Stephen C. Meyer (born 1958) is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and Director of its Center for Science and Culture; he has also written
Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design
.
He wrote in the Prologue of this 2009 book, “the Dover trial and its associated media coverage made me aware that I needed to make my argument in a more prominent way. Many evolutionary biologists had acknowledged that they could not explain the origin of the first life… In 2005, when I was repeatedly placed in the position of defending the theory of intelligent design in the media, the argument that I most wanted to make in its favor had little public standing. I have written this book to remedy that deficiency… [This book] does not just make an argument; it also tells a story, a mystery story and the story of my engagement with it.” (Pg. 6, 8) Later, he adds, “This book examines the many successive attempts that have been made to resolve this enigma---the DNA engine---and will itself propose a solution.” (Pg . 32)
He observes, “The interdependence of proteins and nucleic acids raises many obvious ‘chicken and egg’ dilemmas… The cell needs proteins to process and express the information in DNA in order to build proteins. But the construction of DNA molecules… also requires proteins. So which came first, the chicken (nucleic acids) or the egg (proteins)? If proteins must have arisen first, then how did they do so, since al extant cells construct proteins from the assembly instructions in DNA. How did either arise without the other?... scientists investigating the origin of life must now explain the origin of at least three key features of life. First, they must explain the origin of the system for storing and encoding digital information in the cell… Second, they must explain the origin of the large amount of specified complexity or functionally specified information in DNA. Third, they must explain the origin of … the functional interdependence of parts---of the cell’s information processing system.” (Pg. 134-135)
He acknowledges, “Anyone can claim that a fantastically improbable event might have occurred by chance. Chance, in that sense, if always a possible explanation. But it doesn’t follow that chance necessarily constitutes the best explanation. And… I wanted to find the BEST explanation for the origins of biological information. When I realized that I did not need to absolutely DISPROVE the chance hypothesis in order to make an objective determination about its merits, clarity came. By assessing the probability of an event in light of the available probabilistic resources, I could determine whether it was more reasonable to affirm or to reject the chance hypothesis for that event… I concluded that chance was not a terribly promising candidate for ‘best explanation’ of the DNA enigma.” (Pg. 222-223)
He notes, “When I first learned about Prigogine and Nicolis’s theory and the analogies by which they justified it, it did seem plausible. But as I considered the merits of their proposal, I discovered that it had an obvious defect, one that the prominent information theorist Hubert Yockey described to me in an interview in 1986. Yockey pointed out that Prigogine and Nicolis invoked external self-organizational forces to explain the origin of ORDER in living systems. But, as Yockey noted, what needs explaining in biological systems is not order (in the sense of a symmetrical or repeating pattern), but information, the kind of SPECIFIED digital information found in software, written languages, and DNA.” (Pg. 255)
He recounts, “in the spring of 2000, I had just written an article about DNA and the origin of life… When the letters to the editor came in, I initially blanched when I saw one from a fierce critic names Kenneth R. Miller… Miller claimed that my critique of attempts to explain the origin of biological information had failed to address the ‘RNA first’ hypothesis… Miller was half right… But I knew that two decades of research on this topic had not solved the problem of the origin of biological information… I had decided not to address this issue in my original article. But now Miller’s letter gave me a chance to do so.” (Pg. 296-297)
He points out, “Every major origin-of-life scenario… failed to explain the origin of specified information. Thus, ironically origin-of-life research itself confirms that undirected chemical processes do no produce large amounts of specified information starting from purely physical or chemical antecedents. For this reason, it seemed entirely sensible to think that the conservation laws that computer scientists had devised to describe the flow of information in computational domains applied equally to the larger domain of nature itself. If so, it seemed plausible to think that the informational repositories of life… were pointing to a source of information beyond the realm of physics and chemistry.” (Pg. 332-333)
He states, “Though advocates of intelligent design have been labeled by some of their opponents as creationists… the case for intelligent design depends, ironically, upon a form of scientific reasoning---namely, uniformitarian reasoning---that creationists have often bitterly opposed. Indeed, the case for intelligent design depends on the uniformitarian method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself used in formulating his argument … I concluded that a rigorous scientific argument for intelligent design could be formulated.” (Pg. 347-348)
He suggests, “I have found that the scientists and philosophers who reject [intelligent design] typically do so on philosophical grounds.” (Pg. 375) He admits, “Of course, critics of intelligent design may still judge that the number of published books and articles supporting the theory does not yet make it sufficiently mainstream to warrant teaching students about it. Perhaps. But that is a judgment about educational policy distinct from deciding the scientific status, or… the merits of the theory of intelligent design itself… If there were a hard-and-fast numerical standard … no new theory could ever achieve scientific status… Logically, the issue of peer review is a red herring---a distracting procedural side issue.” (Pg. 412-413)
He asks, “Does a reference to an unobservable entity provide a good reason for defining a theory as unscientific?... The answer to that question depends… upon how science is defined. If scientists (and all other relevant parties) decide to define science as an enterprise in which scientists can posit only observable entities in their theories, then clearly the theory of intelligent design would not qualify as a scientific theory Advocates of intelligent design infer, rather than directly observe, the designing intelligence for the digital information in DNA. But … this definition of science would render many other scientific theories, including many evolutionary theories of biological origins, unscientific by definition as well.” (Pg. 423-424)
He admits, “As a Christian, I’ve never made any secret about my belief in God or even why I think theism makes more sense of the totality of human experience than any other worldview… the theory does not make claims about a deity, nor can it. It makes a more modest claim… about the kind of cause---namely, an intelligent cause---that was responsible for the origin of biological form and information.” (Pg. 440) Later, he adds, “there is no question that many advocates of … intelligent design do have religious interests and beliefs and that some are motivated by their beliefs. I personally think that the evidence of design in biology… strengthens the case for theism and, thus, my personal belief in God. Subjectively, as a Christian theist, I find this implication of intelligent design ‘intellectually satisfying.’” (Pg. 447)
He concludes, “In some [cosmological] models, it’s even more probable that a whole universe like ours spontaneously fluctuated into existence than it is that our universe with its extraordinarily improbable initial conditions evolved into an orderly and lawlike way over billions of years. This means that the many-worlds-in-one hypothesis generates an absurdity. It implies that … our memories and perceptions are … quite possibly chance fabrications of quantum fields… the proposal … renders all scientific reasoning and explanation unreliable… It would be hard to invent a more self-refuting hypothesis than that?” (Pg. 508)
This book is a substantial addition to the literature about Intelligent Design, and will be of great interest to those [whether ‘pro’ or ‘con’] studying the theory.
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