Darwin's Doubt

by Stephen C. Meyer

  Who was that other scientist? None other than Richard Sternberg, the evolutionary biologist who was punished for his openness to intelligent design while serving at the Smithsonian Institution (and the National Institutes of Health) in 2004. Around that time, Sternberg’s doubts about neo-Darwinism and his growing interest in intelligent design led him to consider the possibility that the majority of the genome could really be functional.48 His research subsequently confirmed what was for him, an idea inspired in part by intelligent design.

  In Signature in the Cell, I described many other discriminating predictions of the theory of intelligent design—predictions that differ from those of competing materialistic evolutionary theories—and how those predictions might help to guide new research in various subdisciplines of biology, including some in medicine. These predictions may also lead scientists to make new discoveries—discoveries that proponents of a competing perspective might not have been inclined to make—or to accept.

  Open Vistas

  By now it should be clear why so many brilliant scientists have missed the evidence of design in the Cambrian explosion. Scott Todd, a biologist writing in Nature, succinctly stated the reason: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”49 When scientists decide by fiat that intelligent design lies beyond the bounds of science, their decision will prevent them from considering this possibly or probably true explanation for the origin of animal form. But it will also deprive them of a new perspective that can generate new research questions and foster new avenues of discovery. Knowing this helps solve the final mystery of this book, but it also suggests a more productive way forward to address mysteries yet unsolved. Scientists committed to methodological naturalism have nothing to lose but their chains—fetters that bind them to a creaky and exhausted nineteenth-century materialism. The future lies open before them, and us. As we in the intelligent design research community like to say, let’s break some rules and follow the evidence wherever it leads.

  20

  What’s at Stake

  In the summer of 2002, I had the opportunity to hike up to the Burgess Shale with a group of geologists, geophysicists, and marine biologists. Our group also included my then eleven-year-old son and a teenage friend of his who was interested in the Cambrian fossils and the debate about Darwinism and design.

  When we got to the top of the mountain, I was unprepared for the impact the fossils would have on me. I had seen many fossils before, of course. But seeing these fossils—marine animals from the dawn of animal life at the top of a mountain with their beautifully preserved appendages and organs—rendered the idea of the “Cambrian explosion” a good deal less theoretical for me than it had been. These complex sea creatures, now brushed by the thin air at an elevation of 7,500 feet in the middle of the Canadian Rockies, had apparently arisen suddenly, almost from nothing by way of ancestral forms, in the sedimentary record. Everything about them cried out for a story—a big story. It set my mind and imagination racing (see Fig. 20.1).

  As wonderful as the fossils were, our trip to see them was made more memorable by two things that happened en route—one on the way up the mountain and one on the way down. As we were making our ascent, crossing a large talus slope—a section of the mountain void of vegetation and covered with only fragments of sedimentary rock—I heard my son unexpectedly call out to me from up at the front of our group. His voice had a trembling quality. I looked forward to see him, normally a fearless kid blessed by energy without bound, standing locked in place, pale and wide-eyed. I stepped around several of the other hikers on the trail to catch up with him. It turned out he was experiencing a kind of vertigo, though the mountain was not dangerously steep at that point (see Fig. 20.2). As he set out across the path that cut through the rocky slope, he had made the mistake of looking down the mountain. Without trees as a reference point and with hundreds of feet of loose rock fragments above and beneath him, he became disoriented and frightened. I steadied him as we walked in step, stride for stride, with me directly behind him across that open stretch of the mountain. Before long we were back to a place on the trail where trees and other plants appeared, providing a steadying presence as a point of reference. My son’s perspective quickly returned. He relaxed and soon was smiling and leaping confidently ahead of me again.

  On the way down the mountain, I had a striking interaction with a member of our group, who gave voice to a different kind of disorientation. It began as a conversation between my son’s friend and our official field guide, who had been assigned to us by the local Burgess Shale Geoscience Foundation. Our guide was a paleontologist and did a terrific job. He told many a fine story about the geological history of the surrounding formations, about the discovery of the fossils, and of course about the evolutionary history of animal life. In fact, just before we turned the final corner on the trail to ascend to a large collection of excellent fossils available for viewing at the top of the mountain, he slipped a statement of support for evolutionary orthodoxy into his description of the fossil site. Our guide was clearly unaware that many of us in the group knew the fossils we were about to see challenged the standard Darwinian story.

  FIGURE 20.1

  A trilobite fossil found at the Burgess Shale. Courtesy Michael Melford/National Geographic Image Collection/Getty Images.

  FIGURE 20.2

  Figure 20.a (left): Photograph of the author and his son Jamie at the Walcott Quarry of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, Canada. Figure 20.2b (right): Pausing for a moment to reflect on the slope below the Burgess Shale outcrop.

  We hadn’t made an issue of our views, of course, but nearly all the scientists on the hike were skeptical of neo-Darwinism. Paul Chien, the University of San Francisco marine biologist who had worked with J. Y. Chen in China on the sponge embryo fossils, was on the trip, and he had more than a passing acquaintance with Cambrian-era paleontology—as did several of the Canadian geologists with us. Still, not wanting to introduce any needless discord, we carefully avoided engaging the issue. We just wanted to see the fossils.

  As we descended the mountain, however, my son’s young friend asked our guide how he squared what we had just seen with his support for Darwinian evolution. The guide at first maintained his commitment to the Darwinian party line. He said he thought that Darwin would feel “vindicated” by the discovery of the Burgess fossils. This proved too much for the precocious, intellectual teenager, who loudly blurted out, “What?! Darwin would feel vindicated? By the sudden appearance of all those animals without any ancestors in the fossil record! Are you kidding?!”

  You would have to know this endearing young man to understand how his uninhibited outburst only charmed and amused our guide. But fortunately it did. The rest of us, however, were initially mortified. This was the discussion we were trying to avoid, knowing exactly the intense emotions it often provokes. With scientists, it is generally safer to discuss religion and politics.

  Nevertheless, to his credit, our guide took the challenge in stride. He explained how the Burgess fossils demonstrated evidence of change over time, how the rock column showed the great age of the earth, and how the discovery of the fossils high on a mountain revealed the evolution of the planet. Our young friend had spent too much time reading up on the subject to let the point go at that. He brushed aside the issue of the earth’s age, which like our guide he reckoned in billions of years, and assured the man that he accepted evidence for change over time in the sedimentary record. He didn’t question evolution in that sense. He questioned Darwinian evolution. “Where is the evidence of gradual change?” he demanded, as his teenage voice cracked with excitement as it moved into the upper register. He continued, “What mechanism could produce so many new animals so quickly?”

  An odd thing happened then. The paleontologist now leading us down the trail suddenly ceased to act the part of “guide.” He dropped any pretense of superior authority and said, “You know
, I’ve wondered about that myself.” I thought I could hear in his voice the candid amazement of the fourteen-year-old boy he once was.

  “How do you explain it?” he asked my son’s friend.

  Our young spokesman confidently piped up and asserted, “Intelligent design, of course!”

  At which point, our guide began to ask the probing questions. Soon my son’s friend had exhausted his store of knowledge and began to look to me to join the conversation. I did so, reluctantly at first. I explained the information argument for intelligent design and how the Cambrian explosion contributed to it. Our guide asked me the hard questions: How can we detect design? Is intelligent design science? Aren’t we just arguing from ignorance and giving up on science, or at least mainstream evolutionary science, too soon? He also wanted to know who I personally thought the designer was. His challenges were tough and honest. A terrific conversation ensued.

  When we reached the trailhead, he surprised me, thanking me for the conversation—and thanking my young friend for starting it. He then spoke a bit more personally and revealed that he sometimes found thinking about biological origins disturbing. He said that as a scientist he was committed to the evolutionary perspective. But he also found its denial of purpose depressing. He wondered if there was some way to affirm both science and the kind of purpose and meaning in life that religion speaks about. As we parted ways, he said he would like to learn more about intelligent design. He told me he was intrigued by the perspective we were developing. I felt that we had made a genuine human connection rather than, as sometimes happens in the evolution debate, merely flinging assertions at one another.

  Over the years, as I’ve researched and thought about biological origins, I have had numerous similar conversations with people of many persuasions and backgrounds: religious and nonreligious; scientists, engineers, medical doctors; businessmen and -women, appliance repairmen and taxi drivers. These conversations usually start innocently enough as the result of someone asking me what I do for a living. Though I often euphemize my response (“I work for a research organization”) to avoid getting trapped in a heavy conversation on an airplane or over a broken dishwasher, often the conversations come whether I want them or not. People are interested in how life began and they instinctively understand that whatever theory we adopt has larger philosophical, religious, or worldview implications. People are usually energized by considering those larger implications and questions. Many would like to find a way to harmonize the evidence from science with a view of the world that addresses their deepest existential longings as human beings, their yearning for purpose and significance. But like our guide, many have been frustrated by the difficulty of arriving at a coherent synthesis.

  It’s not hard to see why. On the one hand, many people of faith have little real interest in what science has to say about life’s origins. Indeed, many well-meaning religious believers have adopted a view of the relationship between science and faith that rejects the testimony of science as irrelevant or even dangerous and affirms that just reading the Bible will give all the insight needed to understand how life came to be. Their approach does not really attempt to harmonize faith and science, since it takes faith in the Bible, and often a particular interpretation of the Bible, as the only reliable source of information about life’s origin.

  On the other hand, many scientists and others who think that science has something to teach us about the big questions have started by assuming the neo-Darwinian account of biological origins, despite its many scientific difficulties—and despite its denial of any role for purposive intelligence in the history of life.

  In particular, two popular ideas about how Darwinism informs worldview have come to different conclusions about the worldview it affirms—or allows. The first view, the “New Atheism,” has been articulated by spokesmen such as Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion and the late Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great.1 It purports to refute the existence of God as “a failed hypothesis,”2 as another New Atheist book puts it. Why? Because, according to Dawkins and others, there is no evidence of design in nature. Indeed, Dawkins’s argument for atheism hinges upon his claim that natural selection and random mutation can explain away all “appearances” of design in nature. And since, he asserts, the design argument always provided the strongest argument for believing in God’s existence, belief in God, he concludes, is extremely improbable—tantamount to “a delusion.” For the New Atheists, Darwinism makes theistic belief both implausible and unnecessary. As Dawkins has famously put it, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”3

  The New Atheists took the publishing world by storm in 2006 when The God Delusion first appeared. But nothing about the “New” Atheism was actually “new.” Instead, it represents a popularization of a science-based philosophy, called scientific materialism, that came into currency among scientists and philosophers during the late nineteenth century in the wake of the Darwinian revolution. For many scientists and scholars at the time, a scientifically informed worldview was a materialistic worldview in which entities such as God, free will, mind, soul, and purpose played no role. Scientific materialism, following classical Darwinism, denied evidence of any design in nature and, therefore, any ultimate purpose to human existence. As British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell put it early in the twentieth century, “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving” and which predestine him “to extinction in the vast death of the solar system.”4

  An alternative and increasingly popular view is known as theistic evolution. Popularized by Christian geneticist Francis Collins in his book The Language of God (also published in 2006),5 this perspective affirms the existence of God and the Darwinian account of biological origins. Yet it provides few details about how God might or might not influence the evolutionary process, or how to reconcile seemingly contradictory claims in the Darwinian and Judeo-Christian accounts of origins. For example, Collins has declined to say whether he thinks God in any way directed or guided the evolutionary process, though he affirms neo-Darwinism, which specifically denies that natural selection is guided in any way. Darwinism and neo-Darwinism insist that the appearance of design in living organisms is an illusion because the mechanism that produces that appearance is unguided and undirected. Does God, in Collins’s view, guide the unguided process of natural selection? He, and many other theistic evolutionists, don’t say. This ambiguity has made an uneasy reconciliation of science and faith possible, but it has also left many questions unanswered. In fairness, many theistic evolutionists would argue that not all such questions can be answered, because science and faith occupy separate, non-overlapping realms of inquiry, knowledge, and experience. But that answer itself underscores the limits of the harmonization of science and faith that Collins and others holding his view has achieved.

  The argument of this book presents a scientific challenge to both of these views. In the first place, the evidence and arguments we have seen show that the scientific premise of the New Atheist argument is flawed. The mechanism of mutation and natural selection does not have the creative power attributed to it and, thus, cannot explain all “appearances” of design in life. The neo-Darwinian mechanism does not explain, for example, either the new genetic or epigenetic information necessary to produce fundamentally new animal body plans.

  This book has presented four separate scientific critiques demonstrating the inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism, the mechanism that Dawkins assumes can produce the appearance of design without intelligent guidance. It has shown that the neo-Darwinian mechanism fails to account for the origin of genetic information because: (1) it has no means of efficiently searching combinatorial sequence space for functional genes and proteins and, consequently, (2) it requires unrealistically long waiting times to generate even a single new gene or protein. It has also shown that the mechanism cannot produce new body plans because: (3) early acting mutations, the only kind
capable of generating large-scale changes, are also invariably deleterious, and (4) genetic mutations cannot, in any case, generate the epigenetic information necessary to build a body plan. Thus, despite the commercial success of The God Delusion and its wide cultural currency, the New Atheist philosophy lacks credibility because it has based its understanding of the metaphysical implications of modern science on a scientific theory that itself lacks credibility—as even many leading evolutionary biologists now acknowledge.6

  Second, this book poses a strong challenge to theistic evolutionists such as Francis Collins for many of the same scientific reasons. Collins places great trust in modern Darwinism as the unifying theory of biology, but seems completely unaware of the formidable scientific problems now afflicting the theory—in particular, the challenges to the creative power of the natural selection/mutation mechanism. He makes no attempt to address or answer any of these challenges. In addition, many of his arguments for universal common descent—the defense of which was his main concern in The Language of God—are based upon the alleged presence of nonfunctional or “junk” elements in the genomes of different organisms. Though the theory of intelligent design, which Collins says he opposes, does not necessarily challenge this part (common descent) of Darwinian theory, the factual basis of his arguments has now also largely evaporated as the result of ENCODE and other developments in genomics.7 Thus, this popular view of biological origins, and its conception of God’s relationship to the natural world, now stands starkly at odds with the evidence. But why attempt to reconcile traditional Christian theology with Darwinian theory, as Collins tries to do, if the theory itself has begun to collapse?