Stephen Meyer and Darwin

There is increasing doubt that Darwinian mechanisms can account for macroevolution, the big changes. In Darwin’s Dilemma, Stephen Meyer has written that the construction of new life forms requires massive amounts of new DNA information to direct the process. However, there is no evidence that natural unintelligent means can account for such information:

• Although we don’t know of a material cause that generates functioning digital [DNA] code from physical or chemical precursors, we do know—based upon our uniform and repeated experience—of one type of cause that has demonstrated the power to produce this type of information. That cause is intelligence or mind. As information theorist Henry Quastler observed, “The creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” Whenever we find functional information—whether embedded in a radio signal, carved in a stone monument, etched on a magnetic disc, or produced by an origin-of-life scientist attempting to engineer a self-replicating molecule—and we trace that information back to its ultimate source, invariably we come to a mind, not merely a material process.

Meyer insists that many evolutionary biologists now acknowledge that there is no natural (non-intelligent) explanation for the origin of the genetic code, but many still insist that once life exists, that the code can be influenced by mutations and natural selection to produce new structures. However, an increasing number are raising objections:

• natural selection explains “only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.” The technical literature in biology is now replete with world-class biologists routinely expressing doubts about various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory, and especially about its central tenet, namely, the alleged creative power of the natural selection and mutation mechanism.

As a result, there is growing chasm between beliefs of the professionals and those of the public, who are still nourished by the textbooks supporting the doubtful neo-Darwinian narrative:

• Today modern neo-Darwinism seems to enjoy almost universal acclaim among science journalists and bloggers, biology textbook writers, and other popular spokespersons for science as the great unifying theory of all biology. High-school and college textbooks present its tenets without qualification and do not acknowledge the existence of any significant scientific criticism of it.

According to Meyer, this acclaim for Darwinism is less than deserved, especially in light of Darwin’s own problem with his theory:

• “The difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata [intermediate forms] which on my theory were no doubt somewhere accumulated before the Silurian [i.e., Cambrian] epoch, is very great,” he wrote. “I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.”

Darwin expected that future finds would uncover vast troves of intermediate ancestral forms. Instead, these finds have only highlighted the same absence. How did Darwinists explain this utter lack of necessary transitional forms:

• As Agassiz explained, Darwin’s theory “rests partly upon the assumption that, in the succession of ages, just those [essential] transition types have dropped out from the geological record which would have proved the Darwinian conclusions had these types been preserved.”

Darwin admitted that the fossil record failed to substantiate his theory, as many other evolutionists now admit. However, Darwin had hoped that future finds would validate his theory. According to Meyer, many paleontologists have observed that the fossil finds, especially during the Cambrian period, contradict Darwinian hopes in numerous ways:

• (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.

However, to make the connection between one species to another, many transitional forms are necessary. In fact, they should all be transitional forms. Their absence speaks powerfully against Darwinism.