Thinking Christian reviews “Darwin’s Doubt”, a new book by Stephen C. Meyer

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

NOTE: you can tune in to the Dennis Prager radio show  at 2 PM Eastern today in order to hear Dr. Meyer discuss the new book.

I found a book review of the new book on intelligent design by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. This book is concerned with the fossil record, and it is the sequel to the highly acclaimed “Signature in the Cell“, which dealt with the origin of biological information in the first living cell.

Excerpt:

The title of the book refers to the difficulty [Charles Darwin] had in explaining the “Cambrian Explosion,” the vast proliferation of new animal body plans (new “phyla” or major animal groupings) that appears in fossils in the Cambrian strata, deposited some 530 million years ago. These animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, without any plausible predecessor such as Darwin’s theory predicted. Darwin wrote,

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

Darwin saw this accurately as a challenge to his theory. It remains one still. The animals appear too quickly in the record to be explained through his gradualistic theory.

And it remains a challenge from the perspective of mainstream science. Various theories have been proposed in explanation of the suddenness with which these new phyla came on the scene. Perhaps selective fossilization caused their predecessors to disappear from paleontologists’ view. Mainstream science casts serious doubt on that view. Statistical paleontology renders it deeply improbable. The soft-body hypothesis appears unlikely to succeed, since the evidence shows soft-bodied organisms have been frequently fossilized.

Or maybe the Cambrian animals’ precursors really are there in the record, in the form of exotic Ediacaran fossils. But these organisms are not clearly animals of any sort, and what they are is so in confusion that they could hardly be considered evidence for anything. Further,

As Nature recently noted, if the Ediacaran fauna “were animals, they bore little or no resemblance to any other creatures, either fossil or extant.” … This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject an ancestor/dependent relationship between the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.

Scientists have proposed genetic histories for these phyla, but as Meyer pointedly puts it, these scenarios all “assume a gene.” And a lot more besides. That is to say, they beg the question of evolution’s explanatory adequacy by assuming that it must be true. From there they suggest pathways according to which genes “must have” evolved. But there’s no evidence of it in the record.

Now the exciting thing is that at the time of writing (Monday night), the book is number one on Barnes and Noble:

Darwin’s Doubt #1 at Barnes and Noble

And number ten on Amazon:

Darwin’s Doubt #10 at Amazon.com

Now is this a book for the layman? Well, I’ve met the guy who wrote the book review above face-to-face, and his background is not in biology. I think if he can struggle through it, then I could do it too. And so could you. I think that both of Dr. Meyer’s books are must-read books for anyone interested in knowing how well the presumption of naturalism succeeds when confronted with the latest scientific evidence. These are the books you need to buy and read if you are serious about integrating science and religion. The thing to realize is that naturalists and atheists and materialists have no answer to these books. None. Do you like winning? Then spend the money and time on the books that are unstoppable in a debate.

Filed under: Commentary, Cambrian Explosion, Darwinism, Evolution, Fossil Record, Fossils, Information, Intelligence, Intelligence Cause, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Origin

The Gospel Coalition interviews Stephen C. Meyer on the Cambrian explosion

A great introduction to the Cambrian explosion on The Gospel Coalition, of all places!

Here’s one question and answer that emphasizes that the progress of science is making the problem posed by the Cambrian fossils worse for Darwinists.

Have the last century of fossil discoveries resolved or aggravated Darwin’s doubt?

Fossil discoveries since Darwin’s time have only made the Cambrian explosion problem worse for his theory.

Darwin believed that the fossil record was woefully incomplete, and he predicted that the problem of abrupt appearance of animals in the Cambrian would be alleviated by future discoveries.

But the opposite happened. Scientists have combed the Precambrian strata for the alleged precursors to the Cambrian animals, and they haven’t found the direct evolutionary ancestors that Darwinian theory predicts. Instead, they have made new discoveries which confirmed that the Cambrian explosion was real event—and a worldwide one—and that the animal phyla really did appear abruptly.

The first major Cambrian-era fossil discovery after Darwin’s time took place over a hundred years ago now, in 1909, when Charles Doolittle Walcott (then the head of the Smithsonian Institution) discovered the Burgess Shale Cambrian deposit in the Canadian Rockies. This deposit showed many diverse soft and hard-bodied organisms which were preserved in exquisite detail. They all appeared in the Cambrian, with no clear evolutionary ancestors.

The question remained, however, whether the Burgess Shale Cambrian animals were a lucky isolated event, or evidence of a worldwide pattern. Over the next decades, additional discoveries of Cambrian animals were made in other parts of the world, including Russia, Greenland, and Australia.

But the most spectacular find of all took place in 1984, with the discovery of Cambrian fossils in Chengjiang, China. This deposit confirmed that the Cambrian explosion was a worldwide event, with many of the same creatures found in Canada being present in beautiful detail.

So as more and more fossils have been discovered, we’ve found the same pattern over and over around the world: diverse types of animals appear abruptly in the Cambrian, without clear evolutionary precursors. This has accentuated the “dilemma” that Darwin faced.

So the progress of science is making the problem worse for Darwinists. The more discoveries we make, the tougher the problem becomes for them, and the more the effect looks like the result of intelligent action. Kudos to the Gospel Coalition for posting on science, too.

I’ve already ordered my copy of Darwin’s Doubt at the reduced price. Have you? And don’t forget that Dr. Meyer’s first book, the ground-breaking Signature in the Cell, can also be obtained. That was the best book on intelligent design out there, but people who have read Darwin’s Doubt are telling me that it will be far better!

Filed under: News, Cambrian Explosion, Darwinism, Evolution, Fossil Record, Fossils, Information, Intelligence, Intelligence Cause, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Origin

Doug Axe explains the chances of getting a functional protein by chance

I’ve talked about Doug Axe before when I described how to calculate the odds of getting functional proteins by chance.

Let’s calculate the odds of building a protein composed of a functional chain of 100 amino acids, by chance. (Think of a meaningful English sentence built with 100 scrabble letters, held together with glue)

Sub-problems:

• BONDING: You need 99 peptide bonds between the 100 amino acids. The odds of getting a peptide bond is 50%. The probability of building a chain of one hundred amino acids in which all linkages involve peptide bonds is roughly (1/2)^99 or 1 chance in 10^30.
• CHIRALITY: You need 100 left-handed amino acids. The odds of getting a left-handed amino acid is 50%. The probability of attaining at random only L–amino acids in a hypothetical peptide chain one hundred amino acids long is (1/2)^100 or again roughly 1 chance in 10^30.
• SEQUENCE: You need to choose the correct amino acid for each of the 100 links. The odds of getting the right one are 1 in 20. Even if you allow for some variation, the odds of getting a functional sequence is (1/20)^100 or 1 in 10^65.

The final probability of getting a functional protein composed of 100 amino acids is 1 in 10^125. Even if you fill the universe with pre-biotic soup, and react amino acids at Planck time (very fast!) for 14 billion years, you are probably not going to get even 1 such protein. And you need at least 100 of them for minimal life functions, plus DNA and RNA.

Research performed by Doug Axe at Cambridge University, and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Molecular Biology, has shown that the number of functional amino acid sequences is tiny:

Doug Axe’s research likewise studies genes that it turns out show great evidence of design. Axe studied the sensitivities of protein function to mutations. In these “mutational sensitivity” tests, Dr. Axe mutated certain amino acids in various proteins, or studied the differences between similar proteins, to see how mutations or changes affected their ability to function properly. He found that protein function was highly sensitive to mutation, and that proteins are not very tolerant to changes in their amino acid sequences. In other words, when you mutate, tweak, or change these proteins slightly, they stopped working. In one of his papers, he thus concludes that “functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences,” and that functional protein folds “may be as low as 1 in 10^77.”

The problem of forming DNA by sequencing nucleotides faces similar difficulties. And remember, mutation and selection cannot explain the origin of the first sequence, because mutation and selection require replication, which does not exist until that first living cell is already in place.

But you can’t show that to your friends, you need to send them a video. And I have a video!

A video of Doug Axe explaining the calculation

Here’s a clip from Illustra Media’s new ID DVD “Darwin’s Dilemma”, which features Doug Axe and Stephen Meyer (both with Ph.Ds from Cambridge University).

I hope you all read Brian Auten’s review of Darwin’s Dilemma! It was awesome.

Related DVDs

Illustra also made two other great DVDs on intelligent design. The first two DVDs “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet” are must-buys, but you can watch them on youtube if you want, for free.

Here are the 2 playlists:

• Unlocking the Mystery of Life (12 videos in a playlist)
• The Privileged Planet (12 videos in a playlist)

I also recommend Coldwater Media’s “Icons of Evolution”. All three of these are on sale from Amazon.com.

Related posts

• The origin of the universe from nothing
• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants to permit life
• The fine-tuning of the galaxy, solar system, and planet to permit life
• Origin of the building blocks in the simplest replicating cell
• Origin of biological information in the simplest replicating cell
• Sudden origins of all major body plans in the Cambrian explosion
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The limits on what natural selection and random mutation can do
• Peer-reviewed paper says there is no atheistic explanation for the Cambrian explosion
• Does the Cambrian explosion disprove Darwinian evolution?

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The undisputed best book on intelligent design now has a sequel

The very best book on intelligent design is Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell“, which discusses the knotty problem of the origin of life. And now, a new book by Dr. Meyer has been announced to tackle another huge problem: the fossil record.

Here is the description of the new book, entitled “Darwin’s Doubt”:

Darwin’s Origin of Species launched a revolution whose scientific, cultural and spiritual effects are still with us. Now a new revolution is on the horizon. On June 18, the HarperOne imprint of HarperCollins will publish Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, by Stephen C. Meyer.

[...]Meyer begins with what Darwin himself regarded as a troubling enigma, a subject of doubt and even some scientific distress. It is a mystery from which subsequent generations of Darwinists have sought to distract the public’s attention. Some 530 million years ago, in the event called the Cambrian explosion, there sprang suddenly into existence the majority of animal body plans (phyla) that have existed on Earth. The shallow seas of the Cambrian period abruptly teemed with diverse, exotic animals.

Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have struggled to explain this epic event. Dr. Meyer takes his readers on a journey through scientific history, starting with the discovery of the Burgess Shale by Charles Walcott in 1909. He shows how failed attempts to give a satisfying Darwinian explanation of the Cambrian explosion have opened the door to increasingly profound questions, posed by evolutionary biologists themselves, leading to a far greater mystery: the origin of the biological information necessary to build the animals of the Cambrian and all the living creatures that have existed on Earth.

I have already pre-ordered my copy!

Filed under: News, Cambrian Explosion, Darwinism, Evolution, Fossil Record, Fossils, Information, Intelligence, Intelligence Cause, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Origin

What is intelligent design? Dr. Stephen C. Meyer explains the theory

A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“.

You can get an MP3 of the lecture here. (30 MB)

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

• intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
• Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
• Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
• but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
• even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
• can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
• there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
• overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
• the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
• meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
• it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
• although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
• similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
• the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
• so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
• however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
• there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
• but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
• the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
• the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
• the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
• if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
• the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
• the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
• we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
• the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

A sequence of amino acids forming a protein

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

Here is an article that gives a general overview of how intelligent design challenges. If you want to read something more detailed about the material that he is covering in the lecture above related to the origin of life, there is a pretty good article here.

Related posts

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation

Filed under: Videos, Amino Acid, Assembly, Bonding, Cell, Chance, Darwinism, Design Patterns, DNA, Doug Axe, Evidence, Evolution, Faith, Gene, Information, Intelligent Design, Law, Life, Materialism, Message, Messenger RNA, Naturalism, Necessity, OOL, Origin, Polymerase, Protein, Protein Folding, Protein Synthesis, Replicator, Ribosome, RNA, Science, Self-Organization, Sequence, Side Chains, Software Engineering, Specificity, Specified Complexity, Stephen C. Meyer, The DNA Enigma, William Dembski