Darwin's Doubt

Darwin’s Doubt, the brand new New York Times bestseller by Cambridge-trained Ph.D., Stephen Meyer, is creating a major scientific controversy. Darwinists don’t like it.

Meyer writes about the complex history of new life forms in an easy to understand narrative style. He takes the reader on a journey from Darwin to today while trying to discover the best explanation for how the first groups of animals arose. He shows, quite persuasively, that Darwinian mechanisms don’t have the power to do the job.

Using the same investigative forensic approach Darwin used over 150 years ago, Meyer investigates the central doubt Darwin had about his own theory. Namely, that the fossil record did not contain the rainbow of intermediate forms that his theory of gradual evolutionary change required. However, Darwin predicted that future discoveries would confirm his theory.

Meyer points out that they haven’t. We’ve thoroughly searched the fossil record since Darwin and confirmed what Darwin originally saw himself: the discontinuous, abrupt appearance of the first forms of complex animal life. In fact, paleontologists now think that roughly 20 of the 28 animal phyla (representing distinct animal “body plans”) found in the fossil record appear abruptly without ancestors in a dramatic geological event called the Cambrian Explosion.

And additional discoveries since Darwin have made it even worse for his theory. Darwin didn’t know about DNA or the digital information it contains that makes life possible. He couldn’t have appreciated, therefore, that building new forms of animal life would require millions of new characters of precisely sequenced code—that the Cambrian explosion was a massive explosion of new information.

For modern neo-Darwinism to survive, there must be an unguided natural mechanism that can create the genetic information and then add to it massively, accurately and within the time allowed by the fossil record. Is there such a mechanism?

The answer to that question is the key to Meyer’s theory and entire book. Meyer shows that the standard “neo-Darwinian” mechanism of mutation and natural selection mechanism lacks the creative power to produce the information necessary to produce new forms of animal life. He also reviews the various post-Darwinian speculations that evolutionary biologists themselves are now proposing to replace the crumbling Darwinian edifice. None survive scrutiny. Not only is there no known natural mechanism that can create the new information required for new life forms, there is no known natural mechanism that can create the genetic code for the first life either (which was the subject of Meyer’s previous book Signature in the Cell).

When Meyer suggests that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the evidence at hand, critics accuse him of being anti-scientific and endangering sexual freedom everywhere (OK, they don’t explicitly state that last part). They also claim that Meyer commits the God of the gaps fallacy.

But he does not. As Meyer points out, he’s not interpreting the evidence based on what we don’t know, but what we do know. The geologically sudden appearance of fully formed animals and millions of lines of genetic information point to intelligence. That is, we don’t just lack a materialistic explanation for the origin of information. We have positive evidence from our uniform and repeated experience that another kind of cause—namely, intelligence or mind—is capable of producing digital information. Thus, he argues that the explosion of information in the Cambrian period provides evidence of this kind of cause acting in the history of animal life. (Much like any sentence written by one of Meyer’s critics is positive evidence for an intelligent being).

This inference from the data is no different than the inference archaeologists made when they discovered the Rosetta Stone. It wasn’t a “gap” in their knowledge about natural forces that led them to that conclusion, but the positive knowledge that inscriptions require intelligent inscribers.

Of course, any critic could refute Meyer’s entire thesis by demonstrating how natural forces or mechanisms can generate the genetic information necessary to build the first life and then massive new amounts of genetic information necessary for new forms of animal life. But they can’t and hardly try without assuming what they are trying to prove (see Chapter 11). Instead, critics attempt to smear Meyer by claiming he’s doing “pseudo science” or not doing science at all.

Well, if Meyer isn’t, doing science, then neither was Darwin (or any Darwinist today). Meyer is using the same forensic or historical scientific method that Darwin himself used. That’s all that can be used. Since these are historical questions, a scientist can’t go into the lab to repeat and observe the origin and history of life. Scientists must evaluate the clues left behind and then make an inference to the best explanation. Does our repeated experience tell us that natural mechanisms have the power to create the effects in question or is intelligence required?

Meyer writes, “Neo-Darwinism and the theory of intelligent design are not two different kinds of inquiry, as some critics have asserted. They are two different answers—formulated using a similar logic and method of reasoning—to the same question: ‘What caused biological forms and the appearance of design in the history of life?’”

The reason Darwinists and Meyer arrive at different answers is not because there’s a difference in their scientific methods, but because Meyer and other Intelligent Design proponents don’t limit themselves to materialistic causes. They are open to intelligent causes as well (just like archaeologists and crime scene investigators are).

So this is not a debate about evidence. Everyone is looking at the same evidence. This is a debate about how to interpret the evidence, and that involves philosophical commitments about what causes will be considered possible before looking at the evidence. If you philosophically rule out intelligent causes beforehand—as the Darwinists do—you will never arrive at the truth if an intelligent being actually is responsible.

Since all evidence needs to be interpreted, science doesn’t actually say anything—scientists do. So if certain self-appointed priests of science say that a particular theory is outside the bounds of their own scientific dogma, that doesn’t mean that the theory is false. The issue is truth—not whether something fits a materialistic definition of science.

I’m sure Darwinists will continue to throw primordial slime at Meyer and his colleagues. But that won’t make a dent in his observation that whenever we see information like that required to produce the Cambrian Explosion, intelligence is always the cause. In fact, I predict that when open-minded people read Darwin’s Doubt, they’ll see that Dr. Meyer makes a very intelligently designed case that intelligent design is actually true. It’s just too bad that many Darwinists aren’t open to that truth—they aren’t even open minded enough to doubt Darwin as much as Darwin himself was.

No, I don't think that. (And conversely, I hope you don't think I'm pursuing a proof for the nonexistence of God.)

No, I don't think that!!!

You wrote, "...my impression is that you contend that the information must have been supplied by an agent outside the system, which may not be a proof of God but is evidence for some First Cause."

YES: I suspect that the information must have a cause "outside" the system, because I strongly doubt it could have arisen by "natural causes"; i.e., from "within" the system. But I'll keep an open mind if someone can show me why this isn't true.

And you nail me on "First Cause." Yep — I do believe that a First Cause very likely had to be involved. But here I'm thinking in Aristotelian terms.

You'll remember Aristotle's First Cause, a/k/a/ the Uncaused Cause, a/k/a/ the "Prime Mover." The reasoning goes like this: If the Universe had a Beginning — which if the Big Bang Theory is correct, it had — then logically, there could be nothing "before" it. This looks to me like an "ex nihilo" situation — a something that comes out of a nothing, or "No-thing."

But really, we can know nothing by way of science that can "verify" or "falsify" this. Indeed, the first few milliseconds after the Big Bang, science doesn't even "work": There is no Planck Time, no Planck Length; science is simply inoperable under conditions where space and time haven't even kicked in yet.

So we can't even get back to the Beginning, let alone conjecture what "preceded" it — which if it was in fact the Beginning, nothing did.

And then, don't forget the Singularity. I think all the "initial conditions" of an evolutionary universe were specified there, all at once. This Singularity may well contain the "information," or "instruction set," that guides universal evolution, and orders it.

Well, that's how I'm thinking through these issues. FWIW.

HHTVL, I got a reply from my friend, AG. It was totally lovely. I'd share it with you instantly; but then recalled I hadn't asked his permission to do that.

So I wrote back and asked for permission!

If he gives it — I expect he will — I'll send it right along to you.

Best wishes to my gracious correspondent, HHTVL!

I would point to my own brain, which like the trees and stars, is a part of nature.

Why do you believe it is "objectively false" that there is (as I suggested) "no known 'natural' cause of information?" If all of nature — the natural world — supposedly "supervenes on the physical" and/or material, how does such an intangible, immaterial, yet utterly necessary thing as information come about in the first place?

Is my inference correct that you regard your brain as a "natural" cause of information? Which would seem to entail the idea (if you are a materialist or physicalist) that mental processes — and mind itself — are caused by atomic activity in the brain? That mind is merely the epiphenomenon of physico-chemical brain activity, to which it reduces, and nothing more?

And yet as British biologist J. B. S. Haldane remarked (1927): “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

You wrote:

In information systems to which entropic proofs apply, computer networks (the network proper) is a closed system, whereas computers themselves generally are not (because they are connected to both sinks and sources of information.)

While your observation may be true, it completely overlooks a highly inconvenient question: Where did the information come from that was needed to build the computer and program its operations in the first place? Did the atoms of which it is composed do all this?

Such questions might strike you as simply dumb or tendentious. But really, all I'm doing by asking them is trying to figure out what your beliefs are....

Here's the situation as I see it:

No evolutionary theory can succeed without confronting the cell and the word. In each of the some 300 trillion cells in every human body, the words of life churn almost flawlessly through our flesh and nervous system at a speed that utterly dwarfs the data rates of all the world’s supercomputers. For example, just to assemble some 500 amino-acid units into each of the trillions of complex hemoglobin molecules that transfer oxygen from the lungs to bodily tissues takes a total of some 250 peta operations per second. (The word “peta” refers to the number ten to the 15th power — so this tiny process requires 250x10¹⁵ operations.) — George Gilder, "Evolution and Me," 2006.

And that's just one process. An astronomical number (from our perspective) of other processes are also occurring simultaneously, all of which must act together to preserve an organic system in a living state. Are we to suppose that "clever atoms" are responsible for the organizational information indispensable for achieving his result?

We started out quibbling about whether Kahre's Law applies to "open" systems in nature, or only to the "closed" ones. [Please allow me to correct a mistake I made; I realized it was a mistake from reviewing an old article I wrote on this subject, back in 2005: The "law" under question here isn't Kahre's, it's Ashby's.] You suggested this "law" of information theory applies only to closed systems. Which I tend to associate with non-living systems in nature, though that may not be technically accurate.

It seems evident (to me anyway) that biology cannot be reduced simply to physics ("matter in its motions" as described by the physicochemical laws, given initial and boundary conditions), leading to "random" mutations whose fitness value will be "rewarded" or punished by the environment — since the genetic, algorithmic, and symbolic information content of living organisms is much greater than the information content of the physical laws. Biology "uses" physics and chemistry, but does not reduce to physics and chemistry. "More" is needed; and that "more" is information.

Chaitin pointed out that the laws of physics have very low information content, since their algorithmic complexity can be characterized by a computer program fewer than a thousand characters in length. In 2004, in a private communication to a colleague, Chaitin wrote: “My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s laws, the Schrödinger equation, and Einstein’s field equations for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving ‘motion-picture’ solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.”

How does the complexity of living organisms increase if its main driver is the physicochemical laws, estimated to have an algorithmic complexity of only 103 bits? Certainly, the observed flow of environmental information is enormous, and tellingly, it is morphological information. But what is the source of the enormous environmental information flow?

Now Ashby’s Law (Ashby, 1962) states that “The variety of outputs of any deterministic physical system cannot be greater than the variety of inputs; the information of output cannot exceed the information already present in the input.” In accordance, Kahre’s “Law of Diminishing Information” reads: Compared to direct reception, an intermediary can only decrease the amount of information (Kahre, 2002, 14). Moreover, it is a widely held view nowadays that the chain of physical causes forms a closed circle. The hypothesis of the causal closure of the physical (Cameron, 2000, 244) maintains (roughly) “that for any event E that has a cause we can cite a physical cause, P, for its happening, and that citing P explains why E happened”. Therefore, not only Ashby’s and Kahre’s laws but the causal closure thesis is in conflict with the complexity measures found in physics and in biology. Now if the algorithmic complexity of one human brain is already around I₁~10¹⁵–10¹⁷ bits, the information paradox consists in the fact that the information content of physics is I_(physics)~103 bits while that of the whole living kingdom is ... I_(biology)~10¹⁵–10¹⁷ bits. Taking into account also that physics is hopelessly far from being able to cope with the task to govern even one human person’s biological activity ~2*10²¹ bits per second, it becomes clear that at present, modern cosmological models’ algorithmic complexity is much less than the above obtained complexity measures characterizing life. — A. Grandpierre, "Complexity Measures and Life’s Algorithmic Complexity," 2005.

Lots of questions, my friend. Your thoughts?

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