Quotes from Stephen C. Meyer

As Darwin described it, the ability of natural selection to produce significant biological change depends upon the presence of three distinct elements: (1) randomly arising variations, (2) the heritability of those variations, and (3) a competition for survival, resulting in differences in reproductive success among competing organisms.

Complex sequences exhibit an irregular, nonrepeating arrangement that defies expression by a general law or computer algorithm

with clues that would seem to discredit him. Through his grouping of disparate body types into existing phyla and his ingenious version of the artifact hypothesis, Walcott had found an elegant way to explain all this seemingly uncooperative evidence in a Darwinian way.

renowned British philosopher, Antony Flew, announced that he had repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evidence of intelligent design in the DNA molecule.6

intelligent design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins that challenges strictly materialistic views of evolution.

As Chen explained, the Chinese fossils turn Darwin's tree of life "upside down.

assumed both the capability and the fallibility of human reason.

Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.

Theistic evolutionists...deny what advocates of intelligent design affirm, namely, that the past activity of a designing intelligence, is detectable or discernible in living systems.

Methodological naturalism asserts that , to qualify as scientific, a theory must explain all phenomena by reference to purely physical or material--that is, non-intelligent or non-purposive--causes or processes.

In any case, the discovery in China of chordates, and other previously undiscovered phyla in the Cambrian, only accentuates the puzzling top-down pattern of appearance that other Cambrian discoveries had previously established.

Since the most exquisitely delicate structures, as well as embryonic phases of growth of the most perishable nature, have been preserved from very early deposits, we have no right to infer the disappearance of types because their absence disproves some favorite [i.e., Darwinian] theory."25

Those who rejected it wholesale, as Agassiz did, consigned themselves to increasing irrelevance. AGASSIZ

All this notwithstanding, I have long been aware of strong reasons for doubting that mutation and selection can add enough new information of the right kind to account for large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovations—the various information revolutions that have occurred after the origin of life.

The term "Cambrian explosion" was to become common coin, because Walcott's site suggested the geologically abrupt appearance of a menagerie of animals as various as any found in the gaudiest science fiction. During this explosion of fauna, representatives of about twenty of the roughly twenty-seven total phyla present in the known fossil record made their first appearance on earth (see Fig. 2.5).

The discovery of the fine tuning of the universe, like the discovery of the beginning of the universe itself, represents an effect that requires a cause with specific attributes, including both transcendence and intelligence.

As science advanced in the late nineteenth century, it increasingly excluded appeals to divine action or divine ideas as a way of explaining phenomena in the natural world. This practice came to be codified in a principle known as methodological naturalism. According to this principle, scientists should accept as a working assumption that all features of the natural world can be explained by material causes without recourse to purposive intelligence, mind, or conscious agency. Proponents

host of distinguished biologists have explained in recent technical papers, small-scale, or "microevolutionary," change cannot be extrapolated to explain large-scale, or "macroevolutionary," innovation

requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.

For many, his reference to the work of a transcendent mind merely demonstrated that he was unable to abandon an outmoded idealistic approach.

Many origin-of-life scientists have similarly recognized how difficult it is to generate specified biological information by chance alone in the time available on the early earth (or even in the time available since the beginning of the universe).

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin openly acknowledged important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it. Yet today's public defenders of a Darwin-only science curriculum apparently do not want these, or any other scientific doubts about contemporary Darwinian theory, reported to students.

Agassiz trained an army of able young naturalists who took his method to other universities, and they in turn passed them on to their students, themselves future professors.38

Oxford biologists Alan Cooper and Richard Fortey depict the Ediacaran fauna as lying on a line of descent separate from the Cambrian animals rather than being ancestral to them.23