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

by Stephen C. Meyer

He suggested that it was at least possible that “functionally useful proteins are very common in this [combinatorial] space so that almost any polypeptide one is likely to find [as the result of mutation and selection] has a useful function.”10 Many neo-Darwinian biologists subsequently came to favor this possible solution. The solution was this: even though the size of the combinatorial space that mutations needed to search was enormous, the ratio of functional to nonfunctional base or amino-acid sequences in their relevant combinatorial spaces might turn out to be much higher than Eden and others had assumed. If that ratio turned out to be high enough, then the mutation and selection mechanism would frequently stumble onto novel genes and proteins and could easily leapfrog from one functional protein island to the next, with natural selection discarding the nonfunctional outcomes and seizing upon the rare (but not too rare) functional sequences.