Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the second post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
Yesterday in this series, I identified two approaches I found as a young man in the young-earth creationist literature of the time. The key figure in that circle taking the second approach was organic chemist A. E. Wilder-Smith (1915–1995). Wilder-Smith was a young-earth creationist. Yet I never got the sense from him that his young earth views did the heavy lifting in his arguments against naturalism or for intelligence in nature. (As an aside, Wilder-Smith was a professor from 1964–70 at the same school — the University of Illinois’s Chicago branch — where I was doing my undergraduate in 1980–81, he at the medical campus, me at the university campus.)
Wilder-Smith wrote a number of books, some on general apologetics, but his most significant books, in my view, were about the role of information in biology and how the type of information found in biology undercuts naturalistic attempts to explain biological complexity and function. The most important of these books was The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution (1970), in which he treated genetic systems as cybernetic and information-processing systems and argued that their programming originated through intelligence.
Accounting for Information Processing
The issue for Wilder-Smith was not the mere existence of biomacromolecules but rather accounting for the information processing required for such molecules to arise and interact, their very arrangements and functions resulting from the execution of encoded instructions. Biology was giving us computer programming and symbolic codes which, by mapping functional structures to functional structures, exhibited a tacit semantics.
The point was similar to John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, where the physical substrate could not explain the semantics atop it. Wilder-Smith was pointing to a mystery for naturalism, but a mystery in principle resolvable through the guidance of a real teleological intelligence. As he recounted in one of the recorded lectures I heard by him (I never saw him in person though we did correspond by mail and had one conversation by phone), it was a mystery and one he discussed with the linguist Noam Chomsky, who agreed with him that this was indeed a deep mystery.
The Famous Wistar Symposium
Wilder-Smith’s 1970 book The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution extensively cites the 1967 proceedings of the famous symposium at the Wistar Institute (pictured at the top) in Philadelphia: Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution: A Symposium Held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, April 25 and 26, 1966, Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph, no. 5 (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967).
At this symposium, mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and Marcel Schützenberger, as well as engineer Murray Eden, offered a mathematical critique of neo-Darwinism. Wilder-Smith’s 1970 book very extensively quotes from that symposium, especially remarks by Schützenberger and Eden. Schützenberger pointed to the coordination problem between a computer code and what it does, analogizing this to the coordination between genotype and phenotype. Coordination is a problem because small changes at the level of the computer code/genotype can very easily disrupt computer function/phenotype, making randomness at the level of code or genotype in the main toxic.
Random genetic changes, even with natural selection at work, thus seem like a recipe for evolution to fail. But where the Wistar mathematicians, though critical of neo-Darwinism, were engaged in pure critique (“this doesn’t work”), Wilder-Smith was looking for an intelligent design alternative (“this is what replaces it”). He didn’t call it “intelligent design” at the time, but throughout the concluding portions of his 1970 book, he refers extensively to design and intelligence, and there he makes an explicit design argument. He even invokes William Paley’s design argument, though he cashes it out not in terms of a watch but in terms of information.
Next, “Discovering a Design Argument Based on Information.”