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Signature in the Cell

DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
Jan 22, 2014cstadt rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
DNA is the carrier of vast amounts of complex specified information. Where did this information come from? To answer this question Meyer utilized the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin used in The Origin of Species, and that is one of multiple competing hypotheses. You compare different possible causal explanations to try to explain a given effect or event in the remote past. You evaluate them to see which cause best explains the evidence and then you infer that cause which provides the best explanation. What constitutes the best explanation? According to Darwin it was the one that referred to a cause which is known from our uniform and repeated experience to produce the effect in question. And according to Darwin's scientific mentor, Charles Lyell, the famous geologist, we should be looking for causes now in operation. Now, an obvious cause of information-rich sequences is intelligence. That is not controversial. Computer programs are designed by programmers, and the similarity between DNA and computer software is uncanny, so certainly here we have a strong appearance of design. We know that intelligence has the causal power to produce information. But perhaps unguided material processes are actually a better explanation for the origin of information in living things. To answer this question Meyer devotes a lengthy part of the book to review the history of chemical evolution, the attempts to explain how life came from non-life, using only unguided material processes. These fall into the categories of chance, necessity, or some combination of the two. After his lengthy survey he concludes that none are satisfactory, and that even Richard Dawkins, "not known for rhetorical restraint in support of evolutionary orthodoxy, candidly admitted in 2008 that 'no one knows' how life arose in the first place" (p.333). Thus Meyer concludes that, using Darwin's own method, if you look at all the competing classes of causal explanations that have been proposed to explain the origin of information, that intelligent design is the best explanation. Neither chance, law-like necessity, nor the combination of the two have demonstrated the power to produce information. But intelligent agents have repeatedly done so. Now, this principle is conceded by scientists in other fields such as those in the SETI project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If they were to find information embedded in a radio signal coming from outer space, they would assume it was coming from an intelligence. In any other realm of experience (eg. archeology, forensics, cryptography) when we find the hallmarks of information we readily infer design.