… he just won’t review it. Well, that’s an improvement on the practice of others, for sure. That is, he has read it but won’t review it, rather than reviewing what he hasn’t read (a practice we here call noviewing).
Interestingly, he notes,
I’ve drawn a little red circle around the part of this tree that Stephen Meyer discusses in Darwin’s Doubt. It’s the evolution of animals and, in particular the early fossil evidence of multicellular animals. Most of these appear rather suddenly in the fossil record during the Cambrian (about 530 million years ago). Scientists have long been puzzled about this rapid evolution of complex animals and there are many hypotheses that attempt to account for it. In fact, there’s a recent book by Douglas Erwin and James Valentine that summarizes the science behind The Cambrian Explosion. It all seems quite reasonable to me.1 I don’t know exactly why complex animals evolved so rapidly but I don’t see any reason to doubt the facts of evolution and I don’t see any reason to propose that God must have been responsible for this little bit of the tree of life.
Moran’s regular readers will doubtless fall for this fallacy: It’s only a little bit, so it doesn’t matter. In reality, the “little bit” of a problem is typically the key to what’s wrong with the big picture. I (O’Leary for News) haven’t read Meyer’s book yet, so I don’t know if Meyer drags God into it, but really, he hardly needs to in order to demonstrate that the Cambrian is an even bigger problem now for conventional Darwinian evolution now than it was when Darwin first worried about it, ironically blaming the incomplete fossil record. .