But what about biology? Do we have good reason to believe in the sweeping power of Darwin’s mechanism? Could it really have generated all the life forms we see around us? No. The evidence points in the opposite direction: Beyond the borders of an organism’s diverse population, selection-and-mutation soon hit a brick wall. If an adaptive change needs more than two coordinated mutations to succeed, it won’t happen, however generous you are with the time window.4 Any major innovation would require far, far more mutations. It’s not clear that even directed mutations could turn one organism into
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