>> i was interested in the question of sort of why we fight wars and then how we explain those. and that for me emergencies as the most important element is that confederates for a long time, particularly for lower and nonslave-holding confederates be the argument has been it's an somewhat irrational whar it doesn't make sense for them to fight and my argument -- what i-tell my students we have to give historic actors the same they had to ourselves. we explain things to us in a way

to make sense and they did the same thing and trying to figure out why they started and continued over time and we continue to make sense and i wanted to catch that dinenism over time. >> we have been talking about aaron shaheen, why families fight.

>> stephen meyer, director for the center of science and culture at the discovery institute argues that our dna provides evidence of an intelligent designer and helps explain how life began. the discovery institute hosts this event at the seattle art museum. it's an hour, 10 minutes. >> i had the chance to be in great britain earlier in the year. and i was speaking at what i thought was shroovs bury and

it's a place of darwin's birth and i was speaking to give a dissecting voice on the legacy of voice and i found there's a tremendous interest of darwin and his legacy this year. it is the 200 anniversary of darwin's birth. the 150th anniversa of origin of species. and darwin is so big he's even on the one. he have the queen on one side of the 10 pound note and charles on the back. so around the world with this anniversary, there is question about his legacy. what has darwin left us and what does he know because of darwin that we didn't know before. and quite typically, the answer to that question is, well, darwin refuted the design argument. he gave us the idea of evolution and the understanding of the mechanism of natural selection but according to many national historians, many biologists,

darwin is principally important because he refuted the old classical argument from design. >> ayala has put it more in a pithy way saying darwin gave us design without a designer. now, that idea has picked up in e works of richard dawkins who is the foremost spokesman for

modern neodarwinism. >> now, i'mn old college professor and it's hard for me not to want to call on me, and if i do, forgive me but i want to offer a quiz for anyone who can come up with a key wordn this notation. it's obviously pearance, right. we've got the -- the darwinian view looks like they were designed because there's a punitive undirected, merely on natural selection or mutations that can produce the appearance or the illusion of design without that natural selection. that was darwin's idea. the idea of being random variations in a population and differential reduction.

let's put that idea of darwin's in context. what he was trying to show all the living forms that has arisen since the very beginning of life were produced by a purely undirected natural process. and the process again is natural selection. darwin also depicted the history of life as a great tree. and he suggested that all of the living forms that exist today exist by the branches at the top of the tree, the giraffes, t crocodiles, the mammals and ourselves and all of those forms eventually could be traced back -- they descended by the power of natural selection from originally one or very few simple forms. so that's his theory of evolution sometimes call biological evolution because what darwin was attempting to do was explain all the -- all the forms that we have today from

simpler preexisting forms but darwin did not answer a fundamental question, a for fundamental question. in fact, he didn't even address it. and that was the question of the origin of the very first life, the form of life that's represented by the very base of the tree or the trunk there. to get life going, somehow very simple chemicals have to be selected from a cell. darwin didn't address that topic and we'll see as that lecture appears, in 150 years subsequent generations of scientists who have addressed it haven't been able to solve the mystery of the origin of the first life either. now, there is question today in the scientific literature and among many of my colleagues at discovery institute about the sufficiency of darwin's theory of getting from that first life to all the living forms we see today. but for the purposes of argument, i'm going to set that question aside in this lecture as i've done in my book to focus

on this more fundamental question, the question of the origin of the very first life. can that very first life be explained as a result of a purely undirected process such thatny appearance of design that we might find and, for example, the first living cell can be safely assumed to be an illusion? or is there evidence of aual design? is design merely apparent or is there actual intelligent design? that's the question i'm going to address specifically as it relates to the question of the origin of the first life. now, in darwin's time, scientists were not particularly concerned about this. there was a general materialistic turn in science during the late 19th century with an attempt to explain all major phenomenon by reference to matter and motion and maybe the laws of nature. but even though there wasn't a formal theory of the origin of the first life, scientists weren't very concerned about not having such a theory, and i'm

talking about materialistically oriented evolutionary biologists because they assumed that the cell was extremely simple. it didn't seem -- it didn't seem that it was going to be difficult to produce an explanation for the origin of the first cell because the cell was thought to be something like a blob of jell-o which could be produced by a few sple ingredients, a few simple chemical ingredients reacting with each other in one or two simple reactions. i love the quote on the scrn behind me because it makes me feel so very smart being able to look back with the benefit of hindsight and all that's been discovered, you know, in the last century and indeed the last 100 and even just the last 10 years in fields like molecular and cell biology and genomics. and this is thomas huxley. he said a cell is a simple

homogenous globualism. there wasn't a lot of information because of explaining this design because scientists at the time didn't think the cell really appeared all that designed. it just looked like something that a few chemical reactions could produce. they thought that the essence of life was this substance, this goon the inside of the cell membrane called protoplasm. all of that changed first gradually and at the turn of the century as we began to lrn more about proteins and metabism, but then dramatically in the 1950s and '60s, where scientists called th moleculap biological revolution. one of the key discoveries was the discovery by watson and krick of the structure of the dna module the simple double

helix, which a cultural icon. we see it on news reports and we know criminals are convicted because of dna evince and we know there are biotech firms that are investigating dna and genes and the like. so we're all very familiar with dna. but at the same time, there's something profoundly mysterious about this molecule that we've never really come to grips with and that's what my book is about. one way to think of it is to think of something else that another -- one of the brilliant discoveries of francis ick. he was the brilliant english turned biologicalist and he ended up breaking the ultimate code the digital code that's stored in the dna molecule. from 1957 he proposed an amplification of the work that he and watson had done in 1953 and that was his so-called

sequence hpothcist and he said those four functionxactly like alphabetic charaers in a written language or digital characters in a machine code. now, if you just think about this and set aside the familiarity that we have on this subject from high school biology, we realize this is a stunning outcome which was confirmed in a series of discoveries over the next 10 to 15 years during this revolution in molecular biology. and what was discovered was this. that these four characters -- the four chemicals that function as characters direct the production of proteins and the protein machinethat keep the cell alive.

the way this works inside this cell is that the arrangements of the as, cs, gs and ts convey instructions for arranging the constituent parts of proteins called amino acids. and here break for a visual aid. now, some of you have seen a version of this talk before so you're getting very frightened by all this amino acid talk but i'm going to break this down for you. these are snap lock blocks set on the box from which i stole them. ages 2 to 4. [laughter] >> it's a child's toy but it illustrates something very important about how molecular biology works. proteins are like the toolbox in the cell and they are formed from amino acids which i've represented with these beads. proteins have very specific three-dimensional shapes that allow them in a hand in glove fashion to perform critical

functions in this the cell just like your toolbox out in the garage may have a hammer and a saw and a wrench and a set of pliers and each one ofhose tools has a relationship between its form and its function, the shape of the tool largely determines what kind of a job it can do. the same kind of relationship exists between the shape of the protein and the kind of job that it can do in the cell. but the shape the protein adopts, here's some pictures off the internet of the intricate three dimensional shapes that proteins have, those shapes are determined in large part by the interactions wh these amino acids. each of these amino acids have what we call side chains, little sticky-outies on the back. that's the technical term, the sticky-outies and the connections cause different

shapes to form and those spes again are responsib for the functions that proteins can perform inside the cl. here's an example of a protn, an enzyme protein, that performs -- it breaks apart a two-part sugar molecule and there's a breakdown of the protein and that two-part sugar that looks a bit like a barbell and you see there's a perfect hand in glove fit that is responsible for the chemical breaking that the enzyme accomplishes. and this is typical of almost all proteins. they perform their function because of this exquisite three-dimensional specificity, this hand in love fit. the key question in biogy, how does that specificity arise and we now show specificity derives from the specificity of consequence in the amino acids

which in turn derives from the in fact, the instructions, the digital code stored along the spine of the dna molecule. so that is what i call the dna enigma and i willxplain in a minute why i call that an enigma. before we do that, though, it might be helpful to have a nice visual representation of exactly what the instructions, the digital code in dna does within the molecule -- or within the cell. we now know that and it's nice to have a look. i'm in just a second press a button and you're going to see an animation and it's first going to show you the digital code represented symbolically along the spine of the dna molecule and you'll see a lot of stuff that happens real fast. the what you'll see is the dna molecule will be separated by a large protein complex that will open the molecule and expose it for cope why go and you'll see a

large copying machine and you'll see it spits out a single strand of copy of the dna information and that copying is going to go out. i'm going to show the animation on the digital code of the dna. okay. so here we see the dna code representing graphically with thes, ts along the sign and we'll see this protein complex come and attach itself and that's preparing the molecule, the dna strand now for -- to be copied and there we're going to see it attac and it's beginning to spit out that single stranded copy of the rna. this is a view of inside of it and its individual bases are

potioned and added to form this single-stranded copy of the genetic instructions. now, there's the copy completed and it's going to be transported out to something called the nuclear pore complex which is an information recognition device that controls the flow of information in and out of the cell's nucleus. out it goes here. and it's now going to approach and be transported to a two-part chemical factory. and it's going to thread in there and as the messenger transcript is read and threads through, it's now going to provide the instructions for building the chain of i meano acids which you see along the bottom there and a mechanical process ensues with the words in

the genetic message. now, and you see the growing protein and the messenger is at the top. it begins the folding process and then it's often shepherded out to something called -- it's a barrel-shaped protein that will cause it to fold i know more specificity. it's called a chaperon. and the animator here in just a second will show us when the protein comes into its final confirmation. it's going to light up there for us. boom, there we go. and then the door opens and out it goes to the outer sito plasm where t animator has done a

beautiful job of bringing the beautiful intricacy when we see building a cell. it directs the assembly instructions. it is the assembly instructions that directs protein synthesis and all the wonderful proteins that the dna makes. i call it the dna enigma. it is not the question of the structure of dna. watson and krick solved that problem in 1953. when they e-luce daylighted the dna of the molecule they solved one mystery but they created another. so the mystery is not the mystery of the structure of dna. it's not even the mystery of where biological information resides. we now know where at least some of the information that living organism resides and it resides along the dna molecule. the dna enigma -- neither is the dna enigma the mystery of what the information in dna does.

we now have a very good handle on that. we've seen an animation albeit perhaps a little simplified of what's called gene expression or protein synthesis. it's something even more fundamental. it's the mystery of the origin of the information on the dna molecule and it's connected to another and very profound and long-standing mystery in biology and that is the mystery of the origin of life. here we have a leading german origin of life biochemist who says that the problem of the origin of life is basically equivalent to the problem of biological information. the origin of biological information. now, it's fairly easy to see why the problem of the origin of life and the origin of information are so intimittly connected. i used to ask my students if you want to give your computer a new

function, what do you have to give it? they would immediately understand, maybe they got it. they're better at computers than anyone over 30. and it's code. you have to give -- you have to give it a new code, a new program. the same thing is true in life. if you want to build a new organism, if you want to build a new organ or structure, if you want to build a new molecular machine, information required. new proteins are required and in turn that means new information. more fundamentally, if you want to build life in the first place and get life going you need information. the very information that we now know runs the show in biology, the information in dna, the very first living cell would have required such information and that is the dna enigma. the mystery of the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life. now, for engineers and scientists in the group, one clarifying point might be

helpful. there's a mathematical description or information that was provided by the mathematician claude shannon with his -- and this is one of his -- the simpler forms of one of his equations. and mathematically information is inverse related to probability. so the more improbable a sequence of characters is, the more information it conveys. there is, however, shannon himself pointed out a limit of the mathematical concept of information. shannon's eations and his form of analysis cannot help us capture the distinction with these two types sequences. the sequence on top is very impossible and it has a large inkackable informatn. the sequence on the bottom is also very improbable and, therefore, has a lot of shannon information but ihas something else, an extra nonquantitatetive elemen has a specificity of

arrangement that enables that sequence to carry or convey functional information. of it performs a communication function. and the term of artn information -- the information sciences is the bottom string is specied information or specified complexity where the top string is merely complex or it merely has shannon information. now, when we talkbout the dna enigma, about the kind of information that is necessary to get life going, it's important to recognize we're talking about specified information. functionally specified information where the arrangement of the characters matters. and francis the genius on the cutting edge in the late 1950s was very clear to clarify this from the beginning of the molecular biological information.

>> we're talking -- when we talk about biological information, the kind that needs to be explained to underand the origin of life, we're talking about specied functionally specified information, not merely shannon information or improbability. now i first encountered the dna enigma at a conference in 1985. there were several scientists there that i've come to know in the ensuing years and there was aman who i don't a book called the mystery of life's origin. he shared the critique that he provided in his book of theories of the chemical origin of life. and he provided an exhaustive critique and though the conference was set up as a kind of debate between two different schools of thought, nearly everyone on the panel accepted the main thrust of thaxton's critique, that they do not

provide an adequate explanation of the origin of the first life. and i became really fascinated with this question because i had been under the impression, having gone through two science degrees at that point, that the evolutionary biologists had pretty much had the questions sewn and it was striking and surprising to me that leading origin of life sciensts readily conceded did not have all the answers or even the key answers to the central question. and i learned that the key question that was a stumbling block for all the theories of the origin of life was the origin of information so a year or so later i was off to cambridge england and i began a ph.d. program after having a number of long conversations with dr. thaxton and some of his colleagues about the problem of the origin of life and i wanted to investigate this mystery. and in my graduate studies i naturally did two things.

i studied the many competing theories of the origin of life that were out there. and one of the reasons that this was such a profound mystery is that the problem of the origin of information is a problem of apparent design. we talked about how the darwinians attempt to explain the appearance of design but when we're talking about digital code, machine code inside a cell, we're talking about something as richard dawkins himself acknwledges is uncannily computer-like. bill gates, our local hero here in seattle has said dna is like a computer program but far more advanced than any we have created. so the question arises, is this code that functions for all the world like a computer program or maybe a section of code in a cad cam program, a cad program in a manufacturing plant -- is this the product of intelligence? it looks as if it were designed

by intelligence. is there undirected mechanism that can explain away this striking appearance of design at the very foundation of life? that was the question that seized me. as i began to investigate it i came across a book of a molooks likeler biologist who was a colleague of cricks. and on the cover of his book called chance & necessity, he said that if you're going to be a scientist you should approach all problems with the same basic strategies. you should try to explain all phenomenon by reference to chance processes, by reference to natural laws or what you might call necessity and/or by the combination of the two. and as i began to investigate the different theories about the origin of life, i found that sure enough the various theories exemplified one of these two or three basic approaches.

they either exemplified a reliance upon chance or a reliance on necessity or natural laws or what were called self-organizational scenarios where the laws of physics and chemistry were invoked to try to explain the essential ingredients of life. or some models attempted to explain the combination of the two. and one such model was called p pre-biotic natural selection and that natural selection interacting with random events. now, in my book, i look a whole series of proposals that had been made to try to solve the dna enigma and try to account forhe origin of information that's necessary to build the first life. and i show that each of these proposals exemplifies one of those three baic approaches that he laid out in 1967. and i critiqued these models but

in some ways it wasn't really my b to critique them. i've been simply to report these critiques that were made by other theorist whose become convinced that indeed the field ist a state of impasse. when i give this talk in a longer form, i like to go into a number of these key models and exemplify what's wrong with each of these basic approaches. the good people at c-span, however, have about 65 minutes of tape tonight so we're going to kind of skate by this. i'm just going to look at one of these approaches that kind exemplifies exactly why the problem of the origin of information is such a deep mystery, and i'm going to look at thi approach specifically because it has been one othe most popular approaches to try to solve the problem of the origin of life. it's sometimes known as self-organization, and it relies on what you might call forces of chemical neceity.

it was first proposed in the late 1960s by a scientists named dean kenyon and gary simon. you could explain the origin of the specific arrangements of the amino acids that you find in proteins and i suppose they hope that you could also explain the origin of the arrangement of the basis in the dna model because of the forces of chemical attraction and forces of necessity. most of us are familiar with crystals and in particular the chemical formula for a crystal of salt which as i recall na and cl an the na has a plus charge and the cl a minus charge and it creates an orderly structure that repeats over and over again. and the idea was that justs the order in a crystal is the product of chemical forces of attraction, so too is the arrangement of the key constituent parts of the

biomolecules also the product of forces of attraction. the scientists who brought this forward was dean kenyan who was at the same conference write heard charles thaxton speak and kenyan was publicly repudiating his own theory, a theory he had called biochemical predestination. for presbyterians here, he was not a calvinist. [laughter] >> he was referring to the forces of attraction between the constituent parts of these key molecules. in 1985 he ended up rejecting -- he publicly repudiated his own theory which was something of a shock of this conference and sent a ripple through the origin of life biology and it got me even more intrigued with this whole subject. now, and so i want to illustrate why this idea of biochemical

predestination doesn't work and what kenyan came to in his own understanding of why his tory didn't work. kenyan realized that even if you had some forces of attraction that could help explain why the amino acids line up the way they do in proteins, you had a more fundamental issue and that is you had to explain the origin of the information in dna because we know that dna produces the sequence -- the sequential arrangement of amino acids and proteins. and as he examined me carefully the chemical structure of the dna molecule, he realized that his proposal was never going to work. if you look at the chemical structure of dna, you see on the two -- outside parts of the molecule little circles with ps and pentagons. that's the representation of what's called the sugar phosphate backbone. th par of the molecule is the medium upon which the genetic text is inscribed. it isot the information. it's the medium where the information is stored.

along the spine of the dna molecule in the vertical axis where yosee the as, ts, gs representing the chemical basis, that's the axis where the information is stored. now, kenyan's idea rememr was you would have forces of attraction that were responsible for causing the key message-bearing information-bearing constituents of the biomolecules to line up a particular way. notice that there are no little sticks between the as, cs, gs, ts. they represent bonds. there are bonds between the gs, the cs, the as and the sugar phosphate backbone but interestingly, those bonds are the same no matter which one of those chemical characters is being attached to the backbone. a lot of chemistry but let them break it down with another visual aid. got a little message here, okay? it says mind over matter.

mind over matter. it's going to have something about how the mariner's rock. but i'm not sure they do yet. now, this is a magnetic chalkboard here and i've got magnetic letters that stick to the chalkboard. there are forces of attraction here at work. self-organizational forces you might consider them except is the information in this little message the result othe magnetic forces of attraction that caused the letters to stick to the backboard here? can you see that the information is not the result of the magnetism. instead, you can see that quickly because the same magnetic forces are at work as i disrupt that message, right? now, this is a very nice analogy to what's going on in the dna molecule. the backbone of the molecule corresponds to the backboard here. it's the medium of the message. there are forces of attraction that explain why the basis stick

to the backbone but those forces of attraction do not explain the sequential arrangement of the characters. do you see that? there areo bonds between the characters and the same type of chemical bond is responsible for each site where the characters stick, just as we got the same force of magnetic attraction no matter where is the site. there's nothingbout the chemistry of the dna molecule that dictates the sequential arrangement of the characters that constitute the information. it's something extraneous to the physics and chemistry to the system. it would be like saying that the information in this morning's "seattle times" hormone is the chemistry to ink bond to paper. we know clearly something else is at work?

intuitive intuitively, there the idea that there is intelligence behind the information. now, i first encountered this idea in discussions with charles thaxton the chemist i met in 1975. in an epilogue in his book, he and his co-authors sketched it out. and when i left for graate school and began my work in cambridge, i was seized with this. >> and so naturally i went back and i studied the scientific methods of reasoning that are used by scientists who are trying to reconstruct the distant past and develop theories of origins and, of course, that led me to charles darwin.

and it turns out that darwin pioneered a method of scientific reasoning that goes by a couple of different names. it's sometimes called the method of multiple competing hi-into sees and the method of inferg to the best explanation and we see here in a quote where he's defend his own scientific method. he's describing his use of this method of inference to the best explanation. and this is the way the method goes. it's designed by scientists who are trying to determine the cause of an ancient event. and they have a limitation. scientists, historical scientists trying to do this, are not able to go back and actually see the event so what they do is they propose different things and hoping in

the best of cases to find only one to explain the effect in question but that leads to a question. a question of scientific method. how do we determine which of the competing causes is best? how do we determine whi explanation provides the best explanation for the event that we're trying to explain. well, it turned out that darwin and his key scientific mentor, the great geologist charles lyle had a very practicals is of reasoning. and one day while glancing at the front piece of lyell's book i had an epiphany -- because the subtitle of lyell's book e title of

>> you want to invoke the cause that will produce the thing in question. if you want to explain the layer of volcanic ash in eastern washington, you're going to prefer the volcanic eruption hypothsis over the earthquake hypothsis because volcano produce such phenomenon and earthquakes do not. so i asked myself a question. what is the cause now in operation that produces digital code? what is the cause that we know of from our uniformed and repeated experience, another rt of the methodical dictum? we should be looking for causes now in operation that we know from our uniformed and repted experience. what is the cause now in operation for the production of information generally? intelligence. thank you. it was exactly what i thought.

later i camecross an information scientist, a pioneer in thepplication of the theory of molecular biology. he said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. is that true? well, indeed it is. remember, our quote from bill gates, dna is like a computer program. but far more advanced than any we ever created. we know that programs come from programmers. we know that information generally, whether we're talking about an description or a headline or a book or a section of digit code from a computer program always comes fromn intelligent source. we know that from our uniformed and repeated experience, from our present experience of cause and effect. we know that cause that is now in operation. as we -- as i examine the competing approaches to explaining the dna enigma, the origin of the infortion necessary to produce the first

life, i very consciously develop the case for intelligent design using the very method that darwin himself had used. the method of multiple competing thoughts. in the book i look at those based on chance and necessity and those based on a combination of the two and show from the literature in the area of origin of life biology that each of these approaches have failed. and instead there's only one known cause of the origin of information, and that cause is intelligent design, conscious activity. and, therefore, if there's only one known cause of a give and effect, the presence of the effect points songly back to the action of the cause. and so that's the argumenthat i've developed in signature in the cell. that's in a sense the argument based on biology 101. one of the things that's also very exciting which i address in the book and i'll only touch here in closing, there are many other signatures or fingerprints

of intelligence in the informational properties of living systems. my colleagues at the biologic institute is the lab that we started here in seattle and in redmond have been working on a simulation which is called gene expression and one of my colleagues is a computer programmer. he was an architect-level programmer at microsoft, and he was working closely with our molecular design. he dropped down a book on my desk, which is a standard manual for software engineers. and my colleagues said to me, he said i'm getting an eery feeng that someone figured all this out before us. [laughter] >> and i said what do you mean? and he explained to me the concept of a design pattern is apparently a term of art in computer science. it means a design strategy or a

design logic and he said there's all kinds of different design strategies, design patterns that we use to process information. and i'm finding all of them inside the cell or many of them and the interesting thing is they are -- and they started microsoft talk. it's like they're an 8.0, 9.0, 10.0 of the same strategy that we use. and he said they're just executed -- same design logic but executed with much more engineering elegance. and some of the things -- and i discuss some of these design patterns in the last part of my book. the fact that we have messages within messages in the genome. it's called nested coding of information. there's files within folders and folders within super folders a way of storing information. there's a distributed storage and retrieval system for genetic

modules, for informational modules, informational data sets and the operating system in e genome which we used to think was junk dna by the way, it's not junk. the operating system causes those modules to be accessed and that's what we understand a gene to be. at every level we're seeing a hierarchy of information and it's just an absolutely fascinatingystem that's being revealed by the most current discoveries in modern biology, in modern genomics. 's an interesting time to be involved in molecular biology and all the new discoveries are showing that there's -- that the case for intelligent design is even stronger. each one of these design patterns is a feature for which there is only one known cause in the universe and that cause is called intelligent design. in closing i'd like to make one last point. the common objective is that it's an argument for ignorance.

that we're arguing from what we don't know rather than what we do know. my sometimes debating partner has made this objection repeatedly. he says intelligent design argues that life is t specifically complex to have evolved by fatural forces, therefore, life must ve been created by an intelligent designer. he's accusing us for arguing in a fallacious manner like this. he's saying the argument for design is basically simply -- constitutes nothing more than what natural processes can do. he's sing natural processes cannot produce the effect in question, therefore, since we can't ink of anything else, we invoke the mysterious notion of intelligent design. but, in fact, the notion of intelligent design is not myerious. it's something that we know about from our own repeated experience and the argument is not an argument for ignorance. it is an argument from what we know both about the features of the cell and the genome but also about the cause and effect structure of the world.

so the argument for intelligent design actually goes like this. none of the natural processes that we've examined, no chance, necessity or the combination of the two have demonstrated the power to produce the effect in question. the specified information that runs the show in biology. but we do know of a cause, a type of cause which is known to produce that effect that cause is intelligence, therefore, intelligent design constitutes the best explanation based on what we know from biology and from our knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world. that's the former argument that darwin used. but instead, what i've done is actually turned tables and showed that by using darwin's method and applying it to information to evidence that he did not yet know abt, we can now show that e central legacy of darwin is not that the is no evidence of design but rather we can use darwin's very method to reaffirm the case for desn based on these very exciting discoveries of modern biology. and i thank you. [applause]

[applause] >> now, you have to read the book. [laughter] >> and there will be books in the lobby and steve will be signing them but first we'll have some questions. we have some question time and if you would like to come up to the microphone and make a short question, he'll answer them. we have one. maybe we could line up along here. i have a feeling there'll be more. >> one of the most impressive arguments i found in your book which you haven't mentioned here is at the very end and that's

the suggestion that neo-darwinists are finding it necessary to paw at a multiuniverse hypothsis to avoid the improbability of this kind of code development occurring within the time that our universe has existed. i'd like to know what's happening with that argument among neo-darwinists right now. >> well, there's only -- you're right. you know folks are in trouble, biologists are in trouble when they invoking infinite numbers of other universes to render otherwise extremely probable events probable it's a rather technical discussion when you get into these guesses. we have a first class philosopher and bru gordon who's doing some real cutting edge on that work. he's got a great article coming out in a new volume later on in the year -- the volume is called nature to nature.

i'd refer to you some of his work on that but i guess it was the second appendix in the book has a 10-page discussion in which i take on that attempt to softly problem of the origi of life by punting to multiverses. it's rather technical so i'll refer tome to it. i would say -- i don't think there's only one biologists who's proposed this. hi name is kunan and there's a little sense of tongue and cheek in the proposal and it's been named in that same spirit on scientists working on the origin. of life. you can imagine how unsatisfying that is if you're trying to figure out how the chemistry produced the code and somebody said well, we've gothese billions and billions of other universes out there and it happened some way out there and we happened to behe lucky one. that's essentially a confession ofgnorance and that we failed. but there are technical problems with that proposal even on its own terms which i spell out in the book.

>> this is a monumental achievement, steve. i understand that you were seeking endorsements including francis collins. i was wondering if there's any -- do you see any overlap between what your doing in the signature in the cell and what collins has argued in the language of god? and are you looking forward to debating him at some point? >> a very timely question. no, i didn't actually seek his endorsement. i found it unlikelyhat he would provide it. on the other hand, there's a kind of curiosity. collins has been publicly critical of intelligent design. most of his criticisms have been directed at michael beehee's argument. i think michael gets the better of that exchange but setting that aside, collins is very famous for his work on the human genome project. and when the completion of that

was announced othe white house lawn, he very avertly said that we're not the result of a purely undirected evolutionary process. instead, referred to the human genome as the book of life by which god wrote the plan for building life. and i actually quote collins in the first chapter of my book. so i've been actually curious out how he would respond to this argument from information. he's the human genome guy after all which is all about the book of life. d beyond that, collins, though, he has said he's against intelligent design, argues that the fine-tuning of the laws in physics that are -- that were set in place at the very beginning of the universe spes very powerfully to an intelligence behind the universe. that is a design argument. and heakes a similar argument about the origin of the human moral sense. so i'm curious and i think this

is something that would -- i think a clarifying conversation would be in order to kind of get to the bottom of this exactly where does collins agree and disagree with us andf so, why given that he does actually make design arguments and if anything, the complexity of the genome far exceeds even the complexity of the fine-tuning of physics and chemistry so thank you for that he question. >> if i quote him right, i think dawkins makes the claim that any idiot can see random changes are not going to generate any proteins. but he makes the claims that random mutations plus natural selection is not random. and i can't -- i can't put that together. now, i don't think in your book that you answer that explicitly. you implyit. to me it's a nonsense to say that the result of that is nkt

raom. >> i do have a fairly extensive section in the book on this approach which combines natural selection and random variatis or random mutations. of course, the complex is different here. we're trying to explain the origin of life, you have a problem if you're going to invoke natural selection. and this is where the real problem has been. for natural selection to work, you have to have organisms that are capable of differential reproduction. and so natural selection actually presupposes self-replicating organisms. but self-replication in turn resupposes the existence of information-rich dna and proteins. the information in dna is responsible for the pcess of self-replication among other things. so there's kind of a problem here for scientists who want to say, we can rescue the origin of life -- the chemical evolution from the immense improbability by bringing in natural

selection. because natural selection is only operative once you have self-replicating organism which in turn implies that you already have dna and oteins. what are we trying to explain? we're trying to explain the origin of the information of dna and proteins. it's like the guy who's walking home from work. he's kind of absent-minded he must be a professor of philosopher or something. he falls in a big hole and he can't get out but he says, no problem. he says, all i need as a ladder and he walks home and get the ladder walks back in the hole and jumps in and climbs out. that's what's going on with pre-biotic science. one of the leading origin of life biologists nobel prize winner puts it this way, theories of natural selection have a big problem, they need information which implies they

have t presuppose what's going on in the first place. the attempt to bring that in doesn't solve the problem. and you are essentially left with -- you're thrown back on pure chance or else this attempt to use self-organizational forces of necessity and i critique both of those approaches in the book. very good question. >> thank you. >> i'm wondering where you got the intelligence for the title of your book, "signate in the cell." i've used richard dawkins use that phrase but you didn't say that. >> i didn't want to plagiarize anything. the context that the doctor is referring to at the very end of the movie where dawkins is probed b the origin of life problem and he acknowledges that a quote no one knows how lif first began. of course, he's talking within the framework of a standard

evolutionary approach, which assumes only materialistic explanations. and then he goes on to say and i suppose, he said, there could be a signature of intelligence side life and if so, that would point to the need of some kind of intelligent cause but he said that would have to be an intelligence outside of space that had itself directed by tside of processes. i call that the a, b, g, anything but god. [laughter] >> and i raise that not because intelligent design necessarily proves the existence of god but rather because it shows that dawkins' whole program of the new atheist program presupposes that god can't be part of the answer. he would go to such lengths as to propose the space alien hypothsis. it shows he's got a visceral

distaste for considering anything beyond that. it's curious that dawkins first of all acknowledges that there isn't an explanation for the origin of life. he's a very ardent c-span for the theory and the origin of god delusion, the belief in god is tantamount to a delusion yet he acknowledges there is not a better explanation than design when talking about the first life, which he does so in effect when he acknowledges no one knows from within a materialistic perspective. in a sense you can see the foundational premise of his new atheist argument is falsely predicated. there is compelling evidence of design and dawkins actually -- at the origin -- at the point of the origin of first life, wkins is not in a position to answer that first argument. >> you seem to start to answer this with your last slide but as you're getting toward