Darwin's Doubt

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life—a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building new animal body plans. Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this biological information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by the theory of intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes. Meyer’s groundbreaking case for intelligent design is built on: The Mystery of the Missing Fossils: A deep dive into the Cambrian fossil record, where complex animals appear suddenly without the ancestral precursors Darwin’s theory requires. The Cambrian Information Explosion: An exploration of the explosion of digital information—the genetic code—required to build the new animal forms of the period. The Failure of Neo-Darwinian Theory: A rigorous critique of why the mutation and selection mechanism fails to produce the new genetic information and body plans that arose in the Cambrian period.