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Stephen Meyer speaks in Meacham Auditorium Monday night. Meyer is a director of the center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. His new book: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, claims a digital code embedded in our DNA points powerfully to a design intelligence and helps unravel a mystery of how life began. Marcin Rutkowski/The Daily |
The case for intelligent design is based on the same method of reasoning that Charles Darwin pioneered in the “Origin of the Species,” an intelligent design advocate told an audience Monday at Meacham Auditorium in the Oklahoma Memorial Union.
Stephen Meyer, director and senior fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, outlined his belief in the scientific authenticity of intelligent design, which he explains in his new book, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.”
“If you apply Charles Darwin’s method of reasoning to what we know now that he didn’t, you come to exactly the opposite conclusion that he did,” Meyer said. “There is evidence of design in nature, and you find that evidence most obviously on display in the digital code that is stored in the DNA.”
Meyer explained the code in human DNA is very similar to a computer program, only much more complex than any program ever created.
“If we trace information back to its source, we always come to a mind, not a material process,” he said
Meyer said this logic points decisively to a “prior designing mind” when applied to the discovery of information in DNA and the complex information processing system that surrounds it.
He explained that he believed the three most common explanations of the origin of life — chance, pre-biotic natural selection and self-organization — all fail to offer the origin of the produced information.
“I think it is a false analogy, because computer systems do not reproduce, and do not mutate as greatly, or as quickly as life does,” said Gregory Maus, philosophy sophomore and vice president of the Darwin Student Association.
Maus said Meyer’s argument was similar to the idea of finding a watch in the desert and assuming it was created by an intelligent designer.
“This is similarly flawed in its comparison to the development of life, because watches cannot likewise reproduce, or mutate,” Maus said.
Joshua Malone, microbiology sophomore and president of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club, said he hoped students would realize that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific argument.
“Our organization is promoting discussion on the question of design,” Malone said. “We really want students to gain a better understanding of the debate that is going on between natural selection and intelligent design.”
Meyer said evolutionists reject the intelligent design argument partly because it challenges evolutionists’ religious devotion to Darwin’s theory.
“I hope that people realize that this is a fascinating topic and one that can be discussed with energy, passion, but also civility,” he said. “It’s the great question.”
Meyer earned his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin of life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences.
The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club sponsored Meyer’s lecture.
The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Club will host a screening of “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Era” at 7 p.m. today at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. After the showing, a discussion will be hosted by Meyer and Jonathan Wells, a biologist and proponent of intelligent design.
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Evolutionists are not 'religiously' devoted to anything. That's an incredibly vacuous assertion and is a poor attempt to disqualify real science. I cannot emphasize this enough: intelligent design is not science. It isn't even remotely science. There is not a single peer-reviewed study done that is accepted in the scientific community that validates the hypothesis of intelligent design. It's embarrassing that a microbiology major would subscribe to such an inane concept given that even a tangential understanding of microbiology REQUIRES an understanding of evolution. Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.
DNA doesn't indicate an intelligent design. Monkeys randomly punching keys will eventually type a work of Shakespeare-- that doesn't mean that that the Monkeys intended to produce novel prose or that the work was developed with design in mind.
"The argument that "DNA is code" depends on which level you are looking at DNA. From the level of conscious minds, it would appear as if DNA is a code read by cells to produce a magnificent organism.
However, at a molecular level, DNA is a nucleic acid. Genes store a particular sequence of DNA, and this sequence determines how the genes interact with each other and its environment. The DNA sequence is never read or interpreted as information at this level. Physical, chemical properties of DNA determine which traits are conserved, expelled or just there."
-http://necrofiles.blogspot.com/2008/03/dna-proves-existence-of-god.html?zx=e418210ed2f221e8
"campus science club" ??? please spare me
I take immense personal offense in Meyer's statement about "evolutionists' religious devotion to Darwin's theory."
That is a gross mischaracterization of the way I - and other scientifically-minded people - think about evolution. It is not a religious doctrine in which we place faith or devotion. Rather, it is the conclusion one draws upon objectively examining the immense amounts of scientific evidence for the origin and changes in biological life.
Science is, and never will be, a religion, for one critical reason: science encourages questions and embraces contradicting evidence, whereas religion, in general, spurns them. The comparison is pitiful.
-Scott Mauldin
President
Darwin Student Society
Of course intelligent design (ID) is not science. ID is nothing more than a childish idiotic belief in magic.
Stephen Meyer is a creationist who works at the Discovery Institute, which is called the Dishonesty Institute by scientists. The Discovery Institute is a Christian creationist organization that wants to dumb down science education to accommodate the childish beliefs of uneducated Christian morons.
ahhh i want to argue with everyone and not get anywhere
"The DNA sequence is never read or interpreted as information at this level."
This is false.
There are all kinds of proteins that read information from different parts of the primary structure besides the bases themselves. This isn't very new in the literature either. In fact, your monkey punching argument dates to about the same time as your understanding of DNA. They did the experiment on that too, and like in real life, there were actual factors (that means not imaginary) that had terribly entropic effects on the keyboards and the computers. It involved a lot of dung and piss and destruction of the machinery eons earlier than even a meaningfull sentence was produced. So the analogy you're reffering to describes what happens at the molecular level perfectly as organizations of amino acids and metabolic balances are smashed to oblivion by natural forces eons before they would have enough tries to fit any pattern you would call life.
I would submit that someone claiming an "understanding" of all the proposed contradictory mechanisms of evolution would in fact prevent you from obtaining anything better than a tangential understanding of microbiology. I would counter that nothing about evolution makes sense in the light of biology.
Evolution = change happens. See, it predicts everything, what a powerful theory.
Scott:
With all due respect, I consider the NCSE's caricature of ID to be a gross mischaracterization of the way I - and other scientifically-minded people - think about intelligent design. As a "scientifically-minded person" I have absolutely no problem invoking known causes for observed effects.
On your second point, I would simply direct you to one of the questions in the museum's response lecture to "Darwin's Dilemma" last Tuesday:
Lecture attendee: "If a precambrian rabbit wouldn't falsify Darwinian/Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, can you think of anything that would?"
Dr. Stephen Westrop [curator of SNOMNH invertebrate paleontology]: "As a paleontologist, I am comfortable with saying that natural selection is already well established and the find of such a rabbit, though forcing us to push many of our phylogenetic dates much earlier, would not falsify the theory."
Would you consider Dr. Westrop's science to truly be welcoming question and open to scrutiny?
I hope that you were able to attend our screening, and if not I would more than happily accomodate another viewing for you. We welcome scrutiny, and would like to extend an open invitation for you and your entire Society to attend our next meeting at 5pm on October 12th in Gaylord 2020. We intend to simply discuss this past week and whatever else comes up. Please don't hide behind blog posts like most of our biology faculty did this week. Open your ideas for scrutiny, and we will open ours.
Sincerely,
Josh Malone
President
IDEA Club
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