In 1993, Professor Philip Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley
invited a group of scientists and philosophers to a small beach town on the
central coast of California.
They came from major academic centers, including Cambridge, Munich, and the
University of Chicago, to question an idea that had dominated science for 150 years.
I think Pajaro Dunes represented a turning point for many of us.
Individually, we all had questions about evolutionary theory.
But when we came together, each person brought something of their own to the
table.
And suddenly, we all had a glimpse of a new way of looking at life that none of us
had individually seen before.
I would have to say that this was an intense period of time in my life.
It just seemed that there was something here much more intellectually satisfying
than the view that I had held up until this time.
Looking back on it now, I think that gave me the motivation to actually look at the
evidence and just see where I thought it pointed.
I realized that this was bigger than any one person or discipline.
And this was the beginning of a community of scientists who were now willing to face
the fundamental mystery of life's origin.
I sometimes wonder why anybody talks about anything else.
Because this is the most interesting topic there is.
Where did we come from?
How did we get here?
What brought us into existence?
What is our relationship to reality as a whole?
You look at the incredible diversity and complexity of life and inevitably the
question arises, what brought all this into existence?
Was it simply chance and necessity?
Undirected natural forces?
Or is there something else going on?
Is there a purpose, a plan, a design?
A design due to an intelligent cause?
I think that is the fundamental question.
The scientists who came to Pajaro Dunes set out to re-examine the mystery of
life's origin.
For each had significant doubts about widely held evolutionary ideas.
Among them, biochemist Michael Behe questioned how natural processes could
have assembled the intricate structures found within living cells.
Dean Kenyon was an evolutionary biologist who no longer thought that chemistry alone
could account for the origin of life on Earth.
And Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and William Dembski were seeking a new approach.
One that could explain the origin of the genetic information encoded in living
organisms.
These scientists and philosophers began to formulate an alternative to the central
theory of modern biology.
A theory born in the mind of a British naturalist.
His name was Charles Darwin.
In 1831, Darwin, then 22 years old, set sail on a five-year survey expedition
for the British Empire.
He journeyed from England on the HMS Beagle, traveling around the southern tip
of South America, then north toward a chain of volcanic islands in the Pacific
called the Galapagos.
On this desolate archipelago, 600 miles off the western coast of Ecuador,
Charles Darwin encountered an extraordinary array of birds, reptiles and
mammals, the likes of which he had never seen before.
For more than a month, Darwin studied plant and animal life, took extensive
notes and collected specimens.
Then he left, never to return.
Twenty-five years passed as he developed a theory about how the diverse forms of life
on Earth had originated.
In 1859, Darwin published a book titled On the Origin of Species.
Its impact on science, and ultimately all of western culture, was dramatic.
Darwin argued that all life was the product of purely undirected natural
forces.
Time, chance, and a process he called natural selection.
For 2,500 years before Darwin, most prominent scientists and
philosophers, people such as Plato, or Newton, or Kepler, viewed the world as
the product of some kind of design or plan.
But a fundamental shift occurs with Darwin's idea of natural selection,
and a real change in scientific philosophy is set in motion.
Darwin was not the first scientist to propose a theory of evolution,
but he was the first to offer a plausible naturalistic mechanism that could produce
biological change over long periods of time.
To understand how natural selection works, consider the finch populations Darwin
encountered on the Galapagos Islands.
Thirteen species of finches inhabit the Galapagos Islands, and they vary subtly in
terms of their body size and shape of the beak.
Darwin returned to England with nine different species of these birds.
According to contemporary Darwinian theory, differences in the sizes and
shapes of the birds' beaks are the direct result of natural selection.
One example often cited involves species of seed-eating finches.
Following seasons of heavy rain, small soft seeds are plentiful throughout
the islands.
Birds with short beaks can easily gather food.
However, during periods of drought, the only seeds available are encased in
hard, tough shells that remain on the ground from the previous year.
In these circumstances, only birds with longer, sharper beaks can crack the shells
and eat the seeds.
Those birds with the longer beaks survive because they can reach the food source,
whereas other birds cannot.
That long beak, then, confers what biologists now call a functional
advantage.
The finches with smaller beaks, unfortunately, die out from starvation
because they cannot reach that food source.
If the drought conditions continue, the environment causes a change in the
features of the finch population as a whole.
Over time, the long beaks are passed on to succeeding generations because those beaks
enable the birds to survive.
Natural selection was a powerful idea.
Physical variations that proved advantageous would be inherited by
succeeding generations.
Through this process, populations would be altered, and over time, fundamentally
different organisms would arise without any form of intelligent guidance.
Darwin wanted to explain everything in the history of life in terms of undesigned,
unintelligent natural processes.
And when he looked for an explanation, what he found was that a process he could
observe in domestic populations also operates in the wild.
Now, Darwin himself was very familiar with domestic breeding.
He himself studied pigeon breeding.
And he knew that for centuries, human breeders had been able to make
dramatic changes in populations by selecting only certain individuals to
breed.
Darwin really suggested that this same process operates in the wild.
For Charles Darwin, natural selection explained the appearance of design without
a designer.
There was no longer any need to invoke an intelligent cause for the complexity of
life.
In effect, natural selection became a kind of designer substitute.
Today, Darwinism is generally assumed throughout science and the academic world.
Yet, despite its wide acceptance, a growing number of scientists and
scholars, including those who met at Pajaro Dunes, now challenge key aspects of
Darwinian theory.
When we came together at Pajaro Dunes, we certainly didn't agree on everything.
But we did share a real dissatisfaction with the mechanism of natural selection
and the role that it was playing in biological explanation.
Natural selection is a real process, and it works well for explaining certain
limited kinds of variation.
Small-scale change.
We have lots of examples of that, in fact.
Where it doesn't work well is explaining what Darwin thought it could, namely,
the real complexity of life.
We have the finch beak, and then you've got the finch itself.
A minor change in the structure of the beak versus the origin of the organism
itself.
These are different scales of phenomena.
These are different kinds of problems.
And the important problem for biology is to understand where natural selection
works and where it doesn't, and why there's a difference.
Evidence is very powerful, and all of us have the sense that if we let that
evidence speak for itself, that it would lead us in a very different direction,
away from natural selection, and towards a different conclusion about the origin and
nature of life on Earth.
Natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations.
She can never take a great and sudden leap, but must advance by short and sure,
though slow steps.
It's really interesting to notice that the more we know about life and the more we
know about biology, the more problems Darwinism has and the more design becomes
apparent.
Since 1988, Dr. Michael B.
has investigated complex biological systems that seem to defy explanation by
natural selection.
For the longest time, I believe that Darwinian evolution explains what we saw
in biology, not because I saw how it could actually explain it, but because I was
told that it did explain it.
In schools, I was taught Darwinian biology.
And through college and graduate school, I was in an atmosphere which just assumed
that Darwinian evolution explained biology.
And again, I didn't have any reason to doubt it.
It wasn't until about 10 years or more ago that I read a book called Evolution,
A Theory, and Crisis by a geneticist by the name of Michael Denton, an Australian.
And he put forward a lot of scientific arguments against Darwinian theory that I
had never heard before.
And the arguments seemed pretty convincing.
And at that point, I started to get a bit angry because I thought I was being led
down the primrose path.
Here were a number of very good arguments and I had gone through a doctoral program
in biochemistry, became a faculty member, and I had never even heard of these
things.
And so from that point on, I became very interested in the question of evolution
and since have decided that Darwinian processes are not the whole explanation
for life.
Michael Behe's skepticism derived in large measure from what modern biology has
revealed about life's most fundamental unit, the cell.
In the 19th century, when Darwin was alive, scientists thought that the basis
of life, the cell, was some simple glob of protoplasm, like a little piece of jello
or something that was not hard to explain at all.
This perception didn't really change too much until the early 1950s.
But in the last half century, our knowledge of the cell has just exploded.
Today, powerful technologies reveal elaborate microscopic worlds, worlds so
small that a thimble full of cultured liquid can contain more than 4 billion
single-cell bacteria, each packed with circuits, assembly instructions,
and miniature machines, the complexity of which Charles Darwin could never have
imagined.
At the very basis of life, where molecules and cells run the show, we've discovered
machines, literally molecular machines.
There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one end of the cell to
the other.
There are machines which capture the energy from sunlight and turn it into
usable energy.
There are as many molecular machines in the human body as there are functions that
the body has to do.
So if you think about hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling,
blood clotting, respiratory action, the immune response, all of those require
a host of machines.
When we look at these machines, we ask ourselves, where do they come from?
And the standard answer, Darwinian evolution, is very inadequate in my view.
In speaking on the topic of scientific naturalism...
During the early 1990s, at a series of academic conferences, Behe first shared
his doubts about the ability of natural selection to construct complex molecular
machines.
One machine particularly attracted his attention.
I remember the first time I looked in a biochemistry textbook and I saw a drawing
of something called a bacterial flagellum with all of its parts in all of its glory.
It had a propeller and a hook region and the drive shaft and the motor and so on.
I looked at that and I said, that's an outboard motor.
That's designed.
That's no chance assemblage of parts.
Behe's reaction was not surprising.
For the molecular motors that drive bacteria through liquid each depend upon a
system of intricately arranged mechanical parts.
These parts come into focus when portions of a cell are magnified 50,000 times.
Biochemists have used electron micrographs like this one to identify the parts and
three-dimensional structure of the flagellar motor.
In the process, they have revealed a marvel of engineering on a miniaturized
scale.
Howard Berg at Harvard has labeled it the most efficient machine in the universe.
These machines, some of them are running at 100,000 RPMs and are hardwired into a
signal transduction or sensory mechanism so that it's getting feedback from the
environment.
And even though they're spinning that fast, they can stop on a dime.
It only takes a quarter turn for them to stop and shift directions and start
spinning 100,000 RPM in the other direction.
And just like outboard motors on motorboats, it has a large number of parts
which are necessary for the motor to work.
The bacterial flagellum, two gears, forward and reverse, water-cooled,
proton motive force.
It has a stator, it has a rotor, it has a U-joint, it has a drive shaft,
it has a propeller.
And they function as these parts of machines.
It's not convenient that we give them these names.
That's truly their function.
Since its discovery, scientists have tried to understand how a rotary motor could
have arisen through natural selection.
As yet, they have failed to offer any detailed Darwinian explanation.
To see why, we must understand a feature of molecular machines known as irreducible
complexity.
Irreducible complexity was coined by Mike Behe in describing these molecular
machines.
Basically, what it says is that you have multi-component parts to any given
organelle or system in a cell, all of which are necessary for function.
That is, if you remove one part, you lose function of that system.
The idea of irreducible complexity can be illustrated by a familiar non-biological
machine.
A mousetrap.
The trap is composed of five basic pieces.
A catch to hold the bait.
A strong spring.
A thin bent rod called the hammer.
A holding bar to secure the hammer in place.
And a platform upon which the entire system is mounted.
If any one of these parts is missing or defective, the mechanism will not work.
All components of this irreducibly complex system must be present simultaneously for
the machine to perform its function.
Catching mice.
Irreducible complexity also applies to biological machines, including the
bacterial flagellar motor.
All told, there are about 40 different protein parts which are necessary for this
machine to work.
And if any of those parts are missing, then either you get a flagellum that
doesn't work because it's missing the hook or it's missing the drive shaft or
whatever, or it doesn't even get built within the cell.
In evolutionary terms, you have to be able to explain how you can build this system
gradually when there's no function until you have all those parts in place.
The irreducible complexity of molecular machines poses a severe challenge to the
power of natural selection.
According to Darwin's theory, even very complex biological structures like an eye,
an ear or a heart can be built gradually over time in small incremental steps.
Yet, as Darwin made clear, natural selection can only succeed if these random
genetic changes provide some advantage to the evolving organism in its struggle for
survival.
As I have attempted to show, it is not necessary to suppose that the
modifications are all simultaneous if they were extremely slight and gradual.
Natural selection is scrutinizing the slightest variations, rejecting those that
are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.
But could Darwin's small, favorable variations have produced a bacterial
flagellum?
Some scientists doubt the possibility.
How could something new like a bacterial flagellar motor and all the components
that go with it, how could it develop out of a population of bacteria that don't
have that system?
When each change, according to Darwin's theory, has to provide some kind of
advantage.
Imagine such a scenario early in the Earth's history.
An evolving bacterium somehow develops a tail and perhaps even the pieces necessary
to attach it to the cell wall.
Yet, without a complete motor assembly, this innovation would provide no advantage
to the cell.
Instead, the tail would lie immobile and useless, invisible to natural selection,
which by definition can only favor changes that aid survival.
The logic of natural selection is very demanding.
Unless the flagellum mechanism is completely assembled and actually works,
natural selection simply cannot preserve it.
It cannot be passed on to the next generation.
The important thing to realize about natural selection is it selects only for a
functional advantage.
In most cases, natural selection actually eliminates things, things that have no
function or that have a function that harms the organism.
So, if you had a bacterium with a tail that didn't function as a flagellum,
chances are natural selection would eliminate it.
But the only way you can select for a flagellum is if you have a flagellum that
works, and that means you have to have all the pieces of the motor in place to begin
with.
So, natural selection can't get you the bacterial flagellum.
It can only work after the flagellum is there and operating.
In 1996, Michael Behe published a book titled Darwin's Black Box.
In it, he argued that natural selection, Darwin's designer substitute, could not
explain the origin of the bacterial flagellum or any other irreducibly complex
biological system.
Instead, Behe concluded that the integrated complexity of these systems
pointed to intelligent design.
Darwin's Black Box created immediate controversy.
Over 75 publications, including some of the world's leading newspapers and
scientific journals, reviewed the book.
Some scientists praised Behe's work, while others dismissed it as unscientific
and religiously motivated.
Behe's critics also insisted that he had underestimated the power of natural
selection.
They argued that the flagellar motor could have been constructed from parts used to
build simpler molecular machines, like this needle-nose cellular pump.
If the components of the pump already existed, they could have been preserved by
natural selection even before the bacterial motor arose.
This theory is called co-option.
It's essentially saying that evolution or natural selection at some point was able
to borrow components of one molecular machine and build a new machine with some
of these components.
Scott Minnick has studied the flagellar motor for nearly 20 years.
His research has led him to challenge the co-option argument.
With a bacterial flagellum, you're talking about a machine that's got 40 structural
parts.
Yes, we find 10 of them are involved in another molecular machine, but the other
30 are unique.
So where are you going to borrow them from?
Eventually, you're going to have to account for the function of every single
part as originally having some other purpose.
So you can only follow that argument so far until you run into the problem of
you're borrowing parts from nothing.
But even if you concede that you have all the parts necessary to build one of these
machines, that's only part of the problem.
Maybe even more complex, I think more complex, is the assembly instructions.
That is never addressed by opponents of the irreducible complexity argument.
Studies of the bacterial motor have indeed revealed an even deeper level of
complexity.
For its construction not only requires specific parts, but also a precise
sequence of assembly.
You've got to make things at the right time.
You've got to make the right number of components.
You've got to assemble them in a sequential manner.
You've got to be able to tell if you've assembled it properly so that you don't
waste energy building a structure that's not going to be functional.
Building a molecular machine has been compared to the construction of a house
where workers follow a detailed blueprint and plan for assembly.
The foundation of a house is poured before the walls are erected.
Plumbing and electrical fixtures are installed prior to enclosing the walls of
the structure.
Windows must be hung before siding is applied.
And shingles are attached only after plywood sheets are nailed to the rafters.
So it is with the construction of a flagellar motor.
You build this structure from the inside out.
You are counting the number of components in a ring structure or the stator.
And once that's assembled, there's feedback that says, okay, no more of that
component now.
A rod is added.
A ring is added.
Another rod is added.
U-joints added.
Once the U-joints add a certain size and a certain degree of bend, about a quarter
turn, that's shut off.
And then you start adding components for the propeller.
These are all made in a precise sequence, just like you would build a building.
To build a motor correctly requires a complex system of machines that coordinate
the timing of the assembly instructions.
But how could natural selection construct such a system?
The co-option argument doesn't explain this.
You see, in order to construct that flagellar mechanism, or tens of thousands
of other such mechanisms in the cell, you require other machines to regulate the
assembly of these structures.
And those machines themselves require machines for their assembly.
If even one of these pieces is missing or put in the wrong place, your motor isn't
going to work.
So this apparatus to assemble the flagellar motor is itself irreducibly
complex.
In fact, what we have here is irreducible complexity all the way down.
We know a lot about the bacterial flagella.
We still have a lot to learn, but we know a lot about it.
And there's no explanation for how this complex molecular machine was ever
produced by a Darwinian mechanism.
150 years ago, scientists did not know about irreducibly complex molecular
machines.
Yet Charles Darwin anticipated the difficulty that systems such as these
could pose to his theory.
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not
possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications,
my theory would absolutely break down.
There are really two big questions in biology.
How do you get new living forms with new structures like wings and eyes from life
that already exists?
And secondly, how did life originate on Earth in the first place?
Now, of course, we know that Darwin spent most of his life formulating an answer to
the first of these two questions.
Charles Darwin compared the history of life on Earth to a great branching tree.
The base of the tree represented the very first living cell.
And the branches were new and more complex life forms that had evolved over time from
the first primitive organism.
Darwin was trying to explain how the branches on the tree of life originated.
He was trying to show how natural selection could have modified existing
organisms to produce the great diversity of plant and animal life that fills the
Earth today.
But when it came to the base of the tree, which represented the origin of the first
life, the first living cell, Darwin had very little to say.
In fact, in the origin of species, he didn't even address the question of how
life might have originated from non-living matter.
The only glimpses we have of Darwin's opinions on the subject appear in a letter
he wrote to a colleague named Joseph Hooker.
Regarding the first production of a living organism, if, and oh what a big if,
we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and
phosphoric salts, light heat and electricity present, that a protein
compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex
changes, at the present, such matter would be instantly devoured.
But this may not have been the case before living creatures were formed.
During the final years of his life, Darwin did little to develop his idea that
a primitive cell might have emerged from simple chemicals in the primordial waters
of the early Earth.
But later in the 1920s and 30s, a Russian scientist named Alexander Oparin
formulated a detailed theory about how this could have happened.
It was called chemical evolution.
Oparin thought that he could explain the origin of the first life using Darwinian
principles.
He envisioned simple chemicals combining and recombining to form larger molecules,
and then these larger molecules organizing themselves, with the help of chance
variations and natural selection, into the first primitive living cell.
Over the next three decades, many scientists worked to develop and refine
these ideas, as they pondered the questions both Oparin and Darwin had
raised.
How could life have evolved from simple chemicals?
One man thought he knew.
The problem of biological origins, for a very long time, I would say,
has been of real deep interest to me, just because of the scale of the problem,
the importance of it.
Where did we come from?
Why are we here?
All that kind of question, probed from the point of view of natural science.
During the late 1960s and throughout the 70s and early 80s, Dean Kenyon was one of
the leading chemical evolutionary theorists in the world.
And like others in his field, he was trying to explain how life on Earth began
through a purely natural process.
In 1969, Kenyon co-authored an important book on the origin of life.
Gary Steinman and myself thought that if we were to pull together all of the lines
of empirical evidence that had accumulated by the mid to late 60s in one continuous
argument, we were very enthusiastic about the possibilities for explaining the
origin of the main life-building elements.
Despite his optimism, Kenyon faced a significant problem.
To explain how life began, he first had to account for the origin of the essential
building blocks of every cell that has existed on Earth, large complex molecules
called proteins.
Proteins have a wide range of function in the cell, everything from structural
requirements in terms of scaffolding of the cell, the cytoskeleton, to enzymes,
where they're actually processing molecules to harvest energy or to build
components of the cell.
Proteins do pretty much all of the jobs inside of the cell, except for storing
genetic information.
That's left to the DNA, the RNA.
But all the day-to-day jobs, cleaning up the cell, making energy, it's all
proteins.
Kenyon knew that proteins would have been as important to the first life as they are
to living cells today.
He also recognized the complexity of their construction.
By the 1960s, scientists had determined that even simple cells are made of
thousands of different types of proteins, and the function of these molecules
derives from their highly complex three-dimensional shapes.
The irregular shapes of some proteins allow them to catalyze or trigger chemical
reactions because of the hand-and-glove fit that they have with other molecules in
the cell.
While other protein molecules form interlocking structural components.
The individual parts of a bacterial motor, like this ring structure, are each made of
either a single protein molecule or an assembly of proteins fitted together into
a specific shape.
These proteins are, in turn, made of smaller chemical units called amino acids
that are linked together in long chains.
There is a very great degree of intricacy of architecture down in the cell units in
these protein-forming amino acids.
In nature, 20 different types of amino acids are used to construct protein
chains.
Biologists have compared them to the 26 letters of the English alphabet.
Alphabetic letters can be arranged in a huge number of possible combinations.
And it's the sequential arrangement of the letters that determines whether you have
meaningful words and sentences.
If the letters are arranged correctly, you'll get meaningful text.
But if they're not arranged correctly, you'll get gibberish.
And the same principle applies for amino acids and proteins.
There are at least 30,000 distinct types of proteins, each made of a different
combination of the same 20 amino acids.
They are arranged, like letters, to form chains, often hundreds of units
long.
If the amino acids are sequenced correctly, then the chain will fold into a
functioning protein.
Proteins are arranged with their amino acids in such a way that the amino acids
collapse on each other into an architecture that is pre-programmed by the
order of the amino acids.
It folds into a certain structure, and that structure can do a certain
function.
So all proteins in the cell have a certain three-dimensional pattern that's based on
the arrangement of amino acids in the chain.
This arrangement is critical.
For if the amino acids are incorrectly sequenced, a useless chain forms,
and instead of folding into a protein, it will be destroyed in the cell.
Proteins, like written languages or computer codes, have a high degree of
specificity.
The function of the whole depends upon the precise arrangement of the individual
parts.
But what produces the precise sequencing of amino acids that gives rise to the
specific shapes and functions of proteins?
During the 1950s and 60s, discoveries about protein structure forced biologists
to confront this mystery.
Dean Kenyon believed he could solve it.
In his book Biochemical Predestination, Kenyon and his co-author Gary Steinman
proposed an intriguing theory.
Kenyon wrote, Life might have been biochemically predestined by the
properties of attraction that exist between its chemical parts, particularly
between amino acids in proteins.
At the time that Biochemical Predestination came out, I and my
co-author were totally convinced that we had the scientific explanation for
origins.
Kenyon proposed that the chemical properties of the amino acids caused them
to be attracted to each other, forming the long chains that became the
first proteins, the most important components in the living cell.
And this meant that life was effectively inevitable, predestined by nothing more
than chemistry.
Many scientists embraced Kenyon's ideas, and over the next 20 years, Biochemical
Predestination became a best-selling text on the theory of chemical evolution.
Yet five years after the book's publication, Kenyon quietly began to doubt
the plausibility of his own theory.
It was during that whole period of time that my doubts about certain aspects of
the evolutionary account became apparent.
I remember one coming into contact with a powerful counter-argument given to me by
one of my students, and I could not refute that counter-argument.
Kenyon was challenged to explain how the first proteins could have been assembled
without the help of genetic instructions.
In living cells today, chains of amino acids are not formed directly by forces of
attraction between their parts, the scenario Kenyon envisioned on the
early Earth.
Instead, another large molecule within the cell stores instructions for sequencing
the amino acids in proteins.
It is called DNA.
Initially, Kenyon believed that proteins could have formed directly from amino
acids, without any DNA assembly instructions.
And that's why so many scientists were excited about his theory.
But the more he and others learned about the properties of amino acids and
proteins, the more he began to doubt that proteins could self-assemble without DNA.
In DNA, Kenyon encountered a molecule with a property he could not explain through
natural processes.
For locked securely within its double helix structure is a wealth of information
in the form of precisely sequenced chemicals that scientists represent with
the letters A, C, T and G.
In a written language, information is communicated by a precise arrangement of
letters.
In the same way, the instructions necessary to assemble amino acids into
proteins are conveyed by the sequences of chemicals arranged along the spine of the
DNA.
This chemical code has been called the language of life, and it is the most
densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known
universe.
Like other scientists working on the origin of life, Kenyon realized he had two
choices.
Either he had to explain where these genetic assembly instructions came from,
or he had to explain how proteins could have arisen directly from amino acids
without DNA in the primordial oceans.
And in the end, he realized he could do neither.
It's an enormous problem how you could get together in one tiny submicroscopic volume
of the primitive ocean all of the hundreds of different molecular components you
would need in order for a self-replicating cycle to be established.
And so my doubts about whether amino acids could order themselves into meaningful
biological sequences on their own without pre-existing genetic material being
present just reached, I guess for me, the intellectual breaking point sometime
near the end of the decade of the 70s.
As Kenyon re-evaluated his theory, new biochemical discoveries further
weakened his conviction that amino acids could have organized themselves into
proteins.
The more I conducted my own studies, including a period of time at NASA Ames
Research Center, the more it became apparent that there were multiple
difficulties with the chemical evolution account.
And further experimental work showed that amino acids do not have the ability to
order themselves into any biologically meaningful sequences.
Faced with mounting difficulties in his own theory and a growing body of
scientific data about the importance of DNA, Kenyon was forced to confront the
absolute necessity of genetic information.
The more I thought about the alternative that was being presented in the criticism
and the enormous problem that all of us who worked on this field had neglected to
address, the problem of the origin of genetic information itself, then I really
had to reassess my whole position regarding origins.
For Dean Kenyon, a new question became the focus of his search for life's origin.
What was the source of the biological information in DNA?
If one could get at the origin of the messages, the encoded messages within the
living machinery, then you would really be on to something far more intellectually
satisfying than this chemical evolution theory.
Yet Kenyon realized that he faced a narrowing set of options.
By the 1970s, most researchers had rejected the idea that the information
necessary to build the first cell originated by chance alone.
To understand why, consider the difficulty of generating just two lines of
Shakespeare's play Hamlet by dropping Scrabble letters onto a tabletop.
Then consider that the specific genetic instructions required to build the
proteins in even the simplest one-celled organism would fill hundreds of pages of
printed text.
Of course, serious origin of life biologists did not believe that life had
arisen by chance alone.
Instead, they envisioned natural selection acting on random variations among
chemicals to produce the first life.
But there was a problem with this proposal.
By definition, natural selection could not have functioned before the existence of
the first living cell.
For it can only act upon organisms capable of replicating themselves.
Cells equipped with DNA that pass on their genetic changes to future generations.
Without DNA, there is no self-replication.
But without self-replication, there is no natural selection.
So you can't use natural selection to explain the origin of DNA without assuming
the existence of the very thing you are trying to explain.
Chance, natural selection and his own theory of self-organization had all failed
to explain the origin of genetic information.
Now Kenyon saw only one alternative.
We have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the
simplest of cells.
So the concept of the intelligent design of life was immensely attractive to me and
made a great deal of sense.
As it very closely matched the multiple discoveries in molecular biology.
In the years since Kenyon's rejection of chemical evolution, science has revealed
the details of an entire system of information processing that bears the
hallmarks of intelligent design.
With computer animation, we can enter the cell to view this remarkable system at
work.
After entering the heart of the cell, we see the tightly wound strands of DNA,
storehouses for the instructions necessary to build every protein in an organism.
In a process known as transcription, a molecular machine first unwinds a
section of the DNA helix to expose the genetic instructions needed to assemble a
specific protein molecule.
Another machine then copies these instructions to form a molecule known as
messenger RNA.
When transcription is complete, the slender RNA strand carries the genetic
information through the nuclear pore complex.
The gatekeeper for traffic in and out of the cell nucleus.
The messenger RNA strand is directed to a two-part molecular factory called a
ribosome.
After attaching itself securely, the process of translation begins.
Inside the ribosome, a molecular assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain
of amino acids.
These amino acids are transported from other parts of the cell and then linked
into chains often hundreds of units long.
Their sequential arrangement determines the type of protein manufactured.
When the chain is finished, it is moved from the ribosome to a barrel-shaped
machine that helps fold it into the precise shape critical to its function.
After the chain is folded into a protein, it is then released and shepherded by
another molecular machine to the exact location where it is needed.
This is absolutely mind-boggling to perceive at this scale of size such a
finely tuned apparatus, a device that bears the marks of intelligent design and
manufacture.
And we have the details of an immensely complex molecular realm of genetic
information processing.
And it's exactly this new realm of molecular genetics where we see the most
compelling evidence of design on the Earth.
When I look at molecular machines, or the incredibly complex process by which
cells divide, I want to ask, is it possible that these things had an
intelligence behind them, that there was a plan or a purpose to this structure?
Science ought to be a search for the truth about the world.
Now, we shouldn't prejudge what might be true.
We shouldn't say, I don't like that explanation, so I'm going to put it to one
side.
Rather, when we come to a puzzle in nature, we ought to bring to that puzzle
every possible cause that might explain it.
One of the problems I have with evolutionary theory is that it
artificially rules out a kind of cause even before the evidence has a chance to
speak.
And the cause that's ruled out is intelligence.
Since the late 19th century, since the time of Darwin, in fact, in part because
of Darwin's writing in The Origin of Species, scientists came to accept a
convention, a definition of science, that excluded the possibility of design as
a scientific explanation.
And that convention has a name.
It's called methodological naturalism.
And it just means that if you're going to be scientific, you must limit yourself to
explanations that invoke only natural causes.
You can't invoke intelligence as a cause.
And yet, curiously, we make inferences to intelligence all the time.
It's part of our ordinary reasoning to recognize the effects of intelligence.
Consider, for example, these hieroglyphic messages carved upon the ruins of Egyptian
monuments.
No one would attribute the shapes and arrangements of these symbols to natural
causes, like sandstorms or erosion.
Instead, we recognize them as the work of ancient scribes, intelligent human agents.
Similar reasoning leads us to conclude that the mysterious stone figures on the
shores of Easter Island were not formed by the actions of wind and water over great
periods of time.
Nor do we presume that plants could grow into these familiar shapes without some
manner of intelligent guidance.
Of course, we make these inferences all the time, and we know they're correct.
But the question is, on what basis do we make these inferences?
What are the features that enable us to recognize intelligence?
Recently, in a book titled The Design Inference, mathematician William Dembski
has made an important breakthrough in understanding design reasoning.
Dembski has identified the specific features of artifacts that cause us to
recognize prior intelligent activity.
I came to this by trying to look at how do we reason about design?
What are the logical moves that we have to go through in order to come to a
conclusion of design?
So what I'm trying to do is to establish reliable, empirical, scientifically
rigorous criteria for deciding whether something is in fact designed.
So I was looking at the logic of it, and what I found was you need
improbability and you need specification, the right sort of pattern, these objective
patterns.
According to Dembski, human beings correctly detect the activity of
intelligence whenever they observe a highly improbable object or event that
also matches a recognizable pattern.
Just such a pattern is found in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
If you travel through the West, you'll see lots of different shapes on
mountainsides.
Most of which mean nothing at all.
They're just rocks strewn in various patterns.
But what you don't see are the faces of Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt,
and George Washington on mountainsides.
The only place you see that is in South Dakota.
And the reason it's there is because a sculptor, an eccentric sculptor,
decided that he wanted to honor these presidents by spending the larger part of
his life chiseling their faces in the side of that mountain.
That pattern is improbable.
A random hillside is also improbable, but a random hillside doesn't specify
anything.
We do know, though, that there were four guys who were presidents of the United
States who had particular patterns with their faces.
And those patterns on the mountainside in South Dakota match faces elsewhere.
If I look up and see the faces, I immediately recognize that they match
the faces of the four presidents that are known from money or portraits at the
National Gallery or paintings in books.
And so I realize when I look at Mount Rushmore, we have not only a highly
improbable configuration of rock, but one which matches an independently
given pattern that reliably indicates intelligence.
So we have a small probability, specification, it's design.
On a seashore, another improbable pattern etched into the earth illustrates how we
detect design.
No one would infer that this message was written by the movement of the tides.
Instead, because of the characteristics of this pattern, we identify the words as the
products of intelligence.
That improbable arrangement also conforms to an independently given pattern,
namely the shapes of the letters that we recognize from English alphabet and the
words that we know from English vocabulary.
And so it's the improbability of the arrangement, plus the fact that it
conforms to an independently given pattern that triggers the awareness of design.
This illustration suggests that William Dembski's criteria for design detection,
small probability and specification, are essentially equivalent to information.
The type of information present not only in pictures, written texts and numeric
sequences, but also encoded in software and radio signals.
The ability to detect information in electromagnetic transmissions has made
possible a unique search for intelligence.
For more than three decades, astronomers involved in SETI, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, have monitored radio signals from outer
space in an attempt to find information-rich patterns.
Typically, radio telescopes receive either random noise or simple repetitive signals
produced naturally by stars, galaxies and other celestial objects.
But astronomers recognize that if they ever identified an information-bearing
signal, it would confirm the existence of intelligent life beyond the Earth.
Some have speculated that an extraterrestrial civilization might have
attempted to communicate by transmitting messages in the universal language of
mathematics, perhaps through a recognizable pattern like a series of
prime numbers.
You're not going to get that by chance.
So you need complexity or improbability, lots of prime numbers, and you also need a
pattern.
And it has to be the right sort of pattern.
It's not a pattern that you're imposing.
It's a pattern that's there objectively.
To date, SETI research has failed to detect any pattern or information that
would indicate intelligence in a distant galaxy.
But in another universe, much closer to home, scientists have discovered a wealth
of information within the nucleus of the living cell.
DNA has a structure that is ideal for carrying information in the A's,
T's, C's and G's, which is the basis of the double helix of DNA, is the potential
for storing a tremendous amount of information.
There is, in fact, no entity in the known universe that stores and processes more
information, more efficiently, than the DNA molecule.
A full complement of human DNA has three billion individual characters.
Analysis of the DNA molecule's coding regions show that its chemical characters
have a specific arrangement that allows them to convey detailed instructions or
information, much like letters in a meaningful sentence or binary digits in a
computer code.
Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a computer program, only much more complex
than any we've been able to devise.
And if you reflect on that, even for a minute, it's a highly suggestive
observation, because we know that Bill Gates does not employ wind and erosion or
random number generators to generate his software.
Instead, he employs intelligent engineers, software engineers.
And so, everything we know in our experience suggests that information-rich
systems arise from intelligent design.
But what do we make of the fact that there is information in life, in every living
cell of every living organism?
That's the fundamental mystery.
Where does that information come from?
For the past 15 years, philosopher and scientist Stephen Meyer has worked to
answer this question.
Meyer has developed an argument to demonstrate that intelligent design
provides the best explanation for the origin of information necessary to build
the first living cell.
It's part of our knowledge base that intelligent agents can produce
information-rich systems.
So, the argument is not based on what we don't know, but it's based on what we do
know about the cause and effect structure of the world.
We know at present there is no naturalistic explanation, no natural cause
that produces information.
Not natural selection, not self-organizational processes,
not pure chance.
But we do know of a cause which is capable of producing information, and that is
intelligence.
So, when people infer design from the presence of information and DNA,
they're effectively making what's called in the historical sciences an inference to
the best explanation.
So, when we find an information-rich system in the cell, in the DNA molecule
specifically, we can infer that an intelligence played a role in the origin
of that system, even if we weren't there to observe the system coming into
existence.
Meyer's work on the origin of genetic information is now part of a comprehensive
scientific case for design that grew out of a meeting of scientists and
philosophers on the central coast of California in 1993.
Their objective was to reassess an idea that had dominated biology for more than a
century.
In the process, they gave birth to a theory that has become known as
intelligent design.
To me, the great promise of design is it gives us a new tool and explanation that
belongs in the toolkit of science.
Intelligent causes are real, they leave evidence of their existence, and a healthy
science is a science that seeks the truth and lets the evidence speak for itself.
The argument for intelligent design is based on observation of the facts.
Now, that's my definition of good science.
It's observation of the facts.
Now, when you observe the facts, as Michael Behe has done, what do you
observe?
You observe this incredible pattern of interrelated complexity.
And the way we conclude intelligent design for the bacterial flagellum is the same
way we conclude intelligent design for an outboard motor.
When we see an outboard motor, we see the way the parts interact and so
on.
We know somebody made that.
The reasoning is the same for biological machines.
So, the idea of intelligent design is a completely scientific one.
Certainly, it might have religious implications, but it does not depend on
religious premises.
When I look at the evidence objectively, without ruling out the possibility of
design, design just leaps up as the most likely explanation.
And that's why I believe that it's true.
I think design is back on the table.
We can't explain these systems by natural law.
And if we're searching for truth, and they are in fact designed,
if we have to be design engineers to understand them, then I say, what's the
problem?
You go where the data leads you.
And the implications, yeah, they have profound metaphysical implications,
but so be it.
So, it's a powerful idea that the universe is rational and comprehensible,
underwritten by a supreme intelligence that meant for this world to be understood
is something that underwrites then the program of science, because then you can
go out and look at the world and the world will make sense.
If it's all just a chaotic assemblage, there's no reason to expect any
rationality out there.
But if it in fact is the product of a mind, then you can go out and science
becomes this enormous, wonderful, puzzle-solving project in which you can
expect to find rationality and beauty and comprehensibility right at the foundation
of things.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin transformed science with
his theory of natural selection.
Today, that theory faces a formidable challenge.
Intelligent design has sparked both discovery and intense debate over the
origin of life on Earth.
And for a growing number of scientists, it represents a paradigm, an idea with the
power to, once again, redefine the foundations of scientific thought.
During the 19th century, scientists believed that there were two fundamental
entities, matter and energy.
But as we enter the 21st century, there's a third fundamental entity that
science has had to recognize, and that is information.
And so as we encounter the biology of the information age, the suspicion is growing
that what we're seeing in the DNA molecule is actually an artifact of mind,
an artifact of intelligence, something that can only be explained by intelligent design.