Signature in the Cell--Part 2

I am continuing a summary of the information in Dr. Stephen Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell.You can read the previous blog entry to see the first part of my report on this important book.


Meyer follows this with an examination of what scientists in the past had thought about biological origins and how they investigated these questions. He found it interesting that Watson and Crick were not doing experiments in labs, but that didn't mean they were not doing science. Instead, they built models based on data they acquired from other sources, like scientific journals, other scientists, and other laboratories. In this way they were much like current advocates of intelligent design, who have been accused of not doing science. A brief story is revealing -- when Meyer asked Fred Hoyle, a famous astronomer, about whether he thought the information stored in DNA might point to an intelligent source, his reply was, "That would certainly make life a lot easier to explain." Meyer goes on to explain that modern science was specifically inspired by the idea that the universe is the product of a rational mind and that humans could understand it. He says historical scientists reasoned from clues back to causes, conferring unseen facts/events/causes in the past from clues or facts in the present. Based on this, he asks what causes now in operation produce digital code or specified information? Intelligent design must qualify as a possible scientific explanation for the origin of biological information because we know that intelligent agents produce specific information.

For the next 150 pages Meyer examines the competing explanations for the origin of biological information. He starts by examining the possibility that chance produced this information. Most people who advocate chance assume that life could not originate without biological information first arising in some form, which means they must explain where the DNA information came from or how proteins might have arisen directly without DNA. Many origin-of-life scientists realize how difficult it is to generate specified biological information by chance alone in the limited time earth has been around. But it's even more difficult than this -- building a living cell not only requires specified information, but it also requires a vast amount of information. For example, the simplest cell requires nearly 500 proteins and nearly 600,000 bases of DNA to assemble these proteins. One experiment in the late 1980s indicated the probability of achieving a functional sequence of amino acids in several known proteins by chance was about one chance in 10 to the 63rd power (it's about like picking one atom out of all the atoms in the universe). Another problem with chance was the discovery of the lack of a favorable prebiotic soup on primitive earth. A biophysicist at San Francisco State University named Dean Kenyon came up with another explanation for the origin of biological information -- self-organization., in which life might have arisen through a series of chemical transformations in which more complex chemical structures arose from simpler ones. However, one of his students asked him if his model could explain the origin of the information in DNA, and Kenyon realized that it could not. Probably the most popular theory now of how life began (apart from intelligent design) focuses on RNA molecules; the premise is that RNA performed both as proteins and DNA. But there are huge problems with this theory -- RNA is easy to destroy, it makes a poor substitute for proteins, and it doesn't explain the origin of genetic information. It's no wonder that Francis Crick said, "... 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."