Darwin's Doubt

by Stephen C. Meyer

  The perspective of this book offers a potentially more coherent and satisfying way of addressing the big questions, of synthesizing science and metaphysics (or faith), than either of the currently popular views on offer. The Cambrian explosion, like evolutionary theory itself, raises larger worldview questions precisely because it raises questions of origins and of design, and with them, the question that all worldviews must address: What is the thing or the entity from which everything comes? But unlike strict Darwinian materialism and the New Atheism built atop it, the theory of intelligent design affirms the reality of a designer—a mind or personal intelligence behind life. This case for design restores to Western thought the possibility that human life in particular may have a purpose or significance beyond temporary material utility. It suggests the possibility that life may have been designed by an intelligent person, indeed, one that many would identify as God.

  Unlike the theistic evolution of Francis Collins, however, the theory of intelligent design does not seek to confine the activity of such an agency to the beginning of the universe, conveying the impression of a decidedly remote and impersonal deistic entity. Nor does the theory of intelligent design merely assert the existence of a creative intelligence behind life. It identifies and detects activity of the designer of life, and does so at different points in the history of life, including the explosive show of creativity on display in the Cambrian event. The ability to detect design makes belief in an intelligent designer (or a creator, or God) not only a tenet of faith, but something to which the evidence of nature now bears witness. In short, it brings science and faith into real harmony.

  Just as importantly, perhaps, the case for design supports us in our existential confrontation with the void and the seeming meaninglessness of physical existence—the sense of survival for survival’s sake that follows inexorably from the materialist worldview. Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists may find it untroubling, even amusing and certainly profitable, to muse over the prospect of a universe without purpose. But for the vast majority of thoughtful people, that idea is tinged with terror. Modern life suspends many of us, so we feel, high over a chasm of despair. It provokes feelings of dizzying anxiety—in a word, vertigo. The evidence of a purposeful design behind life, on the other hand, offers the prospect of significance, wholeness, and hope.

  As my son walked out across the mountain high above the Yoho Valley, he was surrounded by many slabs of rock containing some of the very fossils we had come to see. But as he surveyed that barren portion of landscape, he lost perspective on where he was and what he had come to do. Without landmarks or steadying points of reference, he felt as if he were lost in a sea of sensory impressions. Without his sense of balance, he feared even to take a step. He called out for his father.

  It occurred to me only much later how closely his experience parallels our own as human beings trying to make sense of the world around us. To gain a true picture of the world and our place in it we need facts—empirical data. But we also need perspective, sometimes called wisdom, the reference points that a coherent view of the world provides. Historically, that wisdom was provided for many men and women by the traditions of Western monotheism—by our belief in God. The theory of intelligent design generates both excitement and loathing because, in addition to providing a compelling explanation of the scientific facts, it holds out the promise of help in integrating two things of supreme importance—science and faith—that have long been seen as at odds.8

  The theory of intelligent design is not based upon religious belief, nor does it provide a proof for the existence of God. But it does have faith-affirming implications precisely because it suggests the design we observe in the natural world is real, just as a traditional theistic view of the world would lead us to expect. Of course, that by itself is not a reason to accept the theory. But having accepted it for other reasons, it may be a reason to find it important.

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Quastler, The Emergence of Biological Organization, 16.

  2. In fairness I should mention that a few of my critics did attempt to refute the book’s actual arguments about the origin of life, and my colleagues and I addressed those in several essays collected into a book called Signature of Controversy, ed. David Klinghoffer (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2010; http://www.discovery.org/f/6861).

  3. See Francisco Ayala, “On Reading the Cell’s Signature,” Biologos.org, January 7, 2010, http://biologos.org/blog/on-reading-the-cells-signature.

  4. Venema, “Seeking a Signature,” 278.

  5. Dobzhansky, “Discussion of G. Schramm’s Paper,” 310.

  6. De Duve, Blueprint for a Cell, 187.

  7. Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” 120.

  8. For examples, see such books as Kauffman, The Origins of Order; Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots; Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin; Raff, The Shape of Life; Müller and Newman, On the Origin of Organismal Form; Valentine, On the Origin of Phyla; Arthur, The Origin of Animal Body Plans; and Shapiro, Evolution, to name but a few.

  9. Futuyma asserts, “There is absolutely no disagreement among professional biologists on the fact that evolution has occurred… . But the theory of how evolution occurs is quite another matter, and is the subject of intense dispute” (“Evolution as Fact and Theory,” 8). Of course, to admit that natural selection cannot explain the appearance of design is in effect to admit that it has failed to perform the role that is claimed for it as a “designer substitute.”

  10. See Scott Gilbert, Stuart Newman, and Graham Budd, as quoted in Whitfield, “Biological Theory”; Mazur, The Altenberg 16.

  11. See, e.g., Kauffman, 361; Raff, The Shape of Life; Miklos, “Emergence of Organizational Complexities During Metazoan Evolution.”

  12. Gilbert et al., “Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology.”

  13. Webster, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots, 33; Webster and Goodwin, Form and Transformation, x; Gunter Theissen, “The Proper Place of Hopeful Monsters in Evolutionary Biology,” 351; Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life, 13; Schwartz, Sudden Origins, 3, 299–300; Erwin, “Macroevolution Is More Than Repeated Rounds of Microevolution”; Davidson, “Evolutionary Bioscience as Regulatory Systems Biology,” 35; Koonin, “The Origin at 150,” 473–75; Conway Morris, “Walcott, the Burgess Shale, and Rumours of a Post-Darwinian World,” R928-R930; Carroll, “Towards a New Evolutionary Synthesis,” 27; Wagner, “What Is the Promise of Developmental Evolution?”; Wagner and Stadler, “Quasi-independence, Homology and the Unity of Type”; Becker and Lönnig, “Transposons: Eukaryotic,” 529–39; Lönnig and Saedler, “Chromosomal Rearrangements and Transposable Elements,” 402; Muller and Newman, “Origination of Organismal Form,” 7; Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 8; Valentine and Erwin, “Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments,” 96; Sermonti, Why Is a Fly Not a Horse?; Lynch, The Origins of Genome Architecture, 369; Shapiro, Evolution, 89, 128. David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, writing in the journal Biological Theory, are even more frank, “Darwinism in its current scientific incarnation has pretty much reached the end of its rope” (89–102).

  14. “Statement on Teaching Evolution by the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” St. Louis, Missouri, February 16, 2006; www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/pdf/0219boardstatement.pdf (accessed October 26, 2012).

  15. Dean, “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin.”

  16. Eugenie Scott, quoted in Stutz, “State Board of Education Debates Evolution Curriculum”; also requoted in Stoddard, “Evolution Gets Added Boost in Texas Schools.”

  Chapter 1: Darwin’s Nemesis

  1. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 484. In other places in The Origin, Darwin hedged his bets, referring to life “having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.” Darwin, The Origin of Species, 490.

  2. Though Darwin emphasized natural selection as the “chief agent
of change,” he also emphasized “sexual selection”—the preference that sexually reproducing animals have for some traits over others in prospective mates—as a mechanism responsible for some changes in evolving populations.

  3. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 30.

  4. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 21.

  5. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 306–7.

  6. See the University of California at Berkeley Museum of Paleontology, “Brachiopoda,” www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/brachiopoda/brachiopodamm.html (accessed October 23, 2012).

  7. See www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/trilobite/siluria.html (accessed October 23, 2012), where Roderick Murchison’s skillful trilobite drawings are reproduced.

  8. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” 99.

  9. Ward, On Methuselah’s Trail, 29.

  10. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 307. Darwin’s original quotation used the “Silurian” rather than the “Cambrian,” because in Darwin’s time what we now label as the Cambrian period was subsumed within the concept of the lower Silurian. In a later sixth edition of the Origin, Darwin adopted the term “Cambrian” in place of “Silurian.” See Darwin, On the Origin of Species; sixth edition, 286.

  11. Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 102.

  12. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” 10.

  13. Murchison, Siluria, 469.

  14. Letter from Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin, November 24, 1859.

  15. Between approximately 450 and 440 million years ago, many animal species went extinct. Known as the Ordovician extinction, this event resulted in the disappearance of a huge number of marine invertebrates. This was the second biggest extinction in the history of life, being superseded only by the great Permian extinction (about 252 million years ago). Dott and Prothero, Evolution of the Earth, 259.

  16. Mintz, Historical Geology, 146, 153–54, 124–27.

  17. Prothero, Bringing Fossils to Life: An Introduction to Paleobiology, 84–85. Dott and Prothero, Evolution of the Earth, 376–79.

  18. Dott and Prothero, Evolution of the Earth, 425–26; Li et al., “An Ancestral Turtle from the Late Triassic of Southwestern China”; Gaffney, “The Comparative Osteology of the Triassic Turtle Proganochelys.”

  19. William Smith, 1815 Geological Map of England and Wales.

  20. Radiometric dating methods estimate the age of rocks based upon measurements of the ratios of unstable radioactive isotopes and their daughter products given known radioactive decay rates.

  21. Gould, Wonderful Life, 54.

  22. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 302.

  23. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 311.

  24. Gould, Wonderful Life, 57.

  25. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” 97.

  26. Robinson, Runner on the Mountain Tops, 215.

  27. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, vii.

  28. Robinson, Runner on the Mountain Tops, foreword.

  29. Quoted in Holder, Louis Agassiz, 180.

  30. Dupree, Asa Gray, 227.

  31. Dupree, Asa Gray, 226. Though the German idealists believed that living forms reflected divine archetypes, they did not all oppose the idea of the transmutation of species. In Schelling’s view, for example, each species reflected a preexisting archetype, but emerged in time through a gradual transition of form.

  32. Dupree, Asa Gray, 260.

  33. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 284.

  34. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 88.

  35. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 282.

  36. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation.

  37. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” 101.

  38. Robinson, Runner on the Mountain Tops, 231–34.

  39. Quoted in Lurie, Nature and the American Mind, 41.

  40. Quoted in Lurie, Nature and the American Mind, 42.

  41. Thanks go to my former student Jack Ross Harris and his probing, unpublished 1993 essay “Louis Agassiz: A Reevaluation of the Nature of His Opposition to the Darwinian View of Natural History.” His work on the subject first brought to my attention the way in which historians writing after the widespread acceptance of Darwinism had attempted to minimize the scientific basis of Agassiz’s objections to his theory.

  42. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 244.

  43. Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 246.

  44. Quoted in Lurie, Louis Agassiz, 373.

  45. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, 51.

  46. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” 92–101.

  47. Gray, Darwiniana, 127.

  48. See the parallel lines on the sides of the hills on either side of the valley in this beautiful picture: www.swisseduc.ch/glaciers/earth_icy_planet/icons-15/16.jpg (last accessed Oct. 23rd, 2012). www.uh.edu/engines/epi857.htm (last accessed Oct. 23rd, 2012). See also Tyndall, “The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy.”

  49. Darwin, Autobiography, 84. Also, Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that Darwin took more than twenty years to concede his mistake. In his autobiography, Darwin labeled it “one long gigantic blunder from beginning to end… . Because no other explanation was possible under our then state of knowledge, I argued in favour of sea-action; and my error has been a good lesson to me never to trust in science to the principle of exclusion.” See Himmelfarb’s discussion in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, 107.

  50. See Oosthoek, “The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy and Forestry.”

  51. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 307.

  52. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 308.

  53. Agassiz, “Evolution and the Permanence of Type,” 97. That Agassiz’s objection was first and foremost empirically driven can be seen from his comments elsewhere as well. For instance, in “Researches on the Fossil Fishes,” he writes, “More than fifteen hundred species of fossil fishes, which I have learned to know, tell me that species do not pass insensibly one into another, but that they appear and disappear unexpectedly, without direct relations with their precursors; for I think no one will seriously pretend that the numerous types of Cycloids and Ctenoids, almost all of which are contemporaneous with one another, have descended from the Placoids and Ganoids. As well might one affirm that the Mammalia, and man with them, have descended directly from fishes.” Quoted in Agassiz, Louis Agassiz and Correspondence, 244–45.

  Chapter 2: The Burgess Bestiary

  1. Gould, Wonderful Life, 71. A slightly different version of this story is found in Charles Schuchert, “Charles Doolittle Walcott,” 124. See also Schuchert, “Charles Doolittle Walcott Paleontologist—1850–1927,” 455–58.

  2. Gould, Wonderful Life, 71.

  3. Gould, Wonderful Life, 71–75.

  4. A distant relationship between Marrella and chelicerates is currently the favored hypothesis. See García-Bellido, D. C., and Collins, D. H., “A New Study of Marrella Splendens (Arthropoda, Marrelomorpha) from the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia, Canada,” 721–42; Hou, X. G., and Bergström, J., “Arthropods of the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Fauna, Southwest China,” 109; Bergström, J., and Hou, X. G., “Arthropod Origins,” 323–34.

  5. Other authorities, such as Douglas Erwin at the Smithsonian, arrive at a slightly higher total. By counting groups that some paleontologists count as subphyla or classes as phyla, Erwin argues that about twenty-five phyla first appear in the Cambrian out of about thirty-three total (by his way of counting) phyla known from the fossil record. [See Erwin et al., “The Cambrian Conundrum: Early Divergence and Later Ecological Success in the Early History of Animals,” 1091–97.] I’ve used a slightly more conservative method for estimating the total number of phyla that first appear in the Cambrian (see Fig. 2.5). I came to my count consulting the following sources:

  Phylum references listed in same order as they appear on the chart.

  Cnidaria: Chen et al., “Precambrian Animal Life: Probable Developmental and Adult Cnidarian Forms from Southwest China.”

  Mollusca: Fedonkin and Waggoner. “The Late Precambria
n Fossil Kimberella Is a Mollusc-Like Bilaterian Organism.”

  Porifera: Love, G. D. “Fossil steroids record the appearance of Demospongiae during the Cryogenian period.”

  Annelida: Conway Morris and Peel, “The Earliest Annelids: Lower Cambrian Polychaetes from the Sirius Passet Lagerstätte, Peary Land, North Greenland.”

  Brachiopoda: Skovsted and Holmer, “Early Cambrian Brachiopods from NorthEast Greenland.”

  Bryozoa: Landing et al., “Cambrian Origin of All Skeletalized Metazoan Phyla—Discovery of Earth’s Oldest Bryozoans (Upper Cambrian, southern Mexico).”

  Chaetognatha: Szaniawski, H. “Cambrian Chaetognaths Recognized in Burgess Shale Fossils.”

  Chordata: Chen et al., “A Possible Early Cambrian Chordate”; Chen, “Early Crest Animals and the Insight They Provide into the Evolutionary Origin of Craniates”; Janvier, “Catching the First Fish”; Monnereau, “An Early Cambrian Craniate-Like Chordate”; Conway Morris and Caron, “Pikaia gracilens Walcott, a Stem-Group Chordate from the Middle Cambrian of British Columbia”; Sansom et al., “NonRandom Decay of Chordate Characters Causes Bias in Fossil Interpretation”; Shu et al., “An Early Cambrian Tunicate from China”; Shu et al. “Lower Cambrian Vertebrates from South China.”

  Coeloscleritophora: Bengtson and Hou, “The Integument of Cambrian Chancelloriids.”

  Ctenophora: Chen, J. Y. et al. “Raman Spectra of a Lower Cambrian Ctenophore Embryo from Southwestern Shaanxi, China”; Conway Morris and Collins, “Middle Cambrian Ctenophores from the Stephen Formation, British Columbia, Canada.”

  Echinodermata: Foote, “Paleozoic Record of Morphological Diversity in Blastozoan Echinoderms”; Shu et al., “Ancestral Echinoderms from the Chengjiang Deposits of China”; Zamora et al., “Middle Cambrian Gogiid Echinoderms from Northeast Spain: Taxonomy, Palaeoecology, and Palaeogeographic Implications.”

  Entoprocta: Zhang et al., “A Sclerite-Bearing Stem Group Entoproct from the Early Cambrian and Its Implications.”

  Euarthropoda: Cisne, J. L., “Trilobites and the Origin of Arthropods”; Daley, “The Morphology and Evolutionary Significance of the Anomalocaridids”; Grosberg, “Out on a Limb: Arthropod Origins”; Siveter, “A Phosphatocopid Crustacean with Appendages from the Lower Cambrian.”