Huh, a number of leading ID (intelligent design) scholars seem to have turned up recently in Cambridge, England, where they gave presentations. What was the occasion, you may wonder? You’ll have to go on wondering. So far we’ve seen Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski. (Ha, as I was writing this, a man doing some construction in our office asked me, as we introduced ourselves, if I am David Berlinski. I explained that I’m some other David.) Paleontologist Günter Bechly was also there in Cambridge, and he gave a fascinating talk about what he calls the “elephant in the room” in conversations about Darwinian evolution. 

You’ve heard the challenge a million times: “Doesn’t the fossil record prove the scientific accuracy of Darwinian theory?” As Dr. Bechly details, the opposite is true. A theory like Darwin’s makes predictions — including the prediction of gradualism. That is, from the remains of fossilized creatures, forms of life should be seen to morph gradually, one into the other, by exceedingly fine degrees. Darwin expected that. And he was troubled by evidences against it, such as what he called the “abominable mystery” of flowering plants and their geologically sudden eruption into existence. Richard Dawkins has said gradualism is crucial to neo-Darwinism in order for it to do any “explanatory work.” But looked at without blinders, the fossil record in fact shows a consistent pattern of abrupt transitions: “explosions,” “revolutions,” “Big Bangs.” The famed Cambrian explosion is just one of many, starting with the Avalon explosion (about 575 to 565 million years ago) of the enigmatic Ediacaran biota. And, Bechly notes, it’s not just ID proponents who recognize this. Mainstream scientists do, too.

Evidence of Intelligent Design

This is not merely negative scientific evidence against Darwinian evolution, Bechly says. “Non-gradual forms of transition” are among the “explanatory deficits” admitted by the more candid evolutionists themselves regarding the modern evolutionary synthesis. Those evolutionists include distinguished biologist Gerd Müller. Dr. Bechly was in the audience at the Royal Society’s infamous 2016 meeting when Dr. Müller conceded as much. Bechly took the photo of Müller’s noteworthy slide, pictured at the top. Other deficits listed by Müller include “phenotypic complexity” and “phenotypic novelty” — basically, the major items that neo-Darwinism is supposed to explain, i.e., how complex and novel organisms arise. “That’s bad,” comments Bechly dryly. 

But, he concludes, the jumps or “saltations” in the fossil record also give positive scientific evidence of intelligent design. Such explosions of creativity are just what you’d predict from the activity of a designing mind, a source of biological information outside nature that has shaped the long history of life. Without using a strong word like “prove,” the fossil record certainly points to design over Darwin.