This week, a new book came out by Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Having followed the ID movement and specifically its arguments on the Cambrian ‘Explosion’ for a long time, as well being somewhat up on the recent literature, and especially on phylogenetics, I feel that I have a pretty good sense of what to look for in any work purporting to be a capable commentary on the topic. As I read through Meyer’s book, though, in case after case I see misunderstandings, superficial treatment of key issues which are devastating to his thesis once understood, and complete or near-complete omission of information that any non-expert reader would need to have to make an accurate assessment of Meyer’s arguments.

After months of exuberant propaganda about the book from the Discovery Institute, I was half-expecting some kind of definitive, detailed, “serious” treatment of the issue from Meyer, who has had 4 years since his last book to work on this one, and has had 9 years since we raked over the coals his 2004 incompetent and self-plagiarized offering in the blogpost “Meyer’s Hopeless Monster”. I was sorely disappointed. I’ll hit a few of the main points. It would be nice if I had the time to write a comprehensive review, explain the issues from scratch in a Phylogenetics 101 sort of way, and provide detailed references, but given what my summer looks like, this is not likely. So, I’ll just outline what occurs to me as the most significant points– and what would occur to anyone else actually trained in phylogenetic methods, who also knows something about the Cambrian Explosion. If technical terms and the like don’t make sense, I encourage readers to google them. In the cases I have checked, Wikipedia does better at explaining the actual issues and methods than Meyer does.

A. THE “EXPLOSION” TOOK AT LEAST 30 MILLION YEARS, AND WAS NOT REALLY “INSTANTANEOUS” NOR PARTICULARLY “SUDDEN”

Darwin’s Doubt is festooned with illustrations, mostly redrawn from other sources in a rather strange cartoon-like format also found in other recent ID books. However, there is never an illustration like these:

If Meyer takes his own arguments at all seriously, he is invoking divine intervention not just for the origin of life and the Cambrian, for basically every new gene, ORFan, any adaptation of any significance, and some ill-specified level of morphological difference. This is, probably, billions of separate divine interventions. It essentially amounts to invoking divine intervention at every instance where Meyer personally doesn’t understand something, even in cases where scientists understand something quite well, and Meyer simply can’t be bothered to do the work necessary to understand what they are talking about.

Richiyaado wrote:Nick Matzke's money quote:

If Meyer takes his own arguments at all seriously, he is invoking divine intervention not just for the origin of life and the Cambrian, for basically every new gene, ORFan, any adaptation of any significance, and some ill-specified level of morphological difference. This is, probably, billions of separate divine interventions. It essentially amounts to invoking divine intervention at every instance where Meyer personally doesn’t understand something, even in cases where scientists understand something quite well, and Meyer simply can’t be bothered to do the work necessary to understand what they are talking about.

So it's 'poofing' all the way down.

bert wrote:I came across this article by Carl Zimmer, which near the end also discusses Matzke and his own collision with the Incredibly Deluded people.

Bert
Meyer should change is name. Start it with an L instead of an M. Would help to prevent me to confuse it with PZ Myers.

Lowpro wrote:It seems Jireh (or Gibhor aka "Gibhorrent" on JREF) has already taken to Meyer's fairy tales and brought the echo location bs over there.

BTW did Meyer REALLY try to sweep statistics under the rug because statistics produces statistical results?!

Lowpro wrote:It seems Jireh (or Gibhor aka "Gibhorrent" on JREF) has already taken to Meyer's fairy tales and brought the echo location bs over there.

BTW did Meyer REALLY try to sweep statistics under the rug because statistics produces statistical results?!

The law of entropy? You mean the second law of thermodynamics then what is there to disprove. The second law is in relation to a closed system. In a closed system, the amount of potential energy decreases while the potential entropy increases until equilibrium is met. But in an open system, such as Earth, where there is a constant source of energy via that giant, burning orb in the center of our solar system, energy is always being provided for the planet. Earth is not an isolated system.

As for the Cambrian Explosion: Prior to the Cambrian we have fossil records of organisms. The conditions during the Earth around 570 million years ago were perfect for organisms to thrive. The term explosion suggests a sudden event, but that's not technically true as there was approximately 50 million years of evolution occurring during the time period. In that period, as you can see with what you dubbed microevolution, changes over time add up. Populations of organisms diversify, and you get a wide variety of life. All the Cambrian explosion was was an evolutionary period in which many of the major Phyla developed, most of them worms, arthropods, and jellyfish, all aquatic lifeforms and simple organisms slowly evolving via natural selection.

Darwin did not know genetics nor about DNA. If he would have communicated with Gregor Mendel, in Germany, he would have figured about inheritance and could have contributed more to this theory, but such is history. Therefore Darwin could not explain the hows of his process. He knew evolution via natural selection was occuring and he could provide evidence for it, as he did in his books: Origin of Species and Descent of Man, but could not explain the technicalities. With the discovery of genetics we can affirm Darwin's theory of evolution.

The problem with intelligent design is it suggests that life looks intelligently designed. It creates a God of Gaps and all it takes is for something to be demonstrated not being made with design, or poor design in fact, as has been the case, to really make God, whom is a creator God, look...not perfect. For example, in human males we develop nipples in the womb. Nipples are not necessary for males and have not been in recorded history. The reason why males have nipples is because in the womb we all develop as females, before the activation of the y chromosome in the male embryo causes the development of genitalia and testosterone. Another example is again in a male body, we have tubes called vas deferens which are important for ejaculation as they transport sperm from the testes. However, the tube itself goes up over the urether tubes and comes back down towards the penis. Thus in humans taking a course which wastes energy. It is inefficient design. But it makes sense in light of evolutionary history, where the testes of fish are indeed inside the organism. As the testes dropped in the evolution of animals until humans we see the conservation of energy in that the vas deferens is simply extended instead of created all anew, as you would expect if it were truly designed.

Micro-evolution is nothing more than evolution. For example, I mentioned ring species. The phenomena of ring species shatters that concept of micro-evolution, macro-evolution. A group of amphibians in the western US are split into two different populations due to a flood. Group A is the parent group, but group one and two are a result of the flood. Group one can breed with group a, group two can breed with group a, and group one and two can breed with each other still. Same species, yes? Group one and two migrate and group three and four are generated. Same thing. Group three can breed with one and A, group four can breed with two and A, and group three and four can breed with each other. Same species still? But wait. It happens one more time. Group three and four migrate and form groups five and six. Group 5 can breed with 3, 1, and A. Group 6 can breed with 4, 2, and A. But Groups 5 and 6 can no longer breed with each other. Are they then the same species? Technically yes, but they no longer can breed with each other. It is when that happens, than genetic diversity begins. This all happens within a few years. Imagine adding millions of years to that. You get species adding genetic differences and slowly change. That is all evolution is: change in organisms over time. Micro-evolution and macro-evolution are the same thing, just one is on a much grander scale.