors of specific Cambrian animals or however sparsely distributed in the vast sequences of Precambrian strata, would solve the mystery of the Cambrian explosion, especially if these forms exemplified some abstractly perceived commonality such as bilateral symmetry. To see what’s wrong with this way of thinking, imagine an ambitious distance swimmer claiming that it would be possible to swim between California and Hawaii over a period of many months or years because of the small islands that provide way stations where he could eat, rest, and overnight at each stage along his marathon journey. But instead of showing that an archipelago dotting the route between California and Hawaii at reasonably accessible intervals actually exists, he points to a couple of barren atolls in the South Pacific far from the most likely course to Hawaii. Clearly, in that case, the claims of our intrepid hypothetical swimmer would not be credible. In a similar way, the claims of those who assert that a few isolated and anatomically enigmatic forms of life in the Precambrian solve the problem of the Cambrian explosion also lack credibility. To