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. New 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 designed 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

Why DNA Points to a Mind Behind the Universe

Why were so many intellectuals enthralled by Darwin's theory of evolution as put forth in The Origin of Species?

Could it partially be driven by a desire to  not be held accountable to a higher power other than themselves? Or to ethical values they don't want to be restrained by? Why has the State gone to such great lengths to purge not only Christianity from the schools but even a view of science that might suggest that there is a God that created the spectacular beauty and design that is revealed in nature, including the miraculous origins life itself?

I get it, that the Founding Fathers had good reasons for the separation of Church and State. But for decades elites have been directing us to "trust the science" while simultaneously not permitting many scientists speak out about what they are seeing as evidence of a mind behind the creation. And why are these legitimate findings are absolutely abolished in the schools.

This naturally dovetails with one of my repeated themes: He who controls the narrative controls the people. Why are people so afraid of open discussion about the implications of contemporary findings unveiled by earnest scientific inquiry?  

One of the things I have been reminded of recently is that the attitude of a scientist is very different from that of a mathematician. For mathematicians, 2 + 2 = 4. Always. 

True scientists propose theories. They say, "This is what we know, for now." It takes great humility to say, "I am not certain, but this is what appears to be what the facts are saying." Darwin was a scientist. He did not state that what he believed about the origin of species, or life itself, was a certainty. It was a theory that he was proposing. He assumed, incorrectly, that as science advanced and archeology advanced, and more fossil records were unearthed, that his theory would be proven.

Instead, archeology and science have failed to find the evidence for life form transitions of new species on a scale required to demonstrate that our ancestors were monkeys, or snails or protozoa. 

The purpose of this blog post is to introduce you to Stephen C. Meyer, a leading voice in the repudiation of the New Atheism movement. Today I briefly wrote on my substack a few thoughts on Meyer's talk Why DNA Points to a Mind Behind the Universe. 

About Stephen C. Meyer
He earned an M.Phil. (1987) and Ph.D. (1991) in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis focused on the methodology of origin-of-life research. Meyer is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Science and Culture (CSC) at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, a think tank he helped found. The CSC is the primary organization promoting the intelligent design movement. 

His major books include:

• Signature in the Cell (2009): Argues for intelligent design based on the information in DNA; named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement.
• Darwin’s Doubt (2013): A New York Times bestseller examining the Cambrian explosion and the case for ID.
• Return of the God Hypothesis (2021): Integrates evidence from physics, cosmology, and biology to argue for a theistic explanation of the universe.

Are you committed to to Lifelong Learning? 
Here are some wonderful things to explore.

Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

"If you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn't get there by itself."

The past couple months I've been listening to episodes of Uncommon Knowledge, an long-running interview and discussion program hosted by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute at Stanford. It features in-depth conversations with political leaders, scholars, journalists, historians, scientists, and other prominent thinkers on topics like politics, economics, history, culture, foreign policy, education, and current events. The discussions are meaty, with lots of protein for your brain muscle.

This week I listened to Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in which Robinson moderated a critique Darwinian theory with David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer.

Listening to this and similar lectures has generated a number of insights such as one of the key differences between math and science. In math, 2 + 2 = 4. Period. In science, theories are proposed with a measured humility, in this manner: "This is what we know... for now."

When Darwin proposed his On the Origin of Species, he knew it didn't answer all the questions. He assumed that science in the future would fill in the gaps. So it was strange to me even in high school that every single nature show would include a nod to Darwin. If I was watching a program about sharks they always mentioned, as if it were fact, that this killer instinct evolved over a period of sixty million years. All this was assumed and extrapolated from the uncritical acceptance of Darwin's ideas.

So it was refreshing to learn of other points of view. Gelernter argued that Darwin's theory does not adequately explain the emergence of new species, particularly due to the Cambrian explosion and advances in molecular biology. Meyer promotes intelligent design, emphasizing the complexity of DNA as evidence of intelligent causation, while Berlinski remains skeptical yet open-minded.

All three underscored the lack of free speech in academia regarding Darwinism critiques and the challenge of understanding consciousness, with Meyer suggesting intelligent design could offer broader scientific insights beyond Darwinism. 

Problem one with Darwin's theory is the very narrow period of time that all these species came into existence, a period science has called the Cambrian explosion. 

The second problem became evident after the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. Here's what that means as regards evolution.

If you want a computer to do something new, you have to write fresh software code for it. That's exactly what scientists discovered about life in the second half of the 20th century, starting with Watson and Crick's work on DNA. To create a new kind of living thing, a nnew species, you also need new "code." That code is the information stored in DNA—the long molecule that looks like a twisted ladder.

[EdNote: Before cracking the code for DNA in 1953, Francis Crick was a code breaker during World War II.]

The sequence of letters along the DNA molecule tells the cell how to make all the different protein molecules it needs to function. Then there's extra information that tells those cells how to organize themselves into the right shapes and structures—like how to build eyes, legs, or the overall body plan of an animal or plant.

In short: just like software code runs a computer, DNA is the instruction manual that builds and runs living organisms. If you want a truly new life form, you need to write new instructions in that DNA code.

"Things are more complicated than Darwin knew. We understand that producing new forms of life now means not just new shapes, new activities in which life engages, but a prior code." And what are the odds of a new species happening? These guys break it down for us mathematically. You are more likely to wake up as a cockroach tomorrow than to see a new species come into existence. (My nod to Gregor Samsa.)

If you want to listen to the program, you can find it here on YouTube. Whereas all three agree that Darwin's conclusions were flawed, they are not all in agreement with the notion of "intelligent design," which is an interesting discussion in and of itself.

MY REASONS for sharing this blog post is to encourage you to (A) reconsider the implications of how Darwin and his ideas have been applied since his death, and (B) to watch or listen to Dennis Robinson's Uncommon Knowledge programs on YouTube. Lots of great guests and very smart people.

TWO FINAL QUOTES FROM THE PROGRAM

A.  "Darwin now poses a final challenge. Whether biology will rise to this last one as well as it did to the first, when his theory upset every apple cart, remains to be seen. How cleanly and quickly can the field get over Darwin and move on? Striking sentence. This is one of the most important questions facing science in the 21st century." 

B. "Scientists are paid for making guesses, not for making right guesses, but for making interesting plausible ones. And if scientists, after the guess has been made, don't do their job, don't investigate the guess, don't do their best to figure out is it true or false, then we are false to science and we're betraying science."

RELATED LINKS

The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays

Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

Ideas Have Consequences: Eugenics

I once read that the London Times from 1935-1939 praised Hitler's Germany in its editorial pages for what he was doing there. What he was doing was courageously practicing ideas that had become quite popular in the early part of this century as an outgrowth of the advocacy of Charles Darwin's son, Major Leonard Darwin and other believers in eugenics, the selective breeding of humans. This is why many of the mentally ill, and even bed-wetters, were eliminated from the ranks of German society, by extermination.

Until recently I had failed to connect the dots, but the importance of eugenics was a highly popular belief amongst educated, liberal-minded people in Western society. It's a fairly ugly chapter that we don't hear much about because it has been relegated to the closets.

If you're like me, you probably also wondered why Charles Lindbergh was so enthralled with Nazi Germany. When you discover that he, too, was an advocate of eugenics then you begin to grasp why he, too, liked what Hitler was doing on this ground-breaking front.

One should often be suspicious of the recommendations scholars make when they are predicting doom. The Population Bomb was the big thing when I was in college. Back in 1932, predictions of gloom and doom were announced if the world did not engage in widespread eugenics reforms. These were predictions by Major Darwin, a whole-hearted advocate of eugenics for decades at this point. Across the Atlantic, someone was listening.


Major Darwin Predicts Civilization's Doom Unless Century Brings Wide Eugenic Reforms (NYT 1932)*

New York Times
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 3:49:34 PM by MNDude
Aug 21, 1932 Eugenists (sic) from all over the world will attend the Third International Congress of Eugenics today and tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History. At general and sectional meetings they will discuss advances in the study for the physical and mental improvement of the human race.

Aug 23, 1932 Eugenic reforms must be adopted within the next hundred years if civilization is to go on, was the message of Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, founder of the modern theory of evolution, read last night at the Third International Congress of Eugenics, which opened yesterday at the American Museum of Natural History.


It is not history's prettiest chapter, but it's a good one to familiarize oneself with.

*SOURCE: Major Darwin Predicts...

You can go here for more on Darwin and Eugenics.