“In his “Socrates in the City” talk in Washington last week, Steve Meyer asked: “Is there a scientific controversy about the theory of evolution?” After quoting many spokesmen for official science who deny the existence of any such controversy, or any reason to doubt evolutionary theory whatsoever, Meyer showed that there are significant reasons to doubt both biological and chemical evolutionary theory.
He first addressed the problems associated with chemical evolutionary theory, which “attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler pre-existing chemicals.” Here he explained the critical question of the origin of genetic information. This is the problem he addressed in his bookSignature in the Cell, a problem that has beset all attempts to explain the origin of life by reference to undirected chemical evolutionary processes.
The most important idea for laymen to grasp is that of biological information. It’s difficult to understand “exactly what information is,” Meyer has written. It’s not a physical thing. He quotes the evolutionary biologist George Williams as saying that information “doesn’t have mass or charge or length,” and matter “doesn’t have bytes.” It follows that matter and information belong to “two separate domains.”
Information in biology is best understood as analogous to software code. Recall Bill Gates’s comment: “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”
Software is a set of instructions for a new program in a computer. Likewise, DNA contains a set of instructions for the assembly of parts, namely proteins, within a cell. In the 19th century the cell was thought to be simple. Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex it was. The cell today is sometimes compared to a high-tech factory. (Except it’s much more complex than that — factories can’t replicate themselves.)
Here is the key question: How did the requisite information get into the DNA in the first place? Without it, the first cell would never have been…” (
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Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow
