文档介绍：The Cambrian Explosion:
Biology’s Big Bang
Stephen C. Meyer, Marcus Ross,
Paul Nelson, and Paul Chien
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I. Introduction: Design without a Designer?
Both Charles Darwin himself and contemporary neo-Darwinists such as
Francisco Ayala, Richard Dawkins, and Richard Lewontin acknowledge
that anisms appear to have been designed by an intelligence.
Yet classical Darwinists and contemporary Darwinists alike have argued
that what Francisco Ayala calls the “obvious design” of living things is only
apparent. As Ayala, a former president of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, has explained: “The functional design an-
isms and their features would therefore seem to argue for the existence of
a designer. It was Darwin’s greatest plishment to show that the di-
anization of living beings can be explained as the result of a nat-
ural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or
other external agent.”1
According to Darwin and his contemporary followers, the mechanism of
natural selection acting on random variation is sufficient to explain the ori-
gin of those features of life that once seemed to require explanation by
reference to an intelligent or purposeful designer. Thus, according to
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324 Meyer et al.
Darwinists, the design hypothesis now represents an unnecessary and un-
parsimonious explanation for plexity and apparent design of living
organisms. On these as well as methodological grounds contemporary biol-
ogists have generally excluded the design hypothesis from consideration as
an explanation for the origin of biological form.
Yet does Darwinism, in either its classical or contemporary versions, fully
eed in explaining the origin of biological form? Can it explain all evi-
dence of apparent design? Most biologists now acknowledge that the Dar-
winian mechanism of natural selection acting on random variations can
explain small-scale microevolutionary changes, such as cyclical variatio