Overall I don’t expect this to change the views of diehard atheist evolutionists, but I would hope that my theistic evolutionist friends will give this book a close reading. A caution: this is a tome that took me two weeks to go through in evening reading, and I am familiar with the field. Like the classic tome Goedel, Escher, Bach, it simply can’t be gone through quickly.

When I first saw that the new book by Steve Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt, centered on the Cambrian Explosion, I was loathe to read it. I had been led to believe over the years that everything that could be said about the Cambrian Explosion has already been said. I was quite happy to believe that the only real discontinuities in the story of life occurred at the origin of life and at the origin of human consciousness.

I should have known better; science marches onward, and old arguments get reexamined as new data arises. Steve Meyer’s book is a wonderful, comprehensive case that the origin of the major types of animals, namely the phyla, is just as strikingly discontinuous as the origin of life. As such, it represents a solid second volume complementary to his previous work, Signature in the Cell, which focused on the origin of life.

I had come to think that discussing the Cambrian Explosion was misguided because of two arguments: 1) that the explosion was merely an artifact of the fact that organisms before that time did not have hard bones or shells, and 2) that the explosion was short on the geological time scale, but was really quite long on the biological time scale. Meyer disposes of both of these arguments quite handily. On the first, modern science shows that soft-bodied organisms are well preserved in the strata before, during, and after the Cambrian. Also, many of the body types which appear in the Cambrian can’t even be imagined without their hard parts to give them structure. An earlier, boneless version could not have had the same body plan at all. On the second objection, Meyer shows that the geological time scale has gotten more compressed over the years, not less; best estimates now are 5-10 million years, which is quite short geologically. Meyer then spends a good number of chapters establishing what the natural time scale is for evolution.

From a physicist’s perspective, I am used to thinking of time as a relative thing (for electrons in solids, a few trillionths of a second can be a long time, while for stars in clusters, a few million years can be a short time.) What makes something a short time or a long time is the natural time scale of the system– much less than the natural time scale is short, and much longer than the natural time scale is long. A fairly convincing case has been made in the literature of molecular clocks that the natural time scale for evolution of the degree seen in the Cambrian is a billion years, not 5 million years. Even that billion-year time scale may be an underestimate, if one looks at the microscopic details of protein folding. Thus the intrinsic biological time scale is not less than the geological time scale, and the Cambrian Explosion does indeed occur in a fantastically short time. Meyer cites many evolutionists who acknowledge this problem; the Cambrian problem has not gone away for those who are really in the know, no matter what popularizers may say.

This is a solid scientific review, not a polemic diatribe. It also comes at a good time. Like Signature in the Cell, it comes after 10-20 years of debate on intelligent design. Thus Meyer can summarize the back and forth of the debate in a nice story-like approach. The story is not one of gaps in our knowledge constantly being filled, but the paradox of the Cambrian becoming sharper and sharper. Again, when evolutionists talk to each other instead of to the public, they are remarkably candid about this, and Meyer well documents this with many quotes.

After posing the problem, Meyer discusses some of the non-orthodox, semi-Darwinian proposals floated in the last few decades, such as Gould’s punctuated equilibrium and epigenetic neo-Lamarkianism. All of these are built on a surprising amount of hand-waving, invoking new terms but brushing over the actual physical mechanisms. One section I was quite happy about was the section on “self-organization,” promoted by Kaufmann, Prigogene, and others. This area has had a strong following in the physics world for three decades, but I have always thought it was sterile, for the reasons that Meyer cites. Essentially, getting “order” from natural self-organizing process and getting “information” are two totally different things.

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[Editor’s note: Stephen Meyer’s new book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, will debut this coming Sunday in the #7 place on the New York Times hardback nonfiction list. HT: Nancy Pearcey]