Signature In The Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design [Paperback]

 

 

Create your own review

The reviews by mcewin "mac" (St. Johns) and C. Finnigan (Saskatoon) should be removed as they are not reviews of the book, but are comments made by predjudices towards the beliefs of the author and other scientists of similar beliefs. They offer absolutely no insite into the content of the book. After reading from the book samples, I find these people to be uncredible biased reviewers.

There is indeed scientific meathod to the model and discussion in this book and is worth reading for insite into this theory.

The mentioned reviewers' predjudices (which are hate crimes) are evident in the following quotes from their reviews...

----------
By McEwin:
"Amazon would be better off reclassifying this under Religion, where it belongs.

PS. Thank the reviewers who save you from the Lake of Meyer."

By C. Finnigan:
"No need for the magical sky fairies."
------------

I have voted for them to be removed, and anyone who beleives in an open scientific exchange of information and discussion should vote for their removal too.

To have a clearer idea of the content of this book, I strongly recommend reading the impartial article of Thomas Nagel in The Times Literaty Supplement of November 27, 2009, who has chosen this book as one of his two best books of the year. Quoting Nagel about the subject of this book: "(it) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter...before the process of biological evolution could begin."

The year 2009 marked the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. This caused a lot of reflection about the legacy of Darwin, about what his greatest contribution is thought to be. Although the theory of evolution leaps to mind, many scholars believe that Darwin's legacy is not so much his theory per se but the consequences of his theory: that by providing a completely materialistic account of biological history he refuted the classical argument from design, the idea that nature bears witness to a designing intelligence. Richard Dawkins echoes this sentiment in his book The Blind Watchmaker: "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." The operative word here is "appearance" because it is thought that unguided material processes can counterfeit the appearance of design, that design is in fact illusory.

It is a legitimate question to ask, was Darwin right? Can every appearance of design in biology be accounted for by undirected material processes? With these questions in mind, Stephen Meyer turns his attention to an area of biology that Darwin left unaddressed, and that is the origin of the first life. What was once thought to be a fairly straightforward question in Darwin's day and for almost a century thereafter turned out to be something entirely different with a discovery made by Francis Crick in 1957. Four years after discovering, along with James Watson, the structure of the DNA molecule, Crick formulated his "sequence hypothesis." This was the realization that the four chemical bases along the spine of the DNA molecule functioned just like alphabetical characters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code.

DNA, then, is the carrier of vast amounts of complex specified information. Where did this information come from? To answer this question Meyer utilized the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin used, and that is one of multiple competing hypotheses. You compare different possible causal explanations to try to explain a given effect or event in the remote past. You evaluate them to see which cause best explains the evidence and then you infer that cause which provides the best explanation. What constitutes the best explanation? According to Darwin it was the one that referred to a cause which is known from our uniform and repeated experience to produce the effect in question. And according to Darwin's scientific mentor, Charles Lyell, the famous geologist, we should be looking for causes now in operation.

Now, an obvious cause of information-rich sequences is intelligence. That is not controversial. Computer programs are designed by programmers, and the similarity between DNA and computer software is uncanny, so certainly here we have a strong appearance of design. We know that intelligence has the causal power to produce information. But perhaps unguided material processes are actually a better explanation for the origin of information in living things. To answer this question Meyer devotes a lengthy part of the book to review the history of chemical evolution, the attempts to explain how life came from non-life, using only unguided material processes. These fall into the categories of chance, necessity, or some combination of the two. After his lengthy survey he concludes that none are satisfactory, and that even Richard Dawkins, "not known for rhetorical restraint in support of evolutionary orthodoxy, candidly admitted in 2008 that 'no one knows' how life arose in the first place" (p.333).

Thus Meyer concludes that, using Darwin's own method, if you look at all the competing classes of causal explanations that have been proposed to explain the origin of information, that intelligent design is the best explanation. Neither chance, law-like necessity, nor the combination of the two have demonstrated the power to produce information. But intelligent agents have repeatedly done so. Now, this principle is conceded by scientists in other fields such as those in the SETI project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. If they were to find information embedded in a radio signal coming from outer space, they would assume it was coming from an intelligence. In any other realm of experience (eg. archeology, forensics, cryptography) when we find the hallmarks of information we readily infer design.

That is the essence of the argument at the first-order level, the level of evidence and reasoning to a conclusion. But with intelligent design the debate is also at the second-order level. This is the level of discussion where the nature of science, knowledge, and rationality are at issue. Frequently it is hard to get to the first-order questions of evidence because people get hung up on the second-order issues. So Meyer devotes the last portion of the book addressing these questions, ones like is intelligent design science? He argues that, since the early 1980's, philosophers of science have rejected demarcation criteria that have been used to distinguish science from pseudo-science because any given demarcation criteria, whether it is observability, explains by natural law, or what have you, if it is applied too stringently it ends up excluding not only intelligent design but also areas that are already accepted as part of science.

Meyer makes the interesting point that insisting that intelligent design is not science merely reclassifies it; it does nothing to answer the question of whether it might be true. We know that both natural and intelligent (or agent) causes are interwoven in our everyday experiences, and we can distinguish between them. How do we know from the outset that only natural causes played a part in the history of biology? Is science to be the search for truth, or merely the search for the best naturalistic explanation?

Those who are willing to concede that design might in principle be empirically detectable, but who nevertheless think that intelligent design is a dead end for science would do well to read this section of the book. Meyer gives a whole host of research questions that are suggested by a design paradigm, some of which are already being pursued. For example, Jonathan Wells has suggested that centrioles, tiny structures involved in cell division, are actually tiny molecular machines, turbines, which possibly malfunction when the abnormal cell division of cancer occurs. This is not a question that occurs to those operating in a evolutionary paradigm, who think of cancer as arising exclusively from mutations in the DNA (p.487).

Meyer lists other testable predictions that intelligent design makes that can be compared to those made by evolutionary science. For example, until fairly recently it was thought that the preponderance of "junk DNA" in the genome was evidence not of design but of undirected evolutionary processes. Design theorists back in the early 1990's, however, predicted that most of this "junk DNA" would in fact turn out to serve useful functions, and that is precisely what we are seeing with recent discoveries.

Design was properly a part of biology prior to 1859. It is ironic that, as Darwin's one long argument in the Origin seemed to render this idea irrelevant except to the eyes of faith, now Stephen Meyer, by using Darwin's own method of argumentation, has made design once again a necessary explanatory concept in the natural world.

For those interested in a summary of Meyer's argument but who get bogged down in this long book, I would recommend a one-hour lecture he gives, entitled "DNA by Design", available on DVD from Access Research Network.

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 5 customer reviews on Amazon.ca

 

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Food for Thought
This is a very thorough review of the historical thinking about the origin of life and how this has shifted from a creationist perspective down through the ages to a purely... Read more

Published on April 5 2010 by J. Bromley

1.0 out of 5 stars No science here.
Useless. Once big argument from ignorance. Just because we don't know doesn't mean we'll never find out. No need for the magical sky fairies.

Published on Dec 17 2009 by C. Finnigan

Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

› See all 5 customer reviews on Amazon.ca

Search Listmania!