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[This response is crossposted from Biologos.org]

No doubt it happens all the time. There must be many book reviews written by reviewers who have scarcely cracked the pages of the books they purport to review. But those who decide to write such blind reviews typically make at least some effort to acquire information about the book in question so they can describe its content accurately—if, for no other reason, than to avoid embarrassing themselves. Unfortunately, in his review of my book Signature in the Cell (titled ironically, “On Reading the Cell’s Signature”), eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala does not appear to have even made a search for the crib notes online. Indeed, from reading his review it appears that he did little more than crack the title page and table of contents—if that. As a result, his review misrepresents the thesis and topic of the book and even misstates its title.

The title of my book is not Signature of the Cell as Ayala repeatedly refers to it, but Signature in the Cell.

The thesis of the book is not that “chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms” as he claims, but instead that intelligent design can explain, and does provide the best explanation for (among many contenders, not just chance) the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell.

Further, the topic that the book addresses is not the origin of the genomes of organisms or the human genome as the balance of Professor Ayala’s critique seems to imply, but instead the origin of the first life and the mystery surrounding the origin of the information necessary to produce it.

Ayala begins his review by attempting to trivialize the argument of Signature in the Cell. But he does so by misrepresenting its thesis. According to Ayala, “The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell [sic] is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms.” He notes—as I do in the book—that all evolutionary biologists already accept that conclusion. He asks: “Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point?” But, of course, the book does not spend hundreds of pages arguing that point. In fact, it spends only 55 pages out of 613 explaining why origin-of-life researchers have—since the 1960s—almost universally come to reject the chance hypothesis. It does so, not because the central purpose of the book is to refute the chance hypothesis per se, but for several other reasons intrinsic to the actual thesis of the book.

Signature in the Cell makes a case for the design hypothesis as the best explanation for the origin of the biological information necessary to produce the first living organism. In so doing, it self-consciously employs a standard method of historical scientific reasoning, one that Darwin himself affirmed and partly pioneered in the Origin of Species. The method, variously described as the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inferring to the best explanation, necessarily requires an examination of the main competing hypotheses that scientists have proposed to explain a given event in the remote past. Following Darwin and his scientific mentor Lyell, historical scientists have understood that best explanations typically cite causes that are known from present experience to be capable, indeed uniquely capable, of producing the effect in question.

In the process of using the method of multiple competing hypotheses to develop my case for intelligent design in Signature in the Cell, I do examine the chance hypothesis for the origin of life, because it is one of the many competing hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the origin of the first life and the origin of biological information. Naturally, since chance was one of the first hypotheses proposed to explain the origin of life in the wake of the discovery of the information-bearing properties of DNA, I critique it first. Nevertheless, I go on to examine many more recent models for the origin of biological information including those that rely on physical-chemical necessity (such as current self-organizational models), and those that rely on the interplay between chance and necessity (such as the currently popular RNA world scenario). My discussion of these models takes over 90 pages and four chapters. Did Ayala just miss these chapters?

I should add that my critique of the chance hypothesis provides a foundation for assessing some of these more recent chemical evolutionary theories—theories that Ayala would presumably recognize as contenders among contemporary evolutionary biologists and which rely on chance in combination with other processes. For example, in the currently popular RNA world scenario, self-replicating RNA catalysts are posited to have first arisen as the result of random interactions between the chemical building blocks or subunits of RNA. According to advocates of this view, once such self-replicating RNA molecules had come into existence, then natural selection would have become a factor in the subsequent process of molecular evolution necessary to produce the first cell. In Signature in the Cell, however, I show that the amount of sequence-specific information necessary to produce even a supposedly simple self-replicating RNA molecule far exceeds what can be reasonably assumed to have arisen by chance alone. Indeed, my analysis of the probabilities of producing various information-rich bio-molecules is not only relevant to showing that “chance, by itself, cannot account for” the origin of genetic information, but also to showing why theories that invoke chance in combination with pre-biotic natural selection also fail.

In any case, Signature in the Cell does not just make a case against materialistic theories for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life, it also makes a positive case for intelligent design by showing that the activity of conscious and rational agents is the only known cause by which large amounts of new functional information arises, at least when starting from purely physical and chemical antecedents.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my response to Francisco Ayala.

Premier Radio UK aired a debate recorded earlier this week between Signature in the Cell author Stephen Meyer and noted Oxford University chemist and “new atheist” Peter Atkins. The debate is part of the kick off of promotion for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which arrives in the UK on DVD this month.

Both Atkins and Meyer are accomplished scholars with very different viewpoints. The at times testy back and forth between them is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

Click here to listen to the debate, which is about an hour long.

Signature in the Cell continues to stir up debate and attract attention as Thomas Nagel's selection of SITC as one of the Books of the Year brought on an interesting series of letters, where Nagel was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia.

This week, author Stephen Meyer himself responds in a letter, with a shortened version published yesterday. (Nagel himself responded with a letter that is published on the same page by TLS.) Below is Meyer'e letter in its entirety.

To the Editor

The Times Literary Supplement

Natural Selection and the Origin of Biological Information

I’ve been honored by the recent attention my book Signature in the Cell has received in your letters section following Thomas Nagel’s selection of it as one of your books of the year for 2009.

Unfortunately, the letters from Stephen Fletcher criticizing Professor Nagel for his choice give no evidence of Dr. Fletcher having read the book or any evidence of his comprehending the severity of the central problem facing chemical evolutionary theories of life’s origin.

In Signature in the Cell, I show that, in the era of modern molecular genetics, explaining the origin of the first life requires—first and foremost—explaining the origin of the information or digital code present in DNA and RNA. I also show that various theories of undirected chemical evolution—including theories of pre-biological natural selection—fail to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce the first self-replicating organism.

Yet, in his letters to the TLS (2 and 16 December), Stephen Fletcher rebukes Nagel (and by implication my book) for failing to acknowledge that “natural selection is a chemical as well as a biological process.” Fletcher further asserts that this process accounts for the origin of DNA and (presumably) the genetic information it contains.

Not only does my book address this very proposal at length, but it also demonstrates why theories of pre-biotic natural selection involving self-replicating RNA catalysts—the version of the idea that Fletcher affirms—fail to account for the origin of genetic information.

Indeed, either Dr. Fletcher is bluffing or he is himself ignorant of the many problems that this proposal faces.

Continue reading "Stephen Meyer Responds to Fletcher in Times Literary Supplement" »

Over at Evolution News & Views, Dr. Jay Richards is weighing in with his thoughts on Signature In The Cell, in response to the beginning of a series of thoughtful reviews and discussion of the book over on Scott McKnight's Jesus Creed blog at Beliefnet.

Richards responds in part:

I'm familiar with McGrath and Conway Morris's views, and think they have some merit; but I don't think they offer an alternative that Meyer fails to address. Smoothing for inconsistencies in their proposals, their idea is basically that God hard-wired or "front-loaded" everything "in the beginning" as it were to give rise to complex life somewhere, while allowing for a lot of "freedom" and variation within the cosmos. (So they're not hard determinists.)

Those who follow the debate over evolution will remember 2009 as the year Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell convincingly made a new scientific case for intelligent design. In fact, according to Doug Groothuis, "Its publication may prove to be a decisive moment for the Intelligent Design movement.

One could not ask for more in a philosophy of science treatise than what we find in The Signature in the Cell. The book is no less than magisterial, an adjective that curmudgeons such as myself seldom use. At every level--philosophical, scientific, historical and literary--it is a superb treatise.

Reading every word of its 508 pages of text (not counting end notes)--as I did--repays the reader greatly. Meyer thoroughly examines a most significant topic--how life came about--and does so in an engaging, warm, and philosophically rigorous fashion. (Few books ever do such a thing.) In fact, I have never read a book that goes so deep while remaining so welcoming to the reader. It does do by using a minimal narrative structure--there is no obtrusive autobiography here--to guide us through the issues and arguments pertaining to the nature and origin life at the genetic level. The reader is lead step-by-step into the question of the origin of biological information, and so receives a hearty education in the history of science in general and the scientific question to understand life itself. (emphasis added)

Of course, it's difficult to be objective when it seems everyone has a stake in the debate over the origin of life itself. As another reviewer observes:

Certainly in our own day such inquiries are made with apostolic fervor, both by those who adhere to science and by those who follow faith – and by that segment of every population, quieter than the first two and by far more numerous, who believe it’s possible to live in both mindsets simultaneously. These are the great and rancorous ‘God Debates’ of our beleaguered modern moment, with battle-ready contestants on both sides, writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Behe, and Kenneth Miller squaring off on TV screen and town hall stage to wrestle with eschatological questions as old as Abraham. The fool sayeth in his heart ‘there is no God’ – the wise man, apparently, sayeth it on Larry King Live.

Into this supercharged atmosphere Cambridge-educated chemist and scientific historian Stephen Meyer puts forth his own case in his new book Signature in the Cell. In its calmly-reasoned 400 pages (with an extra 100 tightly-packed endnotes), Meyer constructs the strongest argument yet made for the theory of Intelligent Design, and he does it without once advocating any living God.

Read the rest of this substantive review here.

The parallels between the CRU email scandal (aka "Climategate") and the abuse of science perpetrated by those who want to keep Darwin-skeptics out of their universities, journals, and way, are clear to those closely involved in the debate over evolution. Today Stephen Meyer explains in an article at Human Events how familiar it is to have "scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard 'peer review' process to keep skeptical views from being heard."

Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory, it sure does. For years, Darwin-doubting scientists have complained of precisely such abuses, committed by Darwin zealots in academia.

There have been parallels cases where e-mail traffic was released showing Darwinian scientists displaying the same contempt for fair play and academic openness as we see now in the climate emails. One instance involved a distinguished astrophysicist at Iowa State University, Guillermo Gonzalez, who broke ranks with colleagues in his department over the issue of intelligent design in cosmology. Released under the Iowa Open Records Act, e-mails from his fellow scientists at ISU showed how his department conspired against him, denying Dr. Gonzales tenure as retribution for his views.

To me, the most poignant correspondence emerging from CRU e-mails involves discussion about punishing a particular editor at a peer-reviewed journal who was defying the orthodox establishment by publishing skeptical research.

Salvo magazine has an excellent review of SITC in its latest issue, from science writer Heather Zeiger.

In what would be typical British understatement, Dr. Stephen Meyer calls DNA replication a “curiosity.” Here is the conundrum: DNA needs proteins to replicate, but these same proteins are encoded in DNA. So which came first? In his magnum opus, Signature in the Cell, Dr. Meyer puts on the table what went through my mind when I took my first biochemistry class: How did this closed loop get started? Whatever made the loop could not have made the first DNA molecule the same way that it is made now. And the DNA and protein interaction is just one of many closed loops in perhaps the most efficient factory ever observed—the cell.

In 500 pages, Meyer takes his readers on a journey from working as a geologist in Texas, to walking the halls of Cambridge studying the philosophy of science, to being interviewed on television for his theories on origins. The value of his book is not merely in its conclusion that intelligence best explains the source of the DNA code; it is in the process Meyer uses to bring us to this conclusion. The reader sees the scientific process firsthand.

Want to know more about the Amazon.com bestselling book that made the Times Literary Supplement's Top Books of 2009? Robert Deyes has a review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell below:

New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Scientific Naturalism
In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compelling facets of the Intelligent Design case — that of biological information in DNA. Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative.

Meyer's historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.
Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of 'turning point' historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.

Continue reading "Signature in the Cell, "A Landmark Assault on Scientific Naturalism"" »

Last week on Dec. 2nd, Dr. Meyer was on Dennis Miller's radio program to talk abouth is book. You can listen to the interview here. http://www.discovery.org/v/1671

Stephen Meyer has already made year-end lists with Signature in the Cell, an Amazon bestselling science book and one of Times Literary Supplement's books of the year for 2009, but the latest news go far beyond that: Stephen Meyer has been named World Magazine's "Daniel of the Year" for 2009:

This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year's huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.

The cover story is what should become the essential profile of Meyer, following what World's Marvin Olasky describes as "the four-stage pattern that is common among intellectual Daniels: Questioning, discernment, courage, and perseverance."

Meyer says, "You ask how someone gets the moxie to take something like this on. Part of the answer is that I didn't know any better when I was young. I was just so seized with this idea and these questions: 'Was it possible to develop a scientific case? Were we looking at evidence that could revive and resuscitate the classical argument from design, which had been understood from the time of Hume and certainly the time of Darwin to be defunct?' If that was the case, that's a major scientific revolution."

Courage becomes a determinant once we count the cost and see that it's great. Meyer's first inkling came when "talking about my ideas to people at Cambridge High Table settings, and getting that sudden social pall." But the cost was and is more than conversational ease: San Francisco State University in 1992 expelled a professor, Dean Kenyon, who espoused ID, and other job losses have come since. Meyer and other ID proponents saw "that this would be very controversial. One of the things that emboldened all of us who were in the early days of this movement was meeting each other. In 1993 we had a little private conference [with] 10 or 12 very sharp, mostly younger scientists going through top-of-the-world programs in their respective fields who were all skeptical. I think the congealing of this group gave everyone the sense that this was going to be an exciting adventure: Let's rumble."

The article, as the title indicates, is a profile in courage worth reading, particularly this bit:

Many who enter the courage stage at first think that the war in which they find themselves will end in a few years. There comes a time in many lives, though, when a hard realization sinks in: It will not be over in my lifetime. That's when some give in while others proceed to the perseverance stage. That's where Meyer is: Signature in the Cell ends with a long list of testable predictions concerning the direction of science over the next several decades. Meyer predicts that further study will reveal the importance of "junk DNA" and the reasons for what seem to be "poorly designed" structures: They will reveal either a hidden functional logic or evidence of decay from originally good designs.