These two elements, the abstract cipher component based architecture of the cell’s
encased in the sequence of DNA bases and information-processing system, along with its
the contrastingly palpable and quirkily
shaped proteins of cellular machinery are,
roughly, the beginning and end points of
what is called gene expression. And, it was
the explication of gene expression in the
1960’s that formally confirmed Crick’s
hypothesis that the sequencing of DNA bases
contained information content. But how was
this information originally supplied? It is the
origin of biological information that is the
pivotal question of SITC.
Dr. Meyer paves the way with a riveting
discussion of gene expression, which he
depicts as an intricate process that relies on
interdependent components that transcribe,
transport and interpret encoded information.
In a chapter titled “The Molecular
Labyrinth,” Meyer takes us on a factory tour
of cellular machinery that describes the chain
of interactions that results in a working
protein. Dizzyingly, it is working proteins
from which this machinery itself is
constructed. This theme of closed loops is
recurring in SITC. Indeed, when Meyer
discusses computer-assisted design and
manufacturing and its congruence with gene
expression, he remarks: “The cell’s
information-processing system is strikingly
similar to CAD-CAM technology, though it
differs...in at least one important respect: the
cell’s information-processing system not only
produces machines, it also reproduces itself.”
His argument focuses unwaveringly on the
origin of first life, leaving the question of the
origin of species to others. As he lays out his
case, Meyer defines some of the daunting
puzzles that origin of life researchers must
solve. He insists they must determine the
origin of three things: (1) the system for
storing and encoding digital information in
the cell, (2) the specific information content
stored in the nucleotide sequences and (3) the
TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010
intrinsic interdependence.
SITC chronicles attempts to solve the DNA
enigma and its evident intransigence, quoting
sundry expressions of futility by origin of life
researchers, molecular biologists and
philosophers of science including Phil Sci
luminary Karl Popper: “What makes the
origin of life and the genetic code a
disturbing riddle is this: the code cannot be
translated except by using certain products of
its translation.”
Meyer illustrates the intuitive appeal of the
intelligent design hypothesis and hints at the
formal methods of historical science with an
inspired bit of parallel reasoning drawn from
NASA’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence
(SETI). This quest, he notes, “presupposes
that any information embedded in electro-
magnetic signals coming from space would
indicate an intelligent source.” He continues:
As yet, radio astronomers have not
found any such information-bearing
signals. But closer to home, molecular
biologists have identified information-
rich sequences and systems in the cell,
suggesting, by the same logic, the past
existence of an intelligent cause for
those effects.
A Cambridge educated philosopher of
science with a background as a working
geophysicist, Meyer outlines a distinct form
of scientific inquiry, applied to cases in which
there are singular causes and effects, that is
used in such disciplines as geology,
archeology, paleontology and evolutionary
biology. Historical science invokes a
detective-like, multi-pronged approach,
marked by “abductive” reasoning: a forensic
method that reasons backward from available
clues to their possible causes. Meyer avers
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 that the historical method is not unbounded
or ungoverned by empirical evidence, offering
that one of the key tests for any historical
hypothesis is the test of causal adequacy. This
rests on a process of comparing the
explanatory power of competing hypotheses,
starting from the uniformitarian premise that
the laws of nature now in effect have
operated always and everywhere in the
universe. In the modern parlance of historical
science, this is called “inference to the best
explanation” (IBE).
Meyer argues that we know, from our
uniform experience of cause and effect, only
one kind of cause for the type of faces we see
on Mt. Rushmore; similarly we know of only
one kind of cause for the sort of digital code
we see in the DNA molecule. Bill Gates has
remarked that DNA is like a software
program—only much more complex than any
we’ve ever written. (This is quite a
pronouncement from the man who has
overseen the various incarnations of the ultra
high footprint Windows operating system
and the similarly gargantuan Microsoft
Office suite.) Coded information, whether it
comes from a radio signal, a hieroglyphic
inscription or a computer program, is known
to come from an intelligent source. The
information found in DNA accordingly
points back to an intelligent source. This is
the core argument in SITC.
SITC describes Meyer’s personal story, in
which he is first struck by the intuitive
rightness of a necessary nexus between
intelligence and coded information. It seemed
compelling that the mapping of an
arrangement of DNA bases to a separate and
remote arrangement of amino acids should be
the product of planning. It should be possible
to formulate a scientific argument to this
effect, Meyer reasoned, “because it might be
true.” He set out to develop a scientific case
for ID in the manner of Darwin and his
mentor, influential geologist Charles Lyell,
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hearkening back to Darwin’s own doctrine of
vera causa. This principle rules out exotic
causes to explain past events and seeks causes
that are known to produce the effects that are
under scrutiny. It is the key logical device that
supports Darwin’s crucial inference that the
principles of controlled micro-evolution
observed in the breeding of animals
(“variation under domestication”) were
transferable to speciation occurring over the
eons. Vera causa echoes Lyell’s notion of
“causes now in operation,” a key tenet of
historical science. The phrase is immortalized
in Lyell’s seminal Principles of Geology, which
Darwin read when not overcome with
seasickness during the Beagle voyage.
In an “aha” moment Meyer asked himself
“what is the cause now in operation that
produces digital or alphabetic code?” This
yields the answer that there’s just one—
intelligence. To generalize the principle of an
effect pointing to a single cause, Meyer
enlists mid twentieth century philosopher of
science, Michael Scriven to sketch out an
investigative framework:
“According to Scriven, in order to
establish a causal claim, the historical
scientist needs:
1. ‘evidence that his [proposed cause]
was present’...2. evidence that ‘it has on
other occasions clearly demonstrated its
capacity to produce an effect of the sort
here under study’...3. [to establish] an
‘absence of evidence (despite a thorough
search)...of...other possible causes.’”
Item one, the causal existence criterion, is
dicey. So, how do historical scientists establish
the existence of a past cause? The key,
according to Meyer, is uniqueness. First, the
historical scientist examines the historical
event to identify a defining effect. Consider
this example:
TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010
 There is a geological formation close to
Meyer’s home in Washington State, an ash
layer in the eastern part of the state. This ash
layer is a defining feature of an unexplained
historical event—the origin of the geo-
formation. It happens that there is a lone
known cause of such an ash layer, a volcanic
eruption. So, abductive reasoning leads to the
provisional belief that a volcanic eruption is
the best explanation. Other causes are
considered but rejected as causally inadequate
because each fails, as a cause now in operation,
to produce the target effect. Earthquakes, for
example, produce many interesting effects
but, as a cause now in operation, they do not
produce ash layers.
So, here we go: if a proposed cause is known
to be the unique cause of a target effect then
it is assumed to have been present prior to the
historical event that exemplifies this effect.
And, if there is no single effect pointing to a
lone cause? Well, then this same logic is
extended to an ensemble of effects, a “wider
class of facts,” that converge on a single cause.
Meyer supplies a homespun illustration of
this variant: a wet driveway could arise from a
variety of causes but a wet driveway, upon
which rests a wet car, accompanied by dry
surroundings, under cloudless skies with a
nearby bucket of soapy water and sponge is a
wider class of facts that points to a single
cause...
Ironically, perhaps, it is this very category of
scientific reasoning that has buttressed neo-
Darwinism. Stephen Jay Gould, the iconic
Harvard paleontologist and polymath of the
last century, has defended evolutionary
biology from attacks that challenge its
testability by invoking it as an exemplar of a
class of scientific enquiry whose theories are
tested by evaluating their explanatory power,
and not necessarily by controlled laboratory
experiments.
TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010
A key cog in Meyer’s long argument is the
scarcity of something called specified
complexity, an idea with its roots in
information theory and the brainchild of
mathematician William Dembski. This can
be defined briefly as an irregular
arrangement of meaningful information such
as the character string “TIME AND TIDE
WAIT FOR NO MAN,” which is
composed of 23 letters augmented with
judicious spacing. When we look at such a
character string, we do not believe that it
resulted from spilling a bag of well-
scrambled Scrabble letters. When analyzed
by Dembski, this judgment actually derives
from an intuitive grasp of the compound
effect of the low probability of any particular
arrangement of 23 letters plus the specified
complexity of this arrangement that
conforms to the rules of an English sentence.
Meyer asserts that, apart from human
artifacts such as “paintings, signs, written
text, spoken language, ancient hieroglyphics,
integrated circuits, machine codes, computer
hardware and software,” specified complexity
is not found in the natural world, beyond
negligible quantities, other than in biological
molecules of DNA, RNA and proteins.
Meyer submits that the quantity of specified
complexity in the DNA molecule
overwhelms the chance opportunities of the
universe—its “probabilistic resources.” He
weighs the causal adequacy of the chance
hypothesis, as a diligent historical scientist
will do, and finds that the opportunity for
even a single working protein to be
synthesized by chance is vanishingly small,
based on computations that include such
mind-numbing factors as the number of
elementary particles in the observable
universe (10^80), the number of seconds
since the big bang (10^16 ), a unit of
distance known as the Planck length (10^-33
centimeters), and so forth. Meyer makes a
sobering case to the ever hopeful gambler
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 who believes that eventually, he will win.
“Eventually” has its limits.
Interspersed with what might otherwise be
dry mathematical and statistical discussions,
and throughout these pages, Meyer
illustrates a core assortment of probability
and pattern recognition topics with
homespun, fun and accessible stories and
thought experiments. These smooth the way
as these same concepts are applied to the
problem at hand. Meyer skillfully images
burly men alerted by not-to-be-believed runs
at the roulette wheel, coin flipping games,
criminal justice punishments of deceptive
mathematical cruelty, an amusing plagiarism
episode taken from real life and a stable of
characters including Slick, the ever sunny
gambling man.
With engaging whimsy, he ingeniously
adduces The Cat in the Hat as a metaphor
for the displacement of one problem by
another in a kind of continuing regress in
which each highly improbable arrangement
is explained by another. Readers will recall
Dr. Seuss’s immortal sequel, The Cat in the
Hat Comes Back, in which our eponymous
hero must triumph over the tenacious pink
bathtub ring, the pink stuff that spreads from
one household item to another as the Cat
gamely concocts successive ploys to restore
order before the parents return.
The target of this conceit is various theories,
computer simulations and laboratory
experiments conceived to explain bio-
molecular activity as the product of
undirected processes. Meyer’s critiques of
these rival theories note two persistent
trends: (1) proposed solutions “solved” the
problem of specified information by using
other unexplained sources of information,
and (2) simulations produced seemingly
significant results by targeting desirable
outcomes, i.e., relying on human intelligence.
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Most prominent among the first is what is
known as “RNA World.” This is a set of
theories that share the proposition that the
first molecules imbued with information
occur midstream in the gene expression
scenario, viz., in the RNA molecules that
have various downstream functions. The
appeal of RNA World is that it seems to
circumvent the interdependency between the
enzymatic functions of modern proteins and
the information-storage function of modern
DNA by positing that primitive RNA
molecules did a little of both. But Meyer’s
critique of RNA World effectively conveys
that RNA advocates are just pushing the
pink stuff around: “every attempt to leapfrog
the sequencing problem by starting with
supposedly ‘information generating’ RNA
replicators has only shifted the problem to
the specific sequences that would be needed
to make such replicators functional.”
The second trend, the elephant in the room
of simulation experiments, is the role of
intelligence, human intelligence, in efforts to
simulate bio-molecular natural selection on
the prebiotic earth. Early examples of such
attempts were computer programs by
Richard Dawkins and Bernd-Olaf Küppers
who invoked the curiously transparent device
of setting a target character string, an
English phrase such as “four score and seven
years ago,” as a proxy for a target biological
molecule, and gravitating toward a match of
the target string. The software sifted
through a crop of (pseudo) random strings,
of the same length as the target, and favored
those that most closely resembled it, in
iterative fashion. This has produced apparent
success and, Meyer argues, we should expect
no less since the game is rigged. He proffers
that Darwinian natural selection is not
present in a prebiotic world and, in any case,
is not aware of targets; he avers that the
Dawkins-Küppers experiment withers under
scrutiny. Meyer provides a clear and
TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010
 convincing expression of the weakness of all
such attempts through recounting remarks of
a software engineer of his acquaintance:
There is absolutely nothing surprising
about the results of these algorithms.
The computer is programmed from the
outset to converge on the solution. The
programmer designed the code to do
that. What would be surprising is if the
program didn’t converge on the
solution. That would reflect badly on
the skill of the programmer. Everything
interesting in the output of the program
came as a result of the programmer’s
skill—the information input. There are
no mysterious outputs.
In the end, Meyer ruminates on the false
choice between religion and science that has
permeated Western culture for some time. He
acknowledges, without reserve, that ID has
metaphysical implications and that he is a
Christian believer. But, Meyer takes decided
umbrage, as a professional scientist, at the
slings of pigeonholing critics and proponents
of metaphysical naturalism (a religion itself,
no?) impugning ID’s formulations as
fundamentally religious. He presents the
common sense view that it cannot be a source
of alarm or scientifically discrediting that ID
has metaphysical implications since it, not
surprisingly,
“addresses a major philosophical question
that most religious and metaphysical systems
of thought also address, namely, ‘What
caused life and/or the universe to come into
existence?’ Thus, like its materialistic
counterparts, the theory of intelligent design
inevitably raises questions about the ultimate
or prime reality. …Scientific theories must be
evaluated on the basis of the evidence, not on
TELICOM XXIII.1 – First Quarter 2010
the basis of philosophical preferences or
concerns about implications.”
Staying on point, Meyer offers another
example of a scientific theory with
metaphysical implications, the big-bang
theory, to which “scientists with materialistic
philosophical leanings” were initially hostile
because of its implication of a universe with a
temporal beginning, an idea with a distinctly
theistic tinge.
Dr. Meyer gives us appendices that, while
fittingly apart from the narrative flow, are at
the crux of the debate. Appendix A concerns
predictions of intelligent design, some of
which can “help adjudicate proposals that
invoke either intelligent causes or
materialistic mechanisms.” Appendix B gives
a fair hearing to the possibility of a
“multiverse,” an unlimited number of parallel
universes, as a logical device to extend—to
infinity—the probabilistic resources available
to the various chance hypotheses.
His long argument is encyclopedic yet lively
and persuades that science is at an impasse in
explaining the origin of life as the product of
undirected processes. The work overall,
technical at times, is directed to the general
reader. The scientifically trained reader must
decide whether a popular work is “trying to
pull a fast one,” preferably guided by criteria
that are consistently and dispassionately
applied across historical sciences. The
author’s passion for his argument is palpable
but scrupulously controlled; he is ever
mindful that it is the target of scornful
attacks by opponents who are, to put it gently,
not disinterested. Meyer delivers his
argument in the manner of a dish best served
cold, yet forcibly enough to shake the base of
the materialistic paradigm.
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