Signature in the Cell: Stephen Meyer Faces his Critics, pt. 1: The Presentation

yeah yeah Bravo to Ladd and Jerry and the illustrious nice work again it's a beautiful film we need to make a big segue because I don't want you to get confused to think that the rest of the evening is really about the Cambrian explosion or something like that we're going to take a very different turn we're going to be dealing with topics and intelligent design dealing with the book signature in the cell which has to do with the origin of life and information in DNA so just want you to get to her your mental steering wheel spinning because we're going to go in a different direction and Steve Meyer is the author of this book and I want to give him an introduction from the podium and show a brief clip to give him an even longer introduction here he is dr. Steve Meyer is founder and director of the Discovery Institute Center for science and culture which is intelligent designs primary intellectual and scientific headquarters dr. Meyer is a Cambridge University trained philosopher of science the author of peer-reviewed publications and technical scientific philosophical and other books and journals he's been featured in media appearances on CNN MSNBC NBC ABC CBS FOX News PBS and the BBC in 2008 he appeared with Ben Stein in that wonderful little film called expelled he's also featured prominently in two other science documentaries icons of evolution and unlocking the mystery of life he's the author of the best-selling book signature in the cell published just last year and available tonight let's roll a little video introduction of our speaker and then hear from Steve Meyer the existence of complex biological machines raises an obvious question if natural selection wasn't the agent of their construction then what was the centerpiece of my investigation was an interview with philosopher of science dr. Stephen Meyer Meyer who holds a PhD from Cambridge University brought me face to face with the most efficient information processing system in the universe the DNA molecule and it's language of life the discovery of the information bearing properties of DNA and RNA is a fundamental challenge to all materialistic theories of the origin of life neo-darwinism and its associated theories of chemical evolution and the like will not be able to survive the biology of the information age the biology the 21st century according to a lot of mainstream media the theory of intelligent design is a faith-based idea and in saying that they want to dismiss it as something that has no basis in science but the media has confused a fundamental issue they're confusing the evidence for the theory with the implications of the theory the theory of intelligent design may well have implications that are supportive of theistic belief but the theory is not based on theistic belief it's based on the discovery of digital code in cells miniature machines and cells the fine-tuning the laws of physics and chemistry and standard ways of scientific reasoning about the remote past in the history of life impressed to see that there would be a question time afterwards and that people would be actually even twittering me my daughter just taught me two texts over Christmas vacation so I'm they're going to be pretty impressed since there will be question time let me just say a few words about my approach to questions when I had my first year in graduate school in England I was attending a lecture on the philosopher Immanuel Kant and I'd had one course in in such philosophy when I was an undergraduate so I was a little bit out of my depth and about halfway through the lecture the lecturer was talking about an aspect of Kant's philosophy that I had actually encountered before and I raised my hand and asked if he could direct me to a place in Kant's writings where I could read more about the issue that he was discussing and it was clear was a question that revealed some ignorant on my part and there was a kind of quiet shuffling of feet and an awkwardness after the lecture was over over my my supervisor who was an English dawn of the old school took me aside and he said in his high Oxbridge accent he said Maya he said I know in the States you've learned that the only stupid question is the one you didn't ask then he paused and said it's different here well there will be some time for questions afterwards and it's American rules okay so I'm not sure how many we can feel but do feel that any question is fair game I want to talk tonight about signature in the cell the case for intelligent design based on DNA and I want to begin with with the central question of design and and raise the question about about Darwin a year ago I had I had the opportunity to go back to England and the lecture in what we we Americans would say shrewsbury the British pronounce it Shrewsbury and it's the birthplace of Darwin and it was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth the month I was there and all across the world last year there were discussions of the legacy of Charles Darwin what did he teach us what did he leave us obviously the theory of evolution he proposed a mechanism for that evolution called natural selection he pioneered a method of studying events in the remote past but many historians of ideas and biologists and evolutionary biologists and scholars say that the principle legacy of Darwin has to do with the with the idea of design in the first slide I have here Francisco Ayala says that the functional design of organisms and their features would seem to argue for the existence of a designer but it was Darwin's greatest accomplishment to show that the directive organization of living beings can be explained by a natural process a fully undirected natural process called natural selection without any need to resort to a creator or any other external agent in the article more recently Ayala has said that Darwin gave us design without a designer or at least the appearance of design and that's the critical Darwinian concept next slide please when it pops up it will be a quotation from Richard Dawkins who says the biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose we're a little too numerous tonight for me to do my usual kind of teaching style QA but or asking rhetorical questions but let me ask one anyway what is the key word in this phrase obviously very good ok the obvious from a Darwinian point of view you have an appearance but the appearance is entirely illusory things look designed living systems look designed but they look design because there is a purely undirected natural process that can produce that appearance without itself being designed or guided in any way natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence say the Darwinian but but it is not designed or guided in any way now let's what why do the Darwinian say this this is a classic Darwinian point of view and it sounds counterintuitive to many people outside biology but it actually makes sense if you understand understand this from from a Darwinian point of view I got a little picture here of a sheep all right and I want you to do a little thought experiment with me this goes back to the 19th century in the 19th century biologists were very impressed with what they called adaptation they noticed that organisms seemed well adapted to their environment fish live in the water they had Ginn's gills and fins birds fly in the air they have wings animals that live in cold climates have thick fur or feathers for example that like this sheep now if you in the 19th century well it was well known that human breeders could actually cause animals to adapt to their environment if you wanted to say you were in the far north of Scotland and you wanted to breed a woolly or breed of sheep what would you do well in the 19th century it was well known you could choose the wiliest males and the wiliest females and allow only them to breed such that over a succession of generations of choosing only those bulliest animals you would end up producing a much woolly or breed of sheep now Darwin's insight was that nature could accomplish what the human intelligent breeder could accomplish he it not he didn't use this example but if we adapt it to a Darwinian point of view we could imagine a series of very winters and if you had a series of very cold winters such that only the wooly a sheep survived in each successive generation wouldn't the net result be the same as with the artificial selection of the breeders in other words nature would be killing off all but the wiliest in each generation but that would cause only woolly ones to be left to breed and the woolly characteristic would be amplified over time thus causing the Sheep to be adapted to their environment in other words Darwin was able to provide a naturalistic explanation for the phenomenon of adaptation which too many 19th century biologists bespoke design the organisms are adapted to their environment if there's a fit between the environment and the organism it was thought perhaps that was best explained because the designer had designed the organism to survive and thrive in that environment but Darwin gave an account of that adaptation without any need for a designer so he eliminated the need for intelligent design now a couple slides forward there's a another rhetorical question with a sheep on it for our guys in the back and the question is essentially this is adaptation the only appearance of design and if not his national natural selection explained all the others it might be that Darwin has provided a perfectly adequate explanation of adaptation at least the minor variations that occur in the cause animals to adjust to changes in their environment but that he hasn't explained or his modern followers haven't explained for example the very large scale changes that occur in the history of life in evolutionary biology today in biological literature around the world they're an increasing number of scientists who are questioning the creative power of mutation and selection there's a group of scientists called the Altenburg 16 who have made a lot of news this this last year all evolutionary biologists who are increasingly skeptical about the creative power of natural selection and they're calling for a new theory of evolution tomorrow in the event discussing the Cambrian explosion both the film and several of the scientists talking will be raising questions of the creative power of darwin's mechanism of natural selection and its ability to produce fundamentally new forms of life from simpler pre-existing forms now that's not what I'm going to be discussing tonight next slide instead I'm going to be looking at a more fundamental issue not the question of how you get new forms of life from simpler pre-existing forms but instead the question of how you get life in the first place what we see on the on the screen behind me is a Darwin's famous Tree of Life picture of the history of life it's a diagram that depicts the change that he envisioned taking place over time with one axis is time that's the vertical that and then the horizontal axis is change in form so that the Tree of Life is meant to convey the idea that over time vary from the very simplest form of life there's been a gradual morphing or changing of organisms in their form until at the top of the tree in the branches at the top are representing all the forms of life that exist today whether we're talking about reptiles or birds or bacteria or whatever it is but at the very base of the tree there's the there's a mystery and that mystery has to do with the origin of the very first life now Darwin was well aware of this in his time but he didn't read he didn't attempt to solve it he was more focused on on biological evolution after Darwin there was another theory that came along called chemical evolution that attempted to explain how you got that first simple cell from simpler pre-existing chemicals and what I want to look at tonight is whether or not those theories have explained away the appearance of design or any appearance of design that might reside at the at the point of the origin of the first life or another way to say that is that might reside within the simplest living cell next slide now in the 19th century as I mentioned Darwin neither explained nor attempted to explain the origin of the very first life he had a few speculations about it that he wrote to colleagues and letter but he didn't attempt to develop any kind of systematic theory yet scientists even very soon after the publication of the Origin of Species were quite convinced that Darwin had explained away all appearances of design at least many of his followers and and the evolutionary biologist that followed in his wake why was there such confidence that Darwin had explained away all evidences of design when it was also known that he hadn't explained the origin of the first life well the simple answer to that the next slide underscores this is that that note where we got to go back one sorry the quote oh I yeah I was on the quote from Huxley they were very very good it in the 19th century it was that the cell was thought to be extremely simple it wasn't thought to be the kind of thing that manifested any intricacy or evidence of design in fact the one of Darwin's key followers Thomas Henry Huxley believed that these these fundamental substance that made up life was something called protoplasm and in in Huxley's view protoplasm was the was a simple chemical substance that could be produced by a few simple chemical reactions another staunch Darwinian on the continent Ernst Haeckel had the same view and they both had quotations like the one which made statements like the one in the quotation behind me that the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated plasm it's like jello it's not very complicated and if you think of life in that way even if you don't have a detailed theory of the origin of life you're going to assume that it's going to be a pretty easy task to explain away the origin of life with by reference to a few simple chemical reactions now that you start that view change gradually by the 1890s we know a lot more about proteins and in the 1920s and 30s there was a theory a theory of the origin of life that was devised by a man named Alexander Oparin a Russian scientist and that theory attempted in a very Darwinian fashion to provide a step-by-step account of the the growing awareness that scientists had of the complexity of the cell but in the 1920s and 30s that awareness was still very dim all that really changed beginning in the 1950s and 60s with what historians of biology now call the molecular biological revolution and we can have a look in the next slide at our fear the fearless leaders in that intellectual revolution Watson and Crick they made a discovery in 1953 that is course well known to almost all of us it was the discovery rather the elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule they were first able to determine that it DNA had this beautiful double helix structure and that shook the scientific world there were parallel discoveries going on in the field of protein chemistry and so side by side science was making progress on gaining an understanding of what was going on in their inner workings of life in the even the simplest living cell now in the very next slide we see the chemical structure of DNA that that Watson and Crick were able to discover now I think an even more important discovery or insight rather came three or four years later when Francis Crick proposed something called the sequence hypothesis and the sequence hypothesis next slide was was the recognition that along the spine the DNA molecule there are four chemical subunits called bases that function just like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in the machine code which is to say it's not the shape or the chemical structure of those subunits that causes them to perform the function they do rather it's the sequential arrangement of those bases those chemical units or sections of code you might think of a group of Scrabble letters I have a few up here on the on the podium with me if you've got a pile of Scrabble letters on the side of the board they're not going to do anything for you they won't score you won't score any points in the game but if you arrange them properly to score to to spell words you put them on the right squares you're going to get points in other words it's the second so arrangement of the letters that allows them to perform a function in that game the same thing is true in life it's the sequential arrangement of the bases that allow them to perform a function and the function that they perform which is what Crick anticipated is that they provide instructions for building the critical proteins and protein machines out of which which allow the cell or which keeps the cell alive proteins perform all the we just got me back okay proteins perform all the important jobs in the cell they they are enzymes which catalyze reactions they form structural parts of larger machines they help process information you can think of proteins like the toolbox or the toolbox of the cell inside the toolbox are lots of different types of tools each one has a different shape and each one can do a different job in virtue of its shape you a hammer can hammer a nail because of the shape it has you wouldn't use a saw to do that well proteins have this same kind of feature they have complex three-dimensional shapes or structures and in virtue of those structures they can perform different functions now we can move forward on the slide past the DNA there's the DNA okay now proteins are made of smaller units called amino acids and not so much keep in mind now is two different kinds of molecules that that are inside cells there's the DNA molecule and we're going to come back to that in a minute and there's the protein molecules that the information on DNA encodes for the instructions on DNA direct the cell and tell it how to build the proteins and protein machines that this cell needs to stay alive now here's a here's a a child's toys called they're called snap-loc blocks when my kids were little I stole them from them I don't know that they've ever really gotten over that they're teenagers now so on the box that said ages 2 to 4 so I don't think they're missing them too much but in any case I'm using these to illustrate the relationship between amino acids which are the building blocks of proteins and proteins which are long chains of amino acids which fold into intricate three-dimensional structures and the idea here is that if we go let's go past that slide showing the amino acids in their chemical formula formulae there'll be there'll be a test on that afterwards this is a these are some pictures of different proteins that you can find on on the internet and the proteins have these beautiful three-dimensional structures it turns out that these three-dimensional structures are critical to the jobs that proteins perform next slide the proteins it turns out have an intricate hand-in-glove fit with other molecules in the cell either the molecules that they are binding with to form structural parts or the molecules that they may be involved with in chemical reactions this is a protein that's involved in just breaking apart a two part sugar notice that there's a beautiful hand and glove fit between the bar bell shaped disaccharide and the protein into which it Nestle's and it's in virtue of that fit that the chemical reaction that the protein catalyzes can take place it breaks that bond apart in this particular case and that's that's the story with proteins over and over again they have beautiful three-dimensional structure but that three-dimensional structure derives from the precise arrangement of the amino acids in these long linear chains if you get the arrangement of amino acids just right the protein is going to fold up into the structure that's necessary to perform a function if the arrangements are wrong and you get the amino acids whoop dropped one there if you get the amino acids to if they're arranged in the wrong way you may not get a fold and and a nice structure and you may lose the function that the protein performs so the amino acids have a property that can be called sequence specificity if something is sequence specific the function of the whole depends upon the precise arrangement of the parts think of some other things that might have sequence specificity besides proteins a couple things come to mind human language computer code and and the arrangement of proteins are amino acids and proteins now the question is where does that how does the cell know to put the amino acids together in the right way so the proteins fold properly well that's where we come back to DNA and this is what Francis Crick anticipated in 1957 that the information encoded along the spine of the DNA molecule the precise arrangement of those bases those chemical subunits was conveying instructions to that directed the corrected the construction of the proteins and that's exactly what we now know to be the case and I now have a little piece of animation that I can show that explains exactly how the digital information that's stored along the spine of the DNA directs the construction of proteins I usually like to narrate this myself but we're such a large audience tonight we are we have a clip of the narration that we're going to show in just a second with with my voice providing the narration in a recorded form so we're just going to dim the house lights and watch this narration and then I'll come back and make a few more comments but again the big picture here what's happening what you're going to see is digital information in DNA being copied transported and then that information on what's called a messenger RNA strand is going to direct the construction of proteins at a chemical factory called a ribosome let's have a look in 1957 Francis Crick first proposed that chemicals called bases along the spine of the DNA molecule function is alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in the machine code this animation shows how this digital information directs protein synthesis first a large protein complex separates the tightly wound strands of the DNA to prepare it to be during this process of transcription a protein complex called a polymerase produces a single-stranded copy of the original instructions here we see this copy a messenger RNA molecule being constructed inside the polymerase as individual bases are positioned and added to the growing strand now we see the polymerase in action from the outside as it spits out the messenger RNA transcript next this RNA transcript approaches and passes through a molecular machine called the nuclear pore complex an information recognition device that controls the flow of information in and out of the cell's nucleus now we see the genetic assembly instructions on the messenger RNA approaching and arriving at a two-part chemical factory called a ribosome the site of protein synthesis as the messenger RNA transcript passes through the ribosome the process of translation begins during translation a mechanical assembly line builds a specifically sequence chain of amino acids in accord with the instructions on the transcript these amino acids are transported from other parts of the cell by molecules called transfer RNAs which link specific sequences of bases to corresponding amino acids the sequential arrangement of the amino acids determines the type of protein constructed when the construction of the chain is complete it is transported to a barrel-shaped machine that helps fold it into the precise shape required to perform its function you after the chain is folded into a protein it is released into the outer cytoplasm to do its job in the cell okay so not exactly the simple homogeneous globular plasm that scientists imagined in the 19th century in fact what's really stunning to me I started out in in the field of geophysics in which I was doing digital signal processing and what's going on this is a information processing system it's not just that there's information encoded on DNA it's that there's a whole system for processing that information and I live up in Seattle today or now and and one of the big companies up in Seattle is obviously Boeing and if you go to the Boeing plant today the Boeing the people at Boeing use a technology very much like what's going on in the cell it's called CAD cam computer assisted design and manufacture where you literally have digital information directing the construction of mechanical parts that's what we see what we've just witnessed here in this animation that's what's going on and inside the cells so we're looking at some very sophisticated information and information processing technology now and that that has raised a really important puzzle or mystery I call it the DNA enigma and I have a series of slides about that and I'm going to just talk about the what the DNA enigma is not and then what it is the DNA enigma is not the structure of the DNA molecule Watson and Crick did a beautiful job of elucidating that in 1953 it's not where the information next slide resides we know that information for building proteins is stored along the the spine of the DNA molecule it's not even next slide what that information does we just saw that in the in the in the the animation that information is used to construct to direct the construct rather of the proteins and protein machines that were depicted in the animation as well instead the the DNA enigma is closely associated with another mystery in fact the mystery that Darwin didn't solve back in 1859 the mystery of the origin of the first life the DNA enigma is not per se just the origin of life but it's it's intimately connected with that the DNA enigma is the mystery of the origin of the information that's stored on DNA it's not what does the information do it's not where is it stored it's where did it come from how did digital code come to be inside a molecule where did that information come from and as I said that that information that idea or that that mystery is intimately connected with the the problem of the origin of life now why is that next slide here's a here's a quotation from a leading German origin of life biologist his name is burnt Olaf Coopers and he says this he says the problem of the origin of life is basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of information now that actually makes sense next slide if you think about a computer in fact I used to ask my students this question I'd say if you want to give your computer a new function what do you have to give it and they would immediately know the answer they're under 30 so they are techie right they know it's code you have to give a code software digital information well it turns out the same thing is true in life if you want to build a new form of life from a simpler pre-existing form you have to have dedicated proteins to service new cell types and those proteins are built from instructions that are stored in in DNA but it didn't even more fundamental level if you want to get life going in the first place you have to have proteins and those proteins again require information for their instruct for their construction and that information is stored in DNA so building life we now know is an information problem we need information to build life now I want to just a point of clarification about what I mean by information in a biological context next slide there's there's at least two different conceptions of information there's a we need one more that's showing how you need information to build a critter there we go this is a little math there won't be much more math it's but there's two different at least two different concepts of information and I want to be clear about the one that that I'm applying and using in my argument there's a mathematical notion of information that was first proffered by a man named Claude Shannon in 1949 Shannon had an intuition that information was related to the reduction of uncertainty and that uncertain the reduction of uncertainty was also related to probability if I roll a dice and throw it on the on the the table or a die a single die there will be six possibilities that means there's a certain amount of uncertainty I know know which side is going to turn up once something comes up I've eliminated five possibilities and elected one if I flip a coin and it comes up heads I've also eliminated some uncertainty I've eliminated the uncertainty I had about whether it would be heads or tails I've elected one option and eliminated another in the case of the coin however I'm eliminated eliminating less uncertainty than I am in what then when I'm rolling the die so in Shannon's theory the die because it's eliminating more uncertainty is conveying more information when it comes up on say a three rather than a one two four five or six then is the then is the coin which only eliminates one possibility now notice his concept of information is also closely related to probability because there's a one in six chance of getting any particular side on the die and only a one in two chance of getting in any particular side on the coin the more uncertainty that's reduced the more improbable event and the more information conveyed so in Shannon's idea of information information is inversely related to probability the more improbable an event is when it occur is the more information is being conveyed because the more uncertainty that's being reduced in any case that's his mathematical concept if we can get that equation back up there I'm sure there's people that want to take notes for the test afterwards okay now there's another concept of information though as well and I want to go one further slide okay and this is and I've got some terminology the top a complexity you need to know is a synonym for up for improbability if something's improbable its complex in this mathematical parlance now notice there's a difference between the two strand the strings of characters top and bottom this the string on the top is very improbable so by Shannon's measure of information it has a a high information carrying capacity notice that the string on the bottom is roughly the same length and therefore by Shannon's measure of information it also has a lot of information it's a very improbable arrangement of characters in both cases but can you see that there's an important qualitative difference between the two strings the one on the top doesn't perform a function it has no meaning the one on the bottom does perform a function it performs a communication function and it does so in virtue of the sequence specificity this precise arrangement of the letters in accord with a code or our grammatical set of grammatical conventions now in the Information Sciences there is a distinction between these two and there's terminology to capture that that the string on the top has Shannon information the string on the bottom has what I call functional or functionally specified information or because complexity and improbability are related some people also refer to this as the top string would be complexity the top spring bottom string would be specified complexity when we're talking about information in a biological context we're not talking about strings of characters like the top string we're talking about strings like the bottom ones where the arrangement of the bases are specifically arranged - specifically sequins - to convey information that is functional that produces a functional outcome now and this distinction next slide was made from the very beginning of the molecular biological revolution by now that none other than Francis Crick himself and we see him here saying Crick by the way was was aware of Shannon's work and wanted to make clear that when he was talking about information being encoded in DNA he was not talking about a merely improbable string of characters he was talking about an improbable string that was also specified to perform a function here he says by information I mean the specification of the amino acid sequence in the protein or in speaking about DNA he says information means here the precise determination of sequence either of bases in nucleic acid that's like DNA and RNA or the amino acid residues and proteins so he's talking about the second kind of information not the first that's what we have to explain when I talk about the DNA enigma I'm talking about the origin of the information the mystery surrounding the origin of the information in the DNA molecule and by information I mean functionally specified information not merely Shannen information okay that clarification out of the way let's press on next slide I first encountered what I call the DNA enigma at a conference in 1985 there were scientists on a panel discussing the origin of life and nearly all the panelists agreed that the attempt to explain the origin of life by reference to undirected chemical interactions had come to an impasse theories about chemical evolution how you get to the first living cell from simpler nonliving chemicals were we're fine we're coming to a state of impasse there wasn't a good a good solution a good theory on offer and one of the scientists on the panel was a man named Charles Saxton who had just written a book called the mystery of life's origin I was a young scientist at the time and it just so happened that dr. Thaxton was living in in Dallas where I was working I was work as a geophysicist my job according to my bosses who are all Texans was to look for all out in the guff there is apparently right now quite a bit of all out in the guff but let's never mind next slide anyway I became fascinated with this because I was at the time working in an information science I was doing digital signal processing a seismic data and when I learned that the these one of the central problems at the core of this mystery of the origin of life was the problem of the origin of the information that you would need to get life going I became very fascinated with that a year later I found myself off to graduate school and I went to Cambridge where I wanted to study more about this problem and I did so in a program in the history and philosophy of science I eventually did a doctoral dissertation on the question of origin of life biology and during my during the period of time in which I began to research this I wanted first and first of all to find out how deep an enigma this really was how deep a problem was this in origin of life studies this is a discipline of evolutionary biology and as I got into the literature I found that it was a very significant problem indeed there were three basic approaches that I discovered scientists had proposed or discussed and next slide and these were were chance necessity and the combination of the two and I had in the back of my mind this critical Darwinian concept of design or apparent design Darwin of course favored apparent design but when we're talking about digital code or digital information more precisely stored in a molecule we're looking at something that has a very striking appearance of design in fact no less of an advocate of Darwinian orthodoxy than Richard Dawkins himself has said that the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like he says apart from differences in jargon the pages of a molecular biology journal and a computer engineering journal would be are completely interchangeable the basic ideas of information storage and transmission are they're present in both types of systems that are being analyzed computers and living cells fascinating we have a clear appearance of design a striking appearance of design what intrigued me was that there were so many scientists saying we haven't explained the origin of life and we haven't explained the origin of the information that makes life possible so now we have an appearance of design that has not been explained away by any undirected materialistic process or do we that was the question in my mind and so I began to investigate the different options that I was finding in the technical literature in origin of life research and I found that there were were different approaches to this question three broad approaches there's a slide up ahead with a picture of a book by jacques manova we could go to that that would be great yeah that's the slide the title of the book is chance and necessity Manoa was a colleague of Crick's the brilliant French molecular biologist and in 1968 he wrote a book that was discussing not only developments in molecular biology but it was really a treatise on the whole scientific approach and he was arguing that what scientists should do when they're explaining any phenomena is to explain what they see by reference to chance variations or natural laws which he referred to by the by the code word necessity if I drop a ball to the earth we would say it falls in a court of the law of gravity and therefore we'd say it falls by necessity so a law like explanation is one involving necessity so Munoz says the job of the scientist is to explain things by random or chance variations law like necessity or the combination of the two and as I was studying these different theories and conjectures and proposals and hypotheses about the origin of the first life I found that they typically broke into one of three categories either these theories relied heavily on chance or they relied on necessity or they relied on the combination of the two I also discovered that early on fairly early on scientists had dismissed the idea of chance as having any real explanatory power with respect to this critical problem of the origin of the information in DNA and RNA the information necessary to make life possible there were scientists for example two slides up ahead here we have a quotation from a man named George Wald and there were a number of scientists particularly in the 1950s who were still talking about chance as well put it the hero of the plot he said time is in fact the hero of the plot given so much time the impossible becomes possible the possible probable and the probable virtually certain and the idea was if you if you shake rattle and roll long enough in that prebiotic soup of all the simple chemicals eventually you're going to come up with molecules that are chock full of information that can explain the origin of life so famous biochemistry textbook by a man named lenninger and he was still advocating this idea is late as 1970 but within the technical discipline of origin of life studies which was very carefully linked to developments in molecular biology the pure chance hypothesis went pretty much out of vogue and pretty much out of vogue for good by the mid to late 60s and I I want to explain why that's the case because I think it's important to understand that it has to do with something called the problem of combinatorial x' it turns out that it each one of these sites on in a growing protein chain I'm have to kind of let it lie here there are many possible amino acids that could attach there are 20 amino acids that can be part of proteins 20 protein forming amino acids there's actually a larger class of amino acids maybe as many as 250 or so but if we just limit our concern to the 20 that can be part of proteins you can see that very quickly as the length of the of the chain grows the number of combinations that correspond to any given chain is huge if I've got a one in 20 chance of getting the particular amino acid at one site then I've got a twenty times twenty possibilities associated with two sites or twenty times twenty times twenty possibilities associated with three sites so for any given protein there's a huge number of other possible ways of arranging amino acids now if it turns out that proteins are rare functional proteins are rare within that space of possibilities it's going to be very very difficult to find even a single protein by chance in for example the time of the known universe let me illustrate this a little Morgan and see if you can grasp what what's Drott what drove this development in thinking in origin of life studies imagine we've got a bike lock that has ten ten digits on each dial and four dials how many possible combinations are there well we're always kind of tempted to say 10 plus 10 plus 10 equals 40 but of course it's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 or 10,000 only four dials but lots of different ways of combining those 10 digits on each dial now my my graphic designer has made me a hypothetical buy clock with 10 dials now how many combinations do we have we've got 10 times 10 times 10 times 2 we've got 10 to the 10 or 10 trillion possible combinations now if you're a thief and you want to quickly crack the code on this app I imagine a bike parked out behind the auditorium and you want to get the lock crack before the lecture is over do you have a reasonable chance of getting that done without knowing the combination not if you've got ten trillion possibilities to search a random search is not going to get the job done and that's essentially the problem that scientists began to appreciate in spades by the mid 60s that with proteins the number of possible combinations is so vast and the number of trials you have available so limited even by say a 13 to 14 billion year old universe that you're not going to be able to search the number of possibilities in a short protein a hormone or something where you might have just 10 sites you have 20 to the 10 possible combinations that's an enormous number but what about a modest length protein about I've chosen one about a hundred and 50 amino acids long that's short that's not a long protein it's very modest length but with twenty possibilities at each site there's a hundred and fifty to twenty to the hundred and fifty possibilities or one in ten to the 195th power now there's only 10 to the 80th elementary particles in the whole universe there's only been 10 to the 17th seconds since the Big Bang in my book I go through the math and I take into account all the relevant factors and I show that in essence searching for even a single gene or protein product of that gene by chance alone is not a plausible is not plausible it's like the it's like the bike lock thief in the back there who's now on his forty second guess out of ten trillion combinations he's not going to get it done before the lecture is over it's it's always going to be more likely than not that he will not find that combination by chance so considerations like this led many many origin of life biologists to simply reject chance outright it was a critical paper by the man named Petey Mora in 1964 about this and a quotation here that I like to read in lectures because I think it gets the point across quite nicely blind chance is very limited says AG Karen Smith a Scottish biochemist low levels of cooperation or organization or information he can produce exceedingly easily the equivalent of a few letters or small words but it becomes very quickly incompetent as the amount of organization increases very soon indeed long waiting periods and massive material resources become irrelevant I used to illustrate this to my students what the bag of Scrabble letters go walk out into the audience have them each pick out a letter and then go write the letter on the board it to see how much information chance could generate and of course invariably what they would get would be gibberish occasionally get a couple letters like ugh or um or buh or maybe bat or something and then the students would start hooting and hollering as if they were showing me up showing what chance could really do but I'd always win the argument by just letting the experiment run longer and longer this is Karen Smith's point if you need a little information you might get lucky and get er done but if you need a lot of information and even single genes let alone the amount of information you need to build a whole organism is a lot of information you need a lot chance is not is not plausible now of course this doesn't come as any great surprise to any committed Darwinian zin the audience or to its evolutionary biologists the standard Darwinian approach has never been to rely on chance alone but rather chance in combination with a law like process known as natural selection and so after it became apparent to many scientists in the 60s that the complexity of the biomolecules the the DNA the RNA and the protein the specified complexity the informational complexity of these molecules was so vast and that chance wasn't a plausible explanation for it scientists began to think about combining chance with natural selection and that led to a period of time in which there were scientists proposing ideas about prebiotic natural selection proposing that Darwin's mechanism of differential reproduction his survival of the fittest mechanism could could explain the origin of the information that you need to produce the first life but that had a problem associated with it one that was recognized and has been recognized repeatedly in the literature and the problem is that it begs the question that's a philosopher's a big sin okay it's it's a logical error here's the basic problem in all living organisms natural selection ensues once you have organisms that are capable of reproducing of copying themselves remember my sheep example from the beginning of the lecture you if if there's a group of offspring that have a variety of characteristics and one of those characteristics confers a survival advantage the other such that the others die off that one is going to live to pass that that trade on but if there's no reproduction you can't have natural selection almost by definition in fact proposing natural selection the prebiotic level is really stretching the concept to a breaking point because natural selection presupposes self reproduction or self replication and in here and here's the real kicker in all living organisms self reproduction or replication is predicated is made possible by sequence-specific that is information rich DNA and protein molecules what were we trying to explain the origin of we were trying to explain the origin of DNA and protein rather the information in those molecules and so we invoke natural selection but natural selection doesn't even become a factor until you already have DNA in protein information rich DNA in protein it's a little like this there once upon a time was an absent-minded philosopher of science he was walking home from the from university one day preoccupied with deep thoughts about the origin of life he'd lost his wallet his keys his cell phone all the usual stuff but this day it was worse he fell in a big pit he wasn't watching where he was going but no problem he said to himself I know how to get out of this pit I'm just going to go home get a ladder come back jump in the hole and climb out what's wrong with my story it begs the question about how you get out of the house get out of the pit to get the ladder right it's the same this is essentially what's going on with these theories of prebiotic natural and this was very astutely perceived and articulated by christian to do the Nobel prize-winning biochemist and molecular biologist who's done a lot of work on the origin of life written some important books on the topic and and he put it this way he said theories of pre biological natural selection quote need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place okay it's a begging the question problem now there have been some attempts to get around this by bootstrapping in various ways and there have been some computer simulations and in my book I discuss the problem with those computer simulations which are essentially they're models of their simulating prebiotic natural selection in the computer and there's some problems with those as well which I ID tail in the book and there's another more current model called the RNA world which does also involve natural selection at a very early pre life stage and I'm sure we we will probably want to discuss more about that in the QA I don't want to go into it now chapter 14 in my book is devoted to critiquing those models of the origin of life and we can talk about more about it more later in our discussion the third approach that I mentioned for explaining the origin well explaining anything according to a joke mono is an approach that relies on pure necessity or natural law or what in origin of life studies became known as self-organization and there have been a number of these theories but perhaps the first and most prominent theory was attempting to explain precisely the sequence specificity of proteins and other critical molecules in the cell and the idea behind it was that just as in a crystal of salt there is a force of attraction a chemical force that is responsible for the beautiful ordering of a of the crystalline structure that you often find with salt na has a plus charge CL a minus charge plus and minus attract you get a you get a beautiful matrix that develops up that's a self-organizing process produced by chemical attraction and the idea that was first put forward and his first self organizational theory was put forward by a man named Dean Kenyon and his co-author Gary Steinman in a book called biochemical predestination we have a professor here tonight from Calvin College so I probably need to clarify this is biochemical predestination not the Calvinistic kind okay the idea here is that you've got forces of chemical attraction that are responsible for the sequential arrangement of the amino acids that allows the protein to fold into its right structure and and and and perform a function in the cell there was also the hope that perhaps this idea could be applied to explain not only the sequence specificity in proteins but also in DNA and RNA as well well it turned out that this model unraveled and the chief architect of the model himself ended up repudiating his own theory and there's a kind of many step story associated with this which I tell in the book but I want to zero in on the problem of trying to explain the origin of information in DNA by reference to any kind of self organizational forces of attraction Dean Kenyon realized quickly there were some empirical results that showed that his idea wasn't going to work for proteins there were some slight differences of affinity between some amino acids and others but they didn't correlate to any of the known sequencing in actual proteins but in a more fundamental level he realized that the they've got it if self-organization is going to if it's going to work it's got to explain the origin in DNA and our or RNA because those molecules provide the information for building proteins that's the more fundamental the more fundamental need in explanation so I have it behind me a diagram and I wish I had a point actually it's not there what I have behind me is me that's just disconcerting okay this is the the structural formula for the the DNA molecule and I want you to note a few things what I'm for non chemists here it's going to sound like Chinese at first but stay with hang with me here along this the two sides of the DNA molecule are made of something called the sugar phosphate backbone the Pentagon's are the sugars the circles are the phosphates and the backbone of the molecule is not the informational part of it it's the medium upon which the information is inscribed if you will along the interior of the molecule are two copies running in opposite directions of the informational instructions they're encoded using those bases that I discussed at the beginning of the evening the a C's GS and T's also known as nucleotide bases now it's the specific arrangement of those nucleotide bases that constitutes the the information in the DNA molecule okay now the the the question is could you explain the specific arrangement of the bases by reference to self organizational forces of attraction could chemistry explain that information now there are little sticks that you can see on my figure and the sticks represent chemical bonds connection points where there is a force of attraction holding something together notice that there are sticks between each of the sugars and phosphates notice that there is a bond as well between each of the bases and the Pentagon's in the sugar phosphate backbone but notice that there are no bonds between the bases in the information bearing axis the vertical axis of the molecule on the screen there there are no forces of attraction whatsoever it's not a matter of are there forces that are differential in strength or otherwise it's just that there are no bonds between those those bases no bonds that could explain their specific arrangement notice also that it's you have a bond between the base and the and the and the Pentagon's but here's another little factoid that you need to know it's the same kind of chemical bond in each case it's called an end glycosidic bond for masseur keeping score back home and it's that bond allows any one of the four bases to attach to the backbone with equal facility it doesn't discriminate now that was all probably difficult but I'm now going to make it simple I've got a little visual aid here with a message pandering to the local audience okay La Mirada rocks okay sometimes I put a Z in there because my students told me that made it even more cool okay now II this is you might recognize a magnetic chalkboard this is a little metallic chalkboard and there are magnets in the back of these letters so there are forces of attraction forces of necessity if you will that explain why the message sticks to the medium now that's exactly the same that that's exactly what's going on in DNA there are forces of attraction that explain why the message sticks to the medium but those forces of attraction don't discriminate I can put the L here here or here anywhere I like okay and notice that those forces of attraction do not determine the arrangement I can destroy this arrangement and make another one very easily okay so and so let me put it to you now maybe as a rhetorical question oops but I destroyed the message let's go back to the message rocks I dropped it let's talk about the message I had at the beginning was that the result sometimes these visual aids are more trouble than they're worth what if I got now Lada Reema Nara no that's not going to sick that doesn't good what's the message I had at the beginning the result of the magnetism okay that's the key point back to the DNA the DNA thing I mean I'll get myself out of trouble okay you go let's go back to that DNA picture yeah thanks if you look at the DNA molecule I've never I've never gotten applause for messing up a visual aid before but if you go back to the the point I'm making about the DNA is that the the arrangement of the bases which constitutes the informational endowment of the DNA molecule is not the result of the chemistry attraction that holds the the chemistry of attraction that holds the molecule together the bit that bonds that are involved in the message sticking to the medium don't discriminate and there are no bonds between the characters if you will the bases that constitute the message so chemistry is not determining sequencing in my little illustration back when there was still a message on the board what was the source of that information okay at least a quasi intelligent designer okay now there was a famous chemist named Michael Polanyi who was a friend of Einstein's who nearly won the Nobel Prize a Brit who wrote two brilliant articles in the 1960s that pointed this out one was called life transcending physics and chemistry and the other was called life's irreducible structure and he made the point that the information in DNA is no more the result of the chemistry of the bonding of the constituent parts of the molecule than the information in a newspaper headline is is the but is the product of ink bonding to paper ink does bond a paper but the information is provided by as he put it rather coyly an exogenous source something outside of physics and chemistry now what could that be but when I left for Cambridge in 1986 I had been exposed to some of the early thinking on what's now called intelligent design dr. Thaxton in Charles taxon an epilogue of his to his book the mystery of life's origin had floated the idea that information was at least intuitively a byproduct of mind it was the kind of thing that you expect to come from minds or that we know typically comes from minds and he began to think about the idea of what he called an intelligent cause perhaps playing a role in the explanation of the origin of life I was intrigued with this idea but not altogether convinced and as I left for grad school I had a burning question in the back of my mind could the design hypothesis could the idea that DNA is pointing to design be developed into a rigorous scientific argument and naturally and this may seem counterintuitive to many of you but naturally I began to study the works of Charles Darwin not because he had dismissed design in his work so much although he was certainly therefore interested in the question of design or apparent design but also because he had pioneered a rigorous method of investigating the remote past a method which is sometimes called inference to the best explanation and other times called the method of multiple competing hypotheses and this quote which I won't read is actually Darwin defending the scientific nature of his theory by set by telling some some interlocutors who are objecting to him that he's using a standard scientific method one that applies to understanding events in the remote past now the idea of multiple competing hypotheses is that if you're trying to explain an event long ago next slide actually I may not have remembered to tell the man in the back there we go about did you see the Darwin slide just before that or did I ok he did very good thanks Jimmy anyway this is this is a pictorial representation of this standard method if you're trying to explain explain an event in the remote past you typically what scientists do will posit a number of competing hypotheses and quickly they're hypotheses that posit causes you're looking for a causal explanation of an event especially if you're trying to account for its origin and the best explanation is then the one that we know is able to best explain so the next slide shows the case where we're able to eliminate all but one of those explanations and and settle on on the one that is best now obviously I've just begged a question what makes an explanation best what makes what what is the key criterion if we say we infer that explanation which best explains the evidence we still want to know well what does it mean to best explain the evidence and there's been a extensive discussion about this among philosophers of science but I was impressed in reading Darwin in his and also his scientific mentor Charles Lyell that they had pretty much worked out the answer to this question in very practical scientific terms without the help of philosophers of science thank you very much and they had a criterion that made perfect sense and it made perfect sense to me having had a background in the geological sciences there they said that the explanation which is best is the one that posits the cause which is known to produce the effect in question as here's an illustration in Eastern Washington we have a layer of volcanic ash that you can go and find today if you're a geologist and you don't know how it got there because you didn't have the opportunity to view it happening and you you want to explain the origin of that ash you might posit a number of possible causal hypotheses you might posit a flood you might posit an earthquake you might even positive all K know which of those is best well according to Darwin's criterion the best explanation would be the volcanic eruption hypothesis because in our uniform and repeated experience we know that volcanoes produce effects like that but we have never seen floods or earthquakes doing the same thing see a clear simple common sense criterion at the basis of this excellent scientific method now next slide was one day reading more about this in the works of Charles Lyell from whom Darwin got this this method of reasoning and one day I was reading this long soporific title in 17th century English and about had me asleep the principles of geology being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth's surface by reference to and then suddenly I had I had a bolt from the blue the nickel dropped I loved the phrase by reference to causes now in operation the light went on for me because I suddenly asked myself a question about this DNA enigma what is the cause what is il saying first he's saying that if we're gonna explain an about an event the remote past we should look to our uniform and repeated experience of cause and effect we should be looking for causes that we know that are now in operation that produced the effect we're trying to explain we see volcanoes producing ash therefore we can infer that there must have been a volcano at work is the best explanation for a layer of ash when we when we encounter it especially if there's no other cause that we know can do it so we're looking to causes now in operation I asked myself a question what is the cause now in operation that produces digital information and I realize what you realized a minute ago there's only one and that's that is intelligence in fact there was an information scientist who I was reading about the same time who was a pioneer in the application of information theory to molecular biology his name was Henry Cuellar and he made an offhand comment that had lie Elian and Darwinian implications I thought this is what he said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity habitually associated is like saying uniform and repeated experience that's what we repeatedly observe in other words that's the cause now in operation for producing the critical feature that you need to explain to explain the origin of life and I began to realize that it was possible to formulate a que for intelligent design based on the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin had pioneered in the Origin of Species there's a famous guy up in our neck of the woods named Bill Gates he's got some little enterprise with software or something and he made a comment about DNA that I think is very important and suggested he said the DNA is like a computer program but far more advanced than any we've ever created it's like a computer program in many respects it's also it also has the same attribute that a compute the identical attribute that a program has which is that it encodes specified information functionally specified information now that's a very suggestive remark because we know from experience that programs computer programs always come from programmers we know that more generally information in whatever form we find it always comes from an intelligent source whether we're talking about a headline in a newspaper a paragraph in a book a hieroglyphic inscription information embedded in a radio signal whenever we find information and we trace it back to its ultimate source we always come to a mind not a material process that's what we know from our uniform and repeated experience so when we find information embedded in DNA the most logical thing to conclude is that it - had an intelligent source now if we actually I've been up here flipping slides realizing that we've got this technical problem again where are we in the slides next one there's my hieroglyphic inscription and there's there's picture of the book okay in the book signature in the cell I develop the case for intelligent design in more detail and I develop it though along much the lines that I've been describing tonight I develop it as an inference to the best explanation for the origin of the information you need to build the first living cell and in the process of doing that next slide I look at the various competing classes and types of explanations that have been offered is there another slide after that showing the yeah there we go I look at I look at explanations that rely on chance I look at explanations that rely on necessity I look at explanations that rely on the combination of the two and I show that next slide that in each case those naturalistic explanations chance necessity in the combination the two and very many different models manifesting those basic explanatory strategies have failed to explain the origin of this critical feature of life the information necessary to get it going and so I conclude that intelligent design is the only known cause that's capable of producing the information necessary to produce the first life that's and therefore I conclude that intelligent design constitutes the best explanation now I think it's important to point out that this explanation is not an argument from ignorance two slides forward if I could I have a and then one more I have a friendly and a frequent debating partner named Michael Shermer he and I debate quite often and every time we debate he makes the same argument and every time I make the same response and last time I actually said Michael I'm going to make the same response so maybe I ought to just try a different argument this time but this is what he says he says that intelligent design is is is not this is a philosophical objection essentially he says it's a bad argument because it's arguing from ignorance it's essentially saying natural processes have not been demonstrated to have the power to produce information starting from a chemical a chemical state and therefore therefore intelligent design must have done it it's like saying candidate a is a good is a bit is a good candidate for president because we know that candidate B is such a bad candidate that really there's really you're not giving a positive reason for believing that candidate a is a good is it is it good is it good candidate that's an argument from ignorance you're arguing from what we don't know about either candidate B or in this case natural processes that computers information but this isn't how the case for intelligent design is being constructed that's not the argument we're making we're not just we are critiquing I am critiquing the ability of naturalistic processes to produce information those critiques are also in the relevant literature in chemical evolutionary studies but I'm saying that there is in addition to that another type of cause a type of cause of which we know that is capable of producing information so next slide shows the actual logic of the case it's not that we're arguing just against natural processes we're also saying there is another cause which is known to have the causal powers next slide please to produce information and that cause is intelligence or mind or conscious and rational activity in fact that's the only cause in the universe of which we know that has the capacity to produce the key effect in question and therefore on that basis we can infer it as the best explanation so the argument for intelligent design that I'm making is not an argument from ignorance it's an argument from our knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world of what certain kinds of causes can and can't do or do and don't do and what other kinds of causes are known to accomplish in particular intelligent causes now if we can go about four back there was a little list I just want to end with a little a little anecdote we I mentioned Microsoft a couple times we have in our lab that we helped to start the Discovery Institute a independent lab now called the biologic Institute the director of the lab is here tonight Doug axe and at biologic a computer programmer started to work he resigned from Microsoft for a couple years to help write some code simulating that gene expression system or protein synthesis system that we were showing before how the digital information in DNA is processed to produce proteins one day he came into my office and he threw a book down on my table and it was called design patterns and he said rather cryptically I get an eerie feeling that someone has figured this out before us and I said what do you mean and he said well to explain the book design patterns is apparently a standard operating manual for software engineers and a design pattern is a term of art for a design strategy or a design logic a way of solving a functional problem especially in information processing and my colleagues said to me he said when I say I get an eerie feeling that someone figured this out before us what I mean is the same kind of design patterns that we use in modern high-tech digital computers are being used in the processing of information inside living organisms says I'm just learning about this so I can write the code I'm learning from your molecular guys what's going on but it stuns me it fascinates me inside the cell like inside a computer there's a hierarchical filing system a system of files within folders folders within super folders super folders within SuperDuper folders hierarchical organization of information there's also a there's also something that functions like a spell check if information is being copied and it's not being copied accurately there's a there's a protein complex a machinery that locks on backs up the the system and make sure that the the copying is done over with with the correct fidelity to the original message there's even a way of encoding it's called nested coding of information where information is encoded within other information a technique that's used in cryptography so when my colleague reacted this way this was an intuition on his part I get the eerie feeling someone figured this out before us but again I don't think that that's just an intuition I think there's a logical grounding for a design inference because each of these design patterns are features that we know are produced by one and only one type of cause and that causes intelligence so for many reasons I think that the best explanation for the origin of the information necessary to build the first life and indeed the whole information processing system can be best explained by intelligent design and I'll stop there thank you and good thank you Steve Thank You audience this isn't the most plush seating around so you were very good in patient and you deserve a break but before the break make sure you fill out the card or steal a pen during the break to fill that out you're going to need it when you come back use the order form to order some DVDs visit the book tables by armloads use the restroom we'll be back in 15 minutes to begin the interaction

Channel: Stephen Meyer

Views: 250,243

Rating: 4.7249999 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen Meyer, Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt, Signature in the Cell, intelligent design, science, biology, evolution, modern evolution, Charles Darwin, natural selection, digital information, Discovery Institute, origin of life, Cambrian explosion

Id: eW6egHV6jAw

Length: 81min 2sec (4862 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2014