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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Whether in the analogies he drew to animal breeding or the computer simulations he used to demonstrate the supposed ability of mutation and selection to generate new genetic information, Dawkins repeatedly smuggled in the very thing he insisted the concept of natural selection expressly precluded: the guiding hand of an intelligent agent. He found Dawkins’s computer simulation particularly interesting. In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins described how he had programmed a computer to generate the Shakespearean phrase: “Me thinks it is like a weasel.”1 Dawkins did this in order to simulate how random mutations and natural selection could generate new functional information. Dawkins programmed the computer first to generate many separate strings (sequences) of English letters. He then programmed it to compare each string to the Shakespearean target phrase and select only the string that most closely resembled that target.2 The program then generated variant versions of that newly selected string and compared those sequences to the target, selecting, again, only the one that most closely resembled the desired target. This eventually generated—after many iterations—a string that matched the target perfectly. Axe recognized immediately the role that Dawkins’s own intelligence had played. Not only did Dawkins provide the program with the information that he wanted it to generate (“Me thinks it is like a weasel”), he imbued the computer with a kind of foresight by directing it to com...