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

by Stephen C. Meyer

And let’s say that, as a result, the sheriff just happened to find the body soon after the murder had taken place. Let’s suppose, further, that the sheriff had the presence of mind to immediately measure the temperature of the body only to find that the victim was still warm, indeed almost as warm as a living person.

Following death, the human body cools to the surrounding temperature at a known rate. So, making allowances for vehicular transport, whoever committed the murder could not have gone beyond a certain distance from the remote estate at the time the body was found.

I’ve also examined more recent evolutionary theories and shown why they too fail to explain key aspects of the evidence. To this point, then, much of the evidence has returned a negative verdict. It has told us a lot about what, in all probability, did not cause the Cambrian explosion. But, as in our hypothetical murder case, an accumulating body of evidence that makes one set of explanations less and less plausible may also begin to paint a picture of an alternative cause and the true explanation. PROFILE OF THE SUSPECT

Trained at the University of California by James Valentine, another Cambrian expert, Erwin has worked closely over the past decade with Eric Davidson, whom we first met in Chapter 13, trying to determine what happened to cause dozens of novel body plans to appear—and appear rapidly—in the Cambrian period.

On the positive side of the ledger, they conclude that this cause must have several attributes in order to explain key facts about the fossil record as well as what it takes to build animals.

In particular, the cause must be capable of generating a top-down pattern of appearance; it must be capable of generating new biological form relatively rapidly; and it must be capable of constructing, not merely modifying, complex integrated genetic circuits

On the negative side, Davidson and Erwin rule out both observed microevolutionary processes and postulated macroevolutionary mechanisms (such as punctuated equilibrium and species selection) as explanations for the origin of the key features of the Cambrian explosion. They insist that the requirements for constructing animal body plans de novo “cannot be accommodated by microevolutionary [or] macroevolutionary theory.”2

“The crucial difference between the developmental events of the Cambrian and subsequent events is that the former involved the establishment of these developmental patterns, not their modification.”5

the origin of novel body plans—has any parallel to currently observed biological processes.

All of this raises an obvious question. Could the negative clues that increasingly disconfirm materialistic evolutionary theories also be positive indicators of a different kind of cause—perhaps even an intelligent cause?

not described by any currently proposed theory of micro- or macroevolution

Erwin and Davidson,

have sketched a partial profile of an adequate cause as befits their particular interest in the importance of gene regulatory networks (Davidson) and fossil discontinuity (Erwin).

Simon Conway Morris marvels at “the uncanny ability of evolution to navigate to the appropriate solution through immense ‘hyper...

he argues that evolution may in some way be “channeled” toward propitious functional and/or structural end points—without specifying any known evolutionary mechanism tha...

Erwin and Davidson have made a bold start with their clue list ruling out neo-Darwinism. But the evidence explored in these pages suggests additional attributes that need to be added to their profile of the actual cause of the Cambrian explosion. Our previous investigations have suggested that building an animal requires specified or functional information and that any explanation for the origin of the Cambrian animals must identify a cause capable of generating:

digital information

functionally integrated and hierarchically organized layers of information

designing intelligence—

each of the features of the Cambrian animals and the Cambrian fossil record that constitute negative clues—clues that render neo-Darwinism and other materialistic theories inadequate as causal explanations—

In other words, standard materialistic evolutionary theories have failed to identify an adequate mechanism or cause for precisely those attributes of living forms that we know from experience only intelligence—

Let’s have a look at each of these features of the Cambrian event, starting with key features of the Cambrian animals themselves, to see how they might point to the past activity of a designing intelligence, thereby making intelligent design scientifically detectable.

THE CAMBRIAN INFORMATION EXPLOSION

We have seen that building a Cambrian (or any other) animal would require vast new, functionally specified digital information. Moreover, the presence of such digitally encoded information in DNA presents, at least...

Could this—from a materialistic point of view—unexplained appearance of design point instead to actual intelligent design? I think it does. But to explain why, I need to tell a bit more about the “evolution” of my own thinking on the matter.

I showed that chemical evolutionary models (whether based upon chance, physical-chemical necessity, or the combination of the two) failed to identify a cause capable of producing the digital information in DNA and RNA.

Moreover, because they do not think that natural selection could have played a significant role in evolution until after the first self-replicating organisms had arisen, most evolutionary biologists also think that explaining the origin of information in a prebiotic context is much more difficult than explaining the origin of new information in already living organisms.

It also suggests, therefore, that intelligent design meets the key “causal adequacy” requirement of a good historical scientific explanation. Certainly, intelligence is a “cause now in operation” capable of generating functional or specified information in a digital form.

As I write this, my mind is generating specified information. Intelligent agents generate information in the form of software code, ancient inscriptions, books, encrypted military codes, and much else. And since we know of no “presently acting” materialistic cause that also generates large amounts14 of specified information (especially in a digital or alphabetic form), only intelligent design meets the causal adequacy requirement of a historical scientific explanation. In other words, our uniform experience of cause and effect shows that intelligent design is the only known cause of the origin of large amounts of functionally specified digital information. It follows that the great infusion of such information in the Cambrian explosion points decisively to an intelligent cause.

Intelligent design stands alone as an explanation for the origin of genetic information for another reason: purposive agents have just those necessary powers that natural selection lacks as a condition of its causal adequacy. We have seen that natural selection lacks the ability to generate novel information precisely because it can only act after new functional information has arisen. Natural selection can favor new proteins and genes, but only after they perform some function (influencing reproductive output). The job of generating new functional genes, proteins, and systems of proteins therefore falls entirely to random mutations. Yet without functional criteria to guide a search through the space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed. What is needed is...

(a) operates during a search—bef...

genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms are programs that allegedly simulate the creative power of mutation and selection. Richard Dawkins, Bernd-Olaf Küppers, and others have developed computer programs that putatively simulate the production of genetic information by mutation and natural selection.15

As mathematician David Berlinski shows, genetic algorithms need something akin to a “forward-looking memory” in order to succeed.16

Rational agents can arrange both matter and symbols with distant goals in mind. They also routinely solve problems of combinatorial inflation. In using language, the human mind routinely “finds” or generates highly improbable linguistic sequences to convey an intended or preconceived idea.

In the process of thought, functional objectives precede and constrain the selection of words, sounds, and symbols to generate functional (and meaningful) sequences from a vast ensemble of meaningless alternative possible combinations of sound or symbol.18

Similarly, the construction of complex technological objects and products, such as bridges, circuit boards, engines, and software, results from the application of goal-directed constraints.19 Indeed, in all functionally integrated complex systems where the cause is known by experience or observation, designing engineers or other intelligent agents applied constraints on the possible arrangements of matter to limit possibilities in order to produ...

Analysis of the problem of the origin of biological information, therefore, exposes a deficiency in the causal powers of natural selection and other undirected evolutionary mechanisms that corresponds precisely to powers that agents are uniquely known to possess.

INTEGRATED CIRCUITRY: DEVELOPMENTAL GENE REGULATORY NETWORKS

Keep in mind, too, that animal forms have more than just genetic information. They also need tightly integrated networks of genes, proteins, and other molecules to regulate their development—in other words, they require developmental gene regulatory networks, the dGRNs that Eric Davidson has so meticulously mapped over the course of his career.

Developing animals face two main...

they must produce different types of prot...

These physical targets are typically sections of DNA (genes) that produce other proteins or RNA molecules, which in turn regulate the expression of still other genes.

interdependent networks of genes and gene products present a striking appearance of design.

These molecules collectively form a tightly integrated network of signaling molecules that function as an integrated circuit.

Integrated circuits in electronics are systems of individually functional components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors that are connected together to perform an overarching function.

Likewise, the functional components of dGRNs—the DNA-binding proteins, their DNA target sequences, and the other molecules that the binding proteins and target molecules produce and regulate—also form an integrated circuit, one that contributes to ac...

Davidson himself has made clear that the tight functional constraints under which t...

(the ...

neo-Darwinism has failed to explain the origin of these systems of molecules and their functional integration. Like advocates of evolutionary developmental biology, Davidson himself favors a model of evolutionary change that envisions mutations generating large-scale developmental effects, thus perhaps bypassing nonfunctional intermediate circuits or systems.

Moreover, intelligence is the only known cause of such effects. Since developing animals employ a form of integrated circuitry, and certainly one manifesting a tightly and functionally integrated system of parts and subsystems, and since intelligence is the only known cause of these features, the