Intelligent Design’s Supremacy in Answering the Question of Origins

Travis Coleman

Christian Apologetics Biola University

CSAP 510: Apologetics Research & Writing

Clay Butler Jones, D. Min.

October 2005
Intelligent Design’s Supremacy in Answering the Question of Origins

As Elli Arraway laid on the hood of her classic convertible, her eyes closed with the lingering image of the starlit New Mexico sky fresh in her mind. She settled into the familiar relaxed state listening to the numbing hiss of nondescript radio static she had trained her mind to enter. But, suddenly, Elli’s solace shattered when the headphones she wore relayed a sudden, unexpected signal into her ears.

Birthed in the Hadean furnaces of red giants, white dwarfs, and spinning pulsars and warping to Earth over billions of miles of empty space, radio waves make a cacophony of electromagnetic static, the song of the Cosmos. Elli had been part of the SETI, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, project for the greater part of her professional career and hoped to find evidence of intelligence in outer space. Other astronomers joked, “So, you’re looking for E.T.?” But it was more than that. She and her colleagues at SETI hoped to find something among the chaos of random radio signals that would tell them we were not alone in the universe. Their search had proven empty…until tonight.

One…two…three…five…seven…eleven…the pattern continued counting in prime numbers all the way to 101 and then began to repeat. This was no random set of signal spikes. This was definitely a pattern that did not exist spontaneously in nature. Only in the non-material realm of mathematical theory does the concept of prime numbers exist. It belongs to that non-physical classification known as information. As the story unfolds, Elli and her friends find signals buried within the original signal bearing the unmistakable specified complexity of an intelligence. And it was coming from outer space.

Ellie is the heroin of the movie Contact based on a book with the same title written by the late cosmologist Carl Sagan. Never do Elli, nor any of her compatriots tuning in around the world, ever doubt that this signal came from anything but an intelligent source. Their question was, “who is sending it?” Although a fictional account, SETI is real and scientists never stop scanning the heavens seeking signs of intelligence.

On Feb. 28, 1953, in a laboratory in Cambridge, England, two young biochemists approach the culmination of years of research into what would become their most famous discovery. Their search does not look to outer space. It examines the inner spaces, to the inner workings of the living biological cell, to the very foundations of life as we know it. They are searching for the structure of DNA. What they discover opens the door to a new era. The double helix structure that Crick and Watson discover contains the chemical code that “has been called ‘the language of life’ and it is the most densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known universe.”[1]

The fictional Elli had no doubt she had found a message from intelligent beings from another planet from hearing the simple prime numbers beeping in her headphones. And this is what the real SETI radio astronomers are hoping to find every day. How will they know if they find it? They know the same way you and I recognize design every day. I will explain this process of distinguishing between design and chance, and I will argue that applying these same criteria, we find that DNA is designed.

For this, and many other reasons, an increasing number of scientists assert just that, and offer compelling evidence that poses significant challenges to the most widely accepted ideas on life’s origin, namely Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution through Natural Selection. Their theory is called Intelligent Design. This paper will introduce Intelligent Design theory and why this theory surpasses Darwin’s in explanatory power on the origins of life.

Darwin’s Evolution Mechanism: Natural Selection

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin introduced Natural Selection as the primary mechanism for biological evolution. Darwin saw variations produced within species of plants and animals through domesticated breeding. That’s why we have Chihuahuas and Great Danes instead of only mutts running around. He also saw variations within non-domesticated species, such as various sized and shaped finch beaks, and concluded that these latter cases resulted from unintentional yet similarly functioning natural forces. Where human breeders preserved or eliminated specific traits through selective breeding, nature used its own mechanism for choosing which traits would and would not survive from generation to generation. Darwin concluded, “This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.”[2]

Darwin argued that Natural Selection could explain not only the variations within a species but also the existence of the various species themselves.

In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species.[3]

This is the from-molecules-to-man hypothesis as illustrated in the tree-of-life drawings you may remember from your Jr. High and High School science books. And this idea was not unique to Darwin. “The first suggestion that all organisms may have had a common ancestor and diverged through random variation and natural selection was made in 1745 by the French mathematician and scientist Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) in his work Vénus physique.”[4] He had the what, but he didn’t have the how.

Darwin’s historic contribution was the how. Natural selection provided a viable mechanism for evolution and common descent. “It was Darwin’s point, and the point of most biologists since Darwin, that the course of evolution can be explained by natural selection; it provides a straightforward mechanism whereby the evolution of plants and animals on the face of the earth can be understood.”[5] Simple life forms, undergoing “numerous, successive, slight modifications” [6] over a long period of time, produced life in all its forms. In a nut shell, this is Darwinian Evolution.

But, a lot has changed since 1859 especially in the field of biochemistry. For example, Darwin and his contemporaries knew very little about the inner workings of life’s basic unit, the cell. Today, however, scientists know that living cells consist of very complex biochemical mechanisms likened to the workings of a modern city.[7] Cell’s have incredibly efficient transport mechanisms, waste systems, raw materials collection, storage facilities, manufacturing sites, energy production, defense systems, and more all working together and none of these systems can function without the specific operating instructions and coding in the DNA molecule. You can’t build a city without the blueprints.

Because all biological life requires DNA, any explanation of the life’s origins must consider the origins of DNA itself; and more specifically, the source of the information in DNA. Darwin knew traits were passed on genetically but he didn’t know about DNA, and how complex and specific those genetic processes actually were. He certainly did not know that life depended on information to function.

And this brings us to the question at hand: Can natural selection account for the origin of the information in DNA? Frankly, no, it cannot. Here’s why: DNA functions as an information storage mechanism, a biochemical template for building the proteins that carry out the cell’s functions and make up the cell’s structural components. DNA does not reproduce apart from the cell. Cells do not reproduce without DNA. However, reproduction must already be happening for natural selection to occur. Natural selection, by definition, only functions within reproducing populations. You can’t have your mother’s eyes and your daddy’s nose unless mom and dad have you. Therefore, no DNA, no life, no reproduction, no natural selection. Because Darwinian evolution cannot explain DNA’s origin, it cannot explain life’s origin.

So it seems we’re back to square one. Where did life come from? But we’re at square one with scads more tools with which to answer the question of origins than Darwin had. So let’s examine the information at hand and see where it leads. We know DNA is necessary for life and we know DNA contains information. But, where does this information come from? To answer this question, let’s look at other types of information and their sources.

Information

The evolutionary biologist, George C. Williams writes, “Our everyday experience is that linguistic communications…cannot be reduced to the material medium in which they are encoded and emerge only from pre-existing intelligence.” [8] We know paper and ink are different than the message they carry. We need look no further than our everyday experience to understand what information is. After all we live in the Information Age, one full of computers, e-mail, cell phones, newspapers, and billboards all feeding us information.

But let’s talk more specifically about information. Information is non-material. It doesn’t have physical characteristics like mass, electro-magnetic charge, and it doesn’t take up space in your back seat. What this means is that you can have information contained in various physical forms or mediums and the information itself does not change. For example, you may be reading this paper, on a computer screen. It could be a flat LCD screen, a CRT monitor, or it could be a projection on a reflective screen in an auditorium or your living room wall, and you’re reading it in English because that’s the only language I know. It could have been sent to you over the internet which means it had to change from the electronic ones and zeros on my computer into electrical signals that can travel over great distances through wires. It may have had to be transformed into a light signal and sent through a fiber optic network. Maybe it was converted into a radio signal and transmitted to the other side of the world (or in Elli Arraway’s case, from outer space to earth). In all these cases, providing no one corrupted the information somewhere along the line, the information itself has not changed. The information does not change when the physical medium carrying the information changes. The unique properties of information are not physical.

Why can’t your grandma e-mail you a box of cookies? Because material things don’t work like information. They answer to the laws of physics and chemistry. Somehow on Star Trek they figured out a way to change matter and energy into information and back again. But that’s science fiction. We can’t e-mail physical things. We can only e-mail information.

Notice that I said “we.” Most types of information are the product of people; intelligent people. Yes, I said “most”, not all. There are natural causes of some information. George C. Williams, the same George C. Williams quoted above, rightly points out, “The pattern of slow-moving waves in sand dunes records information about what the wind has been doing lately. Their shadow pattern observed late in the day is information about the structure of the dunes and less directly about the wind. The only author recognized here is the wind.”[9]

But what about the type of complex information in a book? Could the wind blow the dunes into such a form that they produce something like a telephone book or even a single sentence? How about a single word? We see that as the complexity of the information increases, natural processes run up against a serious probability constraint. But it’s not just complex. This type of information is too specific in its order to be satisfactorily explained by natural causes.

Of course we do know the cause of complex and specified information: intelligence. In fact, that is the only cause we do know. Any other proposed cause is conjecture. The DNA information cannot be reduced to the laws of chemistry and physics because the information is non-physical. “The plays the thing” that entertains the king, not the chemistry of the ink and paper on which the play is written. It takes a Shakespeare to write Hamlet and it takes a Grandma to invent that prize winning cookie recipe.

To drive home this point more clearly, I will tell you a bit more about DNA. I have used language as the analogy to the information in DNA. The English language has 26 letters and we can organize these characters in an infinite number of ways. But not all of those ways have meaning. All the letters in Hamlet could be scrambled resulting in gibberish and it wouldn’t be Hamlet anymore. If you rearranged Grandma’s recipe, you wouldn’t get cookies. You actually wouldn’t get anything. The information would be lost. Now, that’s just with 26 letters. DNA has on the order of a million “characters” out of which to “write”. [10] But only when they are arranged into a specific meaningful order can life exist. Life isn’t random. It is specific.

Conclusion

Natural Selection’s problem is that it requires biological reproduction; biological reproduction requires the complex, meaningful information in DNA; this type of information requires an intelligent cause. But Natural Selection, by definition, is not the result of intelligence. Therefore the theory of Natural Selection has a problem, a big problem: it cannot account for the origin of information.

Intelligent Design, on the other hand, can explain the origin of information and therefore the origin of life. Given what we know, intelligence as the source for life is the most direct, logical, scientific explanation. The burden of proof falls on the less plausible explanation. Natural Selection is on the ropes with Intelligent Design standing strong in the middle of the ring when it comes to explaining the origins of life.

Here’s an interesting idea. Why don’t we bounce a radio signal containing the DNA sequence off the moon and see if SETI announces to the world they have found intelligent life? Hmm…interesting idea indeed.

Works Cited

Bonner, John Tyler. 1988. The Evolution of Complexity: by Means of Natural Selection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Clayton, John and Nils Jansma. 2001 The Source: Creation—Eternal Design or Infinite Accident? West Monroe, Louisiana: Howard Publishing Co.

“Common descent” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_desent Accessed on 09/10/2005

Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species: by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Quoted by Michael J. Behe in an online article titled “Darwin's Theory Of Evolution - A Theory in Crisis” Accessed via http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com/ 9/10/2005

___________. 1975. The Origin of Species. Abridged and Introduced by Philip Appleman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975.

Unlocking The Mystery of Life. Murrieta, Calif.: Illustra Media. 2002. DVD

Williams, George C. 1992. Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press. as quoted by Phillip E. Johnson. 2001. “Is Genetic Information Irreducible?” Ed. Robert T. Pennock. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

__________. 2001. “Reply to Johnson.” Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. Ed. Robert T. Pennock. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

---

[1] Unlocking The Mystery of Life, (Murrieta, Calif.: Illustra Media. 2002), DVD.

[2] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Abridged and Introduced by Philip Appleman, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975), 44.

[3] Ibid., 26.

[4] “Common descent” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_desent Accessed on 09/10/2005

[5] John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Complexity: by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, c1988) 3.

[6] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 1859, 162. Quoted by Michael J. Behe in an online article titled ” Darwin's Theory Of Evolution - A Theory in Crisis” Accessed via http://www.darwins-theory-of-evolution.com/ 9/10/2005

[7] John Clayton and Nils Jansma, The Source: Creation—Eternal Design or Infinite Accident? (West Monroe, Louisiana: Howard Publishing Co., Inc., 2001), 42.

[8] George C. Williams, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 11 as quoted by Phillip E. Johnson, “Is Genetic Information Irreducible?” Ed. Robert T. Pennock, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge: MIT, 2001), 543.

[9] George C. Williams, “Reply to Johnson,” Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. Ed. Robert T. Pennock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 551.

[10] Unlocking The Mystery of Life, (Murrieta, Calif.: Illustra Media. 2002), DVD