Darwins Doubt, Meyer, Book Review Dennis Mitton 2013

Meyer has certainly done his work any argument so polarizing must be touching down pretty darned firmly on a whole lot of nerves. My thoughts? Indifference mostly. What would I have liked to read? Something new. Something convincing. Something novel. Instead Meyer paints the same old story God did it! - in a shinier, academic, and footnoted way. Here is a secret that Meyer never exposes (or maybe he just isnt aware of it?): working scientists know this stuff already. That is why they are working scientists and that is why they keep asking questions. Why is there still work being done on the mechanism of evolutionary change and the Cambrian Explosion? Because we dont yet fully understand what happened. Does that constitute a crisis within the world of evolutionary science? Certainly not. It is exactly how science works. Years ago now, Dawkins offered up The Selfish Gene as an explanation of how finite and discrete chemistry could drive evolution. The work has been expanded, reformulated, sliced and diced, and built upon. Does this constitute a crisis within the realms of protein synthesis? No. It means that science is working exactly as it should. Gould later argued for punctuated equilibrium. Same thing: slice, dice, build upon, break apart. Science working exactly as it should. This is what science does: deconstruct and reconstruct previous work to continually work for a better understanding of the problem. What scientists dont argue for is that god did it yet this is Meyers winding and around-the-fence-post conclusion. Take protein expression as an example: the Central Dogma of biology is that DNA expresses RNA, which in turn, expresses protein. No scientist working within the field argues that the Central Dogma is systemically wrong, yet, all over the world, very smart and very dedicated people fill peer reviewed journals with studies of how the dogma works and with problematic minutiae. To Meyer this constitutes a silent crisis in biology. To everyone else this is how science works. Does science ever get it wrong? Sure. Darwins predecessor Lamarck argued for the inheritance of acquired traits. It made sense from the view of simple observation just like the sun revolving around the earth makes sense but it couldnt stand up to rigorous scientific investigation and was replaced with Mendels work with what we call genes. A philosophical point always bothers me in this mastiff vs. Yorkee scuffle: religious people, and Christians in general, and Christian scientists specifically, are just scared to death of not knowing. Of not having an answer. So they revert to

theology. God said it; I believe it that settles it. And its a great argument for the church choir. And it gets a whole lot of books sold. But it is not science. Science looks for what we dont know, and seeks out the seemingly unanswerable by figuring it out in an incremental way. The very heart of science is an indifferent shrug. And when we finally know something we drop it and move on to the next thing that we dont. Meyer presents his illogic and straw men in a clear and understandable fashion. The choir will and obviously does enjoy every page. People sitting outside the church will and obviously do groan. My hope is that a few people use the book as a jumping-off place to read what working scientists are saying and writing about and working on.