Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

Required reading in the debate over intelligent design

This is not an easy read. At 413 densely-worded pages, it took me the better part of a month to finish. However, I am glad that I persevered. This is a remarkably well-written, well-researched, and well-argued companion to Meyer’s previous volume Signature in the Cell. Whereas his earlier work made the case for intelligent design based on the complexity of the cell and the inadequacy of materialistic origin-of-life hypotheses, Darwin’s Doubt focuses on the origin of animal life, and the particular challenge posed by one feature of the geologic record: the so-called “Cambrian explosion.” The book is divided into three parts: Part 1 deals with the fossil evidence of the Cambrian explosion, Part 2 deals with the biological information necessary for animal life, and Part 3 argues that intelligent design provides a better explanation of all the evidence than any naturalistic alternatives. I will examine and evaluate each part in turn. Part 1 begins with a history of the early reception of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It is hard to overstate the significance of this little book, which became the foundation of modern evolutionary theory. The scope of Darwin’s theory was vast (after all, he was trying to explain all life as we know it!), and he personally believed that he had solved every problem—save one. The budding discipline of modern geology had unearthed a piece of evidence that did not fit very well into Darwin’s gradualistic schema. Fossils indicate that about 530 million years ago—or what has come to be known as the Cambrian period—there was an extremely abrupt proliferation of different forms of animal life. These animal fossils showed no signs of evolutionary predecessors in earlier layers, leading to the apt description of the “Cambrian explosion.” Darwin himself was aware of this problem, and indeed it gave him some doubt as to the veracity of his theory (hence the title of Meyer’s book). However, he was confident that the problem would one da...