DNA: The Discovery Darwin Never Saw Coming

What keeps me reading extensively, and listening to lectures and audiobooks, is the world’s incredible ability to surprise us at every turn. There is still so much to discover. These insights about the origins of life are but one example. And the implications are truly mind-blowing 

For much of the twentieth century, many people assumed that new discoveries in biology would steadily reinforce Darwin's explanation for the origin of species. Instead, one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the modern era raised an entirely different question. That discovery was DNA.

Stephen Meyer recently summarized this story in a lecture at Cambridge University. His point wasn't merely that Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. The larger discovery came a few years later when Francis Crick realized that DNA functions much like a digital code. 

DNA isn't simply a remarkable chemical. It contains instructions and stores information. Bill Gates once compared DNA to a computer program, only far more sophisticated than anything humans have ever written. That's an analogy, of course, but it captures something vital: living cells don't merely contain chemistry; they contain coded information that directs the construction of proteins, the molecular machinery that makes life possible.

This is where Meyer believes the discussion changes. Chemistry can explain many things. It can explain how molecules interact. But where does meaningful information come from? In our everyday experience, codes, software, languages, and written messages always originate with minds. They don't arise simply because chemicals happen to bump into one another.

Meyer argues that this presents a significant challenge for theories that attempt to explain life's origin solely through undirected material processes. Rather than asking only, "How did the chemicals get here?" he asks another question: "Where did the information come from?" 

Darwin & his ilk believe everything is possible with enough time and chance. It takes a lot of faith to believe 10,000 monkeys with 10,000 typewriters could ever produce Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, or Cervantes' Don Quixote. This itself would be easier than creating life out of goo, or a universe out of nothing (though the latter is a different discussion.)

Science has always advanced by following the evidence wherever it leads. Ironically, Watson and Crick themselves were not looking for evidence of intelligent design. They were searching for the material basis of life. Yet what they uncovered was something that looked remarkably like a language—an information system residing within every living cell. To me, that's one of the fascinating twists in the history of science.

Darwin gave us a powerful theory that appeared to explain many aspects of biological change. Molecular biology in the twentieth century, however, revealed levels of complexity he could never have imagined. Instead of making the question of life's origin simpler, DNA has made it deeper.

Where there is information, we naturally ask about its source. Where there is a message, we ask about the messenger. DNA may not settle the debate for everyone, but it certainly reminds us that life is far more astonishing than anyone imagined a century ago. 

The most amazing (and convincing) feature of DNA to me (according to Meyer in another talk) is that for a species to be design the code must precede it. This contradicts the "survival of the fittest" notions that chameleons changed the colors to blend in to an environment as a matter of survival. Other examples get cited in biology textbooks, but how did the code get altered after the fact when it must precede the species' designs beforehand. It doesn't make sense. 

Bottom Line:
The molecular revolution of the twentieth century introduced questions about the origin of biological information that Darwin himself never addressed and that remain the subject of ongoing debate. The appeal of thinkers like Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski is that contemporary scientists would remain committed to honest inquiry, not dogmatism, cherry-picking or confirmation bias. 

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FWIW Dept.
According to the latest research, on average, a human gene contains about 10,000 to 30,000 "letters" (base pairs). Because the cellular machinery reads the code in three-letter "words" (called codons), this translates to roughly 3,330 to 10,000 amino acids per gene. Overall, the entire human genome across all 23 pairs of chromosomes contains about 3 billion base pairs of information.

Related Links

Why DNA Points to a Mind Behind the Universe
Berlinski and The Devil's Delusion

Jethro Tull and His Views on Manure

While reading the list of Top 100 Ebooks downloaded from Project Gutenberg on July 4, 2026 I noticed that number 60 was  Charles Morton Aikman's Manures and the principles of manuring. In a list that begins with Moby Dick and includes classics by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, Chesterton and Sir Walter Scott, a book about manure seemed quite surprising, especially when it has reached #60 on the chart.

Jehtro Tull in 1973, the year I saw them.

So I decided to peruse its contents. Early on I found an entry about a fellow named Jethro Tull. My only connection with this name had been through the popular British rock band that emerged in the late 60's and whom I later saw at Ohio U on their Thick as a Brick Tour. 

Did the group take its name from the character in Aikman's manure compendium? As it turns out, the answer is yes. Rock band Jethro Tull took its name from the 18th-century English agronimist Jethro Tull (1674–1741), who pioneered innovations like the seed drill that helped spark the British Agricultural Revolution.

Trivia: When Ian Anderson's band was starting out they weren't that good yet so they kept changing the name of the band in order to get re-booked at places they'd already played. Someone on the staff of their booking agent, who was a historian, suggested. the name Jethro Tull at this time because it was the name they were using when they landed a Thursday night residency at London's famous Marquee Club.

The original Jethro Tull developed a theory about the importance of tilling. The more thoroughly one tilled the soil, the more luxurient the crops would be. 

He believed plant food consisted of the particles of the soil. These particles, however, had to be rendered very tiny before they become available for the plant, which would absorb them by means of its rootlets. This pulverisation of the soil goes on in nature independently of the farmer, but only very slowly, and the farmer has therefore to hasten it on by means of tillage operations. The more efficiently these operations are carried on, the more abundant will the supply.  

According to Aikman, Tull introduced and advocated the system of horse-hoe husbandry. This theory was suggested to him by the custom, which he had noticed on the Continent, of growing vines in rows, and hoeing the intervals between these rows from time to time. The excellent results which followed this mode of cultivation induced him to adopt it in England for his farm crops. 

While Tull's theory was based on principles at heart thoroughly sound, he was carried away by his personal success into drawing unwarrantable deductions. Thus he came to the conclusion that crop rotation was unnecessary, provided that a thorough system of tillage was carried out. He was also persuaded that manures could be entirely dispensed with under his new system of cultivation, for the true function of all manures is to aid in the pulverization of the soil by fermentation. We later learned this was a mistaken notion.   

Another thing Tull did was drill holes into the soil and plant at a specific depth. This approach yielded better results than the popular method called broadcasting, that is, flinging the seeds out in all directions. How interesting that today we still use this term, but apply it to media instead of farming. Of course the word still applies to seeds of a different nature. 

It strikes me that writers and farmers have more in common than we sometimes realize. Both spend much of their lives preparing the ground. The farmer tills the soil, plants carefully, and waits. The writer cultivates minds, sows ideas, and waits. Not every seed germinates. Not every field produces an abundant harvest. But every now and then an idea takes root, grows quietly beneath the surface, and changes someone's life.

Whether we're farmers, musicians, teachers, or writers, we're all in the seed-sowing business. We don't control the weather or the harvest. We simply do our best to plant something worth growing.

Jethro Tull was wrong about manure, but he was right about one thing: the condition of the soil matters. Whether we're growing wheat or wisdom, fertile ground is still where the harvest begins.

Happy 250th USA

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

— Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776)

On this Independence Day, that bold promise still echoes as the beating heart of what makes America exceptional: a nation founded on timeless ideals: freedom, self-government, and the dignity of every individual. 

God bless the United States of America. 

A Note from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"I became an American not by birth or by right, but by choice. Like many immigrants, I came to this country from a world in which I’d had no right to speak freely; no right to choose whom I would marry, or where or how I would live; no hope for the kind of life and career with which I am blessed today. I came from a culture in which my station was assigned at birth, by virtue of my sex, and could never be appealed. Looking back today, I can hardly find words to express how grateful I am, every day, to call this country my own."

Largest American flag in the world with mural of whales.

Mural and flag by Wyland, the Marine Michelangelo

All photos courtesy Gary Firstenberg, America's Photographer

Related Link

Spotlight on Wyland, the Marine Michaelangelo

Is Recycling and Waste of Time and Money?

I have been a fan of journalist John Stossel for decades. His latest video short is titled, "Even Greenpeace Says “Most Plastic Simply Cannot Be Recycled.” Here are some of his key points.

For decades we've been encouraged to recycle as though it were a moral obligation. The message has been simple: separate your trash, rinse your containers, and you're helping save the planet.

But what if the story is more complicated? Or even bunk.

John Stossel recently revisited the economics and realities of recycling, and many of his findings are surprising. While recycling aluminum, cardboard, and some paper products generally makes good economic and environmental sense, much of what Americans dutifully place in recycling bins—especially plastics—never gets recycled at all. Some ends up in landfills, some is shipped overseas, and some is ultimately burned or discarded.

Stossel also challenges long-held assumptions about landfill shortages and argues that modern landfills are far cleaner and more abundant than many people realize. His larger point isn't that we should stop caring about the environment. Rather, it is that good intentions don't automatically produce good results. Before spending billions of dollars and millions of hours pursuing any environmental policy, we ought to ask a simple question: Does it actually accomplish what we think it does?

That seems like a reasonable place to begin any honest conversation. In most cases, as Stossel's sources within the industry point out, the answer is "no."

Photo at top of page by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

501 Great Writers—and Why the Classics Still Matter

This weekend I wrote about one of my favorite reference books, Sir J. A. Hammerton's Outline of Great Books. It's a volume I've dipped into for more than forty years, ever since I rescued it from a yard sale for ten cents.

Sitting just below it on my shelf is another book that has served me equally well when I was expanding my reading of serious literature: 501 Great Writers.

Like Hammerton's masterwork, it isn't a book you read straight through. It's a book you browse. Open it almost anywhere and you'll encounter someone you've always meant to read—or someone you've never heard of but suddenly want to discover. That's one of the great pleasures of reference books. They don't simply answer questions, they create curiosity.

I've often heard people dismiss the classics as old, difficult, or irrelevant. Yet I've found the opposite to be true. The classics are the books and authors that have survived fashions, politics, literary movements, and changing tastes. Thousands of writers have faded into obscurity while Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Orwell continue finding new readers. 

This doesn't happen by accident.

They continue to speak because they continue to tell us truths about ourselves and our human predicament. Technology changes. Governments rise and fall. Languages evolve. But human nature changes very little. We still love and envy. We still hope and despair. We still wrestle with pride, ambition, betrayal, forgiveness, and the search for meaning. The great writers understood this, and that's why they still feel surprisingly contemporary.

One of the unexpected benefits of books like 501 Great Writers is that it continually introduces us to authors we've somehow overlooked. Some become lifelong companions. Others simply remind us that the world of literature is much larger than my own reading history.

The structure of 501 Great Writers is different from Outline, which is primary excerpts and summaries. 501 features writer bios accompanied by their signature titles, and photos, pointings or illustrations of the authors themselves. For Robert Louis Stevenson, the first three "signature titles" listed are Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1889). He also wrote poetry and did some travel writing.

The book is useful for introducing readers to authors with whom we're often unfamiliar such as Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Noel Prize for literature. Occasionally there's a little sidebar briefly describing one of the author's most significant work. For Lagerlöf there's a callout on The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

Every writer needs teachers. Some teach us through personal friendship. Others mentor us across centuries. I've frequently mentioned how a mentor, the late John Prin, helped jumpstart my writing career.

The value of a book like this is that it introduces us to writers who have already stood the test of time. They remind me that clarity outlasts cleverness, substance survives fashion, and honest observations about the human condition never become obsolete.

Books are conversations across generations. Every time we open a classic, we're listening to someone whose voice has refused to disappear.

* * * 

PostScript: Yesterday I wrote about Thomas Carlyle. I find it interesting that Carlyle's name didn't appear in this volume. I'm curious whether he appears in this publisher's companion volume 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I just took a peek at the first books listed and see that I've read nine of the first twelve. So many (great) books, so little time!

What recent book have you read that you'd like to recommend to more readers?

A Very Brief Introduction to Thomas Carlyle and 27 Thought-Provoking Quotes

Over the course of 40 years of writing, I've lost track of how many times I unearthed a pointed, pithy quote by Thomas Carlyle. Even so, I never really knew who he was. Last week I found (in a folder on my laptop) a Word doc with ten pages of quotes by Carlyle. Today I was aiming to share a portion of those, but thought maybe it's time to find out a little more who he was.  

Thomas Carlyle  (4 December 1795 – 5 February 1881) was a prominent Scottish essayist, historian, philosopher, and satirical writer. He was a major intellectual figure in the Victorian era, often called the "Sage of Chelsea" and regarded by contemporaries as the "undoubted head of English letters" and a secular prophet.

He was born in Scotland, into a strict Calvinist family, and died in London at the age of 85. Carlyle's writings influenced literature, history, and social thought with a passionate, idiosyncratic style that blended philosophy, history, and moral critique.

I only knew him for his one sentence zingers, but learned this weekend that he wrote volumes. His three-volume The French Revolution: A History has been called a "a masterpiece of historical writing." Carlyle's work directly influenced Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.

In 1841 he published a collection of his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in which he argued that great individuals (heroes) shape history. In our post-modern era, we tend to focus on their feet of clay. His six-volume bio of Friedrich II of Prussia was published in 1858-65, who must have evidently been a hero of his. 

Carlyle's satrical, philosophic novel Sartor Resartus is so strikingly original that I'm thinking of writing a blog post about it. It's full title: Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books. The novel is a hybrid of fiction, autobiography, and social commentary. Its Latin title translates to "The Tailor Re-tailored" (or "The Tailor Patched"). The premise actually sounds hilarious. It's available at Project Gutenberg.

I was only intending to write a very brief intro to a boatload of quotes, but thought you may find him worth knowing better. Carlyle criticized the "machinery" of modern industrial society, laissez-faire economics, and what he saw as moral decay. He championed strong leadership, work ethic, and spiritual renewal. He profoundly shaped Victorian culture, with admirers including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and remains studied for his prose style and role in Romanticism-to-Victorian transitions.  

Though Carlyle is included in Hammerton's Outline of Great Books, he is not covered in 501 Great Writers, edited by Julian Patrck.

Without further adieu, a small collection of quotes from Carlyle.

Bust of Carlyle in Chelsea Library

A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy. 

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge. 

A man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner. 

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things. 

 

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun. 

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. 

A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind. 

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus. 

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope. 

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one. 

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with. 

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct. 

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.  

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries. 

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. 

Every noble work is at first impossible. 

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do. 

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.  (EdNote: Especially now with Polymarket.)

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am. 

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded. 

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. 

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can. 

No pressure, no diamonds. 

Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment. 

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are. 

Silence is as deep as eternity; speech, shallow as time. 

The greatest university of all is a collection of books. 

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Do you find Carlyle stimulating? Leave a note in the comments.

An Outline of Great Books: The Best Ten Cents I Ever Spent

This past week I was triggered by a New York Times article titled, The Books Times Readers Are Most Excited About This Summer. The subhead reiterates. "As summer kicks off, here are the new books that our readers say they’re most eager to dive into."

When I see articles like this, my first thought is, "How many of these books will stand the test of time?" It seems to me that since there are so many truly great books from the world's great writers that most of us have never read, why not spent your summer reading a few of the great works from the past that have shaped our minds and our world? It's just so "modern" to ever be chasing "the latest shiny new toys."

The Best Ten Cents I Ever Spent

In 1982 or '83 I stopped at the yard sale of someone who was clearly educated. This was in the vicinty of Hamline Unversity in St. Paul. They were selling books by the bag, ten books for a dollar. 

One of the the books I acquired was a battered copy of the 1936 Outline of Great Books, edited by Sir J. A. Hammerton, an ambitious attempt to make the world's classic literature accessible to ordinary readers. Rather than reproducing the complete texts, it provides substantial outlines, summaries, and excerpts from approximately 250 of the Western world's most important works in history, philosophy, science, religion, poetry, biography, travel, and criticism. 

Hammerton's project was an attempt to give readers a guided tour of civilization's intellectual heritage. These were the days before television and long before the internet.

Click to enlarge

For me, it was a useful tool for broadening my education. In Sherwood Wirt's You Can Tell the World, he begins by emphasizing our need (he is addressing Christian writers, but his admonition applies to all writers) to understand the great minds and read the great books if we are aiming to influence the world. Outline of Great Books is thus a tool for becoming aware of the important players in the various scholarly disciplines. It's more than a Cliff's Notes version of the great ideas and themes of Western literature. It is comprised of excerpts from their actual writings. A person living in a small farming town might never have access to Aristotle, Dante, Gibbon, Goethe, Cervantes, or Tolstoy, but they could obtain a familiarity with their ideas and writings here.

 

What I find especially interesting is that the book no doubt inspired people to read the originals. Many families owned only a few dozen books. Outline of Great Books functioned almost like a literary map. You could read a 10–20 page condensation of a work and decide whether you wanted to pursue the full text.

The work belongs to a larger "outline" movement of the early twentieth century, alongside books like The Outline of History and other educational compendia that sought to democratize knowledge. Will and Ariel Durant released the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization around this same time, a history in more layman's terms than academic.

Outline of Great Books reflects a worldview that was common among educators of the era: An educated person should possess at least a working acquaintance with the great books that shaped Western civilization. Sadly, that assumption has largely disappeared today.

I won't deny that the book has limitations. It's focus is primarily on the great books of Western civilization, and even the section on religion omits the religions of other regions of the world. Nevertheless, it's an impressive compendium and I've pulled it off the shelf more than a few times over the years. (In fact, just two weeks ago I pulled it out to see what scientists were covered, and specifically to check out which of Sir Isaac Newton's works were cited.

It's interesting who is included and excluded in a volume such as this. Also, I'm curious if books like this will ever be published again. Everything people want can be found somewhere on the Internet now, it seems. If you can't find it, you ask Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT or some other LLM. 

What interests people today seems to be podcasts of contemporaries talking about their contemporary writing and contemporary history, so that Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, Carlyle, Hume, Schopenhauer, Goethe and the like are now relics. Who reads Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire any more? We've been told we are now living it, but what really happened in Rome 1600-1700 years ago that resulted in its downfall?

The real point I want to make, though, is how I found this gem for 10 cents. It was a treasure at a bargain price. If your eyes are open, there are probably countless overlooked treasures all around us. When it comes to books, library sales and used book stores are repositories of riches. Open your eyes.