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

by Stephen C. Meyer

According to neo-Darwinian theory, new genetic information arises as random mutations occur in the DNA. “Random” means that mutations occur without respect to the functional needs of the organism—mutations have no inherent directionality. Nevertheless, natural selection can only “select” what random mutations first generate.14 And for the evolutionary process to produce new forms of life, random mutations must first generate—at the very least—new genetic information for building novel proteins. And that, Denton told me, was the problem. When it comes to producing new genetic information, the neo-Darwinian mechanism, with its reliance on random mutations, faces a needle-in-a-haystack dilemma, or what mathematicians call a “combinatorial problem.”