Stephen C. Meyer

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design 1 by Stephen C. Meyer is the latest book from a major proponent for intelligent design (ID).2 Signature is Meyer’s magnum opus. Meyer is the director of the Discovery Institute’s (www.discovery.org) Center for Science and Culture, the flagship organization for the ID movement. He is a trained geologist and has a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Science from Cambridge. 3 Signature is written at a level accessible to the layman but also informative to the specialist in biochemistry. The book is a history of Meyer’s interest and involvement with ID. The main focus of the book is the origin of the informational code in DNA, especially as it relates to the origin of life. The book discusses several topics including the history of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the cracking of the DNA code, the history and status of origin of life theories (especially the RNA world), basic information theory, various scientific methodologies and modes of thought and why ID is scientific, historical sciences, detecting design, why ID is the best explanation for the origin of the information in DNA, and responses to ID critics. This review will touch upon some of the book’s highlights.

1. 1. Meyer SC (2009) Signature in the Cell; DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, HarperCollins, New York, NY. The book’s website is www.signatureinthecell.com
2. 2. Reynolds D (2006) Intelligent Design. TASC Newsletter, May, 2006. See http://www.tasc-creationscience.org/ sites/default/files/newsletters/2006/may06.pdf
3. 3. Meyer’s dissertation was on the topic of origin of life biology.

The genome of organisms contains their genetic material, which largely determines how they will develop. Scientists are learning more and more about the genome of various organisms, which is revealing more and more about the amazing wisdom of God in their design and creation. It seems that our understanding of the functioning of life is always incomplete, and the genome is always more complex than we had thought. Will we ever fully understand the functioning of life, or will it always be a mystery to us?

Well-known atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins authored the now best selling book The God Delusion which was published last year.¹ This is just one of several recent popular science books by atheists to hit bookstores in the last few months. This essay will discuss selected scientific and philosophical arguments made in the Delusion.

The phrase "intelligent design" is heard a great deal lately in the media, usually in the context of secondary school science education.

Toxicologists like myself make a living out of evaluating the impact of chemical exposures and other insults on the health of laboratory animals (we can't test humans after all). Rats and mice, members of the evolutionary order Rodentia, make up a large majority of these experimental animals. Ken Boschert, a veterinarian with Washington University's division of comparative medicine and the operator of a Web site called Net Vet (netvet.wustl.edu/) estimates that 99 percent of experimental animals nowadays are rats and mice, which are small, cheap to feed, and reproduce quickly. Rats and mice are also believed to share a closer evolutionary lineage to humans than other non-primate mammals.

Recently I was asked to give a talk on resources available on creation. I expanded the topic to include best evidences for creation. This article is based on that talk. For resources, I will discuss some of the major websites and organizations. Many of these will probably be familiar to you if you have been interested in creation science for a while. For best evidences, I will discuss scripture, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of species, empirical detection of intelligent causes, and the age of the earth.

Many of you will remember with me the epic TV series Mission Impossible which chronicled the adventures of the Impossible Mission Taskforce, a team of government spies and specialists who were assigned "impossible missions" by the unseen "Secretary". If not, you may have seen the more recent movie of the same title. If not, well, bear with me. I think you'll get the point. In the original series, the Team Leader (Dan Briggs the first season, then Jim Phelps the other six) was always given a mission, usually involving the impossible (hence the title) task of disarming an alarming situation within a time limit (inevitably by the end of the show).

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment."-Sherlock Holmes in a Study of Scarlet

Back in the 1960s, scientists discovered sections of DNA that did not code for proteins. These non-coding DNA strands were assumed to be non-functional and were referred to as "junk" DNA, the presumed evolutionary remnants of ancestral organisms.¹ Almost 99% of human DNA is known to be non-coding.