Darwinian evolutionary theory successfully describes adaptive change within existing populations but offers no mechanistic account for the origin of the first functional, self-replicating information system. This paper evaluates that failure across five interlocking domains: the ideological and institutional origins of methodological naturalism; the epistemological circularity of the uniformity-of-nature assumption; the information-theoretic gap between modification and origination mechanisms; the Cambrian Explosion as a top-down architectural event inconsistent with gradualist prediction; and the design inference as the only framework whose predictions have consistently matched observed data. CAT'S Theory (R = Ψ×I×P) is applied as a meta-coherence lens demonstrating that naturalistic accounts collapse when any triad factor reaches zero. Intelligence remains the only empirically observed source of functionally specified complex information.
Coty Austin Trout (Sat,) studied this question.