In 2004, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scholarly journal housed at the Smithsonian Institution, published a peer-reviewed article advocating intelligent design by Stephen Meyer.  Angry readers, alarmed at the article’s deviation from the party line, demanded the journal’s editor be censured for allowing such heresy to gain traction.  In due course, the editor was demoted and assigned another position within the institution.  Such is the opposition that meets any scholar who dares study biology with anything less than a philosophical commitment to monistic materialism—a stance nicely illustrated in Francis Crick’s admonition that biologists, while marveling at the mystery of DNA, must “‘constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved’” (p. 12).  .

Stephen Meyer, however, has amplified his case for intelligent design in Signature in the Cell:  DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, c. 2009).  Meyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science and now directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle.  This book, he says, “attempts to make a comprehensive, interdisciplinary argument for a new view of the origin of life.  “It makes ‘one long argument’ for the theory of intelligent design” (p. 8).  Consequently it is, writes Steve Fuller (a professor at the University of Warwick), “at once a philosophical history of how information has come to be central to cutting-edge research in biology today and one man’s intellectual journey to the conclusion that intelligent design and provides the explanation for that fact.”

Meyer primarily focuses on the reality of non-material information within the biological world.  Just as you can load “information” into a computer without adding any weight to its material components, so too information (evident in the DNA) has been programmed into all that lives.  Consequently, evolutionary biologists, though deeply committed to reductionistic materialism, cannot avoid using teleological language that refers to intentionality and purpose when describing what they behold.  Thus we read them refering to such things as:  “‘genetic code,’ ‘genetic information,’ ‘transcription,’ ‘translation,’ ‘editing enzymes,’ ‘signal-transduction circuitry, ‘feedback loop,’ and ‘information processing system’” (p. 21).  While overtly denying design, they cannot find words that fail to imply it!

As a young scientist working in the oil industry, Meyer himself became enamored with the mystery of life while attending a conference that addressed “three big scientific questions—the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the nature of human consciousness” (p. 24).   One of the speakers was “Charles Thaxton, the chemist who with his coauthors had proposed the controversial idea about an intelligence playing a role in the origin of biological information” (p. 28).  Intellectually challenged, Meyer decided to pursue his interests in one of the world’s elite research universities (Cambridge) and discern the degree to which information, not mindless matter-in-motion, best explains life’s mysterious origins.

Today’s scholars who embrace a “matter first” theory follow the lead of Soviet biochemist Aleksandr Oparin, who sought to harmonize Darwinian science with Marxist materialism.  His position was allegedly confirmed by a famous experiment at the University of Chicago, when Stanley Miller distilled some amino acids from a chemical mix charged with high-voltage electricity.  Despite the textbook popularity of the Miller-Urey experiment, however, recent research reveals its virtual irrelevance to origins-of-life inquiries.  We now know that pre-biotic atmospheric conditions were hostile to life and quite unlike those Miller assumed.

Still more, there is mounting evidence of the complexity of even the simplest forms of life.  As Watson and Crick and their successors began to fathom the double helix structure of the DNA, biologists confronted the massive amount of “information” contained therein.  Renowned information scientists differentiate between “mere complexity” (routine patterns observed in crystals, for example) and “specified complexity” (evident in proteins and cells as well as meaningful sentences).  As Meyer describes the “molecular labyrinth,” carefully identifying the incredible process (through transcription and translation) whereby cells function, he also ponders the deeply philosophical questions regarding life’s beginning.  Are chance and necessity, as many materialists insist, sufficient causes for the realities we observe?

Or is there something more?  Something rational supplying the rationality, the information so evident in all that lives?   To Meyer it was clear that Alfred North Whitehead rightly asserted:  “‘There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things.  And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.’  Whitehead argued that confidence in this proposition was especially inspired by the ‘medieval insistence upon the rationality of God’” (p. 142).   Most great scientists in the history of science—giants such as Kepler and Newton—saw divine design everywhere in the world they studied.  They did so because they inferred the makings of history from its results—employing what Charles Sanders Peirce would label “abduction.”  None of us has seen Abraham Lincoln, but we cannot, as historians, explain the Civil War without affirming his existence and activities.  Historical scientists (as Peter Lipton explained in Inference to the Best Explanation) consider competing hypotheses as they endeavor to explain what happened in the past, what provides “causal adequacy.”  Cosmologists now embrace the Big Bang as the best explanation of the origin of the universe, remarkably unlike the “steady state” theories that long dominated the field.

Reading Lipton’s treatise on inference to the best explanation, “a light came on for me,” Meyer says.  “I immediately asked myself:  What causes now in operation produce digital code or specified information?  Is there a known cause—a vera causa—of the origin of such information?” (p. 171).  Everywhere it seems evident that intelligent agents—and only intelligent agents—are responsible for specified information.  To explain (using abductive reason) all the information in living organisms, it simply makes sense to posit the possibility of an Intelligent Agent as its source.  Mathematical calculations render the possibility of chance (random material events) creating life nearly preposterous.  Indeed:  “The odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance from a prebiotic soup is no better than 1 chance in 10164”  (p. 212).   To illustrate this astronomical number, Meyer notes that there are only half that number of protons, neutrons and electrons in the entire universe!  There have only been 1016 seconds since the Big Bang beginning of the universe!

We’re faced with the fact, as G.K. Chesterton said a century ago, that:  “Evolution as explanation, as an ultimate philosophy of the cause of living things, is still faced with the problem of producing rabbits out of an empty hat; a process commonly involving some hint of Design” (CW, XVII, p. 291).  After carefully explaining (and rejecting) various naturalistic hypotheses, Meyer declares that since “evidence for the causal adequacy of intelligence is all around us both inside and outside the lab” (p. 340) it makes sense to attribute the vera causa of life to intelligent design.   “Experience shows that large amounts of specified complexity or information (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source—from a mind or a personal agent” (p. 343).

Meyer meticulously considers a multitude of issues in 500 pages, adding another 50 pages of endnotes and 30 pages of bibliographical references to scholarly literature.  Yet for an academic treatise it is quite readable, reflecting the author’s pedagogic skill, using illustrations, diagrams and drawings.  “In Signature in the Cell,” says Scott Turner, a SUNY professor of environmental and forest biology, “Stephen C. Meyer gives us a fascinating exploration of the case for intelligent design theory, woven skillfully around a compelling account of Meyer’s own journey.  Along the way, Meyer effectively dispels the most pernicious caricatures:  that intelligent design is simply warmed-over creationism, the province of deluded fools and morons, or a dangerous political conspiracy.  Whether you believe intelligent design is true or false, Signature in the Cell is a must-read book.”

Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books--The Liberating Law; C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue--as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.