The theory of intelligent design is often dismissed as religion pretending to be science. Critics argue that the theory doesn’t make any predictions or contribute to our knowledge of the natural world, and plus, it’s not taken seriously in any peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, a new paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Theoretical Biology makes a strong case for the need for intelligent design.

The paper is called “On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences.” If that title is all Greek to you, don’t worry; you’re in good company. This technical, math-intensive paper was written by intelligent design researchers Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, and Ann Gauger. As Casey Luskin explains at Evolution News, the project came out of the Discovery Institute’s ID 3.0 research initiative, which aims, in part, to test how plausible Darwinian evolution is on a mathematical level. And though it’s just a beginning, this paper’s conclusions should make die-hard Darwinists nervous.

Here’s the background. The fossil record has been a perpetual problem for Darwin’s theory ever since it was first published in 1859. Put simply, the fossil record doesn’t look like the theory predicts it should.

If, as Darwin proposed, all the diversity of life on earth developed through natural selection, sorting random variations over untold eons, living things should change very gradually. This means the record of evolution we find in rocks should look gradual, too. Invertebrates should turn slowly into fish, which should turn slowly into amphibians, which should turn slowly into reptiles and mammals, and so on.

What we actually find is the basis of what philosopher of science Stephen Meyer calls “Darwin’s doubt”: the fossil record consists of numerous “bursts” of biological diversity, such as the famous “Cambrian explosion,” in which new body plans and animal phyla appear in the fossil record seemingly without ancestors.

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