Signature in the Cell

Campus Report ^ | July 21, 2009 | Emily Kanyi

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Signature in the Cell

by: Emily Kanyi, August 21, 2009

Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell does not attempt to unravel the age-old mystery of the origin of life. Instead, Meyer explicitly moves from the known to the unknown and draws from historical and scientific theories that seek to explain the origin of life, including Charles Darwin’s natural selection and James Watson and Francis Crick’s “revolutionary discovery” of the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) mystery.

Based on his exploration of the science, Meyer concludes that the formation of life can be explained by the process of intricate design found in DNA information, a process that shows evidence of some form of organized activity which he argues, points towards intelligent design.

“From ancient times, observers of living organisms had noted that living things display organized structures that give the appearance of having been deliberately arranged or designed for a purpose, for example, the elegant form and protective covering of the coiled nautilus, the interdependent parts of the eye…,”writes Meyer.

According to Meyer, “information merely refers to a sequence of characters that produces some specific effect.”

The theory of intelligent design makes its argument based on “the presence of a single kind of effect, specified information, and an assessment of the ability of that competing cause to produce that effect,” he writes.

Meyer concedes that the question of the origin of life cannot be so easily explained by the mere inference of organized structure in DNA information. “And what does the presence of information in even the simplest living cell imply about life and its origins? Who or what ‘wrote’ the book of life?” he writes.

Referring to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA mystery, Meyer points out that:....

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How does one truly draw anything from the unknown?