"Darwin's Doubt" - Stephen C. Meyer

Above: "Darwin's Doubt - The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design." Stephen C. Meyer. 413 pages. Harper One.

"Darwin's Doubt" opened my mind to the incredible, information rich, complexity of life, and how randomness alone may not be enough to explain it.

I completed reading the above book today.

THE CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION
Beginning 542 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period in the Paleozoic Era, there was a sudden (over the course of five million years, a short time in geological terms) appearance in the fossil record of highly complex marine animals with mineralized skeletal remains. Most major animal phyla known today appeared during this period.

The fossil record shows no earlier transitional or intermediate fossils to the Cambrian fossils, throwing a spanner into the works of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and random mutation. Darwin himself noted the Cambrian problem in his book, "On the Origin of Species," published in 1859, but predicted that future scientists would resolve the problem as more fossil discoveries were made.

NOTE: There are two exciting chapters in "Darwin's Doubt" about the two most important Cambrian fossil discoveries: The Burgess Shale, 1909, in Alberta, Canada; and, the Chengjiang discovery, 1995 (more extensive than the Burgess), in southern China.

In the book's final chapter, the author records his impressions of his and his young son's own trip to the Burgess Shale in 2002. He says: "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."

CHALLENGES TO NEO DARWINISM
Since Darwin's time, the fossil record has more or less stayed the same, but, scientists have learned more about what it actually takes to build an animal. Darwin had little concept about the massive amounts of information required to create animal life that was years later revealed by the discovery of DNA and proteins, now known to be the fundamental building blocks of life.

Beyond the break in the fossil record, Meyer, writing in "Darwin's Doubt," discusses other challenges to Neo Darwinism, among which:

In an attempt to validate the Darwinian hypothesis, scientists, using a "molecular clock," projected known rates of micro evolution for certain animals back to a "deep divergence" point in the past where one animal form would have have branched out, or evolved from another. The results of these deep divergence studies were inconclusive with widely contradictory outcomes. The deep divergence effort has since atrophied.

To explain the Cambrian explosion, evolutionary biologist Stephen C. Gould advanced a concept called "punctuated equilibrium," where morphological change occurs in larger, more discrete jumps than Darwin first envisioned. These jumps, which advocates of "punk eek" say explain the absence of fossil records, were more likely to occur in small populations of animals geographically separated from the main group. Meyer discounts punctuated equilibrium because it does not explain the tops down micro evolution of Cambrian animals later in the fossil record ie. the Cambrian animals were at their most complex, right from the start in the fossil record.

Meyer notes the vast amount of information, not understood until long after Darwin wrote "On the Origin of Species," required to build an animal. A single cell animal has 300 thousand base pairs of DNA. A fruit fly (anthropod) has 150 million base pairs of DNA. Is it plausible, asks Meyer, to think that natural selection, working on random mutations in DNA, could produce the highly specific arrangements of bases necessary to generate the protein building blocks of new cell types and novel forms of life?

Meyer cites the work of mathematician Murray Eden, who asks, can mutation and natural selection generate the needed functional information to build a living organism? Eden notes that computer codes or written text depend on sequence to have function. And so, DNA contains nucleotide bases, where, similarly, sequence determines function of the molecule.

But, random efforts to achieve sequence always degrades function. Randomly mix up the words and letters of the novel "Moby Dick" randomly and you are not likely to get a better novel. And so it is with DNA. It is seemingly improbable that random mutations will generate, or stumble upon, the genetically meaningful or functional information needed to produce new proteins, organs, or to evolve life forms. And if it is theoretically possible, eons more time will have to elapse to render the process conceivable.... as in, geologic time to the fifth power.

Meyer discusses the work of evolutionary biologist Eric Davidson. Typically, paleontologists understand the Cambrian explosion as the geologically sudden appearance of new forms of animal life. Building these forms requires new developmental programs, including both new, early acting regulatory genes and developmental gene regulatory networks (dGRNs). Yet, Davidson's research shows that neither early-acting regulatory genes nor dGRNs can be altered by mutation without destroying existing developmental programs, and thus animal forms.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Meyer posits the theory of intelligent design to explain what science has yet been able to explain about the Cambrian explosion. Intelligent design, says Meyer, challenges the idea that natural selection and random mutation can explain the most striking appearances of design in living organisms. Instead, Meyer affirms, that there are certain features of living systems that are best explained by the design of an actual intelligence - a conscious and rational agent, a mind, as opposed to mindless materialistic process.

NOTE: Bill Gates pointed out the parallel of DNA to written computer code when he said that the human genome is the most complex piece of "software" ever seen. In his quote, Gates did not note a parallel between the "intelligent design" of computer code and whatever mechanism was behind the human genome, but Meyer, in the book, draws such inferences frequently.

The theory of intelligent design, says Meyer, does not reject "evolution" defined as "change over time" or even universal common ancestry, but, it does dispute Darwin's idea that the cause of major biological change and the appearance of design are wholly blind and undirected.

There remains much controversy in the paleontologist and evolutionary biology scientific communities about intelligent design. Meyer quips that it is often times better for scientists with opposing viewpoints to discuss religion or politics rather than the possibility for design in the Cambrian animals.

NOTE: There is an amusing anecdote from the book about the Darwin/Cambrian controversy. Renowned Chinese paleontologist, J. Y. Chen, who participated in the discovery of the Chengjiang fossils in 2002, was a visiting speaker at The Discovery Institute, at the University of Washington, where the author sponsors a lecture series. In his presentation Chen challenged Darwinian orthodoxy in a manner which left many of his US counterparts dumbfounded. During the Q and A Chen was asked if he didn't feel a little vulnerable taking on Darwin in the manner he did. Chen answered, 'in China we can criticize Darwin, but, not the government. In America, you can criticize the government, but, not Darwin."

CONSTRAINING RULES OF SCIENCE
Meyer has a full chapter on how the "rules of science" sometimes interfere with the possibility for legitimate inquiry in the search for truth. Scientists follow a set of rules referred to as "methodological naturalism."

Meyer quotes evolutionary biologist, Richard Lewontin: "...we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Devine Foot in the door." "Why not,?" Meyer responds.

"Darwin's Doubt," published in 2013, was a New York Times bestseller. Proving itself as not a "creationist tract," the book was highly praised by many scientists in the evolutionary biologist and paleontologist communities. Here's (among numerous others cited at the beginning of "Darwin's Doubt)," an endorsement from George Gilder, technologist, economist and New York Times best selling author of "Wealth and Poverty:" "I spend my life reading science books. I've read many hundreds of them of the years, and in my judgement "Darwin's Doubt" is the best science book ever written. It is a magnificent work, a true masterpiece that will be read for hundreds of years."

To be sure, Meyer has his ideological enemies... Richard Dawkins for one... but, we learn from the book that the energy to explore beyond the boundaries of methodological naturalism is growing, full of energy, and has more scientifically trained followers every day.

Resistance to the notion of intelligent design to explain the Cambrian explosion has presupposed that it will be a buttress to creationists who don't go beyond the Bible to explain beliefs about the creation. Meyer discounts such resistance. Intelligent design, he says, is not proof that God, as he is conceived by any particular religious belief, exists. But, he says, we are obligated to follow the evidence to where it leads us.

There is a poignant section at the beginning of the book where Meyer introduces Louis Agassiz, Swiss born scientist at Harvard University and contemporary of Charles Darwin. Agassiz was considered one of the top naturalists of his era. Darwin thought enough of Agassiz that he presented his ideas to Agassiz about common ancestry, natural selection and random mutation before publication.

In an 1874 Atlantic Monthly essay titled "Evolution and the Permanence of Type," 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 Agassiz put it, "It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile, like monstrosities they die out."

Agassiz, who allowed for the possibility of design in the Cambrian animals, became a victim of the then growing support for "methodological naturalism" and was relegated to history's footnotes. Darwin, on the other hand, became the touch stone for scientific truth.
Ironically, today, as Agassiz's position gains purchase, it is Darwin's hypothesis that is increasingly under assault.

CASE FOR CONTRARIANISM
Contrarian that I am, I love to see challenges to existing orthodoxy. There is a fascinating 2012 study in "Reason" magazine that says because scientific knowledge is growing by a factor of ten every fifty years, that half the facts you think you know today are probably wrong. My dad, Weldon J. Taylor, a business educator, told me, "truth cannot be ascertained in the absence of controversy."

Look. I'm not a scientist. I can't say whether Darwin's theory of common ancestry, natural selection and slow moving random mutation is right or wrong. Still, reading this "controversial" book was an eye opening pleasure. "Darwin's Doubt" opened my mind to the incredible, information rich, complexity of life, and how randomness alone may not be enough to explain it.