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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Agassiz was too infected by German idealism to properly assess the factual basis of Darwin’s case.

idealist phil...

A. Hunter Dupree,

“Agassiz’s idealism was of course the basis of his concepts of species and their distribution,” of his insistence that a divine or intellectual cause must stand behind the origin of each type.

ship of science

As science advanced

late nineteenth century,

it increasingly excluded appeals to divine action or divine ideas as a way of explaining phen...

methodological naturalism,

First,

As Lurie concedes,

ichthyology,

comparative anatomy,

taxo...

began organizing a system of information-sharing among naturalists, sailors, and miss...

Agassiz showed himself perfectly willing to accept natural mechanisms where before supernatural intervention had been the preferred explanation.

he regarded material forces,

the laws of...

of embryos: he attributed their natural evolution from zygote to adult as a natural phenomenon and considered this no threat to his belief in a creator.

He also readily accepted the notion of a naturally evolving solar system.47 He thought a skillful cosmic architect could work through secondary natural causes every bit as effectively as through direct acts of agency. The marginalia in his copy of On the Origin of Species suggest that he had this same attitude concerning biological evolution. “What is the great difference,” he wrote, “between supposing that God makes variable species or that he makes laws by which species vary?”

A third problem with the official portrait of Darwin’s chief rival concerns Lurie’s suggestion that Agassiz was a master of particulars,

Each searched for an explanation of a curious geological phenomenon in the Scottish Highlands, the parallel roads of Glen Roy.

but one example to support their position, namely, his rejection of Darwin’s theory; but they cannot use that example to establish his general inability to interpret evidence and then turn around and use that supposed inability to explain his failure to accept Darwin’s theory. That is to argue in a circle.

far more obvious solution

Darwin’s ...

Darwin himself accepted the validity of Agassiz’s objection.51

“To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer. . . . The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”

Why, he asked, does the fossil record always happen to be incomplete at the nodes connecting major branches of Darwin’s tree of life, but rarely—

These terminal branches were well represented (see Fig. 1.8), often stretching over many generations and millions of years, while the “internal branches” at the connecting nodes on Darwin’s tree of life were nearly always—and selectively—absent.

As Agassiz explained, Darwin’s theory “rests partly upon the assumption that, in the succession of ages, just those transition types have dropped out from the geological record which would have proved the Darwinian conclusions had these types been preserved.”53 To Agassiz, it sounded like a just-so story, one that explains away the absence of evidence rather than genuinely explaining the evidence we have.

Darwin didn’t offer one.

The vertical lines in these diagrams represent known animal phyla. The dots within the vertical lines represent animals from those phyla that have been found fossilized in different strata.

The diagram on the left shows the animal tree of life as expected based upon Darwinian theory.

The diagram on the right shows a simplified representation of the actual pattern of the Precamb...

persistent mystery lay at the feet of biologists, one that subsequent generations of scientists would revisit and repeatedly seek to resolve.

In the next chapter, the work of detection moves from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, from the British Isles to British Columbia, and to a fossil site above the Kicking Horse River so astonishing that, even today, paleontologists and some of the most skeptical and hardened of scientific rationalists speak its name with childlike reverence.

But the twentieth century’s most revolutionary fossil discovery was more like fiction: the setting was commensurate with the moment.

Walcott, already the director of the Smithsonian Institution, was about to enter the most significant phase of his professional life. More than this, he was about to make perhaps the most dramatic discovery in the history of paleontology, a rich trove of

later called the Burgess Shale—3000 feet above the town of Field.1

archetypal

Walcott’s diaries and his knowledge of Walcott’s expertise as a geologist.3

one odd couple from Walcott’s quarry,

Marrella and Hallucigenia. Marrella, also called a lace crab,

Walcott described it as a type o...

Hallucigenia

(see Fig. 2.4). On the underside of the creature are seven pairs of limbs, each corresponding in position to one of the pairs of spines on the back, though with the tentacle farthest back offset.

The underbelly also features three pairs of shorter tentacles before the trunk tapers and curves upward in what was probably a flexible extension from the body. Each of the larger tentacles appears to have a hollow tube connected to the gut and a pincer at the tip. This ancient creature was so peculiar that paleontologists feigned disbelief at what they saw, giving it its memorable name.

suggested the geologically abrupt appearance of a menagerie of animals as various as any found in the gaudiest science fiction.

“phylum”) refers to divisions in the biological classification system.

cnidarians