Darwin's Doubt

by Stephen C. Meyer

  In any case, he confuses the logical requirement of citing a vera causa, a true or known cause, with an arbitrary requirement to cite only materialistic causes. He confuses uniformitarianism with methodological naturalism.38 He then critiques my design argument for rejecting the former, though it only rejects the latter. In so doing, he imposes an additional requirement on explanations of past events that leads him to mistake my argument as anti-uniformitarian and to miss the evidence for intelligent design. His implicit commitment to methodological naturalism makes the evidence for intelligent design—“the postman,” as it were—mentally invisible to him.

  Nevertheless, the concern that he raises about the theory of intelligent design not citing a mechanism still troubles people. In fact, I frequently get questions about this issue. People will ask something like this: “I can see your point about digital code providing evidence for intelligent design, but how exactly did the designing intelligence generate that information or arrange matter to form cells or animals?” Or: “How did the intelligent designer that you infer impress its ideas on matter to form animals?” As Asher puts it, “How could a biological phenomenon, even if designed, be simply willed into existence without an actual mechanism?”39

  To help clear things up, several points need to be considered. First, the theory of intelligent design does not provide a mechanistic account of the origin of biological information or form, nor does it attempt to. Instead, it offers an alternative causal explanation involving a mental, rather than a necessarily or exclusively material, cause for the origin of that reality. It attributes the origin of information in living organisms to thought, to the rational activity of a mind, not a strictly material process or mechanism. That does not make it deficient as a materialistic or mechanistic explanation. It makes it an alternative to that kind of explanation. Advocates of intelligent design do not propose intelligent causes because they cannot think of a possible mechanistic explanation for the origin of form or information. They propose intelligent design because they think it provides a better, more causally adequate explanation for these realities. Given what we know from experience about the origin of information, materialistic explanations are the deficient ones.

  There is a different context in which someone might want to ask about a mechanism. He or she may wish to know by what means the information, once originated, is transmitted to the world of matter. In our experience, intelligent agents, after generating information, often use material means to transmit that information. A teacher may write on a chalkboard with a piece of chalk or an ancient scribe may have chiseled an inscription in a piece of rock with a metal implement. Often, those who want to know about the mechanism of intelligent design are not necessarily challenging the idea that information ultimately originates in thought. They want to know how, or by what material means, the intelligent agent responsible for the information in living systems transmitted that information to a material entity such as a strand of DNA. To use a term from philosophy, they want to know about “the efficient cause” at work.

  The answer is: We simply don’t know. We don’t have enough evidence or information about what happened, in the Cambrian explosion or other events in the history of life, to answer questions about what exactly happened, even though we can establish from the clues left behind that an intelligent designer played a causal role in the origin of living forms.

  An illustration from archaeology helps explain how this can be so (see Fig. 19.2). Years ago explorers of a remote island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean discovered a group of enormous stone figures. The figures displayed the distinctive shape of human faces. These figures left no doubt as to their ultimate origin in thought. Nevertheless, archeologists still don’t know the exact means by which they were carved or erected. The ancient head carvers might have used metallic hammers, rock chisels, or lasers for that matter. Though archaeologists lack the evidence to decide between various hypotheses about how the figures were constructed, they can still definitely infer that intelligent agents made them. In the same way, we can infer that an intelligence played a causal role in the origin of the Cambrian animals, even if we cannot decide what material means, if any, the designing intelligence used to transmit the information, or shape matter, or impart its design ideas to living form. Although the theory of intelligent design infers that an intelligent cause played a role in shaping life’s history, it does not say how the intelligent cause affected matter. Nor does it have to do so.

  FIGURE 19.2

  Group of carvings of giant heads, called “Moais,” on Easter Island. Courtesy iStockphoto/Think-stock.

  There is a logical reason we cannot without further information determine the mechanism or means by which the intelligent agent responsible for life transmitted its design to matter. We can infer an intelligent cause from certain features of the physical world, because intelligence is known to be a necessary cause, the only known cause, of those features. That allows us to infer intelligence retrospectively as a cause by observing its distinctive effects. Nevertheless, we cannot establish a unique scenario describing how the intelligent agent responsible for life arranged or impressed its ideas on matter, because there are many different possible means by which an idea in the mind of an intelligent agent could be transmitted or instantiated in the physical world.

  There is another even more profound reason that intelligent design—indeed, science itself—may not be able to offer a completely mechanistic account of the instantiation of thought into matter. Robert Asher worries about how “a biological phenomenon, even if designed,” could be “simply willed into existence without an actual mechanism.” In Asher’s understanding, the uniformitarian principle asks for a precedent, a known cause that not only generates information, but translates immaterial thought into material reality, impressing itself on and shaping the physical world. Asher complains that the argument for intelligent design cannot cite such a precedent and is thus “anti-uniformitarian.”

  Yet a precedent comes very readily to mind, an intimately familiar one for us all. At present no one has any idea how our thoughts—the decisions and choices that occur in our conscious minds—affect our material brains, nerves, and muscles, going on to instantiate our will in the material world of objects. However, we know that is exactly what our thoughts do. We have no mechanistic explanation for the mystery of consciousness, nor what is called the “mind-body problem”—the enigma of how thought affects the material state of our brains, bodies, and the world that we affect with them. Yet there is no doubt that we can—as the result of events in our conscious minds called decisions or choices—“will into existence” information-rich arrangements of matter or otherwise affect material states in the world. Professor Asher did this when he wrote the chapter in his book—representing his ideas impressed as words onto a material object, a printed page—attempting to refute intelligent design. I am doing this right now. This example, representative of countless daily experiences in life, surely satisfies the demands of uniformitarianism.

  Though neuroscience can give no mechanistic explanation for consciousness or the mind-body problem, we also know that we can recognize the product of thought, the effect of intelligent design, in its distinctive information-rich manifestations. Professor Asher recognized evidence of thought when he read the text in my book; I did so when I read his; you are doing so right now. Thus, even though it remains entirely possible that we may never know how minds affect matter and, therefore, that there may always be a gap in our attempt to account for how a designing mind affected the material out of which living systems were formed, it does not follow that we cannot recognize evidence of the activity of mind in living systems.

  Why It Matters for Science

  But if proponents of intelligent design admit that they do not, or perhaps even cannot, answer the question of how the mind responsible for the design of animal life impressed its ideas on matter, why does it matter that we recognize the evidence for intelligent design at all? If intelligent
design just replaces one mystery with another, why not limit ourselves to materialistic explanations after all, as methodological naturalism requires, and be content with accepting the mystery we already have? Wouldn’t that be simpler and more intellectually economical?

  Perhaps. But it puts the mystery in the wrong place. We do know of a cause that can produce the functional information necessary to build complex systems. But we do not know exactly how mind interfaces with matter. If we were to ask what caused the Rosetta Stone to arise, and then insist despite all evidence to the contrary that a purely material process is capable of producing the information-rich etchings on that stone, we would be deluding ourselves. The information etched into that black slab of igneous rock at the British Museum provides overwhelming evidence that an intelligent agent did cause those inscriptions. Any rule that prevents us from considering such an explanation diminishes the rationality of science, because it prevents scientists from considering a possibly—and in this case obviously—true explanation. And the truth matters, not least in science. For this reason, the “rules of science” should not commit us to rejecting possibly true theories before we even consider the evidence. But that is exactly what methodological naturalism does.

  Moreover, adhering to methodological naturalism and refusing to consider the evidence for intelligent design in life does not just affect the explanations that we are willing to consider for the origins and history of life. They also affect the questions we ask about life as it exists, and thus the entire biological research agenda that we pursue.

  An analogy to a human artifact again shows why. If we ask exactly how the scribe responsible for the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone accomplished his or her task—with a metal chisel, a sharpened piece of obsidian, a diamond stylus, or some other material means—we may not have enough evidence to answer that question. Nevertheless, it will help archaeologists to know that they are looking at an artifact of intelligence, rather than a byproduct of strictly natural processes. This will lead them to ask other more relevant questions about the stone, such as: “What do the inscriptions mean?” “Who wrote them?” and “What do they tell us about the surrounding cultures at the time?” In a similar way, what we think about how animal life arose and developed will lead us to ask different questions about living forms—questions that we might never think to ask if we were assuming that they had arisen by a purely undirected mechanism such as natural selection.

  Intelligent agents and natural selection do their work very differently. The mutation and selection mechanism is a blind, trial-and-error process, one that must maintain or optimize functional advantage through a series of incremental steps. Given Darwinian assumptions, we would not expect to see structures or systems in living organisms that required foresight. Nor would we expect to see structures that needed to be produced all at once in large jumps rather than by a series of function-preserving incremental steps. We would, however, expect to see evidence of a trial-and-error process in the genomes of organisms.

  But what happens if we open ourselves to the possibility of detecting design in life? We know a lot about how intelligent designers do their work. Intelligent designers use many established design strategies (or “design patterns,” as engineers would say). They also have foresight that allows them to reach functional goals without the need to maintain function through a series of intermediate structures. They typically engineer new systems from scratch without relying on random, incremental, trial-and-error modifications in one system to produce another.

  Because these two different types of causes operate differently and often produce different types of structures and systems, scientists should expect living systems (and the history of life) to look differently depending upon which type of cause produced the organisms or structures in question. And these differing perspectives and expectations can lead scientists to ask different research questions and make different predictions about what we should find in the structure of life itself.

  The ENCODE Project and an ID Prediction

  In 2012, a dramatic confirmation of one such prediction made by advocates of intelligent design occurred in the field of genomics. Three leading science journals, Nature, Genome Research, and Genome Biology, published a series of groundbreaking papers reporting on the results of a massive study of the human genome called the ENCODE project (short for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements).40 The conclusion: at least 80 percent of the genome performs significant biological functions, “dispatching the widely held view that the human genome is mostly ‘junk DNA.’ ”41

  The discovery challenged a long held neo-Darwinian interpretation of the genome. According to neo-Darwinism, the genome as a whole should display evidence of the random trial-and-error process that gave rise to new genetic information. The discovery in the 1970s that only a small percentage of the genome contains information for building proteins was hailed at the time as powerful confirmation of the Darwinian view of life. The noncoding regions of the genome were assumed to be nonfunctional detritus of the trial-and-error mutational process—the same process that produced the functional code in the genome. As a result, these noncoding regions were deemed “junk DNA,” including by no less a scientific luminary than Francis Crick.42

  Because intelligent design asserts that an intelligent cause produced the genome, design advocates have long predicted that most of the nonprotein-coding sequences in the genome should perform some biological function, even if they do not direct protein synthesis. Design theorists do not deny that mutational processes might have degraded some previously functional DNA, but we have predicted that the functional DNA (the signal) should dwarf the nonfunctional DNA (the noise), and not the reverse. As William Dembski, a leading design proponent, predicted in 1998, “On an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function.”43

  The ENCODE project and other recent research in genomics have confirmed this prediction. As the lead article in Nature reported, ENCODE has “enabled us to assign biochemical functions for 80 percent of the genome in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions.”44 Other research in genomics has shown that, overall, the noncoding regions of the genome function much like the operating system in a computer. Indeed, the noncoding regions of the genome direct the timing and regulate the expression of the data modules or coding regions of the genome, in addition to possessing myriad other functions.45 Before ENCODE, neo-Darwinists would often ask: If the information in DNA provides such compelling evidence for the activity of a designing intelligence, why is over 90 percent of the genome composed of functionless nonsense sequences? The latest genomics research now provides a ready answer to this question: it isn’t.

  The significance of these discoveries in genomics to the debate about design has passed largely unnoticed in the media. But repeated attempts to stigmatize the ENCODE researchers as aiding and abetting “intelligent design creationists” have inadvertently highlighted what is at stake. In this effort, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, Laurence A. Moran, emerged as point man. The Moran strategy centered on tarring scientists and science journalists who publicized ENCODE and its implications with the brush of “Intelligent Design Creationism”—an all too familiar conflation of intelligent design with a very different idea, the biblical literalism of young-earth creationism. When the distinguished journal Science selected ENCODE as one of the top ten science news stories of 2012, reminding readers that it had detonated the notion of junk DNA by revealing overwhelming functionality in the genome,46 Moran jeered, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to be content to point out that many scientists are as stupid as many Intelligent Design Creationists!”47 In the science world, as in the media, “creationist” is a dirty word; it’s like calling someone a Communist used to be in the 1950s. Such attempts to stigmatize results that challenge a favored theory illustrate how an ideological monopoly in science can stifle inquiry and discussion.
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  The demise of the idea of junk DNA illustrates too, in a more positive way, how a competing perspective can inspire research that contributes to new discovery. Although clearly not every scientist who performed research helping to establish the functional significance of nonprotein-coding DNA was inspired by the theory of intelligent design, at least one noteworthy scientist was. During the early part of the decade, before ENCODE made the headlines, this scientist published many articles challenging the idea of junk DNA based on genomics research that he was conducting at the National Institutes of Health. After the publication of ENCODE in 2012, his coauthor on many of those articles, the prominent University of Chicago geneticist James Shapiro, wrote an article in the Huffington Post commending the scientist for his groundbreaking research and for anticipating the ENCODE results years before. In the article, Shapiro acknowledged that he and his coauthor had “different evolutionary philosophies”—his charitable way of referring to his coauthor’s growing interest in the theory of intelligent design.