Thinking to Believe

Here is part 2 of my summary of Stephen Meyer’s response to key objections raised against ID (read part 1).  This post will conclude my review/summary of Meyer’s book.  Links to the entire series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7a.

“ID is an argument from ignorance”

Not at all.  Arguments from ignorance take the following form: X cannot explain Y, therefore Z does.  That is not the form of ID arguments.  ID does not reason that if all naturalistic proposals fail, ID must be true by default.  There are positive evidences provided for inferring design in the universe/biology.  We are not ignorant of how information arises.  We also know from experience that only intelligent designers are capable of producing information (functional, complex specificity).  So postulating an intelligent designer to explain the biological information we observe in the cell is based on what we know, not what we don’t.  If chance and necessity are not adequate to explain the origin of biological information, whereas intelligent agency is, then it is reasonable to view intelligence is the best explanation.[1]

“Doesn’t this presuppose a naturalistic explanation won’t be found in the future?” 

No, it doesn’t.  It merely recognizes that our conclusions should be based on the evidence available to us in the present, not hypothetical evidence that might possibly be discovered in the future.  We must reason to the best explanation given our current data, and our current data gives us no reason to believe life originated by purely naturalistic means, but good reason to believe its origin is due to the activity of a designing intelligence. 

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Stephen Meyer addressed key objections to the design hypothesis that I will share.  Each objection could be answered in much greater detail, but I’ll stick to offering short summaries of key points.  Because of the abundance of objections, I’ll break part 7 into 2 posts. 

“Intelligent Design is not science” 

This is a red herring in that it shifts the focus away from the merits of ID arguments to the classification of those arguments; from the truth of ID to the definition of science.  As Thomas Nagel has written, “A purely semantic classification of a hypothesis or its denial as belonging or not to science is of limited interest to someone who wants to know whether the hypothesis is true or false.”[1]  Arguably, ID is science and should be classified as such.  But even if all parties agreed that it should not be considered science, that does not mean it is false.  It could be that ID is true, but not a scientific truth.  

This objection also presumes that there is a standard definition of science.  There isn’t.  This is called the “demarcation problem.”  Philosophers of science do not agree that there is a single, standard definition of science.  According to Larry Laudan, “There is no demarcation line between science and non-science, or between science and pseudoscience, which would win assent from a majority of philosophers.”[2]  Similarly, philosopher Martin Eger wrote, “Demarcation arguments have collapsed.  Philosophers of science don’t hold them anymore.  They may still enjoy acceptance in the popular world, but that’s a different world.”[3] 

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It’s been a month, but I haven’t forgotten!  For new readers, this is part 6 in my series of posts summarizing Stephen Meyer’s argument for design from his new book, Signature in the Cell.  Past posts can be found here: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

In the last two installments we demonstrated that the OOL cannot be explained by either chance or necessity.  Now we’ll turn our attention to the possibility that the OOL can be explained by a combination of both chance and necessity.  While many models could be examined—and were examined by Meyer—I will only examine the RNA-first, a.k.a. the RNA World hypothesis, since this is the prevailing OOL model today.

The cell presents OOL researchers with a chicken-and-the-egg paradox of which came first: the DNA that makes proteins, or the proteins necessary for replicating DNA?  The paradox was insoluble, so another solution was required.  If neither DNA nor proteins could arise first, what did?

Carl Woese, Francis Crick, and Leslie Orgel proposed an RNA-first model in the late 1960s, followed by Walter Gilbert (Harvard biophysicists) who developed it in the 1980s and gave it its common name.[1]  This model proposes that the first cell consisted of a much simpler self-replicating, self-catalyzing RNA (RNA is similar to DNA, but it is a single strand rather than a double helix, and the nucleotide, thymine, is replaced by uracil).[2]  This model was largely fueled by the discovery of Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman in the early 1980s that sometimes RNA can catalyze chemical reactions like an enzyme does, and thus RNA could serve the dual purpose of information storage (like DNA) and enzymatic functions (like proteins).  “The paradox of the chicken and the egg was thus resolved by the hypothesis that the chicken was the egg.”[3]

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As a result of the failure of the chance hypothesis to explain the origin of life, Dean Kenyon and Gary Steinman proposed a novel solution: life’s origin is due to physical necessity, not chance (Biochemical Predestination, 1969).  Like many others in their day, Kenyon and Steinman were proponents of the protein-first model, maintaining that the first life was based on proteins rather than DNA (DNA came later).  They got around the utterly implausible odds of forming proteins by chance by just denying that chance was involved at all.  They suggested that law-like processes direct the self-organization of chemicals, making the origin of life inevitable, not some lucky happenstance.  Just like electrostatic forces draw sodium and chloride together in ordered patterns to form crystals, some (yet-to-be-discovered) natural law organized biochemicals to form the biological information that makes life possible. 

As evidence for their view that proteins could self-organize to form the basis of life, they pointed to the fact that amino acids bond with certain other amino acids better than others, making certain sequences more likely than others.  This explained how the biological information necessary for life could arise without DNA, RNA, and the transcription-translation process.[1]

Eventually, however, Kenyon came to question his model.  He recognized that even if it could explain the origin of biological information, he still needed to explain the origin of DNA as well as how protein synthesis transformed itself from a self-organizing and self-originating process to one that depended entirely on DNA transcription and translation.  He dismissed the possibility that proteins constructed DNA because the information flow in modern cells is unidirectional, and it’s in the complete opposite direction: information flows from DNA to proteins, not vice-versa.  Because DNA wholly determines the amino acid sequencing of proteins, and because there is no evidence suggesting or reason to think this order was ever different in the past he eventually abandoned the protein-first model.  DNA must have come first.  But based on his knowledge of its chemical properties, he doubted that DNA possessed the same sort of self-organizational properties he thought were present in amino acids.  He was forced by the evidence to abandon his proposal that life originated by necessity.

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Now that we have established what needs explaining (biological information, and the origin and functional interrelatedness of cellular machinery) and the scientific method biologists employ to formulate an explanation, we turn our attention to the four possible explanations for life’s origin: (1) Chance; (2) Necessity; (3) Combination of chance and necessity; (4) Intelligent agency.  In this post I will examine the possibility that life can be explained in terms of chance processes alone.

Just like the lottery, specific probabilities can be assessed for the origin of life by chance.  To illustrate how probabilities are assessed, consider a combination lock.  What are the chances of someone guessing the correct combination of a lock with four dials containing 10 digits each?  To determine the chances one must multiply the number of digits on each dial (10) by itself four times (because there are four dials): 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 10,000 different possible combinations.  The chances of guessing the correct combination, then, are 1 in 10,000.  If one more dial was added to the lock, it would decrease the odds by a factor of 10 (1 in 100,000).  If one is given only one try, the odds of getting the right combination are overwhelmingly against him—so much so that if the lock opened everyone would suspect that his selection was not random, but based on intelligence, or that the lock was faulty.  The odds of cracking the combination increase, however, as one increases the number of attempts.  If one is given 100,000 tries to guess the combination, then the odds are that he will eventually guess the combination through random attempts alone (if each try took 10 seconds, you could crack the 4-dial code in about 28 hours, and the 5-dial code in about 11 days).

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What is the scientific method?  Everyone who sat through grade-school science class knows the answer to this question, right?: observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, conclusion.  What may surprise you is that there is no such thing as the scientific method.  There are a variety of methods scientists employ in their quest to discover the truth about the natural world, none of which can be claimed as the scientific method.  Which method a scientist uses depends on what he is studying.  While the method outlined above works well for “experimental scientists” such as chemists and physicists, it doesn’t apply to “historical scientists” (i.e. those who study the past) such as paleontologists, astronomers, and evolutionary biologists.  Those in the historical sciences require a different method.

Historical scientists study the past, not the present.  They seek to discover the historical causes responsible for past events – effects that we observe in the present.  For such a task the scientific method outlined above simply won’t work.  It’s the wrong tool.  To explain the structure of the fossil record, for example, one cannot engage in experimentation.  Likewise, there is no need for making predictions since predictions address the future, not the past.  How, then, do historical scientists test their theories?

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In my first post on Meyer’s Signature in the Cell I discussed information theory, and claimed that the cell exhibits functional information—information that cannot be explained in terms of the physical machinery of the cell.  In this post I want to provide some background on the machinery and inner workings of the cell to provide evidence for the claim that the cell contains complex specified information (functional information), and explain why biologists have come to recognize that DNA stores and transmits “genetic information,” contains a “genetic blueprint” with “assembly instructions,” and expresses a “digital code.” 

The two most basic components of the cell are DNA and proteins.  DNA is made up of a 4 character chemical alphabet: adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine (these are called nucleotides).  These nucleotides always appear in complimentary pairs: adenine is paired with thymine, and guanine is paired with cytosine. 

Proteins—the workhorses of the cell—are composed of amino acids.  The cell contains 20 different kinds of amino acids.  To create functional proteins, these amino acids must be sequenced together in a specific order, forming a “chain” of amino acids (proteins come in varying lengths, with shorter proteins consisting of ~100 amino acids, most proteins consisting of several hundred, and some as large as 34,350 [titin]).  While there are a number of ways in which amino acids can be sequenced, the vast majority of combinations are functionless.  They sequence must be specified if the protein is to have function (functionality also requires the protein to be folded into a particular shape).

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It’s not often that a book on Intelligent Design becomes a best-seller, or is opined (in print) to be one of the best books of the year by a prominent atheist philosopher.  And yet that is true of Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.  I must say it’s one of the best books I have read on the topic of the evidence for intelligent design in biology.  The information was presented in a very logical, systematic order, with each chapter building naturally on the former.  Not only was Meyer’s approach systematic, but he presented difficult concepts in very understandable ways.  Coming in at 561 pages of text, it is not a quick read, but the time spent is well worth it.

Meyer’s thesis is that the origin of life is best explained by an intelligent cause.  He begins his book by telling how the mystery of life’s origin was not recognized in Darwin’s day, but came to be realized in the decades that followed as knowledge of life’s complexity began to emerge.  That mystery has not been solved over the decades, but rather looms larger and larger the more we discover about the internal workings of the cell, and what is required for even the simplest of life. 

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LiveScience reported on a new “breakthrough” in origin-of-life (OOL) research.  Robert Roy Britt began the article by describing the current state of OOL research: “One of life’s greatest mysteries is how it began.  Scientists have pinned it down to roughly this: Some chemical reactions occurred about 4 billion years ago – perhaps in a primordial tidal soup or maybe with help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea or between the mica sheets – to create biology.” 

I like how Britt “pinned it down” to chemical reactions in a soup, or maybe volcanoes, or maybe the sea, or maybe between mica sheets.  The specificity is overwhelming.  Can you imagine if homicide detectives worked like this?: “Captain, we haven’t caught the killer yet, but we’ve pinned it down to a human being, living on some continent, on this planet.”  Good work guys.  I’m glad you narrowed it down for us.  Now I can check outer-space off my list as a possible location for the origin of life.  Oh wait, some scientists think life did originate in outer-space!  Maybe the killer isn’t living on this planet after all.  Someone better alert the detectives to broaden their search.  End of sarcasm.

So what was the big breakthrough?: a self-replicating RNA molecule.  Some background information will be helpful.  One theory of how life originated from inorganic material by purely chance, natural processes is the RNA-world hypothesis.  According to this hypothesis, RNA strands formed from nucleotides, which later gave rise to DNA, proteins, and the basic cell.  Among its many problems, however, is the fact that no RNA strand has ever self-replicated in the lab.  But Gerald Joyce and his team at the Scripps Research Institute was able to get RNA to do just that.  This isn’t much of a breakthrough, however, at least not as it concerns OOL research. 

Joyce was able to get RNA to replicate only by engineering the RNA molecules to copy “word-by-word” rather than letter-by-letter (nucleotide by nucleotide).  But that is not how RNA replicates in natural conditions, so why think this experiment tells us anything about how RNA might have been able to self-replicate on the early Earth, and how life got started?  If anything, it seems to demonstrate that for RNA to replicate apart from the cell requires an intelligent agent to manipulate it into behaving in ways it does not behave in nature.  And if that’s what we’re doing, then the results of the experiment don’t tell us anything about the chance, physical process by which life emerged. 

Then there is the matter of the nucleotide strings Joyce and his team put in the beaker with the RNA.  These raw materials are necessary for RNA replication, but why think they would have been available in the early Earth, and/or available in the quantities and locations needed?  If an ancient RNA molecule needed thousands of nucleotides at location X for replication to occur, but only 50 were present at location Y, there would be no replication.  As Stuart Kauffman wrote:

The rate of chemical reactions depends on how rapidly the reacting molecular species encounter one another-and that depends on how high their concentrations are. If the concentration of each is low, the chance that they will collide is very much lower. In a dilute prebiotic soup, reactions would be very slow indeed. A wonderful cartoon I recently saw captures this. It was entitled ‘The Origin of Life.’ Dateline 3.874 billion years ago. Two amino acids drift close together at the base of a bleak rocky cliff; three seconds later, the two amino acids drift apart. About 4.12 million years later, two amino acids drift close to each other at the base of a primeval cliff…. Well Rome wasn’t built in a day.[1]

Is it any surprise that if you provide the right kind of “RNA food” in the right quantities, in the right location, and re-program the RNA so that it is able to join itself to those nucleotides, that it does so?  No.  Because it is not surprising that when an intelligent agent involves itself in the process, what is naturally impossible becomes possible.  Take away that intelligent agent, however, and you are left with the impossible.  Joyce’s work was not a breakthrough for OOL research, but a reaffirmation of what we already know: intelligent agents can do things nature cannot do on its own.