Stephen Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center
for Science and Culture, spoke the other evening at a forum called
“Socrates in the City.” Normally it’s in New York City, but tonight
it was at the University Club in Washington, D.C. The founder, Eric
Metaxas, gave a great introduction. He’s someone who doesn’t follow
the intellectual herd.
The author of an influential book, Signature in the
Cell, Meyer addressed the question, “Is there a scientific
controversy about the theory of evolution?” He made a strong case
that there is. A few days later, I also interviewed him about the
prospects for intelligent design.
In his talk, inquiring how life first appeared from simpler
pre-existing chemicals, Meyer emphasized the concept of biological
information, which is embedded in DNA. Think of it as analogous to
software code. Bill Gates said that “DNA is like a computer program
but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”
Software contains instructions that direct computers to accomplish
various functions. Likewise, DNA contains instructions for the
assembly of tiny machines called proteins, which perform vital
functions within every cell.
In the 19th century the cell was thought to be simple. Darwin
and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex it
is. Today it is compared to a high-tech factory. (Except it’s much
more complex than that—factories can’t replicate themselves.)
So how did the information get into the DNA in the first place?
Without it, the first cell wouldn’t have been constructed, and life
would not have begun. In Expelled, when
Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins how life began, he said he had no
idea. We still don’t.
Nucleotide bases along the spine of the DNA molecule—in effect
the characters in the genetic text—direct the cell’s molecular
machinery to link specific amino acids into proteins. If the
sequence is incorrectly arranged the protein doesn’t get assembled.
Watson and Crick described the double helical structure of DNA. But
no one has yet explained the origin of the information it contains.
“So that’s a huge stumbling block for evolutionary explanations of
the origin of life,” Meyer said.
Just as computer code comes from programmers, so functional
information comes from intelligence—from mind. Intelligence, or
conscious activity, is the only known cause of the kind of
sequence-specific, information-rich code that we see in biology. We
infer that the ultimate origin of biological information is an
intelligent agent, or agents. All other proposed explanations have
failed.
Some think natural selection can get the job done. But as Meyer
said, processes such as natural selection can’t take place until
life is already up and running. Until we have a living and
self-replicating cell, natural selection doesn’t enter the picture.
Thus, it does nothing to explain how life first evolved from
non-living chemicals.
Meyer also argued that biological evolutionary theory, which
“attempts to explain how new forms of life evolved from simpler
pre-existing forms,” faces formidable difficulties. In particular,
the modern version of Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, also has an
information problem.
Mutations, or copying errors in the DNA, are analogous to
copying errors in digital code, and they supposedly provide the
grist for natural selection. But, Meyer said: “What we know from
all codes and languages is that when specificity of sequence is a
condition of function, random changes degrade function much faster
than they come up with something new.”
He mentioned the Cambrian explosion—the geologically sudden
appearance of most major animal forms. It’s a dramatic event in the
history of life. Animals with new body plans—arthropods,
brachiopods, chordates—appeared suddenly about 530 million years
ago. Nothing resembling a precursor appears in the strata below the
Cambrian.
So the same problem arises: What would it take to build one of
those new body plans? You’d need a big instruction set, just for
one body part. The trilobite had a compound, lens-focusing eye.
“Each new cell for each new tissue had dedicated proteins,” Meyer
said. “The proteins in turn need instructions to be built.”
The problem is comparable to opening a big combination lock. He
asked the audience to imagine a bike lock with ten dials and ten
digits per dial. Such a lock would have 10 billion
possibilities with only one that works. But the protein alphabet
has 20 possibilities at each site, and the average protein has
about 300 amino acids in sequence.
A colleague of Meyer’s, Douglas Axe, formerly a researcher at
Cambridge University and now with the Biologic Institute in
Seattle, found that the ratio of functional to all possible
sequences for a protein 150 amino acids in length is absurdly small
(1 in 10 to the power of 74. “That search space is larger than the
number of atoms in the Milky Way galaxy,” Meyer said. “It’s not
remotely plausible that mutation and natural selection could
produce one functional protein during the entire history of life on
earth.”
Remember: Not just any old jumble of amino acids makes a
protein. Chimps typing at keyboards will have to type for a very
long time before they get an error-free, meaningful sentence of 150
characters. “We have a small needle in a huge haystack.”
Neo-Darwinism has not solved this problem, Meyer said. “There’s a
mathematical rigor to this which has not been a part of the
so-called evolution-creation debate.”
IN AN INTERVIEW, Meyer told me that good things are happening
beneath the media radar. If it’s not in a court or a legislature,
the press pays little or no attention. Academic articles,
especially if mathematical, are ignored. Mainstream journals have
begun publishing peer-reviewed articles promoting intelligent
design. In 2004 Rick Sternberg, as editor of the Proceedings
for the Biological Society of Washington, got into trouble for
publishing an article by Meyer. That was the first peer-reviewed ID
article. Last fall the 50th was published.
“One reason they went after Sternberg was to make an example of
him,” Meyer said. “Now the dam has broken.”
Internationally, ID is also growing. There’s a new Centre for
Intelligent Design in London (C4ID). Affiliated with it is Norman
Nevin, one of the leading geneticists in the UK. A number of full
professors of science within the British system are also
affiliated. The Centre has teamed up with Discovery Institute for
various events.
In addition, “leading U.S. biologists, including evolutionary
biologists, are saying we need a new theory of evolution,” Meyer
said. Many increasingly criticize Darwinism, even if they don’t
accept design. One is the cell biologist James Shapiro of the
University of Chicago. His new book is Evolution:
A View From the 21st Century. He’s “looking for a new
evolutionary theory.” David Depew (Iowa) and Bruce Weber (Cal
State) recently wrote in Biological Theory that Darwinism
“can no longer serve as a general framework for evolutionary
theory.” Such criticisms have mounted in the technical
literature.
At the same time, most draw the line at accepting intelligent
design. They insist it is “not science,” maybe a “science stopper.”
Science, they believe, can operate only by invoking material
causes. But as Meyer has written, scientists earlier felt no such
constraint. Newton argued that the arrangements of the planets and
the stability of their orbits could only have arisen as the result
of “an intelligent and powerful Being.” Robert Boyle, the 17th
century chemist, invoked the activity of a “most intelligent and
designing agent.”
There are plenty of reasons for thinking that ID is scientific,
among them its ability to make predictions that contrast sharply
with those of Darwinism. One addresses the question of whether most
DNA is “junk,” randomly accumulated throughout evolution’s history
of trial and error. Because it seems to lack function, official
science a few years ago proclaimed 98 percent of DNA to be junk.
But if it is designed we would not expect that. Now more and more
of the DNA is turning out to be functional—not junk at all.
Official science, it seems to me, wants to say that everything
we see in the world can be explained without any reference to God.
Darwinism is overwhelmingly an atheistic project, and has been from
the beginning. That’s why any scientific opposition to that agenda
stirs up such resentment.
