Dr. Stephen Meyer is director and senior fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. After completing undergraduate degrees in physics and geology and working in the oil industry, he went to Cambridge in 1986 to pursue a degree in the philosophy of science. Fascinated with the question of how life began and the possibility of intelligent design, Meyer embarked on a journey to find the answer. His book, Signature in the Cell, is the story of that journey.
1. Darwinism has been around for 150 years. How has the theory affected our culture?
Darwin, along with Marx and Freud, other 19th century thinkers, provided the basis of a comprehensive materialistic worldview. Many people associate materialism with spending sprees, supermalls and the slogan, "he who dies with the most toys, wins," but materialism is more than a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. It is also a philosophy that treats the material world as the whole of reality. Materialism asserts that matter and energy, not God, are the things from which everything else comes. As the late Stephen J. Gould put it, "Matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity."
This materialistic worldview made belief in God seem less plausible to educated people; it also changed our conception of human nature. The materialistic conception of human nature ultimately infected almost every area of Western thought and culture, from politics and law to literature and personal mores. Materialists denied objective moral standards, claiming that the right and wrong evolved to suit societal needs and personal preferences. As Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson put it in The Evolution of Ethics: "Morality ... is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends … Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes." Materialistic thinking undermined belief in personal responsibility. If human behavior is determined solely by genetics and environment, then everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable. Materialists also devised utopian political schemes. Thinking they could manipulate people like mathematical variables, social theorists advocated coercive government programs that promised heaven on earth, but often produced the opposite.
2. Your latest work, Signature in the Cell, presents a new case for intelligent design. Tell our readers about that.
The foundations of scientific materialism are in the process of crumbling. In Signature in the Cell, I show how the digital code in DNA points powerfully to a designing intelligence behind the origin of life.
For example, in 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions — the information — for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive. Francis Crick later developed this idea with his famous "sequence hypothesis" according to which the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, "DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we've ever created."
This discovery has made acute a longstanding scientific mystery that Darwin never addressed or solved: the mystery of how the very first life on Earth arose. To date no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information in DNA needed to build the first living cell on Earth.
Yet, modern scientists who argue for intelligent design do not do so merely because natural processes have failed to explain the origin of the information in cells. Instead, they argue for design, because systems possessing these features invariably arise from intelligent causes.
DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. Information — whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book or encoded in a radio signal — always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides a strong scientific reason for concluding that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source.
3. There have been scientists who have spoken out about intelligent design — with disastrous consequences. Why?
One of my friendly debate partners, Dr. Michael Ruse, has explained this very well. He has explained that Darwinism has, for some time, functioned as a secular religion. Like many people, when Darwinists have their beliefs challenged by arguments they can't answer, they often respond emotionally, sometimes using the power at their disposal to suppress dissenting scientific opinions. This phenomenon was vividly documented in the movie Expelled, starring Ben Stein.
4. Some say Darwin refuted his own claims on his death bed. Is that true, or just an urban legend?
All the evidence suggests that he remained committed to his theory right to the end of his life.
5. What will it take for the scientific community to open up to the possibility of intelligent design?
While there is still resistance, I think the scientific community is increasingly becoming more open to the evidence and the case for intelligent design. I was pleasantly surprised when my book received endorsements from a number of prominent scientists that had not yet publicly weighed in on intelligent design, such as Dr. Phillip Skell, a member of the National Academies of Science, and Dr. Norman Nevin, a prominent British geneticist. There are many more endorsements and reviews of the book at www.signatureinthecell.com that show a growing interest in intelligent design based on the information bearing properties of DNA.
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