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These two elements, the abstract cipherencased in the sequence of DNA bases andthe contrastingly palpable and quirkilyshaped proteins of cellular machinery are,roughly, the beginning and end points ofwhat is called gene expression. And, it wasthe explication of gene expression in the1960’s that formally confirmed Crick’shypothesis that the sequencing of DNA basescontained information content. But how wasthis information originally supplied? It is theorigin of biological information that is thepivotal question of SITC.

Dr. Meyer paves the way with a rivetingdiscussion of gene expression, which hedepicts as an intricate process that relies oninterdependent components that transcribe,transport and interpret encoded information.In a chapter titled “The MolecularLabyrinth,” Meyer takes us on a factory tourof cellular machinery that describes the chainof interactions that results in a workingprotein. Dizzyingly, it is working proteinsfrom which this machinery itself isconstructed. This theme of closed loops isrecurring in SITC. Indeed, when Meyerdiscusses computer-assisted design andmanufacturing and its congruence with geneexpression, he remarks: “The cell’sinformation-processing system is strikinglysimilar to CAD-CAM technology, though itdiffers...in at least one important respect: thecell’s information-processing system not onlyproduces machines, it also reproduces itself.”

His argument focuses unwaveringly on theorigin of first life, leaving the question of theorigin of species to others. As he lays out hiscase, Meyer defines some of the dauntingpuzzles that origin of life researchers mustsolve. He insists they must determine theorigin of three things: (1) the system forstoring and encoding digital information inthe cell, (2) the specific information contentstored in the nucleotide sequences and (3) the

component based architecture of the cell’sinformation-processing system, along with itsintrinsic interdependence.

SITC chronicles attempts to solve the DNAenigma and its evident intransigence, quotingsundry expressions of futility by origin of liferesearchers, molecular biologists andphilosophers of science including Phil Sciluminary Karl Popper: “What makes theorigin of life and the genetic code adisturbing riddle is this: the code cannot betranslated except by using certain products ofits translation.”

Meyer illustrates the intuitive appeal of theintelligent design hypothesis and hints at theformal methods of historical science with aninspired bit of parallel reasoning drawn fromNASA’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence(SETI). This quest, he notes, “presupposesthat any information embedded in electro-magnetic signals coming from space wouldindicate an intelligent source.” He continues:

As yet, radio astronomers have notfound any such information-bearingsignals. But closer to home, molecularbiologists have identified information-rich sequences and systems in the cell,suggesting, by the same logic, the pastexistence of an intelligent cause forthose effects.

A Cambridge educated philosopher ofscience with a background as a workinggeophysicist, Meyer outlines a distinct formof scientific inquiry, applied to cases in whichthere are singular causes and effects, that isused in such disciplines as geology,archeology, paleontology and evolutionarybiology. Historical science invokes adetective-like, multi-pronged approach,marked by “abductive” reasoning: a forensicmethod that reasons backward from availableclues to their possible causes. Meyer avers

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that the historical method is not unboundedor ungoverned by empirical evidence, offeringthat one of the key tests for any historicalhypothesis is the test of causal adequacy. Thisrests on a process of comparing theexplanatory power of competing hypotheses,starting from the uniformitarian premise thatthe laws of nature now in effect haveoperated always and everywhere in theuniverse. In the modern parlance of historicalscience, this is called “inference to the bestexplanation” (IBE).

Meyer argues that we know, from ouruniform experience of cause and effect, onlyone kind of cause for the type of faces we seeon Mt. Rushmore; similarly we know of onlyone kind of cause for the sort of digital codewe see in the DNA molecule. Bill Gates hasremarked that DNA is like a softwareprogram—only much more complex than anywe’ve ever written. (This is quite apronouncement from the man who hasoverseen the various incarnations of the ultrahigh footprint Windows operating systemand the similarly gargantuan MicrosoftOffice suite.) Coded information, whether itcomes from a radio signal, a hieroglyphicinscription or a computer program, is knownto come from an intelligent source. Theinformation found in DNA accordinglypoints back to an intelligent source. This isthe core argument in SITC.

SITC describes Meyer’s personal story, inwhich he is first struck by the intuitiverightness of a necessary nexus betweenintelligence and coded information. It seemedcompelling that the mapping of anarrangement of DNA bases to a separate andremote arrangement of amino acids should bethe product of planning. It should be possibleto formulate a scientific argument to thiseffect, Meyer reasoned, “because it might betrue.” He set out to develop a scientific casefor ID in the manner of Darwin and hismentor, influential geologist Charles Lyell,

hearkening back to Darwin’s own doctrine ofvera causa. This principle rules out exoticcauses to explain past events and seeks causesthat are known to produce the effects that areunder scrutiny. It is the key logical device thatsupports Darwin’s crucial inference that theprinciples of controlled micro-evolutionobserved in the breeding of animals(“variation under domestication”) weretransferable to speciation occurring over theeons. Vera causa echoes Lyell’s notion of“causes now in operation,” a key tenet ofhistorical science. The phrase is immortalizedin Lyell’s seminal Principles of Geology, whichDarwin read when not overcome withseasickness during the Beagle voyage.

In an “aha” moment Meyer asked himself“what is the cause now in operation thatproduces digital or alphabetic code?” Thisyields the answer that there’s just one—intelligence. To generalize the principle of aneffect pointing to a single cause, Meyerenlists mid twentieth century philosopher ofscience, Michael Scriven to sketch out aninvestigative framework:

“According to Scriven, in order toestablish a causal claim, the historicalscientist needs:

1. ‘evidence that his [proposed cause]was present’...2. evidence that ‘it has onother occasions clearly demonstrated itscapacity to produce an effect of the sorthere under study’...3. [to establish] an‘absence of evidence (despite a thoroughsearch)...of...other possible causes.’”

Item one, the causal existence criterion, isdicey. So, how do historical scientists establishthe existence of a past cause? The key,according to Meyer, is uniqueness. First, thehistorical scientist examines the historicalevent to identify a defining effect. Considerthis example:

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There is a geological formation close toMeyer’s home in Washington State, an ashlayer in the eastern part of the state. This ashlayer is a defining feature of an unexplainedhistorical event—the origin of the geo-formation. It happens that there is a loneknown cause of such an ash layer, a volcaniceruption. So, abductive reasoning leads to theprovisional belief that a volcanic eruption isthe best explanation. Other causes areconsidered but rejected as causally inadequatebecause each fails, as a cause now in operation,to produce the target effect. Earthquakes, forexample, produce many interesting effectsbut, as a cause now in operation, they do notproduce ash layers.

So, here we go: if a proposed cause is knownto be the unique cause of a target effect thenit is assumed to have been present prior to thehistorical event that exemplifies this effect.

And, if there is no single effect pointing to alone cause? Well, then this same logic isextended to an ensemble of effects, a “widerclass of facts,” that converge on a single cause.Meyer supplies a homespun illustration ofthis variant: a wet driveway could arise from avariety of causes but a wet driveway, uponwhich rests a wet car, accompanied by drysurroundings, under cloudless skies with anearby bucket of soapy water and sponge is awider class of facts that points to a singlecause...

Ironically, perhaps, it is this very category ofscientific reasoning that has buttressed neo-Darwinism. Stephen Jay Gould, the iconicHarvard paleontologist and polymath of thelast century, has defended evolutionarybiology from attacks that challenge itstestability by invoking it as an exemplar of aclass of scientific enquiry whose theories aretested by evaluating their explanatory power,and not necessarily by controlled laboratoryexperiments.

A key cog in Meyer’s long argument is thescarcity of something called specifiedcomplexity, an idea with its roots ininformation theory and the brainchild ofmathematician William Dembski. This canbe defined briefly as an irregulararrangement of meaningful information suchas the character string “TIME ANDTIDEWAIT FOR NOMAN,” which iscomposed of 23 letters augmented withjudicious spacing.When we look at such acharacter string, we do not believe that itresulted from spilling a bag of well-scrambled Scrabble letters.When analyzedby Dembski, this judgment actually derivesfrom an intuitive grasp of the compoundeffect of the low probability of any particulararrangement of 23 letters plus the specifiedcomplexity of this arrangement thatconforms to the rules of an English sentence.Meyer asserts that, apart from humanartifacts such as “paintings, signs, writtentext, spoken language, ancient hieroglyphics,integrated circuits, machine codes, computerhardware and software,” specified complexityis not found in the natural world, beyondnegligible quantities, other than in biologicalmolecules of DNA, RNA and proteins.

Meyer submits that the quantity of specifiedcomplexity in the DNA moleculeoverwhelms the chance opportunities of theuniverse—its “probabilistic resources.” Heweighs the causal adequacy of the chancehypothesis, as a diligent historical scientistwill do, and finds that the opportunity foreven a single working protein to besynthesized by chance is vanishingly small,based on computations that include suchmind-numbing factors as the number ofelementary particles in the observableuniverse (10^80), the number of secondssince the big bang (10^16 ), a unit ofdistance known as the Planck length (10^-33centimeters), and so forth. Meyer makes asobering case to the ever hopeful gambler

who believes that eventually, he will win.“Eventually” has its limits.

Interspersed with what might otherwise bedry mathematical and statistical discussions,and throughout these pages, Meyerillustrates a core assortment of probabilityand pattern recognition topics withhomespun, fun and accessible stories andthought experiments. These smooth the wayas these same concepts are applied to theproblem at hand. Meyer skillfully imagesburly men alerted by not-to-be-believed runsat the roulette wheel, coin flipping games,criminal justice punishments of deceptivemathematical cruelty, an amusing plagiarismepisode taken from real life and a stable ofcharacters including Slick, the ever sunnygambling man.

With engaging whimsy, he ingeniouslyadduces The Cat in the Hat as a metaphorfor the displacement of one problem byanother in a kind of continuing regress inwhich each highly improbable arrangementis explained by another. Readers will recallDr. Seuss’s immortal sequel, The Cat in theHat Comes Back, in which our eponymoushero must triumph over the tenacious pinkbathtub ring, the pink stuff that spreads fromone household item to another as the Catgamely concocts successive ploys to restoreorder before the parents return.

The target of this conceit is various theories,computer simulations and laboratoryexperiments conceived to explain bio-molecular activity as the product ofundirected processes. Meyer’s critiques ofthese rival theories note two persistenttrends: (1) proposed solutions “solved” theproblem of specified information by usingother unexplained sources of information,and (2) simulations produced seeminglysignificant results by targeting desirableoutcomes, i.e., relying on human intelligence.

Most prominent among the first is what isknown as “RNAWorld.” This is a set oftheories that share the proposition that thefirst molecules imbued with informationoccur midstream in the gene expressionscenario, viz., in the RNA molecules thathave various downstream functions. Theappeal of RNAWorld is that it seems tocircumvent the interdependency between theenzymatic functions of modern proteins andthe information-storage function of modernDNA by positing that primitive RNAmolecules did a little of both. But Meyer’scritique of RNAWorld effectively conveysthat RNA advocates are just pushing thepink stuff around: “every attempt to leapfrogthe sequencing problem by starting withsupposedly ‘information generating’ RNAreplicators has only shifted the problem tothe specific sequences that would be neededto make such replicators functional.”

The second trend, the elephant in the roomof simulation experiments, is the role ofintelligence, human intelligence, in efforts tosimulate bio-molecular natural selection onthe prebiotic earth. Early examples of suchattempts were computer programs byRichard Dawkins and Bernd-Olaf Küpperswho invoked the curiously transparent deviceof setting a target character string, anEnglish phrase such as “four score and sevenyears ago,” as a proxy for a target biologicalmolecule, and gravitating toward a match ofthe target string. The software siftedthrough a crop of (pseudo) random strings,of the same length as the target, and favoredthose that most closely resembled it, initerative fashion. This has produced apparentsuccess and, Meyer argues, we should expectno less since the game is rigged. He proffersthat Darwinian natural selection is notpresent in a prebiotic world and, in any case,is not aware of targets; he avers that theDawkins-Küppers experiment withers underscrutiny. Meyer provides a clear and

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convincing expression of the weakness of allsuch attempts through recounting remarks ofa software engineer of his acquaintance:

There is absolutely nothing surprisingabout the results of these algorithms.The computer is programmed from theoutset to converge on the solution. Theprogrammer designed the code to dothat.What would be surprising is if theprogram didn’t converge on thesolution. That would reflect badly onthe skill of the programmer. Everythinginteresting in the output of the programcame as a result of the programmer’sskill—the information input. There areno mysterious outputs.

In the end, Meyer ruminates on the falsechoice between religion and science that haspermeated Western culture for some time. Heacknowledges, without reserve, that ID hasmetaphysical implications and that he is aChristian believer. But, Meyer takes decidedumbrage, as a professional scientist, at theslings of pigeonholing critics and proponentsof metaphysical naturalism (a religion itself,no?) impugning ID’s formulations asfundamentally religious. He presents thecommon sense view that it cannot be a sourceof alarm or scientifically discrediting that IDhas metaphysical implications since it, notsurprisingly,

“addresses a major philosophical questionthat most religious and metaphysical systemsof thought also address, namely, ‘Whatcaused life and/or the universe to come intoexistence?’ Thus, like its materialisticcounterparts, the theory of intelligent designinevitably raises questions about the ultimateor prime reality. …Scientific theories must beevaluated on the basis of the evidence, not on

the basis of philosophical preferences orconcerns about implications.”

Staying on point, Meyer offers anotherexample of a scientific theory withmetaphysical implications, the big-bangtheory, to which “scientists with materialisticphilosophical leanings” were initially hostilebecause of its implication of a universe with atemporal beginning, an idea with a distinctlytheistic tinge.

Dr. Meyer gives us appendices that, whilefittingly apart from the narrative flow, are atthe crux of the debate. Appendix A concernspredictions of intelligent design, some ofwhich can “help adjudicate proposals thatinvoke either intelligent causes ormaterialistic mechanisms.” Appendix B givesa fair hearing to the possibility of a“multiverse,” an unlimited number of paralleluniverses, as a logical device to extend—toinfinity—the probabilistic resources availableto the various chance hypotheses.

His long argument is encyclopedic yet livelyand persuades that science is at an impasse inexplaining the origin of life as the product ofundirected processes. The work overall,technical at times, is directed to the generalreader. The scientifically trained reader mustdecide whether a popular work is “trying topull a fast one,” preferably guided by criteriathat are consistently and dispassionatelyapplied across historical sciences. Theauthor’s passion for his argument is palpablebut scrupulously controlled; he is evermindful that it is the target of scornfulattacks by opponents who are, to put it gently,not disinterested. Meyer delivers hisargument in the manner of a dish best servedcold, yet forcibly enough to shake the base ofthe materialistic paradigm.