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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Thus, ultimately, the scenarios featured in Long’s review essay do not explain the origin of the specified information in either genes or sections of genes. That would require a cause capable of solving the combinatorial inflation problem discussed in the previous chapters. But none of the scenarios discussed in Long’s article even addresses this problem, let alone demonstrates the mathematical plausibility of the mechanisms they cite. Yet, Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry originally cited Long as a definitive refutation of my article—the one in which I argued that the rarity of genes and proteins in sequence space cast doubt on the power of selection and mutations to generate novel genetic information. Professor Miller, in his testimony at the celebrated Dover trial, even convinced a federal judge to affirm that Long had succeeded in demonstrating how genetic information originates in a celebrated legal ruling. Clearly, one cannot solve a problem or refute an argument by failing to address it.31