For most of my adult life, any skepticism toward the reigning dogma in biology, Darwinian evolution, was considered a form of heresy or idiocy. Darwinism was beyond doubt and for a biologist to question it was to imperil his or her career. That state of affairs, however, seems to be changing.
Challenges to the Darwinian orthodoxy are arising almost daily in labs across the country as an increasing number of biologists are growing increasingly skeptical that the standard neo-Darwinian model of unguided, naturalistic evolution can explain either the origin or the complexity of living things.
Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science who has written several books that raise perplexing questions for the standard model. His first book, Signature in the Cell (2010), dealt with the difficulties posed to Darwinian evolution by our current understanding of the structure and function of DNA.
The second, Darwin's Doubt (2014), explained how the fossil record, specifically the fossils found in the Canadian Burgess shale deposits, points to an extremely sudden (in evolutionary time) appearance of almost all the major animal body plans with no evolutionary precursors, a finding that confutes all Darwinian expectations.
Meyer summarizes the arguments presented by these two books in this six minute video for Prager U.:
It's important to note that none of the science that Meyer adduces in this video is, as far as I know, in dispute. Indeed, it's arguments like these that are generating a great deal of the current rethinking among evolutionary biologists and workers in related fields.
