Congratulations to Stephen Meyer for the latest accolade to be received by Darwin’s Doubt — now out in an expanded paperback edition including a new Epilogue responding to the critics. Our friends at World Magazine have recognized it as a “Book of the Year”:
Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) starts with Charles Darwin’s confession: “The difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which on my theory were no doubt somewhere accumulated before the [Cambrian] epoch, is very great.” Darwin admitted that the lack of intermediary forms in the fossil record undermined the key element of his theory, incremental change over long periods of time. He expected the missing links would turn up eventually, but to this day the fossil record has revealed no valid prototypes for the “Cambrian explosion” of new animal forms.
Meyer was World‘s Daniel of the Year in 2009, shortly after he published his previous big book, Signature in the Cell, which unravels the incredibly complex structure of the single living cell and demonstrates the unlikeliness of its evolving by chance. Darwin’s Doubt expands that picture with an examination of what the Cambrian explosion reveals and what sort of hypothesis might best fit the evidence. Using anecdote, analogy, drawings, and diagrams, he makes a highly technical subject accessible for a dedicated layman. Along the way he explores the nature of science itself, and how unexamined assumptions can keep scientists from seeing what is right under their noses.
Good choice, World! Congratulations to the group of other winners as well.
Photo credit: Matt Rose.