Of course, I am in the process of adding Darwin's Doubt to my copy of Signature in the Cell and my copy of Signature of Controversy.
Amazon page, here.
(Notice the screen capture of the two-peak pattern of reviews: those who read and take soberly give high marks, the trolls -- resentful that anyone is challenging the evolutionary materialist ideology -- are trying to drag down its rating, too often through unfair or even guttersnipe rhetorical tactics. Cf. IOSE here on.)
Since I know all too well what it is like to be on the receiving end of Internet troll-mobs, let me excerpt what seems to be the most powerful early favourable customer review, by Thomas Gilson:
This is the book the evolutionists won't want you to read. It's too hot to handle: it might cause you to question whether evolution happened the way they say it did. And questions are horrible, right?
This risky volume is Stephen C Meyer's latest challenge to theories of undirected/unguided evolution. I have to admit, though, that it took a few hundred pages for me to warm up to the adventure of reading forbidden material -- and that's because the first 80 percent or so of the book contains nothing but mainstream science. Sure, it raises serious doubts about unguided evolution's explanatory power, but where do those doubts come from?
They come from Charles Darwin, to start with.
The title of the book refers to the difficulty he 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. Meyer quotes Darwin,
"The difficulty of understanding 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, Meyer points out,
"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.
I could go on summarizing chapter by chapter, but even in summary form it would lengthen this review beyond reason, and besides, the pattern remains the same: the hypotheses for explanations of the Cambrian explosion have been rejected -- by mainstream science.
That's the account Meyer gives of it. I'm no expert in the field, but I have to admit it's convincing. The Cambrian Explosion remains unexplained on any standard terms.
So if it's all basic science, what makes this book so hot? It's Meyer's suggestion that explanations need not be limited to standard terms; that the data might point to a Designer who intelligently guided the world to be the way it was 530 million years ago -- and by extension, today as well.
That's a tough one for mainstream science to swallow . . .
That's what the trolls don't want you to think about. So, that's where a sensible person will be heading, real fast. END
