On Not Reading the Signature: Stephen C. Meyer’s Response to Francisco Ayala, Part 1
Today's entry was written by Stephen C. Meyer. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what BioLogos believes here.
Background Comments by Darrel Falk
At the end of last year, I posted my reflections on Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell. Following this, I sent out copies of my essay to several leading origin-of-life scientists and asked them if they would like to respond. In addition, Francisco Ayala, who is one of the most respected evolutionary biologists alive today was asked to respond to my essay from his broader perspective as both a highly credentialed philosopher and biologist. (He is a member of departments in both disciplines at the University of California, Irvine.) He was not asked to write a book review, but to simply respond to the concerns I had raised. He did.
Stephen Meyer was offered an opportunity to respond to my reflections as well. Steve accepted, and expressed a desire to respond to Ayala also. I agreed to both, but since Steve’s expertise is philosophy, I asked him to restrict his Ayala response to Ayala’s philosophical and theological concerns. He agreed to do so.
Steve’s response to my essay was posted some time ago, but we just recently received his response to Ayala’s. I was quite concerned when I read the latter because Steve seemed to think that Ayala had been asked to write a review of Signature in the Cell. He hadn’t. Rather, he had been simply asked to respond to my reflections in the same way as Steve himself. Ayala had a copy of the book and referred to it, but he was not asked to review it. I apologized to Steve if I had misled him or our readers about what Ayala had been asked to do.
Steve and I talked on the phone recently, and I asked him to revise his essay for three reasons:
Steve and I talked for almost 45 minutes and he pushed hard. We gave each other three days to think about it, but in the end Steve made it clear that he would post it elsewhere unless BioLogos posted it “as submitted.” I did not want it to go up anywhere unless I could make it clear that Dr. Ayala had not been asked to do a book review. So we’re posting it along with this introduction. His submission was long, so we have broken it into two parts. Today we post Part 1. A BioLogos response to Part 1 will follow soon, and that will be followed thereafter by Meyer’s Part 2.
No doubt it happens all the time. There must be many book reviews written by reviewers who have scarcely cracked the pages of the books they purport to review. But those who decide to write such blind reviews typically make at least some effort to acquire information about the book in question so they can describe its content accurately—if, for no other reason, than to avoid embarrassing themselves. Unfortunately, in his review of my book Signature in the Cell (titled ironically, “On Reading the Cell’s Signature”), eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala does not appear to have even made a search for the crib notes online. Indeed, from reading his review it appears that he did little more than crack the title page and table of contents—if that. As a result, his review misrepresents the thesis and topic of the book and even misstates its title.
The title of my book is not Signature of the Cell as Ayala repeatedly refers to it, but Signature in the Cell.
The thesis of the book is not that “chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms” as he claims, but instead that intelligent design can explain, and does provide the best explanation for (among many contenders, not just chance) the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell.
Further, the topic that the book addresses is not the origin of the genomes of organisms or the human genome as the balance of Professor Ayala’s critique seems to imply, but instead the origin of the first life and the mystery surrounding the origin of the information necessary to produce it.
Ayala begins his review by attempting to trivialize the argument of Signature in the Cell. But he does so by misrepresenting its thesis. According to Ayala, “The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell [sic] is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms.” He notes—as I do in the book—that all evolutionary biologists already accept that conclusion. He asks: “Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point?” But, of course, the book does not spend hundreds of pages arguing that point. In fact, it spends only 55 pages out of 613 explaining why origin-of-life researchers have—since the 1960s—almost universally come to reject the chance hypothesis. It does so, not because the central purpose of the book is to refute the chance hypothesis per se, but for several other reasons intrinsic to the actual thesis of the book.
Signature in the Cell makes a case for the design hypothesis as the best explanation for the origin of the biological information necessary to produce the first living organism. In so doing, it self-consciously employs a standard method of historical scientific reasoning, one that Darwin himself affirmed and partly pioneered in the Origin of Species. The method, variously described as the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inferring to the best explanation, necessarily requires an examination of the main competing hypotheses that scientists have proposed to explain a given event in the remote past. Following Darwin and his scientific mentor Lyell, historical scientists have understood that best explanations typically cite causes that are known from present experience to be capable, indeed uniquely capable, of producing the effect in question.
In the process of using the method of multiple competing hypotheses to develop my case for intelligent design in Signature in the Cell, I do examine the chance hypothesis for the origin of life, because it is one of the many competing hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the origin of the first life and the origin of biological information. Naturally, since chance was one of the first hypotheses proposed to explain the origin of life in the wake of the discovery of the information-bearing properties of DNA, I critique it first. Nevertheless, I go on to examine many more recent models for the origin of biological information including those that rely on physical-chemical necessity (such as current self-organizational models), and those that rely on the interplay between chance and necessity (such as the currently popular RNA world scenario). My discussion of these models takes over 90 pages and four chapters. Did Ayala just miss these chapters?
I should add that my critique of the chance hypothesis provides a foundation for assessing some of these more recent chemical evolutionary theories—theories that Ayala would presumably recognize as contenders among contemporary evolutionary biologists and which rely on chance in combination with other processes. For example, in the currently popular RNA world scenario, self-replicating RNA catalysts are posited to have first arisen as the result of random interactions between the chemical building blocks or subunits of RNA. According to advocates of this view, once such self-replicating RNA molecules had come into existence, then natural selection would have become a factor in the subsequent process of molecular evolution necessary to produce the first cell. In Signature in the Cell, however, I show that the amount of sequence-specific information necessary to produce even a supposedly simple self-replicating RNA molecule far exceeds what can be reasonably assumed to have arisen by chance alone. Indeed, my analysis of the probabilities of producing various information-rich bio-molecules is not only relevant to showing that “chance, by itself, cannot account for” the origin of genetic information, but also to showing why theories that invoke chance in combination with pre-biotic natural selection also fail
In any case, Signature in the Cell does not just make a case against materialistic theories for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life, it also makes a positive case for intelligent design by showing that the activity of conscious and rational agents is the only known cause by which large amounts of new functional information arises, at least when starting from purely physical and chemical antecedents.
Stephen C. Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and a founder both of the intelligent design movement and of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, intelligent design’s primary intellectual and scientific headquarters. He is author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
(HarperOne 2009).
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