Darwin's Doubt Summary

The book “Darwin’s Doubt” by Stephen C Meyer attempts to negate the negativity surrounding the theory of intelligent design by giving a creationist’s perspective on the different issues surrounding the controversy and provide an argument for the legitimacy of intelligent design from a scientific and rational viewpoint. The book is broken into three different sections part one titled “The Mystery of Missing Fossils”, part two titled “How to build an animal” and part 3 titled “After Darwin. What?” Part one of the book focuses on the lack of validation and evidence hence the name “The Mystery of Missing Fossils” and gives a very brief introduction to the problems of missing fossils, missing phyla, and just general missing validation of the evolutionary

and his hypothesis. He has this very strange view on the word information. D.N.A. contains the genetic information for us, our genes, our traits, and random mutation have been observed to occur. His argument is that D.N.A. sequences are so long and there are so many possibilities and of those possibilities few exact combinations or variations of those combinations comparatively that it is extremely improbable that these mutations would happen at random. Meyer talks about some terms including Shannon information, information that is neither functional nor meaningful, and attempts to relate them to this idea that the functional information of D.N.A. can be explained by a creator. I think that Meyer brings up a wonderful point here and personally, it brings out this awe and wonder of how it happened in me. I have no idea how life originated and how it mutated into what it did today, and this awe of what I don’t understand does not extend beyond that. The problem I find with Meyer’s Conclusion, is that to come up with the hypothesis, you have to reach out and base it on something you have not observed. Meyer asserts D.N.A. and living beings show complexity and therefore show that they were designed, which could be a very reasonable reaction to the data he’s presented and the preassuming belief that a creator did it. The problem I have is that I have no clue how Meyer determined they were designed. The blind watch maker analogy that was presented is brilliant. Creationists, use their own version of the watchmaker argument saying if you were walking down a beach and you found a watch you could assume there was a designer. But when it comes to talking about existence, physical reality, and life, It’s a little different. The analogy at first glance seems to work but then you realize that even metaphorically speaking it’s an equivocation fallacy. We assume the