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Word Gems
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Dr. Stephen C. Meyer's
Scientific Evidence For A Creator
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origin of life and information enigma
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| Dr. Stephen C. Meyer |
quoted from Dr. Meyer's writing, Scientic Evidence for a Creator
AS NOTED, DARWIN ATTEMPTED
to explain the origin of new living forms
starting from simpler preexisting forms of
life. Nevertheless, his theory of evolution by
natural selection did not attempt to explain
the origin of life—the origin of the simplest
living cell—in the first place. Yet there now is
compelling evidence of intelligent design in
the inner recesses of even the simplest living
one-celled organisms.
Moreover, a key feature of living cells—one that Darwin knew
nothing about—has made the intelligent
design of life scientifically detectable.
In 1953, when Watson and Crick eluci-
dated the structure of the DNA molecule, they
made a startling discovery. The structure of
DNA allows it to store information in the
form of a four-character digital code. Strings
of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleo-
tide bases store and transmit the assembly in-
structions—the information—for building the
crucial protein molecules and machines the
cell needs to survive.
Francis Crick later developed this idea
with his famous “sequence hypothesis,” ac-
cording to which the chemical constituents in
DNA function like letters in a written lan-
guage or symbols in a computer code. Just as
letters of the English alphabet may convey a
particular message depending on their ar-
rangement, so too do certain sequences of
chemical bases along the spine of a DNA mol-
ecule convey precise instructions for building
proteins. The arrangement of the chemical
characters determines the function of the se-
quence as a whole.
Thus, the DNA molecule
has the same property of “sequence specific-
ity” that characterizes codes and language.
Moreover, DNA sequences do not just
possess information in the strictly mathemati-
cal sense described by pioneering information
theorist Claude Shannon. Shannon related the
amount of information in a sequence of sym-
bols to the improbability of the sequence (and
the reduction of uncertainty associated with
it).
But DNA base sequences do not just ex-
hibit a mathematically measurable degree of
improbability. Instead, DNA contains infor-
mation in the richer and more ordinary dic-
tionary sense of alternative sequences or ar-
rangements of characters that produce a spe-
cific effect. DNA base sequences convey in-
structions. They perform functions and pro-
duce specific effects. Thus, they not only pos-
sess “Shannon information,” but also what has
been called specified or functional information.
Like the precisely arranged zeros and ones
in a computer program, the chemical bases in
DNA convey instructions by virtue of their
specific arrangement—and in accord with an
independent symbol convention known as
the genetic code.
Thus, biologist Richard
Dawkins notes that “the machine code of the
genes is uncannily computer-like.” Similarly,
Bill Gates observes that “DNA is like a com-
puter program, but far, far more advanced
than any software we've ever created.” Bio-
technologist Leroy Hood likewise describes
the information in DNA as “digital code.”
After the early 1960s, further discoveries
revealed that the digital information in DNA
and RNA is only part of a complex infor-
mation processing system—an advanced form
of nanotechnology that both mirrors and ex-
ceeds our own in its complexity, design logic,
and information-storage density.
Where did the information in the cell
come from? And how did the cell’s complex
information processing system arise?
These questions lie at the heart of contemporary
origin-of-life research. Clearly, the informa-
tional features of the cell at least appear de-
signed. And, as I show in extensive detail in
my book Signature in the Cell, no theory of un-
directed chemical evolution explains the
origin of the information needed to build the
first living cell.
Why? There is simply too much infor-
mation in the cell to be explained by chance
alone. And attempts to explain the origin of
information as the consequence of prebiotic
natural selection acting on random changes
inevitably presuppose precisely what needs
explaining—namely, reams of preexisting ge-
netic information.
The information in DNA
also defies explanation by reference to the
laws of chemistry. Saying otherwise is like
saying a newspaper headline might arise from
the chemical attraction between ink and
paper. Clearly something more is at work.
Yet the scientists who infer intelligent
design do not do so merely because natural
processes—chance, laws, or their combina-
tion—have failed to explain the origin of the
information and information-processing sys-
tems in cells. Instead, we think intelligent
design is detectable in living systems because
we know from experience that systems pos-
sessing large amounts of such information in-
variably arise from intelligent causes.
The information on a computer screen can be traced
back to a user or programmer. The infor-
mation in a newspaper ultimately came from
a writer—from a mind. As the pioneering
information theorist Henry Quastler ob-
served, “creation of information is habitually
associated with conscious activity.”
This connection between information
and prior intelligence enables us to detect or
infer intelligent activity even from unobserv-
able sources in the distant past.
Archeologists infer ancient scribes from hieroglyphic
inscriptions. SETI’s search for extraterrestrial
intelligence presupposes that information
embedded in electromagnetic signals from
space would indicate an intelligent source.
Radio astronomers have not found any such
signal from distant star systems. But closer to
home, molecular biologists have discovered
information in the cell, suggesting—by the
same logic that underwrites the SETI pro-
gram and ordinary scientific reasoning about
other informational artifacts—an intelligent
source.
DNA functions like a software program
and contains specified information just as
software does. We know from experience
that software comes from programmers. We
know generally that specified information—
whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in
a book, or encoded in a radio signal—always
arises from an intelligent source.
So the discovery of such information in the DNA mole-
cule provides strong grounds for inferring (or
detecting) that intelligence played a role in
the origin of DNA, even if we weren’t there
to observe the system coming into existence.
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