ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott.

In the early 20th century, Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations was combined

with Mendelian inheritance and population genetics to form what's known as the modern synthesis

of evolutionary theory. It's sometimes called Neo-Darwinian theory, or Neodarwinism. According to this

synthesis, the basis for heredity is in DNA molecules that

pass information from generation to generation. And according to the synthesis, the vehicles that

change that DNA include natural selection, random mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow.

Now, in order to understand why this modern evolutionary synthesis cannot account for the origin

and diversity of life on Earth, I want to focus here on the aspects of the theory that are

supposed to drive macroevolution, how a new design or body plan could arise from random mutations,

and how species are supposed to have evolved into new species.

So, I'm putting aside population genetics,

since that's a theory about micro-evolution in action,

about how genes are distributed in a population,

not how they originated in the first place.

As Dr. Stephen Meyer points out, in an article I'm going to read to you shortly,

as a mechanism for the production of novel genetic information,

it's important to remember that natural selection does nothing

to help generate functional DNA-based sequences.

It can only preserve such sequences

if they confer a functional advantage

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