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

by Stephen C. Meyer

William Paley. Paley had argued that just as complex structures such as watches necessarily issue from intelligent watchmakers, the complex structures in living organisms must likewise owe their origin to a designing intelligence. With natural selection, Darwin proposed a purely natural mechanism for constructing the complex organs and structures (such as eyes) present in many forms of life. His mechanism of natural selection worked by constructing such systems one tiny step at a time, discarding the harmful variations and seizing upon the rare improvement. If evolution progressed by “whole watches”—that is, by entire anatomical systems like the trilobite’s eye—then biology would have fallen back to the old absurdity of imagining that a watch could fall together purely at random and all at once. Thus, unless Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism worked gradually by preserving the tiniest of random changes over many millions of years, it didn’t work at all.