Interview with Stephen Meyer

Family North Carolina Magazine—Spring 2010

On Air With . . .
DDr. Stephen Meyer is Director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. One of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, he earned his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. Previously, he worked as a geophysicist and college professor. He has authored numerous technical articles, and editorials in magazines and newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, First Things and National Review. Dr. Meyer has been featured on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, PBS, and the BBC. In 2008, he appeared with Ben Stein in the groundbreaking documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. He is the author of the 2009 book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligence Design.

The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Dr. Meyer conducted by Bill Brooks, president of the North Carolina Family Policy Council (NCFPC). An edited version of this interview aired in two parts in August 2009 on the NCFPC’s weekly radio program, “Family Policy Matters.” Dr. Meyer discussed the evidence for Intelligent Design featured in his book, Signature in the Cell.

You can download part 1 of the interview here: Listen (.mp3) — (.wma)

You can download part 2 of the interview here: Listen (.mp3) — (.wma)

Bill Brooks: You describe your book as one long argument for Intelligent Design, or ID. Talk about what motivated you to write it, and give us a brief overview of ID theory for those of our listeners who are unfamiliar with the term.

Stephen Meyer: ID is the idea that there are certain indicators of intelligent activity, or conscious deliberation, you might say, in the feature of nature. We detect ID in the world around us all the time. If you go to the Dakotas, you’ll see the faces on Mount Rushmore, and we realize that those faces were constructed by intelligent agents, sculptors, rather than say, wind and erosion. And what the ID advocates are saying is that there are similar life features in life, other indicators of intelligence present inside cells or in the very structure of the universe. And that you can tell by examining them that you are dealing with the product of intelligence rather than an undirected process, such as Darwin’s idea of natural selection, for example.

BB: How did you come up with the title, Signature in the Cell?

SM: Well, it relates to this idea that there are indicators of intelligence. The critical indicator of intelligence is information. And what has been discovered inside life is that there is a four character digital code that runs the show in biology. The discovery was first made in the late 1950s, when Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the double helix in 1953. But then in 1957, Francis Crick proposed what was called the sequence hypothesis, in which he suggested that the four chemicals that run along the spine of the DNA molecule function just like alphabet characters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code. Bill Gates, who’s kind of a local hero in the Seattle area, says that DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than any we’ve ever written or created. And that’s a very suggestive remark because we know that programs always come from programmers, and we know that information generally— whether it is in a computer program or a hieroglyphic inscription or a section of a newspaper headline or a book—always comes from an intelligent source. So when we find the information encoded in DNA, the most logical thing to conclude is that it too had an intelligent source—that the information in DNA is actually the signature of intelligence. And that’s the reason I used that metaphor in the title of the book, that information is actually the signature in the cell—the signature of a designing intelligence.

BB: What makes your argument for an ID different from other arguments and evidence that has been presented thus far?

SM: Well, the case for ID is multi-faceted…Another way we define ID is to say it’s the idea that there are certain features of the universe and life that are best explained by reference to an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Well, what features are we talking about? Well, some physicists have pointed to the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics. That there are all these physical parameters that have very precise numerical values or strengths that are exactly what they need to be in order to allow for the possibility of life… That’s an argument that’s been made for design since the 1960s and 70s. Michael Behe in his book, Darwin’s Black Box, developed a very elegant design based on the discovery of the nanotechnology, the miniature machines, the rotary engines, the sliding clamps, the turbines and little robotic walking proteins that have been discovered inside cells. My argument’s different in that it addresses perhaps an even more fundamental evidence of design because it’s looking at the information that you need even to build those molecular machines, and it’s arguing that information is from our experience only produced by one kind of cause and that cause is intelligence. So when we find information, we can defer intelligence as the best explanation for the kind of this critical feature that is pervasive in all living cells, but would have had to be present from the very beginning to get life going. So I’m focusing on a different aspect or feature of living systems that points to a designing intelligence, but a very fundamental one.

BB: What is the DNA enigma, and what does it have to do with ID?

SM: Well, I use that phrase in the book. One of the things I do is I make a case, one long argument as you mentioned, I’m taking a page out of Darwin’s book. He said that his argument for evolution by natural selection, presented in Origin of the Species, was one long argument, one long case. And a lot of people don’t realize that scientists don’t just do experiments, they also put together arguments and they make a case for a particular interpretation of the evidence. And so I follow very much in Darwin’s footsteps using his same method of reasoning to make a case for ID. Obviously that’s the opposite point of view that Darwin ultimately came to—he denied that there was evidence of design in biology. But I’m affirming it. I’m using the same method of reasoning in his footsteps as a scientist using a method of reasoning and building a case. But one of the other things in the book besides developing a scientific argument is [that] I also tell a story, and I tell what is in essence a mystery of information that’s necessary to build life. That’s what I call the DNA enigma. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they solved one mystery—they solved the mystery of where hereditary information resides. Subsequent scientists solved the mystery of what that information does. We now know that it directs the construction of proteins and protein machines within the cell. But there’s another mystery that they exposed, and that mystery is the mystery of the origin of that information, this is a fascinating discovery of modern biology of what runs the show, of inside cells is digital code, and yet no one has given an account of where that information came from. And that mystery is intimately connected with the question of the origin of life because we know that to get life going you need information, and so that’s the DNA enigma. It’s the mystery of the information that’s necessary to produce life—where did it come from.

BB: You note in the book what I think so many people do not realize, which is that Darwin never addressed the question of how the very first life began. Even for those who accept evolutionary theory, the answer to this question is still a mystery, isn’t it?

SM: Yeah, we’re in the 150th anniversary of [Darwin’s] Origin of the Species, but many scientists, and many other people do not realize that Darwin never addressed the origin of the first life. And in 150 years since the publication of the Origin, subsequent generations of scientists haven’t been able to crack the mystery either. At the close of the Origin, Darwin said that what he was trying to do was explain how we get all the forms of life we see today from, as he put it, one or a very few simple forms. But he never gave an account of how those few simple forms began in the very first place. So that’s what my book addresses. It’s this fundamental mystery of the origin of life, and I show in the book, that the origin of life is intimately connected with the origin of information. It’s not hard to see why. I used to ask my students, if you want to give your computer a new function, what do you have to give it? And they would say, well you have to give it a new code. Well, the same thing is true in life. If you want to build a new form of life from a preexisting form of life, if you want to build a new structure, a new molecular machine, you have to have proteins, and those proteins are built from instructions in DNA. At an even more fundamental level, if you want to get life going, you’ve got to have DNA in proteins, and therefore you’ve got to have information to build life in the first place. So that’s the fundamental mystery that has not been solved, and my book addresses that question head on.

BB: ID is often confused with creationism and the news media consistently portrays ID as a religious theory. But you write that ID is an “inference from scientific evidence, not a deduction from religious authority.” Explain what you mean.

SM: Well, that’s right. If you become convinced that there is evidence of ID, then that obviously has larger philosophical implications. The first thing you would want to know is, well, who is the designing intelligence responsible for life? I personally think it is God, and I think there are some good reasons to think that. But the evidence from biology leads us to the conclusion that there was a designing intelligence. So it’s the evidence that leads us to that conclusion, and also some standard methods of scientific reasoning. I alluded to this before—that I used Darwin’s method of reasoning and it might be good to unpack that a little bit to make this clear because I think this shows why the inference to ID is a scientific conclusion and why it’s based on science. Darwin had a very simple straightforward principle of reasoning. He said, when you’re trying to discover a cause in the remote past, if you’re trying to explain an event in the remote past and you want to know what caused it, you should infer that cause which is known to produce the effect you’re trying to explain. We have a layer of volcanic ash in eastern Washington, [and] if you want to explain that scientifically, you should favor the volcanic eruption hypothesis, over the earthquake hypothesis because we know that volcanoes are capable of producing layers of ash where we have never seen earthquakes do that kind of thing. And so I, as I came across that principle in Darwin’s reasoning, I asked myself, what is the cause that’s known to produce information? There’s only one such cause and that’s intelligence, so using Darwin’s own method of reasoning, and his principle of scientific evaluation, I came to the conclusion that ID really is the best explanation. And what follows from that is that if you have a theory which is based on scientific evidence—namely that discovery of digital code in DNA—and you’re using the scientific method of evaluating that evidence—namely Darwin’s own method of reasoning—then that theory is based on science, not based on religion. It may have larger religious implications, but it’s based on science. And that’s what I meant by that quote and that also helps us understand why ID can be distinguished from creationism. Creationism is a view of biological origin that’s based on an understanding or reading of the book of Genesis, and that may be right or wrong—people may have different interpretations of how to read Genesis—but ID is an understanding of biological origins, starting with the scientific evidence, not with the Biblical text.

BB: Well, you just touched on it, but one of the most important questions you address in the book is whether ID qualifies as scientific theory. Is ID science?

SM: Yeah, it all depends on how you define science, of course. Some people have the idea that all scientists do is conduct scientific experiments, and they examine natural phenomenon that are repeatable under laboratory conditions. That’s definitely one part of what science does, but there are other branches and other types of science. One thing that science does is try to reconstruct what happened in the past and to determine the past causes of past events, you might call those sciences the sciences of archeology, or evolutionary biology, or cosmology, historical sciences. And so what I do in the book is show that those are legitimate forms of scientific investigation and that the case for ID can be made using the same cannons of reasoning of those that are used in sciences of that sort. So I think that the theory of ID can be defended as a historical scientific theory just as Darwin’s theory is an example of scientific reasoning, or just as a theory of an ancient civilization in archeology might be an example of that kind of scientific reasoning.

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