Darwin's Doubt Quotes

“In China,” he said, “we can criticize Darwin, but not the government. In America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Agassiz explained his reasons for doubting the creative power of natural selection. Small-scale variations, he argued, had never produced a “specific difference” (i.e., a difference in species). Meanwhile, large-scale variations, whether achieved gradually or suddenly, inevitably resulted in sterility or death. As he put it, “It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Darwin’s picture of the history of life “contradict[ed] what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“mutating the genes that regulate body-plan construction destroy animal forms as they develop from an embryonic state, then how do mutations and selection build animal body plans in the first place?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Oxford biologists Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey depict the Ediacaran fauna as lying on a line of descent separate from the Cambrian animals rather than being ancestral to them.23”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“In any case, the discovery in China of chordates, and other previously undiscovered phyla in the Cambrian, only accentuates the puzzling top-down pattern of appearance that other Cambrian discoveries had previously established.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“that there are no biological forms left to discover. He means, rather, that we have good reason to conclude that such discoveries will not alter the largely discontinuous pattern that has emerged.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“In other words, they have failed to find the paleontological equivalent of the numerous finely graded intermediate colors (Pendleton blue, dusty rose, gun barrel gray, magenta, etc.) that interior designers covet.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Thus, discovery of an embryo in the earliest stages of cell division shows beyond a doubt that Precambrian sedimentary rocks can, under the right circumstances, preserve soft-bodied organisms.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“contents of the guts of several animals.46 The discoveries near Chengjiang demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that sedimentary rocks can preserve soft-bodied fossils of great antiquity and in exquisite detail, thereby challenging the idea that the absence of Precambrian ancestors”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“there is still a mystery to speculate about: Why and how did many animals begin to have hard parts—skeletons of sorts—with apparent suddenness around the beginning of the Cambrian?”24”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“As Chen explained, the Chinese fossils turn Darwin’s tree of life “upside down.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“with clues that would seem to discredit him. Through his grouping of disparate body types into existing phyla and his ingenious version of the artifact hypothesis, Walcott had found an elegant way to explain all this seemingly uncooperative evidence in a Darwinian way.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Yet the Precambrian strata of his day showed no signs of providing any obvious transitional forms, much less a well-articulated bottom-up pattern of animals representing lower taxa proliferating into forms exemplifying higher and higher taxonomic categories.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Indeed, Walcott’s discovery turned Darwin’s anticipated bottom-up—or small changes first, big changes later—pattern on its head.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Yet we would not expect the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations to produce the top-down pattern that we observe in the history of life following the Cambrian explosion.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“The Cambrian explosion appears to conform to the second pattern, the top-down effect.”20 Or”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“FIGURE 2.8
According to Darwinian theory, the strata beneath the Cambrian rocks should evidence many ancestral and intermediate forms. Such forms have not been found for the vast majority of animal phyla. These anticipated but missing forms are represented by the gray circles. Lines and dark circles depict fossilized representatives of phyla that have been found.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“FIGURE 2.7
The origin of animals. Darwinian theory (top) predicts gradual evolutionary change in contrast to the fossil evidence (bottom), which shows the abrupt appearance of the major animal groups.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Instead, the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record, especially in light of the Burgess Shale after Walcott, points to the geologically sudden appearance of complex and novel body plans.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“A PUZZLING PATTERN Over the years, as paleontologists have reflected on the overall pattern of the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record in light of Walcott’s discoveries, they too have noted several features of the Cambrian explosion that are unexpected from a Darwinian point of view11 in particular: (1) the sudden appearance of Cambrian animal forms; (2) an absence of transitional intermediate fossils connecting the Cambrian animals to simpler Precambrian forms; (3) a startling array of completely novel animal forms with novel body plans; and (4) a pattern in which radical differences in form in the fossil record arise before more minor, small-scale diversification and variations. This pattern turns on its head the Darwinian expectation of small incremental change only gradually resulting in larger and larger differences in form.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“A PUZZLING PATTERN Over the years, as paleontologists have reflected on the overall pattern of the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record in light of Walcott’s discoveries, they too have noted several features of the Cambrian explosion that are unexpected from a Darwinian point of view11 in particular: (1) the sudden appearance of Cambrian animal forms; (2)”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“According to Darwinian theory, differences in biological form should increase gradually, steadily increasing the number of distinct body plans and phyla, over time. References for first appearances are found in note 5 of this chapter.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“The question that Darwin’s early critics posed was this: How could he reconcile his theory of gradual evolution with a fossil record so discontinuous that it had given rise to the names of the major distinct periods of geological time, particularly when the first animal forms seemed to spring into existence during the Cambrian as if from nowhere?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“It was these strata that Sedgwick named after a Latinized English term for the country of Wales—“Cambria,” a designation that eventually replaced “Silurian” as the name for the earliest strata of animal fossils.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz thought the evidence of abrupt appearance, and the absence of ancestral forms in the Precambrian, refuted Darwin’s theory.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design