Quotes from Stephen C. Meyer

The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium.

In China," he said, "we can criticize Darwin, but not the government. In America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.

To complicate matters further, proteins must catalyze formation of the basic building blocks of cellular life such as sugars, lipids, glycolipids, nucleotides, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the main energy molecule of the cell).

constructed with the help of specific enzymes. For example, each of the systems involved in the processing of genetic information requires energy at many discrete steps.

Agassiz explained his reasons for doubting the creative power of natural selection. Small-scale variations, he argued, had never produced a "specific difference" (i.e., a difference in species). Meanwhile, large-scale variations, whether achieved gradually or suddenly, inevitably resulted in sterility or death. As he put it, "It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out.

If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz

At the close of the nineteenth century, most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy. But after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.

Darwin's picture of the history of life "contradict[ed] what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe.

Although DNA does not convey information that is received, understood, or used by a conscious mind, it does have information that is received and used by the cell's machinery to build the structures critical to the maintenance of life. DNA displays a property—functional specificity—that transcends the merely mathematical formalism of Shannon's theory. Is

early theories of the origin of life did not need to address, nor did they anticipate, this problem. Since scientists did not know about the information-bearing properties of DNA, or how the cell uses that functionally specified information to build proteins, they did not worry about explaining these features of life.

Darwin's mechanism of natural selection and random variation necessarily required a lot of time to generate wholly novel organisms, creating a dilemma that Agassiz was keen to expose.

documenting Darwin's picture of the history of life. If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants.

Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals.

Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz thought the evidence of abrupt appearance, and the absence of ancestral forms in the Precambrian, refuted Darwin's theory.

Indeed, Walcott's discovery turned Darwin's anticipated bottom-up—or small changes first, big changes later—pattern on its head.

It was these strata that Sedgwick named after a Latinized English term for the country of Wales—"Cambria," a designation that eventually replaced "Silurian" as the name for the earliest strata of animal fossils.

Yet the Precambrian strata of his day showed no signs of providing any obvious transitional forms, much less a well-articulated bottom-up pattern of animals representing lower taxa proliferating into forms exemplifying higher and higher taxonomic categories.

Yet we would not expect the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random genetic mutations to produce the top-down pattern that we observe in the history of life following the Cambrian explosion.

The question that Darwin's early critics posed was this: How could he reconcile his theory of gradual evolution with a fossil record so discontinuous that it had given rise to the names of the major distinct periods of geological time, particularly when the first animal forms seemed to spring into existence during the Cambrian as if from nowhere?

Neither wanted to claim that these discoveries "proved" the existence of God. They cautioned that science cannot "prove" anything with absolute certainty.

The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content. (See Fig. 4.8.)

there is still a mystery to speculate about: Why and how did many animals begin to have hard parts—skeletons of sorts—with apparent suddenness around the beginning of the Cambrian?"24

contents of the guts of several animals.46 The discoveries near Chengjiang demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that sedimentary rocks can preserve soft-bodied fossils of great antiquity and in exquisite detail, thereby challenging the idea that the absence of Precambrian ancestors

The relative suddenness of the Cambrian explosion, even on the earlier measure of its duration, had already raised serious questions about the adequacy of the neo-Darwinian mechanism; consequently, it had also raised questions about whether a Darwinian understanding of the history of life could be reconciled with the Cambrian and Precambrian fossil record.