Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

As conceived from Darwin to the present, natural selection “selects,” or acts to preserve, those random variations that confer a fitness or functional advantage upon the organisms that possess them. But it “selects” only after such advantageous variations or mutations have arisen. Thus, selection does not cause novel variations; rather, it sifts what is delivered to it by the random changes (i.e., mutations) that do cause variations. This has been neo-Darwinian orthodoxy for many decades. All this means that natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base (or amino-acid) sequences, that is, new genetic information. It can only preserve such sequences (if they confer a functional advantage) once they have originated. Adaptive advantage accrues only after the generation of new functional genes and proteins—after the fact, that is, of some presumably successful random mutational search. Thus, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends upon an ineliminable element of randomness—a point that even other evolutionary biologists acknowledged after the debate in Toronto. Laurence Moran and P. Z. Myers, both outspoken atheists, criticized Krauss and Dawkins for mischaracterizing the neo-Darwinian mechanism as wholly nonrandom, and Moran specifically blamed Krauss’s uncritical reliance upon Dawkins as the source of his misinformation.52