The Cambrian Information Explosion – Part 3

Extracted from our series, The New Scientific Evidence That Points to the Existence of God, Part 3. Edited for publication.

Dr. John Ankerberg: In Darwin’s Doubt here, which is one of your bestselling books, you also talk about the circuitry that’s in the animals. And that causes a problem too. Why?

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right. These little circuits are called developmental gene regulatory networks. So, inside living cells you not only have information in the DNA, but you have a whole system of turning the information on and off at the right time, a regulatory circuit that turns it on and off at the right time. So that as the different cells are differentiating one from another—the bone cell from the muscle cell—the right proteins are turned on at the right time to service those cells as the animal is developing.

And the scientists at Caltech who mapped out these, what they’re called developmental gene regulatory networks, discovered, is that when they mapped out their functional relationships and the way they channel and use information, they looked for all the world like electronic circuits. And that was kind of mind blowing.

But then they made another discovery, and that is that these developmental gene regulatory networks are not subject to perturbation. If you change them a little bit, then animal development shuts down. They’re highly integrated systems, such that small changes will mess everything up.

And that raised a huge problem, because we know you need these developmental gene regulatory networks to build a given form of animal life. But if you want to change one form of animal life to another, that means you’d have to change the developmental gene regulatory network. And that’s the one thing we know cannot change without destroying animal development. And that’s another huge problem that has caused doubts about, really, all different theories of undirected biological evolution, Neo-Darwinism and some of the later theories as well.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. And I remember you coming up as a grad student, and you were looking at all of this, and you have the kind of mind that was curious about this. It just raised more and more questions. And finally you came to the question, “Can I make a scientific hypothesis about this to answer all of these questions that are raised that nobody can answer about how in the world do we get the Cambrian explosion? How did we get these animals? How did we get the different forms? How did we get this circuitry? Where did all this information come from?”

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, the key thing I was thinking about is whether or not it’s possible to develop a rigorous scientific argument for intelligent design.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Key phrase, scientifical argument.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right. And also, maybe all these problems with Darwinian evolution, and other forms of biological evolutionary theory, as well as chemical evolution, maybe they’re the flip side of a positive case for intelligent design.

And so, I got to thinking about that, and discovered that Darwin used a method of reasoning for investigating the remote past. It was called inference to the best explanation. And he got this largely from Charles Lyell, the great geologist, who was also investigating events in the remote past. And Lyell had a maxim. He said that when you’re trying to explain an event in the remote past, we should be looking for causes that are now in operation, causes that we know from our present experience produce the effect in question.

And so, I got to thinking about that, and I asked myself, well, what is the cause that produces circuitry? What’s the cause that produces digital code? What’s the cause that produces a complex information storage, transmission, and processing system? All of which are features of either living cells or animal life today. And in each case, the answer was, well, from our present experience we know of only one type of cause that produces those effects, and that cause is an intelligent agent or a mind.

And about the time I was thinking about this, I came across a passage in the work of a man named Henry Quastler. He was an information theorist or scientist who was a pioneer in applying informational concepts to understanding living systems. And he made an offhand comment on page 16 of one of his little books; I remember it vividly. He said, “The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” And I thought, is that right?

And I began to think about that in light of all the failures of evolutionary theories to explain the origin of information and the origin of information-processing systems. And I thought that absolutely is right: In our experience, whenever we see information, whether it’s in a hieroglyphic inscription, or a paragraph in a book, or embedded in a radio signal, or in a section of computer code, and we trace that information back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process.

So Quastler’s little quotation, his maxim, “information is habitually associated with conscious activity,” is true to our experience. And our uniform and repeated experience, which underscores that principle, is also the basis of all scientific reasoning. In fact, that was Lyell’s dictum, that the present is the key to the past. Our present knowledge of cause and effect should guide our inferences about what happened in the past.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And he was a mentor to Darwin, and Darwin picked it up and put it in his book too.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Exactly. And so, what we have developed in making the case for intelligent design in biology, is a positive case for intelligent design as the best explanation of these key features of life: the information-bearing properties of DNA; the information-processing systems that are at work expressing that information; the circuitry that uses it. And we have developed a positive case based on those features, and also based on Darwin’s own method of scientific reasoning, arguing that intelligent design actually provides the best, most causally adequate explanation of the key features that we see in life.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Intelligent design basically says we’re talking about God.

Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, initially it just infers to an intelligent agent. But as you know, in my most recent book, I think when we talk about not only the evidence from biology, but also the evidence from physics and cosmology, the type of designing agent that is necessary to explain those three classes of information is the type of agent that has the attributes that, for example, traditional Jews and Christians have long associated with one and only one person, and that is the deity, with God.