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Vade,

Two men become stranded on a remote island. As they explore the island they come upon a sandcastle with towers, buttresses and a drawbridge. The design of the castle is amazingly intricate.

One man comments, "It is amazing what time and the ocean can create. The small rocks and seashells on the shore must have got caught in eddies and swirled around and chisled out that castle. There were a few palm leaves floating by to scribed out the little lines that look like bricks. We are alone and there is no need to consider anything else."

The other man looks at him incredulously and says, "No, that castle was engineered by another intelligent being, we are not alone."

"But to my mind, the most memorable moment in these last few weeks of genetic astonishments came during an interview with computer scientist Gene Myers at the Maryland headquarters of Celera Genomics, just a few days before the genome maps were made public.

'We're deliciously complex at the molecular level,' Myers said, gesturing with his fork. 'We don't understand ourselves yet, which is cool. There's still a metaphysical, magical element.'

Myers was the guy who put together Celera's genome map. Celera's sequencing machines had broken the 3 billion chemical letters in a strand of DNA into millions of fragments, each a few hundred letters each. 'What really astounds me is the architecture of life,' he said. 'The system is extremely complex. It's like it was designed.'

My ears perked up.

Designed? Doesn't that imply a designer, an intelligence, something more than the fortuitous bumping together of chemicals in the primordial slime?

Myers thought before he replied. 'There's a huge intelligence there. I don't see that as being unscientific. Others may, but not me.'"