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Why Evolutionary Biologists Are “Fatigued” by Darwin

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Evolution
Intelligent Design
Mathematics
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Increasingly, evolutionary biologists acknowledge — in the peer-reviewed literature — that there are serious problems with the modern Darwinian synthesis. The decorated Cambrian paleontologist Simon Conway Morris calls this “Darwin fatigue.” According to Conway Morris, the unresolved problems exposed by the Cambrian Explosion have “opened the way to a post-Darwinian world.” Though you wouldn’t hear this from Bill Nye the Science Guy, and you wouldn’t read it in a high-school or college biology textbook, real-life evolutionary biologists now live in the Wild West of evolutionary thinking, where multiple models compete to replace neo-Darwinism.

In his book 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘸𝘪𝘯’𝘴 𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘵, Stephen Meyer draws on the research of many others to demonstrate that “the neo-Darwinian math is itself showing that the neo-Darwinian mechanism cannot build complex adaptations — including the new information-rich genes and proteins that would have been necessary to build the Cambrian animals.”

Why is this? Current research shows that the numbers of organisms and generations required for the neo-Darwinian mechanism to produce complex features far exceeds the probabilistic resources realistically available over the history of life on Earth.

This sounds suspiciously, well, scientific. Want to know more? See here for a brief “A Précis of Darwin’s Doubt.” Meyer’s work is thoroughly sourced from the mainstream field of evolutionary biology and peer-reviewed scientific literature. So check it out: 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘸𝘪𝘯’𝘴 𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘵 is available in print, Kindle, and audiobook formats from all major book retailers and many libraries!

Emily Sandico

Special Projects Coordinator and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Emily Sandico is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, where she also serves as Special Projects Coordinator. She holds bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and education from Whitworth University and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from Washington State University. She spent 14 years at a major Silicon Valley tech firm, where she worked as a technical editor and product manager, and as a liaison for Fortune 500 clients and the firm’s software development organization, sales force, and technical consultants around the world. Dr. Sandico is a licensed veterinarian with a special interest in how the study of medicine informs our understanding of design in biology. As a citizen and a scientist, she is most interested in helping people to seek truth by building a culture that fosters personal liberty, intellectual honesty, academic freedom, and scientific rigor.
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