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

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

The book is divided into three main parts.

Part One, “The Mystery of the Missing Fossils,” describes the problem that first generated Darwin’s doubt
—the missing ancestors of the Cambrian animals in the earlier Precambrian fossil record—and then tells the story of the successive, but unsuccessful, attempts that biologists and paleontologists have made to resolve that mystery.
Part Two, “How to Build an Animal,” explains why the discovery of the importance of information to living systems has made the mystery of the Cambrian explosion more acute. Biologists now know that the Cambrian explosion not only represents an explosion of new animal form and structure but also an explosion of information—that it was, indeed, one of the most significant “information revolutions” in the history of life. Part Two examines the problem of explaining how the unguided mechanism of natural selection and random mutations could have produced the biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animal forms. This group of chapters explains why so many leading biologists now doubt the creative power of the neo-Darwinian mechanism and it presents four rigorous critiques of the mechanism based on recent biological research.
Part Three, “After Darwin, What?” evaluates more current evolutionary theories to see if any of them explain the origin of form and information more satisfactorily than standard neo-Darwinism does. Part Three also presents and assesses the theory of intelligent design as a possible solution to the Cambrian mystery. A concluding chapter discusses the implications of the debate about design in biology for the larger philosophical questions that animate human existence. As the story of the book unfolds, it will become apparent that a seemingly isolated anomaly that Darwin acknowledged almost in passing has grown to become illustrative of a fundamental problem for all of evolutionary biology: the problem of the origin of biological form and information.

Charles Darwin knew there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. In what is known today as the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record 530 million years ago 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 and makes a compelling case for the theory of intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of the Cambrian animals and the biological information necessary to produce them.

Contents

Prologue
Part One: The Mystery of the Missing Fossils
1 – Darwin’s Nemesis
2 – The Burgess Bestiary
3 – Soft Bodies and Hard Facts
4 – The Not Missing Fossils?
5 – The Genes Tell the Story?
6 – The Animal Tree of Life
7 – Punk Eek!
Part Two: How to Build an Animal
8 – The Cambrian Information Explosion
9 – Combinatorial Inflation
10 – The Origin of Genes and Proteins
11 – Assume a Gene
12 – Complex Adaptations and the Neo-Darwinian Math
13 – The Origin of Body Plans
14 – The Epigenetic Revolution
Part Three: After Darwin, What?
15 – The Post-Darwinian World and Self-Organization
16 – Other Post-Neo-Darwinian Models
17 – The Possibility of Intelligent Design
18 – Signs of Design in the Cambrian Explosion
19 – The Rules of Science
20 – What’s at Stake

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