The case for intelligent design in biology is described in the theatrical documentary The Story of Everything, which opens across the country tonight. That case does not begin with religious conviction. It begins with something far more mundane: what we already know. Every day, human beings produce complex, specified artifacts — smartphones, automobiles, skyscrapers — and we know without question where they come from. They come from minds. They come from agents who conceive, plan, and execute with purpose. This is not a philosophical assumption; it is the uniform testimony of human experience. And it is precisely this experience that Stephen Meyer and his colleagues bring to bear on the biological world — because what we find there, at every level of examination, looks far more like the products of a mind than the outputs of a blind, undirected process.
The Information Argument
At the foundation of every living cell is information — not merely complexity, but specified complexity. The distinction matters. Random gibberish is complex in the sense that it is improbable, but it carries no meaning and performs no function. The instructions in a software program are complex in a different sense entirely: they are arranged in a precise sequence that accomplishes something specific. DNA is information of the second kind, and at a level of sophistication that, as Bill Gates observed, exceeds any software program human beings have ever written.
What Francis Crick recognized, after co-discovering the double helix structure of DNA, was that the four chemical bases along its spine function like alphabetic characters — not because of their physical or chemical properties, but because of their arrangement according to an independent symbol convention, the genetic code. The sequence carries meaning. It codes for something. And as Meyer has argued for decades — including in Return of the God Hypothesis, which inspired the new documentary — when we trace specified complexity of this kind back to its source in every other domain of human experience, whether a paragraph in a book, a line of code, or a hieroglyphic inscription, we always arrive at the same place: a mind. Not a material process, not a chemical reaction, but an agent acting with intention. The discovery that life is built on a foundation of digital, semantic information is not a peripheral finding in modern biology. It is the central challenge that materialist accounts of the origin of life have never successfully answered.
The Fossil Record
The biological argument does not rest on information alone. The fossil record, which Darwinian theory predicts should be rich with transitional forms documenting the gradual transformation of one body plan into another, tells a different story. What we actually observe in the fossils is a pattern of appearance, stasis, and extinction. Species appear in the record, persist largely unchanged, and disappear. The transitional forms that should exist in numbers even greater than the species themselves are conspicuously absent. This is not a minor anomaly to be smoothed over. It is a systematic feature of the evidence — one that fits far more naturally with a pattern of discrete, designed origins than with the slow, incremental process Darwin envisioned.
Nowhere is this more dramatically illustrated than in the Cambrian explosion, a geological moment roughly 540 million years ago in which more than 35 distinct phyla — the highest level of biological body plan classification — appear in the fossil record virtually simultaneously. In geological terms, this is an instant. In Darwinian terms, it is a catastrophe. The theory predicts a long, branching tree of gradual divergence from simple common ancestors. What the Cambrian gives us instead is something closer to a forest that springs fully formed from the ground, with no roots visible beneath it. As Michael Behe makes clear in the documentary, Darwinian evolution depends entirely on successive steps — each one small enough to be preserved by natural selection, each one building on the last. Darwin himself acknowledged that his theory would collapse if any biological system could be found that could not have been built through numerous successive slight modifications. The sudden appearance of dozens of fully realized, irreducibly complex body plans in this geological instant represents precisely that kind of system. There are no prior layers in the fossil record showing the incremental steps that Darwinian theory requires. They simply are not there.
Beyond what the documentary addresses, there is a further problem worth noting. Beneficial mutations in large, complex organisms are extraordinarily rare to begin with. But the mutations that would produce significant changes to body plans do not occur in mature organisms — they occur in early embryonic development, where the consequences of any significant alteration are almost universally catastrophic. Tampering with the developmental instructions that govern how a body plan is laid down in the embryo does not produce a new and improved organism. It produces one that does not survive. The very stage at which large-scale evolutionary change would have to be initiated is the stage at which such changes are most lethal.
The Problem of Gratuitous Beauty
Perhaps the most arresting challenge to the materialist account of life is one that cannot be quantified at all. The biological world is saturated with beauty — and not merely the functional elegance of a well-engineered system, though that is present in abundance. It is beauty that exceeds any plausible survival requirement. The iridescent complexity of a peacock’s tail, the elaborate architecture of a flower that no pollinator will ever fully appreciate, the sheer aesthetic exuberance of the natural world — evolutionary biology calls this the problem of gratuitous beauty, and it is a problem precisely because it has no satisfying materialist solution. Natural selection preserves what survives. It has no mechanism for preserving what is merely, extravagantly beautiful.
And then there is the human response to that beauty. We are moved by it. We seek it out. We find in the biological world something that speaks to us — an invitation, as the documentary suggests, that goes beyond the merely useful. That capacity in us, to perceive and be arrested by beauty that serves no survival function, is itself not a feature that natural selection can straightforwardly account for. It points, as Richard Sternberg observes in the film, toward something Aristotle recognized long before Darwin. The exuberance of the natural world suggests a rational structure to the universe, and perhaps an intelligence behind it reaching toward us.
The biological world, examined honestly, presents three convergent lines of evidence — the informational architecture of the cell, the pattern of the fossil record, and the reality of gratuitous beauty — each of which points beyond blind material processes. Taken together, they tell a story that the materialist tradition has no framework to contain. And that story, as Meyer has argued through much careful scholarship, is not a retreat from science. It is where science, followed honestly, leads.
Editor’s note: For more about The Story of Everything by Walter Myers III, who appears in the film, see here and here.