The Case for a Creator (39 page)

“Whereas information requires variability, irregularity, and unpredictability—which is what information theorists call complexity—self-organization gives you repetitive, redundant structure, which is known as simple order. And complexity and order are categorical opposites.

“Chemical evolutionary theorists are not going to escape this. The laws of nature, by definition, describe regular, repetitive patterns. For that reason one cannot invoke self-organizing processes to explain the origin of information, because informational sequences are irregular and complex. They exhibit the ‘specified complexity’ I talked about. Future discoveries aren’t going to change this principle.”

To me, this absolutely doomed the idea of chemical affinities accounting for the information in DNA. But Meyer wasn’t through. There was yet another devastating problem with this theory.

“If you study DNA,” he continued, “you will find that its structure depends on certain bonds that are caused by chemical attractions. For instance, there are hydrogen bonds and bonds between the sugar and phosphate molecules that form the two twisting backbones of the DNA molecule.

“However,” he stressed, “there’s one place where there are
no
chemical bonds, and that’s between the nucleotide bases, which are the chemical letters in the DNA’s assembly instructions. In other words, the letters that spell out the text in the DNA message do not interact chemically with each other in any significant way. Also, they’re totally interchangeable. Each base can attach with equal facility at any site along the DNA backbone.”

Sensing the need for an illustration, Meyer stood and reached over to the desk to grab another child’s toy—a metal chalkboard with several magnetic letters sticking to it. Sitting back down, he put the chalkboard on his lap and maneuvered the letters until they spelled the word
information
.

“My kids were young when I was first studying this, so I came up with this example,” he said. “We know that there are magnetic affinities here; that’s why the magnetic letters stick to the metal chalkboard.” To demonstrate, he picked up the letter R and let the magnetism pull it back to the board.

“Notice, however, that the magnetic force is the same for each one of the letters, and so they’re effectively interchangeable. You can use the letters to spell whatever you want. Now, in DNA, each individual base, or letter, is chemically bonded to the sugar-phosphate backbone of the molecule. That’s how they’re attached to the DNA’s structure. But—and here’s the key point—
there is no attraction or bonding between the individual letters themselves.
So there’s nothing chemically that forces them into any particular sequence. The sequencing has to come from somewhere else.

“When I show students the magnetic letters sticking to the metal chalkboard, I ask, ‘How did this word
information
arise?’ The answer, of course, is intelligence that comes from outside the system. Neither chemistry nor physics arranged the letters this way. It was my choice. And in DNA, neither chemistry nor physics arranges the letters into the assembly instructions for proteins. Clearly, the cause comes from outside the system.”

He paused while the implications sunk in. “And that cause,” he stressed, “is
intelligence
.”

“ALMOST A MIRACLE”

Like a skillful boxer picking apart the defenses of his opponent, Meyer had adroitly dismantled the three categories of naturalistic explanations for the origin of life and information in DNA. We even discussed another option—the possibility that some external force might be responsible for creating organization, much in the same way gravity creates a vortex as water drains from a bathtub. Meyer quickly dismissed that notion, pointing out that such forces may produce order but they can’t manufacture information.
²⁶

These dead-ends for naturalistic origin-of-life theories would not be a surprise to scientists in the field. When prominent origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel ran into another evolutionist at a Detroit conference several years ago, Orgel admitted the overwhelming difficulties he had encountered in trying to figure out how nucleic acids might have been naturally synthesized on the primitive Earth. Then Orgel candidly conceded, “There are equally overwhelming difficulties in the way of all theories.”
²⁷

In short, no hypothesis has come close to explaining how information necessary to life’s origin arose by naturalistic means. As Crick, a philosophical materialist, has conceded: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
²⁸

For many researchers, the only recourse has been to continue to have faith that, as one scientist put it, some previously unknown “magic mineral” will be discovered to have had “exactly the right properties to cause the necessary reactions to occur to create a nucleic acid.”
²⁹

“Maybe,” I said to Meyer, “someday scientists will come up with another hypothesis.”

“Maybe they will,” he replied. “You can’t prove something like this with one-hundred-percent certainty, because you don’t know what new evidence will show. That’s why all scientists reason in a way that’s provisional. Having said that, though, we do know that some possibilities can be excluded categorically. They’re dead ends. For example, I think you can categorically exclude the idea that self-organizational processes can provide new information. More evidence will simply not change that.”

“Some skeptics would claim you’re arguing from ignorance,” I pointed out. “Scientists admit they don’t know how life started, so you conclude there must have been an intelligent designer.”

“No, not at all. I’m not saying intelligent design makes sense simply because other theories fail,” he insisted. “Instead, I’m making an inference to the best explanation, which is how scientists reason in historical matters. Based on the evidence, the scientist assesses each hypothesis on the basis of its ability to explain the evidence at hand. Typically, the key criterion is whether the explanation has ‘causal power,’ which is the ability to produce the effect in question.

“In this case, the effect in question is information. We’ve seen that neither chance, nor chance combined with natural selection, nor self-organizational processes have the causal power to produce information. But we do know of one entity that does have the required causal powers to produce information, and that’s intelligence. We’re not inferring to that entity on the basis of what we
don’t
know, but on the basis of what we
do
know. That’s not an argument from ignorance.”

“Isn’t there a fundamental weakness to your argument, though?” I asked. “You’re arguing by analogy, comparing the information in DNA to information we find in language. Arguments based on analogies are notoriously weak. Advocates might emphasize the similarities between two things, but opponents will stress the differences.”

“I’ll admit that there is a way of speaking about the information in DNA that goes too far and then becomes metaphorical,” he began. “When people talk about DNA as being a message, that could imply there was a receiver who could ‘understand’ the message. I’m not saying that DNA is this sort of semantic information.

“However, I’m not arguing by analogy. The coding regions of DNA have
exactly
the same relevant properties as a computer code or language. As I said earlier, whenever you find a sequential arrangement that’s complex and corresponds to an independent pattern or functional requirement, this kind of information is
always
the product of intelligence. Books, computer codes, and DNA all have these two properties. We know books and computer codes are designed by intelligence, and the presence of this type of information in DNA also implies an intelligent source.

“Scientists in many fields recognize this connection between information and intelligence. When archaeologists discovered the Rosetta stone, they didn’t think its inscriptions were the product of random chance or self-organizational processes. Obviously, the sequential arrangements of symbols was conveying information, and it was a reasonable assumption that intelligence created it. The same principle is true for DNA.”

THE BIOLOGICAL BIG BANG

Meyer had made a convincing case that intelligence—and intelligence alone—can explain the presence of precise information within genetic material. By itself, this was impressive evidence for the existence of a designer of life.

As I looked down at my hand and tried to comprehend the vast quantities of complex and specific information inscribed in each cell, a slight smile formed at the corners of my mouth. The answer to the monumental question of whether there’s a Creator, I mused, might very well be as close as my own fingertips.

Meyer wasn’t finished, however. As he mentioned in our previous interview, he is convinced that the so-called “Cambrian explosion”—in which a dazzling array of new life forms suddenly appears fully formed in the fossil record, without any of the ancestors required by Darwinism—also is powerful evidence of a designer. The reason: this phenomenon would have required the sudden infusion of massive amounts of new genetic and other biological information that only could have come from an intelligent source.

Among other places, Meyer makes that case in “The Cambrian Information Explosion: Evidence for Intelligent Design” in
Debating Design
, recently published by Cambridge University Press. Another extensive piece, “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang,” appears in
Darwinism, Design, and Public Education
. Meyer coauthored this analysis with Paul Chien, chairman and professor in the biology department at the University of San Francisco, who worked with leading Chinese scientists on interpreting Cambrian fossils unique to China’s Chengjiang region; Paul A. Nelson, a philosopher of biology who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago; and paleontologist Marcus Ross.

“The fossils of the Cambrian Explosion absolutely cannot be explained by Darwinian theory or even by the concept called ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ which was specifically formulated in an effort to explain away the embarrassing fossil record,” Meyer said. “When you look at the issue from the perspective of biological information, the best explanation is that an intelligence was responsible for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon.”

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs to get comfortable. “This sounds fascinating,” I said. “Explain what you mean.”

Meyer clearly relished the opportunity to elaborate. “New developments in embryology and developmental biology are telling us that DNA, as important as it is, is not the whole show,” Meyer began.

“DNA provides some but not all of the information that’s needed to build a new organism with a novel form and function. You see, DNA builds proteins, but proteins have to be assembled into larger structures. There are different kinds of cells, and those cells have to be arranged into tissues, and tissues have to be arranged into organs, and organs have to be arranged into overall body plans.

“According to neo-Darwinism, new biological forms are created from mutations in DNA, with natural selection preserving and building on the favorable ones. But if DNA is only part of the story, then you can mutate it indefinitely and you’ll never build a fundamentally new body architecture.

“So when you encounter the Cambrian explosion, with its huge and sudden appearance of radically new body plans, you realize you need lots of new biological information. Some of it would be encoded for in DNA—although how that occurs is still an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. But on top of that, where does the new information come from that’s not attributable to DNA? How does the hierarchical arrangement of cells, tissues, organs, and body plans develop? Darwinists don’t have an answer. It’s not even on their radar.”

IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

Using radiometric techniques to date zircon crystals in Siberia, scientists have recently been able to increase their accuracy in pinpointing the time frame of the Cambrian explosion, whose beginning they have determined to be some 530 million years ago.

Paleontologists now think that during a five-million-year (or even shorter) window of time, at least twenty and as many as thirty-five of the world’s forty phyla, the highest category in the animal kingdom, sprang forth with unique body plans. In fact, some experts believe that “
all
living phyla may have originated by the end of the explosion.”
³⁰

To put this incredible speed into perspective, if you were to compress all of the Earth’s history into twenty-four hours, the Cambrian explosion would consume only about one minute.
³¹

“The Cambrian explosion represents an incredible quantum leap in biological complexity,” Meyer said. “Before then, life on Earth was pretty simple—one-celled bacteria, blue-green algae, and later some sponges and primitive worms or mollusks. Then without any ancestors in the fossil record, we have a stunning variety of complex creatures appear in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.

“For example the trilobite—with an articulated body, complicated nervous system, and compound eyes—suddenly shows up fully formed at the beginning of the explosion. It’s amazing! And this is followed by stasis, which means the basic body plans remained distinct over the eons.

“All of this totally contradicts Darwinism, which predicted the slow, gradual development in organisms over time. Darwin admitted the Cambrian explosion was ‘inexplicable’ and ‘a valid argument’ against his theory. He insisted ‘
natura non facit saltum
—nature takes no leaps.’ He thought he would be vindicated, however, as more fossils were discovered, but the picture has only gotten worse.