Intelligent Design and the Origin of Animal Life

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. 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 this event, the "Cambrian explosion," many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.

Over the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building animal forms. This newfound understanding has only heightened the mystery surrounding the Cambrian explosion, as the appearance of these complex animal forms in the fossil record suggests the introduction of vast amounts of new biological information.

The Cambrian explosion, which occurred approximately 530 million years ago, was a period of rapid diversification in which many of the major animal phyla first appeared in the fossil record. Prior to this event, the fossil record was dominated by simple, single-celled organisms, with little evidence of more complex multicellular life. Yet, during the Cambrian, a wide variety of complex animals, including vertebrates, arthropods, and molluscs, suddenly emerged, often with no clear evolutionary precursors.

This abrupt appearance of diverse and complex animal life has long puzzled evolutionary biologists, who have struggled to explain how such a wide range of novel body plans and biological information could have arisen so rapidly through purely undirected natural processes. Darwin himself acknowledged the difficulty, writing in The Origin of Species that the Cambrian explosion "is, perhaps, the most serious objection which can be urged against the theory of evolution."

In Darwin's Doubt, Meyer examines the evidence surrounding the Cambrian explosion and considers various explanations that have been proposed to account for this remarkable episode in the history of life. He critically evaluates the ability of neo-Darwinian evolution, as well as other materialistic theories, to explain the origin of the new biological information and novel body plans that appeared during this pivotal period.

Ultimately, Meyer argues that the best explanation for the Cambrian explosion is the action of an intelligent agent, who was responsible for introducing the new genetic and developmental information necessary to produce the novel forms of animal life. This conclusion is based on both the scientific evidence and on the application of the principles of intelligent design, which hold that certain features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than undirected natural processes.

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