Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
~Stephen C. Meyer
Hardback, 624 pages, 2009
Suggested Donation:
$25.00 (includes USPS Media Mail shipping to addresses in US only)
$35.00 (includes international air shipping to all foreign addresses)


In Signature in the Cell, philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer shows how the digital code in DNA points powerfully to a designing intelligence behind the origin of life. Unlike previous arguments for intelligent design, Signature in the Cell presents a radical and comprehensive new case, revealing the evidence not merely of individual features of biological complexity but rather of a fundamental constituent of the universe: information. That evidence has been mounting exponentially in recent years, known to scientists in specialized fields but largely hidden from public view. A Cambridge University-trained theorist and researcher, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, Dr. Meyer is the first to bring the relevant data together into a powerful demonstration of the intelligence that stands outside nature and directs the path life has taken.

The universe is comprised of matter, energy, and the information that gives order to matter and energy, thereby bringing life into being. In the cell, information is carried by DNA, which functions like a software program. The signature in the cell is that of the master programmer of life.
In his theory of evolution, Charles Darwin never sought to unravel the mystery of where biological information comes from. For him, the origins of life remained shrouded in impenetrable obscurity. While the digital code in DNA first came to light in the 1950s, it wasn't until later that scientists began to sense the implications behind the exquisitely complex technical system for processing and storing information in the cell. The cell does what any advanced computer operating system can do but with almost inconceivably greater suppleness and efficiency.
Drawing on data from many scientific fields, Stephen Meyer formulates a rigorous argument employing the same method of inferential reasoning that Darwin used. In a thrilling narrative with elements of a detective story as well as a personal quest for truth, Meyer illuminates the mystery that surrounds the origins of DNA. He demonstrates that previous scientific efforts to explain the origins of biological information have all failed, and argues convincingly for intelligent design as the best explanation of life's beginning. In final chapters, he defends ID theory against a range of objections and shows how intelligent design offers fruitful approaches for future scientific research.
Appearing in this year of Darwin anniversaries--Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species--Signature in the Cell could only have been written now that the data of biology's dawning information age has started to come in. Meyer shares with readers the excitement of the most recent discoveries, as the digital technology at work in the cell has been progressively revealed. The operating system embedded in the genome includes nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval and storage systems. It is very extraordinary--the terminology is all recognizable from computer science.
Author:

Stephen C. Meyer
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer is the director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which has considerable reach into the religious market. Meyer set off a firestorm of media and political attention when the Smithsonian Institution published his pro-Intelligent Design paper in its scientific journal in 2005. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin of life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. Previously he worked as a geophysicist with the Atlantic Richfield Company after earning his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Geology. Meyer has been featured on national television and radio programs such as The Jim Lehrer News Hour, CBS Sunday Morning, NBC Nightly News, ABC Nightly News, Good Morning America, Nightline, Paula Zahn Now (CNN), Topic A with Tina Brown (CNN), Weekend Live with Tony Snow (FOX), The Big Story with John Gibson (FOX), Fox TV News with David Asman, The Tavis Smiley Show (PBS) and others. He has also been the subject of two front pages stories in the New York Times and has garnered attention in other top national print.

Reviews:
In this engaging narrative, Meyer demonstrates what I as a chemist have long suspected: undirected chemical processes cannot produce the exquisite complexity of the living cell. Meyer also shows something else: there is compelling positive evidence for intelligent design in the digital code stored in the cell?s DNA. A decisive case based upon breathtaking and cutting-edge science.
--Dr. Philip S. Skell, National Academy of Sciences and Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, emeritus
In Signature in the Cell, 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.
--Dr. Scott Turner, Environmental and Forest Biology, State
University of New York, and author of The Tinkerer's Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself
Meyer demolishes the materialist superstition at the core of evolutionary biology by exposing its Achilles' heel: its utter blindness to the origins of information. With the recognition that cells function as fast as supercomputers and as fruitfully as so many factories, the case for a mindless cosmos collapses. His refutation of Richard Dawkins will have all the dogs barking and angels singing.

--George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty and Telecosm
This is a "must read" for all serious students of the origin-of-life debate. Not only is it a comprehensive defense of the theory of intelligent design, it is a lucid and rigorous exposition of the various dimensions of the scientific method. Students of chemistry and biology at all levels--high school, undergraduate, or postgraduate--will find much to challenge their thinking in this book.
--Alastair Noble, Ph.D. chemistry, former BBC Education Officer and Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools for Science, Scotland
The origin of life remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern science. Looking beyond the biochemistry of the problem and focusing instead on the origin and information content of the "code of life," Meyer has written an eminently readable and engaging account of the quest to solve this mystery. Sharing both his personal history and a retelling of the key scientific discoveries of the last half century from this new and intriguing perspective, he has challenged us to consider an alternative to the standard story of abiogenesis and discover new meaning from our existence. I recommend this book to laypeople and accomplished professionals alike.
--Edward Peltzer, Ph.D., Ocean Chemistry, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
How does an intelligent person become a proponent of intelligent design? Anyone who stereotypes IDers as antiscientific ideologues or fundamentalists should read Dr. Meyer's compelling intellectual memoir. Meyer as a student became fascinated with the 'DNA enigma'--how the information to produce life originated--and at considerable risk to his career hasn't given up trying to solve the mystery. Meyer shows how step-by-step he concluded that intelligent design is the most likely explanation of how the DNA code came to be, but he's open to new evidence--and in so doing he challenges defenders of undirected evolution to have the courage to explore new alternatives as well.
--Dr. Marvin Olasky, provost, The King?s College, New York City, and editor-in-chief, World

Signature in the Cell is 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 provides the best explanation for that fact. In his own modest and accessible way, Meyer has provided no less than a blueprint for twenty-first-century biological science--one that decisively shifts the discipline's center of gravity from nineteenth-century Darwinian preoccupations with fossils and field studies to the computerized, lab-based molecular genetics that underwrites the increasingly technological turn in the life sciences. After this book, readers will wonder whether anything more than sentimentality lies behind the continued association of Darwin?s name with 'modern biology.'
--Dr. Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology of Science, University of Warwick, and author of Dissent from Descent
The astonishing complexities of DNA have raised questions which the ruling scientific orthodoxy cannot begin to answer. As one of the scientists arguing for 'intelligent design' as the crucial missing link in our understanding of how life came to be, Steve Meyer guides us lucidly through that labyrinth of questions opened by discoveries in molecular biology on the frontier of scientific knowledge.
--Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph
The most substantial of the many outstanding enigmas in our understanding of biology is to explain the source of the genetic information strung out along the Double Helix and how it gives rise to the near infinite diversity of form and attribute of the living world. Dr Meyer's evaluation of the many contending theories in the light of the most recent scientific advances is comprehensive and dispassionate. While his interpretation of the arguments in favour of Intelligent Design may not persuade all, this is a fascinating and intellectually stimulating book.
--Dr. James Le Fanu, author of Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves
Stephen Meyer shows with brilliant clarity that biological systems contain information whose origin cannot be explained by purely physical forces. He explains the crucial difference between the order within a complex system and the information needed to specify the functions of a complex system. Many engineers have always known that hierarchical systems do not evolve from the bottom-up by chance. Now Meyer has explained why hierarchical biological systems cannot evolve from the bottom-up by chance mutations.

--Dr. Stuart Burgess, Professor of Design & Nature, Dept of Mechanical Engineering, Bristol University
This timely and important book is a landmark in the intelligent design debate and one which draws together all relevant research and information. It is elegantly written in a style that is accessible and laced with interesting historical and personal anecdotes. "Signature in the Cell" will pay rich dividends to everyone who turns its pages.
--Dr. Norman C. Nevin, OBE, BSc, MD, FFPH, FRCPath, FRCP (Edin), FRCP
Emeritus Professor in Medical Genetics, Queen's University, Belfast
Signature in the Cell delivers a superb overview of the surprising and exciting developments that led to our modern understanding of DNA, and its role in cells. Meyer tells the story in a most engaging way. He retained my interest through many areas that would normally have turned me off. He is careful to credit new ideas and discoveries to their originators, even when he disagrees with the uses to which they have been put. The central idea of the book is that the best explanation of the information coded in DNA is that it resulted from intelligent design. Meyer has marshaled a formidable array of evidence from fields as diverse as biochemistry, philosophy and information theory. He deals fairly and thoroughly with even the most controversial aspects and has made a compelling case for his conclusion. The book is a delightful read which will bring enlightenment and enjoyment to every open minded reader.
--Dr. John C. Walton, School of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews

Post details: Flawed Engineering And The Junk 'Junkies': Exploring The Tenets Of Imperfect Design
06/16/09
By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

"'Orchids are Rube Goldberg machines; a perfect engineer would certainly have come up with something better'". So spoke the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould who attributed the blunderings of nature to the limited powers of evolution (Ref 1). Richard Dawkins rode Gould's coattails with his own favorite contraption- the laryngeal nerve: "It starts in the head, goes down into the chest, loops round the aorta, then goes straight back into the head again. In a giraffe this detour must be wasteful indeed" (Ref 1).

Proponents of the 'imperfect design' argument state that an intelligent designer should have been able to construct living forms that were both free of flaws and optimal in their design (Ref 2). These same proponents use their own menagerie of apparent imperfections in the way that biological systems are organized to buttress their position against the existence of such a designer (Ref 2). Accompanying such a position is a blatant lack of objective reasoning. Why? Because we cannot assume that living forms are imperfect simply because their designs are different from those which we personally would have chosen (Ref 2). Moreover, the imperfect design premise overlooks the trade-offs that are often necessary to ensure the better design of a larger system (Ref 3). Philosopher Stephen Meyer hammered home this salient point several years ago in an interview with writer and former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune Lee Strobel. According to Meyer:

"Engineers know all designs require optimizing a whole suite of parameters, and so tradeoffs are inevitable to create the best overall result...One illustration that's sometimes given is the laptop...You could look at the screen and say, 'Bad design; it should have been bigger'. You could look at the memory and say, 'Bad design; should have had more capacity'. You could look at the keyboard and say, 'Bad design; should have been easier to use'. But the engineer isn't supposed to be creating the best screen, the best memory, and the best keyboard- he's supposed to be producing the best computer he can given certain size, weight, price, and portability requirements. Could the screen be bigger? Yes, but then portability suffers. Could the computer have more memory? Sure, but then the cost goes too high." (Ref 3)

Darwin of course developed his own flavor of the imperfect design argument by dedicating an entire section of the Origin Of Species to the apparent 'rudiments' of nature (Ref 4). He proposed that, through natural selection, anatomical structures that were in some way 'injurious' or of no use to the survival of an organism would over time diminish in size (Ref 4). Darwin challenged the special creationist viewpoint of the day which maintained that rudimentary organs had been created to "complete the scheme of nature" (Ref 4). Evolutionists today are quick to claim that the human anatomy is abounding in features that exhibit no apparent utility - little toes, ear muscles and male facial hair to name a few favorites. Just like Darwin they relegate these same features to nothing more than vestiges of a former state (Ref 5). Of course in so doing the burden of proof lies with evolutionists, who must demonstrate unequivocally an absence of function- a task that, as biophysicist Cornelius Hunter has argued, is practically impossible to fulfill:

"It is difficult to show that a particular organ lacks value. Whether we are talking about an organ that is thought to contribute little to overall fitness or one thought to be inefficient, our failure to find positive value does not imply that it is nonexistent. One cannot conclude something does not exist unless one has looked in all possible places at all possible times. In fact, the claim that an organ is vestigial [rudimentary] can only be rejected. When we find that the organ makes a positive contribution to fitness, then we disprove the vestigial claim, but it is practically impossible to prove the claim by failing to find such a contribution. It is not surprising that the history of vestigial organs involves shrinking lists." (Ref 6, p.32)

Discussions on functionality as relates to DNA only serve to demonstrate the underlying principle that just because a component of a system is not operationally essential for the system to function does not mean that it is operationally functionless. A study headed by Barbara Knowles from the Jackson Laboratory revealed just how small pieces of DNA called transposons can generate novel messenger RNAs that regulate oocyte and embryonic development (Ref 7). Transposons are fascinating to the molecular biologist for the simple reason that they occupy about 30% of the entire human genome (Ref 7). Historically transposons have been thought of by some as harmful parasites- 'junk' DNA that served no purpose other than to hitch an evolutionary ride through the eons (Ref 7).

Knowles' work was built on the pioneering discoveries of Barbara McClintock who in the 1950s determined that transposons could regulate genes in maize (Ref 7). In all, such efforts have put the 'junk' hypothesis in its place, revealing novel regulatory functions for stretches of DNA that were previously considered to be of little benefit. Intergenic DNA has also been shown to play a part in protecting chromosomes and might serve a role in genome expansion (Ref 8). That is not to say that certain DNA sequences are not dispensable. Indeed Lawrence Berkeley's Edward Rubin has shown that mice missing about 1% of their genome suffered no ill effects of health (Ref 9). Yet simply because large chunks of DNA can be removed from a genome, does not mean that they serve no function.

As a colleague recently reminded me, one would probably not notice if pianist Jacques Loussier missed a note in his glorification of Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' or if Placido Domingo forgot a couple of words in his rendition of Verdi's 'Il Trovatore'. But one would almost certainly notice if Herbert von Karajan had left out a few baton strokes while conducting the accompanying orchestral scores for both these pieces. Still, we cannot ascribe an unnecessary or trivial role to Loussier's omitted notes or Domingo's forgotten words simply because their function does not stare us in the face. Both still play an important part in assuring artistic quality.

We can conclude that much of the so called 'science' of evolutionary theory is based not on cogent arguments but on personal philosophies that exclude design on the basis of methodological boundaries that need not exist.

Literature Cited

1. Richard Dawkins (2003), A Devil's Chaplain, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, UK, p.192

2. Michael J Behe (1996), Darwin's Black Box- The Biochemical Challenges to Evolution, 1st Edition Published by Simon and Schuster, New York, pp. 222-225

3. Lee Strobel (2004), The Case For A Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Towards God, Zondervan Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, pp. 87-88

4. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York, pp. 601-609

5. Jocelyn Selim (2004), Useless Body Parts, Discover Magazine, June 2004, Volume 25, Number 6, pp. 42-45

6. Cornelius Hunter (2001), Darwin's God, Evolution and the Problem of Evil, Brazos Press, A division of Baker Book House Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan

7. Anne E. Peaston, Alexei V. Evsikov, Joel H. Graber, Wilhelmine N. de Vries, Andrea E. Holbrook, Davor Solter, and Barbara B. Knowles (2004), Retrotransposons Regulate Host Genes in Mouse Oocytes and Preimplantation Embryos, Developmental Cell, Volume 7, pp. 597â606

8. Alfredo Flores (2009), Junk DNA Proves To Be Highly Valuable, Seehttp://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2009/090602.htm

9. Roxanne Khamsi (2004), Mice do fine without 'junk DNA', Nature News, 20th October, 2004, Seehttp://www.nature.com/news/2004/041020/full/news041018-7.html

But it sounds like the argument goes, 'it can't be intelligently designed because looking at this thing here: it makes absolutely no sense.'

If that's what the argument is saying, then the very same thing applies to many human designs as well. It's not always (if even often) that the best designs gain dominance in the consumer market.

Some examples:

Beta VCR's made a whole lot more sense than the VHS system which came to dominate the market. VHS was always a disaster waiting to happen.

The old 1940's television broadcast protocol should never have been used for color. It's got to be one of the finikiest systems possible, relying on perfect timing, phase relationship and artificial reconstruction of missing ingredients. It's still being used in analog televisions. Any objective outsider looking at the system would shake his head in wonderment and ask, "Why the HECK did they ever design such a ridiculous system?!?"

The old 2 cylinder steam locomotives produced the same equivalent power as an 8 cylinder internal combustion engine! They could because they had no intake, compression or exhaust strokes. Thus, they produced a power stroke on each half revolution on both sides of the piston. Where the internal combustion engine is (normally) 4 stroke, the steam engine was half stroke. Utilizing modern technology, a new steam engine could drastically improve efficiency and fuel economy but it's not being done. This makes no sense but ......... it's by design!~

Just because something doesn't make sense doesn't mean it wasn't designed that way.

-Vince

You're not missing anything. That is the argument and it does not hold water. In terms of life, maybe designing isn't that easy?

As well, I don't see so much direct design, as conditions designed to allow for life to arise and change.

---

If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.
~ Gensha, Zen Master

That's what we get in "real" life. We evolve and keep building on the old, outdated antiquated base. Eventually, we DO drop the old altogether but it takes ages sometimes. Too much is invested in the old systems to throw them out.

(and speaking of dependencies ......... THAT is something to look for when observing something which doesn't make any sense. Is there ANY tiny reason why something seemingly foolish, is still "allowed" to remain? Does anything else depend on it?)

-Vince