In the 1997 sci-fi Contact, radio astronomer Ellie Arroway searches for evidence of extraterrestrial life by listening to cosmic noise, hoping to discover a signal from alien intelligence. She “hits the jackpot,” so to speak, when she hears pings counting out successive prime numbers. Since math is a universal language, she and the scientific community intuitively interpret the specifically ordered pings as evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. No one suggests that the pings might have resulted from random fluctuations in space. And, indeed, the source turns out to be a signal-sending extraterrestrial somewhere in the material universe.
Cell-Based Manufacturing
By the time Contact came out, the scientific community — indeed, the entire educated public — was well aware of another kind of specifically ordered information, which by similar logic should be interpreted as a signal. In the 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule and its information-bearing properties. From that starting point, scientists went on to discover how the chemical subunits on the “rungs” of the DNA “ladder” function like alphabetic letters in a language and how the information they bear directs protein synthesis in the cell.
The Story of Everything, the upcoming theatrical documentary based on Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis, explains the marvelous information processing that operates inside the cell. For every protein molecule synthesized, the operations include deciphering and copying information from a specific segment of the DNA strand, lining up in correct sequence the required amino acids according to the segment’s specifications, and folding the resulting amino-acid chain into the exact shape necessary so that the molecule can perform its specific task in the cell. The process is comparable to a sophisticated factory production line, with everything running automatically according to preexisting coded instructions. Without it, or without the information that runs it, there would be no life on planet Earth. Zip. Nada. It must have been present, too, in Earth’s first life.
Whence Cometh Order?
Just as the fictional scientists in Contact inferred an intelligent agent by listening to the ordered pings, intelligent design theorists observe the protein-synthesis processes and infer the prior existence of an exogenous intelligence. The reasoning, as stated by Stephen Meyer, is that whenever we detect information — and this is especially true of coded information — if we trace it to its source, we find that the ultimate source is a mind. Synthetic organic chemist James Tour puts it more bluntly: “Molecules don’t come together to do that on their own!”
Indeed. Information and orderly processes don’t happen by accident any more than a factory production line organizes itself out of unassembled constituent parts. Nonetheless, Darwin-faithful biologists observe the same information and protein-synthesis systems but stop short of making the same inference — or at least making it out loud.
In ID circles, the term “information enigma” refers to the puzzle of where the information on the DNA rungs came from. Is the Darwin narrative even remotely plausible given what molecular biology has discovered since the 1950s, or does new evidence point to a different story? We know how the Darwin-faithful and ID theorists come down on the question.
So what about you? The Story of Everything: The Science that Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe brings stunning visuals of these processes to the screen. Well, on April 30, you can judge for yourself.