Here is the introduction to this amazing book
by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer
“Dad, that’s you!” my fourteen-year-old son exclaimed as he looked at the newspaper while we
stood waiting to check out at the tiny general store. His shock at seeing my face in the front section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, when he just went to look for baseball scores, was no doubt compounded by his awareness of our location.1 The general store on Shaw Island, one of the most remote in the San Juan chain north of Puget Sound, was the only commercial establishment on the island. This irony was not lost on my wife, whose raised eyebrow said it all. “I thought we were coming here to get away from all of this.” We were. But then how was I to know that the local Seattle paper would rerun the previous day’s front-page story from the New York Times about the program of scientists I directed and the controversy surrounding our work?
The controversy about the origin of life and whether it arose from an undirected material process or from some kind of designing intelligence is not new. It goes back in Western civilization at least as far as the ancient Greeks, who produced philosophers representing both schools of thought. But the controversy over the contemporary theory of intelligent design (ID) and its implied challenge to orthodox evolutionary theory became big news beginning in 2004 and 2005. And, for better or worse, I found myself right in the middle of it.
Three events sparked intense media interest in the subject. First, in August 2004, a technical journal housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., called the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published the first peer-reviewed article explicitly advancing the theory of intelligent design in a mainstream scientific periodical. After the publication of the article, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History erupted in internal controversy, as scientists angry with the editor—an evolutionary biologist with two earned Ph.D.’s—questioned his editorial judgment and demanded his censure. Soon the controversy spilled over into the scientific press as news stories about the article and editor’s decision appeared in Science, Nature, The Scientist, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The media exposure fueled further embarrassment at the Smithsonian, resulting in a second wave of recriminations. The editor, Richard Sternberg, lost his office and his access to scientific samples and was later transferred to a hostile supervisor. After Sternberg’s case was investigated by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a government watchdog organization, and by the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform, a congressional committee, other questionable actions came to light.4 Both investigations found that senior administrators at the museum had interrogated Sternberg’s colleagues about Sternberg’s religious and political beliefs and fomented a misinformation campaign designed to damage his scientific reputation and encourage his resignation. Sternberg did not resign his research appointment, but he was eventually demoted.
As word of his mistreatment spread, the popular press began to run stories about his case.
Ordinarily, my reaction to such reports might have been to shake my head in dismay and
move on to the next story in the news cycle. But in this case, I couldn’t. As it happened, I
was the author of the offending article. And some of the reporters interested in
Sternberg’s mistreatment were coming to me with questions. They wanted to know more
about the theory of intelligent design and why it had provoked such alarm among
establishment scientists.
Then in December 2004, two other events generated worldwide interest in the theory of
intelligent design. First, a renowned British philosopher, Antony Flew, announced that he
had repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism, citing, among other factors, evidence
of intelligent design in the DNA molecule.6
Flew noted in his announcement that his
views about the origin of life bore a striking resemblance to those of “American design
theorists.” Again, intelligent design was in the news. But what was it? This time I found
myself on the BBC debating a prominent evolutionary biologist about the theory.
Later in the month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced a suit against
a school board in the western Pennsylvania town of Dover. The school board had just
announced its intention to let high school students learn about the theory of intelligent
design. To do this, it proposed to inform students about the existence of a book in the
school library—one that made the case for intelligent design in opposition to the standard
evolutionary theories presented in the existing biology textbooks. When the ACLU
announced its own intentions to sue, the national media descended upon the town en
masse.
The press corps covering the story no doubt already knew about the 1925 Scopes
“monkey trial” from the fictionalized Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, if from no
other source. In Dover they sensed they had the makings of a sequel. During 2005, all the
major American network and cable news programs ran segments about the theory of
intelligent design, the Dover controversy, or both. Stories not only appeared in major
U.S. newspapers, but in papers around the world, from the Times of London, Sekai Nippo
(Tokyo), the Times of India, and Der Spiegel to the Jerusalem Post.
Then in August 2005, just as an end to the media buzz seemed near, a number of political
and religious leaders—including figures as diverse as the Dalai Lama, President George
W. Bush, and the pope—made public statements supportive of either intelligent design or
allowing students to learn about the controversy surrounding it. When Time magazine
followed suit with a cover story about the controversy, our phones started ringing all over
again.
As summer was drawing to an end, my wife and I decided it was time for our family to
get away after friends offered us the use of their island cabin. But in the two-week period
corresponding to our vacation, the New York Times ran its two front-page stories about
our program at the Discovery Institute, the Washington Post broke a story about the latest
developments in the Sternberg case, and the New York Times editorial page offered criticism of Sternberg in its main staff-written editorial.7 After Sternberg decided to
appear on The O’Reilly Factor to tell his side of the story, we knew it was time to head
back to Seattle.
My temporary notoriety provided something my colleagues and I sorely needed—a
platform for correcting much of the misinformation circulating about the theory of
intelligent design. Many news articles and reports confused intelligent design with
biblical creationism and its literal reading of the book of Genesis. Other articles echoed
the talking points of our critics and portrayed our work as either “giving up on science”
or a sneaky attempt to circumvent the legal prohibitions against teaching creationism in
the public schools that the Supreme Court had enacted in 1987.
Yet I knew that the modern theory of intelligent design was not developed as a legal
strategy, still less as one to abet creationism. Instead, it was first considered in the late
1970s and early 1980s by a group of scientists—Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and
Roger Olsen—as a possible explanation for an enduring mystery of modern biology: the
origin of the digital information encoded along the spine of the DNA molecule.
As I explained repeatedly to reporters and cable-news hosts, the theory of intelligent
design is not based on a religious text or document, even if it does have implications that
support theistic belief (a point to which I will return in Chapter 20). Instead, intelligent
design is an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins that challenges strictly
materialistic views of evolution.
Indeed, the theory of intelligent design challenges a specific tenet of contemporary
evolutionary theory. According to modern neo-Darwinists such as Oxford’s Richard
Dawkins, living systems “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
But, to Dawkins and other contemporary Darwinists, that appearance of design is entirely
illusory, because wholly undirected processes such as natural selection and random
mutations can produce the intricate design–like structures in living systems. In their view,
natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without being guided
or directed in any way.
In contrast, the theory of intelligent design holds that there are tell-tale features of living
systems and the universe that are best explained by an intelligent cause—that is, by the
conscious choice of a rational agent—rather than by an undirected process. Either life
arose as the result of purely undirected processes, or a guiding intelligence played a role.
Advocates of intelligent design argue for the latter option based on evidence from the
natural world. The theory does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over
time or even common ancestry, but it does dispute the Darwinian idea that the cause of
all biological change is wholly blind and undirected. Even so, the theory is not based on
biblical doctrine. Intelligent design is an inference from scientific evidence, not a
deduction from religious authority.
Despite the opportunity, I had been given in the media to clarify our position, my
experiences left me with a sense of unfinished business. By 2005, I had devoted nearly
twenty years of my life to developing a case for intelligent design based upon the
discovery of the information-bearing properties—the digital code—stored in the DNA
molecule. I had written a series of scientific and philosophical articles developing this
idea, but these articles were neither particularly accessible nor gathered into one
volume. Now I repeatedly found myself in the position of having to defend an argument
in sound bites that my audience did not know well enough to evaluate. How could they?
Perhaps the central argument for intelligent design, the one that first induced me to
consider the hypothesis, had not been explained adequately to a general, scientifically
literate audience.
Of course, by 2005 many excellent books and articles—including several important
peer-reviewed books—had already been published on different aspects of the theory of
intelligent design. In 1996, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe made a detailed
case for intelligent design based upon the discovery of nanotechnology in cells—such as
the now famous bacterial flagellar motor with its thirty-part rotary engine. Behe’s
Darwin’s Black Box sold over a quarter of a million copies and almost single-handedly
put the idea of intelligent design on the cultural and scientific map. In 1998, William
Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher with two Ph.D.’s (including one from the
University of Chicago), followed suit by publishing a groundbreaking work on methods
of design detection. Dembski’s work, The Design Inference, published by Cambridge
University Press, established a scientific method for distinguishing the effects of
intelligence from the effects of undirected natural processes. His work established
rigorous indicators of intelligent design, but did not make any specific argument for
intelligent design based on the presence of these indicators in living organisms.
These were seminal works, but I had become convinced of intelligent design by another
route. Over the years, I began to develop a related, but largely independent, case for
intelligent design. Unfortunately I had a penchant for writing long, dense essays in
obscure journals and anthologies. Even my article in the Proceedings of the Biological
Society of Washington attracted more attention because of the controversy at the
Smithsonian than because of controversy over the argument itself, though there had been
more than a bit of that in some scientific circles.
In any case, when the national media came calling, I simply could not get them to report
why I thought DNA pointed to intelligent design. Reporters refused to cover the
argument in their articles or backgrounders; debate partners scrupulously avoided
responding to it, but instead continued to recite their talking points about the dangers of
“intelligent design creationism.” Even the judge in the Dover case decided the scientific
validity of intelligent design without considering the DNA evidence.
Though I wasn’t too keen on having federal judges decide the merit of any scientific
argument, let alone one that I favored, the Dover trial and its associated media coverage
made me aware that I needed to make my argument in a more prominent way. Many evolutionary biologists had acknowledged that they could not explain the origin of the
first life. Leading theories failed in large measure because they could not explain where
the mysterious information present in the cell came from. So it seemed there were no
good counterarguments to the case I wanted to make. Yet various avoidance strategies
continued to work because the argument did not have sufficient public prominence to
force a response. Too few people in the public, the scientific community, and the media
even knew about it. And yet it provided—arguably—one of the most important and
fundamental reasons for considering intelligent design.
None of this was actually too surprising. Since World War II, scientists have stressed the
importance of publishing their work in specialized peer-reviewed journals, but
throughout the history of science “paradigm-shifting” ideas and theories have typically
been presented in books, including many that we might now call “trade press” (rather
than academic) books.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, books allow scientists to make sustained and
comprehensive arguments for synthetic new ideas. As the Italian philosopher of science
Marcello Pera has shown, scientists often argue about competing interpretations of the
evidence. Although this is sometimes done successfully in short articles—as Einstein
did in making his case for special and general relativity and Watson and Crick did in their
nine-hundred-word article proposing a double helix structure for DNA—books have
often been the go-to genre for presenting and evaluating new arguments for synthetic
interpretations of a relevant body of evidence.
Perhaps, the best-known example of this form of scientific discourse was provided by
Charles Darwin himself, who famously described his work in On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Section as “one long argument.”13 There, Darwin proposed a
comprehensive interpretation of many diverse lines of evidence. He also argued for the
superior explanatory power of his theory and its two key propositions: (1) the creative
power of natural selection and, (2) the descent of all life from a common ancestor. As
part of his case, he also argued against the explanatory adequacy of rival interpretations
of the evidence and refuted arguments for them. Other scientists such as Newton,
Copernicus, Galileo, and Lyell as well as a host of lesser figures have used books to
advance scientific arguments in favor of novel and comprehensive interpretations of the
scientific evidence in their disciplines.
There are other reasons that books are used to advance paradigm-shifting ideas. New
scientific theories often synthesize a broad range of evidence from many related
disciplines or subdisciplines of science. As such, they are often inherently
interdisciplinary in scope. On the Origin of Species incorporated data from several
disciplines, including embryology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, and
biogeography. Modern scientific journals, typically focused as they are on topics within a
narrowly defined subdiscipline, rarely permit the kind of comprehensive review and
assessment of evidence that the advancement of a new interpretive framework requires.
Additionally, by creating a larger audience for a new idea, a book, and particularly a
popular trade book, can go over the heads of an entrenched establishment to force the
reevaluation of an established theory by creating wider interest in its standing. Darwin
did this by publishing On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection with John
Murray, a prominent trade press in Victorian England. Michael Behe has done this as
well. By making a case for intelligent design based upon various examples of
nanotechnology in the cell, Behe’s book focused international attention on the problem
that complex systems have posed for neo-Darwinism. It also gave the theory of intelligent
design public and, arguably, scientific standing.
This book makes a case for that same idea. It does so, however, on the basis of a different
class of evidence: the information—the digital code—stored in DNA and the other large
biological molecules. The case I make for intelligent design is less well known than
Professor Behe’s and, therefore, to many completely new. Even so, it is not based upon a
new discovery. It is, instead, based upon one of the most famous breakthroughs of
modern biology: the discovery in 1953 of the information-bearing capacities of the DNA
molecule, what I call the “signature in the cell.”
In 2005, when I was repeatedly placed in the position of defending the theory of
intelligent design in the media, the argument that I most wanted to make in its favor had
little public standing. I have written this book to remedy that deficiency. This book
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.
Before coming to work full-time at the Discovery Institute, I worked for twelve years as a
college professor. In teaching I’ve found that it is often easier to understand a scientific
theory if one can follow the historical progression of thought that led to its formulation.
Following a story of discovery is not only more engaging, it can also illuminate the
process of reasoning by which investigators came to their conclusions. For this reason,
I’ve chosen to present my case for intelligent design in the context of a larger historical
and personal narrative.
Thus, Signature in the Cell does not just make an argument; it also tells a story, a mystery
story and the story of my engagement with it. It tells about the mystery that has
surrounded the discovery of the digital code in DNA and how that discovery has
confounded repeated attempts to explain the origin of the first life on earth. Throughout
the book I will call this mystery “the DNA enigma.”
