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Debating Darwin’s Doubt: A Scientific Controversy That Can No Longer Be Denied
In 2013 Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design became a national bestseller, provoking a wide-ranging debate about the adequacy of Darwinian theory to explain life’s history. In Debating Darwin’s A Scientific Controversy that Can No Longer Be Denied, leading scholars in the intelligent design community respond to critiques of Meyer’s book and show that the core challenge posed by Meyer remains Where did the influx of information essential to the creation of new body plans come from? In addition to ten chapters by Stephen Meyer, Debating Darwin’s Doubt also includes contributions from biologists Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, and Ann Gauger; philosopher of biology Paul Nelson; mathematicians William Dembski and David Berlinski; and Center for Science and Culture research coordinator Casey Luskin. In 44 chapters, these contributing authors explore topics such as orphan genes, cladistics, small shelly fossils, protein evolution, the length of the Cambrian explosion, the God-of-the-Gaps objection to intelligent design, and criticisms raised by proponents of theistic evolution. Anyone who wants to understand the cutting-edge of current scientific debates over modern Darwinian theory needs to read this book.
350 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 12, 2015
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188 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 23, 2015
A long hard read, but I had to read to see for myself what has been the content of the response to the publication of `Darwin's Doubt'. I was sadly disappointed with the academic response. No one seems to have given any cogent response to origins of the information found in DNA and the sudden emergence of life in the Cambrian explosion. Plenty of bluster, but nothing of substance.
February 7, 2025
A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS DEFENDING STEPHEN MEYER’S ‘DARWIN’S DOUBT’ BOOK
Editor David Klinghoffer wrote in the Introduction to this 2015 book, “Whatever else Stephen Meyer demonstrated about the explosion of biological information required to build the Cambrian animals, his bestseller ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ served as a massive rebuke to the mantra-like assertion that there is ‘no debate,’ ‘no controversy’ among scientists about Darwinian evolution. There’s plenty! Mayer showed this in the book by addressing the arguments of prominent scientists who seek what they call a ‘Third Way’ (neither intelligent design nor Darwinism) and a new theory of evolution… these researchers launched a provocative website, ‘The Third Way,’ as a gathering place for those sharing their views. And Meyer showed it again with the new Epilogue… in which he replied in detail to the most substantive of his critics. [This book] should be thought of as a supplement to what Dr. Meyer wrote in the Epilogue… Here we have gathered together a sample, collected mostly from writings by the Discovery Institute scholars published at our popular news site ‘Evolution News & Views.’” (Pg. 9-10)
In one essay, Casey Luskin says of the criticism of Meyer by Nick Matzke: “Even if Meyer had made errors in classifying one of the many Cambrian animals, that would in no way affect the strength of his overall argument. The Cambrian fossil record would pose the same two problems to neo-Darwinian theory that Meyer describes at length in his book. Matzke is simply nitpicking.” (Pg. 36)
Meyer himself says of Matzke: “By his own account, Matzke is a dizzyingly fast reader and writer. It was on June 19, 2013… that Matzke published a 9,400 word critical review of ‘Panda’s Thumb.’ Reading a book of this size and composing a review of that length … in little more than 24 hours would be recognized by anyone as a remarkable achievement. Challenged on how it was even possible, unless the review had been largely pre-written before he saw a copy, Matzke … explained how he fit in his work on the review with other responsibilities, at lunchtime, in ‘snippets of the afternoon,’ and then by pulling an all-nighter. I, for one, am content to grant him this prodigy.” (Pg. 42-43)
Meyer says of Charles Marshall’s review of his book in ‘Science’: “Marshall treats my argument as a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ argument not because it actually has the form of a logically fallacious ‘argument from ignorance,’ but because he tacitly presupposes that materialistic causes will ultimately suffice to explain all events in the history of life and that ONLY such explanations count as ‘scientific’ explanations. Yet we know from our uniform and repeated experience that some types of phenomena---in particular, information-rich sequences and systems---do not arise from mindless, materialistic processes. For just this reason, no rational person would, for example, insist that the inscriptions on the Roman Stone in the British museum MUST HAVE been produced by purely materialistic causes... yet Marshall and many other evolutionary biologists maintain an a priori commitment to purely materialistic explanation for all events in the history of life, even events such as the Cambrian explosion that necessarily involve the generation of massive amounts of new functional information… Thus, ironically, Marshall does precisely what he thinks he sees me doing: he allows his own prior commitment to a belief system---evolutionary materialism---to trump objective analysis of the observational evidence.” (Pg. 147-148)
Casey Luskin says of Marshall, “It’s revealing that Marshall doesn’t actually claim that the small shelly fossils solve the problem of the explosion of morphological novelty that occurs later in the Cambrian period. Instead, he seems content to use the small shelly fossils as a rhetorical cudgel, knowing, I suspect, that these fossils do little if anything to diminish the real problem of morphological novelty that makes the subsequent stages of the Cambrian period so vexing from a Darwinian point of view.” (Pg. 154)
David Klinghoffer observes, “What’s important is the way the logjam against intelligent discussion of intelligent design in the mainstream media is finally unjamming. Guys like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins (an increasingly eccentric figure) will continue to stonewall, refusing to evaluate or even acknowledge the arguments of ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ or other rigorous articulations of ID. Gentlemen like Nick Matzke will continue to search for typographical errors in our work, while creating scientific distractions to confuse the willing and the naïve. That’s all a sideshow. Real scientists and thoughtful, open-minded laymen are PAYING ATTENTION RIGHT NOW to a genuine and fascinating disputation about biological origins. The endorsements from scientists … that ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ has already received is itself confirmation of that. I don’t know how the debate will be resolved, if it ever will. But make no mistake: the debate is happening.” (Pg. 189-190)
Klinghoffer says in another essay, “There’s a certain Darwinian dementia that keeps out interlocutors from assimilating evidence and arguments that go against their views… It goes like this: They make a claim and you answer them. But shortly after, they are coming at you again with the identical claim, more belligerently than before, as if you’d said nothing at all. Either there’s been a genuine memory dump, or they never really heard you, or they did hear and retained what you said, but choose now to act as if they didn’t.” (Pg. 209-210)
An essay from the ‘Evolution News & View’ website states: “The orthodox materialist camp in mainstream science remains in full denial mode. They can’t stomach the proposal of ID, but neither can they for the most part bring themselves to answer Meyer by name, or even admit there’s a controversy on the subject. Charles Marshall…is the honorable exception. So we get what look like stealth responses to Meyer’s book that claim to have figured out the Cambrian puzzle without telling you what the urgency for doing so really is, thus evading the task of responding to Mayer directly.” (Pg. 236)
Casey Luskin says of the ‘god-of-the-gaps’ charge: “A genuine argument for intelligent design says something like: ‘Natural selection and random mutation cannot produce new information. Intelligent agency, uniquely in our experience, can produce new information. Therefore intelligent design is the better explanation for the information we see in life.’ This is not a gaps-based argument. It’s a positive argument, based upon finding in nature the type of information that in our experience only comes from intelligence.” (Pg. 296-297)
Meyer states, “It’s worth noting that none of the reviews of ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ or ‘Signature in the Cell’ have refuted (and few have even challenged) either of the two key empirical premises in my arguments for intelligent design as a best explanation… For obvious reasons, critics have not disputed my claim that intelligent agents have demonstrated the power to produce functional information and information-rich processing systems…. Nor… have critics attempted to demonstrate that standard evolutionary mechanisms can account for the origin of biological information and information processing systems… Secular scientific critics of the argument in my book, for their part, have typically either (a) begged the question about the origin of genetic information by assuming the existence of other unexplained sources of information in order to account for specific informational increases in the history of life; or (b) simply ignored the central question posed by the books and quibbled about secondary scientific issues or philosophical matters.” (Pg. 338-339)
Personally, I like all of Meyer’s books, which are typically well-argued and thought-provoking. But this book was, well, rather disappointing. The ID respondents in this book too often resort to name-calling (e.g., ‘Darwinian dementia’) and other ‘personal’ attacks, rather than simply presenting (or re-presenting, more emphatically) the actual scientific evidence.
Editor David Klinghoffer wrote in the Introduction to this 2015 book, “Whatever else Stephen Meyer demonstrated about the explosion of biological information required to build the Cambrian animals, his bestseller ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ served as a massive rebuke to the mantra-like assertion that there is ‘no debate,’ ‘no controversy’ among scientists about Darwinian evolution. There’s plenty! Mayer showed this in the book by addressing the arguments of prominent scientists who seek what they call a ‘Third Way’ (neither intelligent design nor Darwinism) and a new theory of evolution… these researchers launched a provocative website, ‘The Third Way,’ as a gathering place for those sharing their views. And Meyer showed it again with the new Epilogue… in which he replied in detail to the most substantive of his critics. [This book] should be thought of as a supplement to what Dr. Meyer wrote in the Epilogue… Here we have gathered together a sample, collected mostly from writings by the Discovery Institute scholars published at our popular news site ‘Evolution News & Views.’” (Pg. 9-10)
In one essay, Casey Luskin says of the criticism of Meyer by Nick Matzke: “Even if Meyer had made errors in classifying one of the many Cambrian animals, that would in no way affect the strength of his overall argument. The Cambrian fossil record would pose the same two problems to neo-Darwinian theory that Meyer describes at length in his book. Matzke is simply nitpicking.” (Pg. 36)
Meyer himself says of Matzke: “By his own account, Matzke is a dizzyingly fast reader and writer. It was on June 19, 2013… that Matzke published a 9,400 word critical review of ‘Panda’s Thumb.’ Reading a book of this size and composing a review of that length … in little more than 24 hours would be recognized by anyone as a remarkable achievement. Challenged on how it was even possible, unless the review had been largely pre-written before he saw a copy, Matzke … explained how he fit in his work on the review with other responsibilities, at lunchtime, in ‘snippets of the afternoon,’ and then by pulling an all-nighter. I, for one, am content to grant him this prodigy.” (Pg. 42-43)
Meyer says of Charles Marshall’s review of his book in ‘Science’: “Marshall treats my argument as a ‘god-of-the-gaps’ argument not because it actually has the form of a logically fallacious ‘argument from ignorance,’ but because he tacitly presupposes that materialistic causes will ultimately suffice to explain all events in the history of life and that ONLY such explanations count as ‘scientific’ explanations. Yet we know from our uniform and repeated experience that some types of phenomena---in particular, information-rich sequences and systems---do not arise from mindless, materialistic processes. For just this reason, no rational person would, for example, insist that the inscriptions on the Roman Stone in the British museum MUST HAVE been produced by purely materialistic causes... yet Marshall and many other evolutionary biologists maintain an a priori commitment to purely materialistic explanation for all events in the history of life, even events such as the Cambrian explosion that necessarily involve the generation of massive amounts of new functional information… Thus, ironically, Marshall does precisely what he thinks he sees me doing: he allows his own prior commitment to a belief system---evolutionary materialism---to trump objective analysis of the observational evidence.” (Pg. 147-148)
Casey Luskin says of Marshall, “It’s revealing that Marshall doesn’t actually claim that the small shelly fossils solve the problem of the explosion of morphological novelty that occurs later in the Cambrian period. Instead, he seems content to use the small shelly fossils as a rhetorical cudgel, knowing, I suspect, that these fossils do little if anything to diminish the real problem of morphological novelty that makes the subsequent stages of the Cambrian period so vexing from a Darwinian point of view.” (Pg. 154)
David Klinghoffer observes, “What’s important is the way the logjam against intelligent discussion of intelligent design in the mainstream media is finally unjamming. Guys like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins (an increasingly eccentric figure) will continue to stonewall, refusing to evaluate or even acknowledge the arguments of ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ or other rigorous articulations of ID. Gentlemen like Nick Matzke will continue to search for typographical errors in our work, while creating scientific distractions to confuse the willing and the naïve. That’s all a sideshow. Real scientists and thoughtful, open-minded laymen are PAYING ATTENTION RIGHT NOW to a genuine and fascinating disputation about biological origins. The endorsements from scientists … that ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ has already received is itself confirmation of that. I don’t know how the debate will be resolved, if it ever will. But make no mistake: the debate is happening.” (Pg. 189-190)
Klinghoffer says in another essay, “There’s a certain Darwinian dementia that keeps out interlocutors from assimilating evidence and arguments that go against their views… It goes like this: They make a claim and you answer them. But shortly after, they are coming at you again with the identical claim, more belligerently than before, as if you’d said nothing at all. Either there’s been a genuine memory dump, or they never really heard you, or they did hear and retained what you said, but choose now to act as if they didn’t.” (Pg. 209-210)
An essay from the ‘Evolution News & View’ website states: “The orthodox materialist camp in mainstream science remains in full denial mode. They can’t stomach the proposal of ID, but neither can they for the most part bring themselves to answer Meyer by name, or even admit there’s a controversy on the subject. Charles Marshall…is the honorable exception. So we get what look like stealth responses to Meyer’s book that claim to have figured out the Cambrian puzzle without telling you what the urgency for doing so really is, thus evading the task of responding to Mayer directly.” (Pg. 236)
Casey Luskin says of the ‘god-of-the-gaps’ charge: “A genuine argument for intelligent design says something like: ‘Natural selection and random mutation cannot produce new information. Intelligent agency, uniquely in our experience, can produce new information. Therefore intelligent design is the better explanation for the information we see in life.’ This is not a gaps-based argument. It’s a positive argument, based upon finding in nature the type of information that in our experience only comes from intelligence.” (Pg. 296-297)
Meyer states, “It’s worth noting that none of the reviews of ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ or ‘Signature in the Cell’ have refuted (and few have even challenged) either of the two key empirical premises in my arguments for intelligent design as a best explanation… For obvious reasons, critics have not disputed my claim that intelligent agents have demonstrated the power to produce functional information and information-rich processing systems…. Nor… have critics attempted to demonstrate that standard evolutionary mechanisms can account for the origin of biological information and information processing systems… Secular scientific critics of the argument in my book, for their part, have typically either (a) begged the question about the origin of genetic information by assuming the existence of other unexplained sources of information in order to account for specific informational increases in the history of life; or (b) simply ignored the central question posed by the books and quibbled about secondary scientific issues or philosophical matters.” (Pg. 338-339)
Personally, I like all of Meyer’s books, which are typically well-argued and thought-provoking. But this book was, well, rather disappointing. The ID respondents in this book too often resort to name-calling (e.g., ‘Darwinian dementia’) and other ‘personal’ attacks, rather than simply presenting (or re-presenting, more emphatically) the actual scientific evidence.
July 25, 2015
Still at the start but its absolutely great!
December 12, 2019
A pointless book with collection of academic reviews.
August 10, 2022
Eye Openimg
If you haven’t read the first book then this one will be strange for you. The debate will go on, there is no doubt about that. This book will make you question what is being taught out there in the world of science, if one is truly open minded to learning more on the subject. Stephen works hard and his books show that to be true. He isn’t a fly by the pants type of person who merely disagrees with the secular approach to science. I find his work to be refreshing after reading so many book by atheist and evolutionist.
If you haven’t read the first book then this one will be strange for you. The debate will go on, there is no doubt about that. This book will make you question what is being taught out there in the world of science, if one is truly open minded to learning more on the subject. Stephen works hard and his books show that to be true. He isn’t a fly by the pants type of person who merely disagrees with the secular approach to science. I find his work to be refreshing after reading so many book by atheist and evolutionist.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews