go right to them. they're either sentences or passagesr things that helped me understand the way in which the structure was organized. >> host: is there a color-coding there with the green and blue? >> guest: sometimes. sometimes it only means that ran out of blue. other times, i have, other times i'll figure out when i go back, that one color means the passages that i really liked, and others will be ones that i less. others will be one i like less than the other two.

>> it is the 200th anniversary of arwin's birth. and darwin is now so big that

he's even on the money. we have the queen on one sidof the ten pound note and charles on the back. so around the world with this anniversary there is the question about his legacy, what has darwin left us? what do we knobecause 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, he gave us the understanding of the mechanism of natural selection, but according to many intellectual historians, many biology gists, darwin is principally important because he refuted the old classical argument from design. francisco eye y'all la, one of the past presidents of the aaas, american association for the advancement of science, puts it this way: he says:

>> that idea is picked up in the works of richard dawkins. dawkins puts it this way in his classic work, "the blind watch maker." he says, biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. i'm an old college professor, but i want to offer a quiz right now for anyone who can come up with the keyword this this quotation.

it's obviously appearance, right? things look as though they've been designed but they weren't because there is a purely unrected, unguided selection. that can produce the appearance or illusion of design. without that mechanism of natural selection being guided or directed in any way. that was darwin's key idea, natural selection, of course, being the idea of random variations in a population in differential reproduction. now, lut that in context. all therganisms since the beginng of life were produced by a natural process, and that process natural selection. darwin also depicted the htory of life as a great tree, and he

suggested that all of the livg forms that exist today are represented by the branches at the top of the tree. the giraffes, the crocodiles, the mammals, various kinds, and all of those forms eventually could be traced back. they descended by the power of naturalelecon from originally one or very few simple forms. thereso that's his theory of evolution sometimes called buy long cal e -- biological evolution. but darwin did not answer a fundamental question, a more fundamental question. in fact, he didn't en address it. and that was the question of the origin of the very first life, the form of life th@t's represented by the very base of the tree or the trunk there. to get life going, somehow very simple chemicals have to be converted into a living cell.

now, darwin didn't address that topic. >> be explained as the result of a purely undirected process such that any appearance of design we might find in, for example, the first living ell can be safely assumed to be an illusion, or is there evidence of actual 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 origin of the first life. now, in darwin's time scientists were not pticularly concerned about this. thereas a general materialistic turn in science during the late 19th century with an attempt to explain all major phenomenon by reference to matter in motion and maybe the laws of nature. but even though there wasn't a formal theory of the originf first life, scientists weren't very concerned about having sh a theory, and i'm talking about ma tier riskicly oriented boyologists because it department seem it was going to be difficult to produce an explanation for the origin of the first cl because the cell was thought to be something like a blob of jell-o which could be produced by a few simple

ingredientseacting with each other in one or two simpl reactions. i love the quote on the screen 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 in the last century and, indeed,he last 100 and even just the last ten years in fields like molecular and cell genomics. this is darwin's famous protagonist, his famous bulldog, and he said at the time the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of palace. it's a simple glob of jell-o. so there wasn't a lot of worry about not being able to explain this appearance of design because scientists at the time didn't think that the cell appeared all that designed. it just lood like something that a few chemical reactions could produce. they thought that the essence of life was this substance, this goo on the inside of the cell

membrane called protoplasm. and that, all of that changed first gradually at the turn of the century as we began to learn more about proteins and me lab limb, but then da calculate any in the 1950st and '60s during a time historians now call the molecular biological revolution. one of the key discoveries was the discovery by watson and crick of the structure of the dna molecule. the famous double helix with which most of us are very familiar. it's now kind of a cultural icon. we see it on news reports, and we know that criminals are convicted because of dna evidence, and we know there are biotechfms that are investigating dna and genes and the like, so we're all very familiar with dna. buat the same time the'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

thk of something else that -- another one of the brilliant discoveries of francis crick. he was the brilliant english physicist turned biologi. head been a code breaker in world r ii and he ended up being involved in breaking the ultimate code, the digital code store inside 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 hypothesis. according to which t four chemicals on the inside of the spine of the dna molecule, the ones that i've represented with the letters a, c, g, and t, he proposed those four checals called bases function exactly like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in a machine code. if you just set aside the

familiarity we all have with this summit from high school biology -- subject from high school boyle, we -- biology, we have to realize it wasffirmed during this revolution in molecular biology. and what was discovered was this: theseour chemicals that function as characters direct the production of proteachs and the protein mhines that keep the cell alive. th way they, the way this works inside the cell is that the arrangements of the as, cs, gs and ts dictate, they con vie instructions for -- convey instructions for arranging the nstituent parts of proteins called amino acids. and here i break for a visual aid. [laughter] now, some of you have seen a version of this talk before, so you were getting very frightened

by all this amino acid talk, but i'm goi to break this down for you. these are snap lock beads, it said on the box from which i stole them ages 2-4, okay? [laughter] it's a child's toy, but it illustrates something very importt about how molecular biology works. proteins are like the tool box in the cell, and they are formed from amino acids which i've represented with these beads. proteins havepecific three-dimensional shapes that allow them in hand-in-glove fashion to perform critical functions inside the cell just as your tool box out in the garage may have a hammer and a saw and a wrench and a set of flyers. and each -- ply yers, and we've one of those tools has a relationship between its form and its function. the same kind of relationship exists between the shape of the protein and the kind of job that it can do in the cell.

and, but the shape the protein adopts, and here's some pictures off the internet of the inti grate three-dimensional shapes that proteins have, those shapes are determined in large part by the interactions between these amino acids. each of these ame know acids have what are called side chains, the sticky outty -- that's the technical term. [laughter] and the interactions between those chains set in place a constellation of forces which cause different shapes to form and those shapes, again, are responsible for the functions that proteins can perform inside the cell. here's an example of a proteen, an enzyme protein that performs a -- it breaks apart a two-part sugar molecule in the cell. you see the cutout in the middle part of the sde there shows the hand-in-glove fit between

what's called the active site and the protein and that two-part sugar that looks like a bar belle. you can see there's a perfect hand-in-glove fit which is responsible for the breing which the enzyme accomplishes. they perform their function because of this exquisite three-dimensional specificity. now, the key question in biology is howoes that specificity arise? we now know the specificity of shape in the protein derives from the specificity of sequence in amino acids which in turn derives from the specificity of sequence, the specific arrangement, the information, the instructions, the digital code stored along the spine of the dna molecule. so that is what i call e dna enigma, and i will explain in a minute why i call that an e anything behalf. before we do that, it might be helpful to have a nice visual

representation of exactly what the instructions, the digital code in dna doze within the molecule or within the cell. we now know that, and it's nice to have a look. you're going to see an animation. and it's going to first show you the dimmal code represent -- digital code, and then you're going to see a lot of stuff that stts to happen real fast. and 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 copying. and then you're going to see another large protein complex which is the cell's copy machine, and it's going to come in and attach itself to the dna. and then you're going to see that spit o a sgle strand of copy of the dna information, and that copy is going to go out and eventually direct the production of the protein and protein machines. i'm going to show this animation now starting with the digital

code on the dna. okay, so here we seehe dna and the digital code represented graphically with the as, cs, gs and ts along the spine, and now we're going to see this protein complex come and attach itself and that's preparing the molecule, the dna strand now for, to be happy. and there we're going to see the preliminary attach, and it's beginning to spit out that single strand of what would be the rna. this is view on the inside, individuases are positioned and added to form this single-stranded copy of the genetic instrucons. now there's the copy completed, and it's going to be transported out to something called the nuclear pore complex which is a informationecognition device that controls the flow of information in and out of the

cell's nucleus. out it goes here. and it's now gng to approach and be transported to a two-part chemical factory called a likesome. 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 blding the chain of amino acids which you'll see along the bottom there. and a mechanical assembly process ensues as the amino acids are linked up in accord with the three-letter words in the genetic message. now we see the ribosome, and at the bottom you see the protein change. begins the folding process. and then it's often shepherded out to something called a,

what's a barreshaped protein that will cause it to fold with even more specicity. it's called a chaperone. and the animator here in just a cond is going to show us when the proteak comes -- protein comes into its final confirmation, it's going to light up there for us. boom, there we go. and then door opens and out it goes to the outer sigh to mass m and into the cell, and you can see the animator's done a lovely job himself of bringing to life the beauty and intricacy inside the cell. so that is what we're talking about when we're talking about what dna does. it directs the assembly instructions, it is the assembly instructions that directs protein synthesis. okay. so i call this thena enigma, but what is the dna enigma? it's not the question of the structure of dna.

watson and crick solved that problem in 1953. in fact, the first line in m book is do when they -- is when they elucidated the structure of the dna molecule, they solved one mystery, but they created another. so the mystery is not the mystery of the structure of dna. we now know where at least some of the information that living organisms reside, and it resides along the molecule. neither is it 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 dna directs that process. instead the dna enigma is something even more fundamental, it's the mystery of the origin of the information on the dna molecule. and that mystery is intimately

connected wh another and very profound and long-standing mystery in biology, and that is the mystery of the origin of life. here we ve a leading german origin of life biochemist who says that the problem of origin of life is basically equivalent to the pblem 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 intimately connected. i used to like 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. they got it. they're better at computers than anyone over 30. and it's code. you have to give the computer new -- you have to give it new code, a new program. and theame thing is true in life. if you want to build a new organism from a pre-existing work anymore, if you want to build a new no lek collar

machine, new information is required. more fundamentally, if you want to build life in the first place, if y want to 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 e enia. the mystery of the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life. now, for engineers and scientists in the group it's one clarifying point might be helpful. there is a mathematical understanding and description of information that was provided by the matmatician claude shannon with his -- and this is one of the spler forms of one of his equations. mathematically information is inversely related to probability, so the more improbable the sequence of information s the less it conveys. there is a limit to that

mathematical concept. shannon's equations and his form of analysis cannot help us capture the distinction between these two types of sequences. the sequence on the top is very improbable. it's a very improbable arrangement of characters. thusn shannon's theory it has a large incalculable amount of informion-sharing capacity. the sequence on the bottom is also very improbable and, therefore, has a lot of shannon information, but it has something else, an extra nonquantitative element. it has a specificity of arrangement that enables that sequence to carry or convey functional information. it performs a communication function. and the term of our -- in the informatio sciences, the bottom string is specified information or specified complexity where the top string is merely complex or it merely has shannon information. now, when we talk about 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 crick, again, the genius on the cutting edge in the late 1950s, was very clear clarify this from the beginnin of the no lek collar biological revolution. he said information means the precise determination of sequence, either of bases in the nuclei acid or on amino acid residues in the protein. we're talking about the kind that needs to be explained to understand the origin of life, we're talking about scified, 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 identify come to -- i've come to know in the ensuing

years, but one was a man nam charles thackston. at this conference thackston shared the critique that he had provided in his book of theories of the chemical origin of life, and he provided an exhaustic critique. 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 thrt of thax ton's critique. 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 pretty much had all the questions sewn up. and it was surprising to me that scientists readily conceded they did not have all the answers or

even the key answers to the ntral question. and i learned that the key question that was a stumbling block for all the theories of the origin of life was the question of the origin of informatio 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 this problem of the origin of li, and i wanted to investigate this mystery. and in my graduate studies i naturally did two things. first of all, 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 orin of inftion is a problem of apartesign. apparent desig we talked about how the darwinians attempt to explain whey apparent -- away apparent

design, but we're talking about something as richard dawkins himself acknowledges is uncannily computer like. bill gatesas said that dna is like a computer program but far more advanced than any we've ever created. so is this appearance of design, this code that looks for all the world or that functions for all the world like aomputer 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 any undirected mechanism that can explain away this striking appearance of design at the very foundation of life? that was the question that seized me, and as i began to investigate it, i came acrosa book by a molecular biologist who was a colleague's of crick's in the -- colleague of crick's in the 1970s.

he said that if you're going to be a scientist, you should approach all problems with the same basic strategies. u should try to explain all phenomenon by reference to chance processes, by eference to natural laws or what you might call necessity, those principles of nature that force the same thing to happen all the time, or by the combination of the two. and as i began to investigate the different theories about the only 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 orb or a reliance on necessity or natural laws or what were calle self-organizational scenarios where the laws of physics and chemistry were invoked to try to explain the essential ingredients or life, or some models attempted to explain the combination of the two. and one such model was called

prebiotic natural selection. before life even began and natural selection interacting with random events. now, in my book i look at a whole series of proposa that have been made to try to solve the dna enigma, to try to account for the origin of information that's necessary to build the first life. and i show that each of these proposals exemplifies one of those three basic approaches that monod presciently laid out in 1967. and i critique these models, but in some ways it's not, it wasn't really my job to critique them. more i've been able to simply report the critiques by other origin of life theorists who have become convinced that, indeed, the field is at a state of impass. when i give this talk in a longer for i like to go into a number of these key models and exemplify what's wrong with each of these basic approaches.

the good peopl 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, one that kind of exemplifies exactly why the problem of the origin of information is sh a deep mystery, and i'm going to look at this approach specifically because it has been one of the most popular approaches to try to solve the problem of the origin of life. it's sometimes known as self-organization, it and relies on what you might call forces of chemical necessity. it was first proposed in the late 1960s by a scientist named dean ken on, and their idea was that you could explain the idea of the origin of the specific arrangements of the amino acids that you find in proteins, and i suppose they hoped you uld also explain the origin of the arrangement of the bases in the dna molecule because of the forces of chem

corral attraction, forces of necessity. most os are familiar with crystals and in particular the chemical formula for a crystal of salt which, as i recall, nacl. na has a plus charge, the cl a minus charge, and so there's a force of chemical attraction that creates the strucre, an orderly structure that repeats over and over again. and the idea was that just as the order of ahemical in sugar is attraction, so,oo, is the arrangement of the key constituent parts of the biomolecules, also the product of forces of attraction. now, the scientists who advanced this principally was dean kenyon. he happened to be at that same conference in 1985, and i learned at that conference that kenyon 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 lecules. in 1985 he ended up rejecting -- he publicly repudiated his own theory which was something of a shock at this conference, sent a ripple through the field of origin of life biology, and it got me even more intrigued with this whole subject. now, it's -- i want to illustrate why this idea of biochemical predestination doesn't work and what kenyon himself came to in his own understanding of why his theory didn't work. kenyon realized that even if you had some forces of attraction that could help elain 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 information in dna because we know the dna produces the

sequeltial arrangement of amino acids in proteins. an as he examined more carefully, he realized his proposal was never going to work. if you look at the chemical structure of dna, you see on the outside parts of the molecule little circles with ts and pent gons. that's the representation of what's called the sugar phosphate backbone. that part of the molecule is the medium upon which the genetic text is inscribed. it is not the information, it's the medium where the information is stored. along the spine of the dna molecule where you see the as, cs, ts, and gs representi the chemical bases, that's the axis where the information is stored. now, kenyon's idea, remember, was that you would have forces of attraction that were responsible for causing the key message-bearing,

information-bearing constituents of the molecules to line up a particular way. notice that there are no little sticks between the as, cs, gs, and ts. the littl sticks in a structural, or in chemistry represt bonds. there are bonds between the gs, the cs, the as and the sugar phosphate backbon 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 me break it down with another visual aid. got a little message here, okay? it says mind over matter. mind over matter. i was going to have something abou how the mariners 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 o attraction here at work. self-organizational forces you might consider them, except is

the information in this little message the result of the magnetic forces of attraction that cause the letters to stick to the back board here? can you sew that the information -- see that the information is not a result of the magnetism? instead -- you can see that quickly becau 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 back board here. it's the medium of the message. there are forces of attraction that explain why the bases stick to the backbone, but those forces of attraction do not explain the sequential arrangement of the characters. do you see this? there are no bonds betwe the characters, and the same type of chemical bond i responsible for each site where the characters stick. just as you've got the same force of magnetic attraction no matter which letter you put at exactly this site. okay?

so what i'm trying to illustrate here is there's nothing about the chemistry of the dna molecule that dictates the sequential arrangement of the characters that constitutthe information. it's not the chemistry that produces the sequences that convey the instructions, it's something that, it's something extraneous to the physics and chemistry of the system. it would be like saying that the information in this morning's seating times headline -- seattle times headline is the result of the ink bonding to patient. we know clearly something ee is at work. by the way, what else is at work? okay? intuitively, right? recognize, whether it's my little message on the chalkboard or a newspaper headline, intuitively, there is intelligence behind the information. now, i first encountered this idea in discussions with charles thaxton, the chemist i met in 1985. and in an epilogue to his book,

he and his co-authors developed this idea or sketched it out. and when i went to, when i left for graduate sool and beg my work in cambridge, i was seized with a question: could this intuitive connection between information and intelligence be developed into a rigorous scientific argument? and so naturally i went back and i studied the scientific methods of reasoning that are used by scientists who a trying to reconstruct the distant past and develop theories of origins. and, of course, that led me to chars darwin. and it turns out that darwin pioneered a method of scientific running that goes by a -- reasoning that gets by a couple of different names. it's setimes called the method of inferring to the best explanation. we see here in a quote where he's defending his own scientific method. he says, it seems to me that supposing such a hypothesis were to explain such general

propositions -- he means facts -- we ought in accordance with the common way of following all sciences to admit it until some better hypothesis be found out. he's describing his use of this method. and this is the way it goes. it's designed by scientists who are trying to determine the cause of an ancient event. and they have a limitation. they were -- historical scientists trying to do this are not able to go back and actually see the event. so they proposed different hypotheses as to what caused the event, and they evaluate each one in turn hoping in the best of cases to find only one that is adequate 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 which 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,

charles lyle, had a very practiced common sense of reasoning that i they used. and one day while glancing at the front piece of lyell's book, i had an e epiphany because the subtitle crystallized this method in a single phrase. he says here the title of his book is the principles of geology: >> the principle was very simple. if you're going to try to explain an event in the remote past, you want to invoke a cause which is known to produce the effect in question. if you want to explain the layer of volcanic ash that exists in eastern washington, you're going to prefer the volcanic eruption hypothesis over the earthquake hypothesis because we know that volcanos produce sh phenomena

and earthques do not. so i asked myself a question: what is the cause now in operation that pduces digital co? what is the cause that we know of fm our uniform and repeated experience? another part of the method logical dictum of darwin and lyell, we should be looking for causes now in operation that we know from our uniform and repeated experience. what is the cause now in operation for the production of information generally? >> [inaudible] >> intelligence. thank you. that was exactly what i thought. [laughter] later i came across an information scientist, a pioneer in the theory to molecular biologists who happened to make the same observation. he said the creation of new information is habitual aassociated with conscious activity. is that true? well, indeed it is. remember our quote from bill gates, dna is like a computer

program but far, farore advanced than any we've ever created. we know that information generally whether we're talking about a high roinglyic ininscription or a section of digital code in a computer program always comes from an intelligent source. we know that from our uniform and repeated experience, frkm our present experience of cause and effect. we know that cause that is now in opetion. so as we, as i examined the competing approaches to explaining the dna enigma, the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life, i very coniously developed a case for intelligent designsing the very method darwin himself hadsed, the method of multiple competing hypotheses. i looked first at hypotheses based on chance, necessity, and those based on the combination of the two. and show from the literature in the area of origi of life biology that each of these

approaches have failed. and instead there is 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 given effect, the presence of the effect points strongly back to the action of the cause. so that's the argument that 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 on briefly here in closing is there are many other signatures of intelligence in the informational properties of living systems. my colleagues at the boy -- biologic institu, the lab that we've started here in seattle and in red monday have been woking on that animation you saw there, what's called gene education presentation. and one of my colleagues was an

architect-leve programmer at microsoft, and he was worng closely with molecular biologists. one day he came into my office, he dropped book on my desk called design patterns. and my colleague said to me, the programmer, he sai i'm getting an eerie feeling 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. that's apparently a term in computer science, it means a design strategy or a design logic. and he said there's all kinds of different design strategs, design patterns that we use t process infortion. and i'm finding all of them inside the cell, or many of them, and he said the interesting thing is that they are in a -- and then he started talking microsoft. it's like they're an 8.0, 9.0,

10.0 version of the same strategy that we use. and he said they're just executed, same design logic, but ecuted with much more engineering elegance. and some of the things that -- i discuss some of these design patterns in th last part of my book, the fact that we have messages within messages in the, in the gee moms called nested coding of information. there's folders within superfoarlds. a hierarchical filing system in the genome. there is a distributed storage and retrieval system for genetic modules, informational data sets. and the operating sysm in the 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 now understand a gene to be. at every level we're seeing a hierarchy of information, and it's just an absolutely fascinating system that's being

revealed by the most current discoveries in modern biology in modern genoms. sot's a very exciting time to be interested in molecular biolog and me mommic -- genomics, but all of the new studies are showing 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 intelligent dign. now, in closing i'd like to make one more point because a common objection to swemght design is that it'sn argument from ignorance,hat we're arguing from what we don't know rather than what we do know. michael she her has made this objection repeatedly, he says: >> he's accusing us of arguing in a fallacious manner like

this, he's saying the argument for design is basically, simply ignorant -- nothing more than our ignorance of what natural process can do. he's saying wee arguing natch l processes cannot produce the question, therefore, we invoke the mysterious notion of intelligt design. but, in fact, the notion of intelligent desig is not mysterious. it's something we know about, and the argument is not an agent from ignorance, it is an argument from what we know both about the feetures of t cell and the genome, but also about the cause and effect structure of the world. so the argument actually goes like this: none of the natural processes that we've examined have demonstrated the power to produce the effect in question. the specified information that rubs 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 intelligent. therefore, ielligent design

constitutes the best explanation based on what we know from biology and from our knowledge ofhe cause and effect structure of the world. that's the form of argument that darwin used. if this is unscientific, then so was his. i've turned the tables and shown by using darwin's method and applying it to evidence that he did not yet know about, we can show that we can use darwin's method to reaffirm the case for design based on these exciting discoveries of modern biology, and i thank you. [applause]

>> now you have to read the book. and there will be books in the lobby, and steve will be signing them. but, first, we still have some question time, so if you'd like to come up to the microphone and make a short qstion, 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 fnd in your book which you haven't mentioned here is at the very end, and that's the suggestion that neodarwinnists are n findi it necessary to posit a multiuniverse hypothesis 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, what's happening with that argument among neodarwinnists right now.

>> well, there's really only -- you're right. you know boil gists are in trouble when they start invoking ltiple numbers of other universes to try to render otherwise extremely improbable events probable. it's a rather technical discussion when you get into these hypotheses about multiverses. we have at discovery institute a really first class philosopher of physics in bruce gordon who's doing some cutting-edge work on that. he's got a great article coming out, the volume is called nature of nature, and i'd refer you to 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 solve the probm of the origin of lifey punting to multiverses. it's rather technical, so i'll refer people to it, but it i actually -- i would say i don't think there's, there's only one boil gist who's proposed this, his name is coonen, and i think

there's -- he may be serious, but there's a little sense of tongue and cheek, i think, in the proposal, and it's received in that same spirit among most 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, there's these billions or of otherniverses, and it happened somewhere out there, an we just happen to be in the lucky one. but there are technical problems even on its own terms which i spell out in the book. >> this is a monumental achievement, steve. i understandhat you were seeking endorsements including francis collins? i was wondering if there's any -- do you see anyverlap between what you are 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? >> very timely question. no, i didn't actlly seek his endorsement. i thought it unlikely that he would providet. on the other hand, there's a kind of curiousty. collins has been publicly critical of intelligent design. most of his criticisms have been directed at mhaelee hi's argument from irreducible complexity. i actually 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 on the white house lawn, he very overtly said that we're not the result of a purely undirected evolutionary process and 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 fst chapter of my book, not in a critical manner. so i've been curious as to how

he would respond to this argument. he's the human genome guy, after all. and beyond that collins, though he has said he's against intelligentesign, argue that is the fine tuning of the laws of physics that were set in place at the very beginning of the universe speak powerfulfully to an intelligence behind the universe. that's a divine argument. he makes a similar argument about the origin of the han 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 and, if so, why given that he does actually make design arguments. and if anything the complexity of the genome far exceeds even if impressive complexity of the fine tuning laws in history. thanks for that question.

>> if i quote him right, i think dock -- dawkins makes the claim that any idiot can see that, you know, random changes are not goin to generate proteaks -- proteins, but he makes the claim 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 imply it, but to me it's nonsense to say that the result of that is not random. >> i do have a fairly extensive section in the book on this approach which combines natural selection and random variations or random mutations. of course, the context is different her if we're trying to explain the origin of life, you have a problem if you're going to invoke natural selection. in a prebiotic context, okay? 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 presupposes the information in dna i responsible for therocess of selfeplication among other things. so there's kind of a problem for ientists who want to say we can rescue the origin of life chemical evolution from the immense improbability by blinging in natural -- bringing in natural selection because it's only relevant once you have self-replicating organisms which in turn applies -- implies tt you already have dna in proteins. we're trying to expin the origin of dna in proteins. i used to illustrate this with my students by saying it's like the guy who's walking home from work -- he's kind of absent

minded -- and he falls in a big hole, ande can't get out. he says, no problem, all i need is a ladder. so he get -- walks home, gets a ladder, jumps back in and gets out. it's begging the questio of where do you get the information-rich dna in proteins that makes natural selection possible? theories of prebiotic natural selection have a big problem, they need information which implies they have to presuppose what's to be explained in the first place. it's a questio begging argunt. the attempt to bring that in doesn't solve the problem, and you are essenally thrown back on purehance or else this attempt to use self-organizational forces of necessity. i critique both those approaches inhe boo so a veryood question. >> okay, thank you. >> i'm wondering where you got the intelligence for the title

of your book, signature in the cell. i've heard richard dawkins use that phrase, but you don't acknowledge that in the book. >> you know, i didn't want to get caught of plagiarizing or he'd accuse me of intelligent designing something. actually the phrase dawkins used was a signature of intelligence. the context the doctor is referring to is at the very end of the movie expelled where dawkins is probed by ben stein about the origin of life problem, and he acknowledges that a quote, no one knows how life first beg. of course, he's talking within the framework of a standard evolutionary approach which assumes only matialistic explanations. and then he goes on to say, and i suppose, he said, there could be a signatu of intelligence inside 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 somewhere out in space that had itself evolved

under directed processes. so some may call that the abg hypothesis, anything but god. [laughter] and i raise that not because intelligent design necessarily proves the existen of god, but rather because it shows that dawkins' whole prom of the new -- 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 hypothesis. it shows that he's got a visceral distaste for considering anything beyond that. so it's really very curious that dawkins, first of all, acknowledges that there isn't an explanation for the origin of life. he a very ardent spokesman for materialistic evolutionary theory. and remember, too, his argument in the god delusion is that since there's no evidence of sign, belief in god is about the -- tantamount to a delusion. and yet he acknowledges that

there is not a better explanation than design when talking about the first life, at least he does so in effect when he acknowledges that no one knows from a materialistic perspective. so in a sense you can see the foundational premise of his new atheist argument is falsely predicated. there is compelling evidence of design, aawkins actually at the point of the origin of the first life, dawkins is not in a position to answer that argument. >> you seem to start to answer this with your last slide, but as you were getting towards it, it seemedikit was almost sounding like a god of the gaps argument, and then you had your last slide saying that we do see intelligent design in work today so that we can invoke that. i know a lot of people who would see that argument and say, oh, well, we haven't seen anything like a intelligent designer like god in opation though. so could you comment on that? >> yeah, that's right. it's not an argument for god's existence, it's an argument for

a designing intelligence which -- and that's because the principle of reasoning involved scientifically here is one that's based on our uniform and repeated experience. we know by introspection the powers of our own conscious, deliberative minds. we knothey can produce information among other effects. so we have a rich wealth of experience from which to draw in inferring at least a mind of similar intelligence and capacity. once you've inferred that, then it raises a second order question about the identity of the designing intelligence. i'm a traditional three chris myself, not all advocates of the theory of intelligent design are, but design at least has what you might call theistic-friendly indications. though it doesn't prove it. is this a god of the gaps argument? no. the point i was making in those concluding slides, the point w

this, is that a god of the gaps argument and an argument from ignorance are the same thing. well, because cause a is not sufficient to produce the effect, therefore, some other cause b did it. even though w don'tave any positive evidence that that other cause b could have done so. that's not the case with intelligent design. we're saying cause a, b, c, chance, necessity, combination of the two have not demonstrated the power, but there is anoer cautious d, you will, that is known to have the powers that causes intelligence. therefore, that's the best explanation. it's not a fallacy of arguing from ignorance, it's, rather, an inference to the best explanation which is a standard nonfallacious form of scientific reasoning. >> thanks. >> excellent question. >> yes, steve, i was amazed that you would actually answer my e-mails, and i sent you one -- >> did you send me a nasty objection?

>> yeah, that was the one. [laughter] .. we know, the careful to qualify wt we claim about dna. dna contains some of the information necessary to build a cl, but there are higher levels of information, that are necessary to arranging the by-products of gene expression, the products of the protein, so, the cell is a system that contains machines. it contains infortion but,

it may be something beyond that. it's very richly inat that greated system. -- integrated system. dna is necessary, ex-explain origin of dna is necessary condition of understanding life but there may be much more t investigate. i would mention the work of jonathan wells and richard sternberg they are looking at genetic information, the blueprint information responsible for organizing the into cell types. th cell types into tissues. the tissues and organs into body plans. there is a rich hierarchy of information involved in every livin system and one of the things that make this subject fascinating. think we're getting a cue to stop. >> i think we're at the end. but i want to ask you a question about this very exciting period that we're in and that your book is kind of flagship for. can you mention se of the other things that support it at discovery institute and

center for science and culture enterprises you think people should know about works in progrs coming along that shore up and help defend this exemplary argument. >> thank you. we have charles thaxton here lping us with our summer mentoring program for young scientists last week. we had a nice photo-op, put his book and my book together. s eppy log, i aense the inspation for my book. my book has a book coming in cereal, what do they call that in movies, sequel. the richard sternberg is doingn myth of junk dna. look for that. he and jonathan wells, paul nelson are involved in a very interesting research project on higher levels of information. something by the way that is not easily readily explained by neodarwinism. because the neodarwinists want to explain origin o biological form by referce to mutations at lowest level of information in the

hierarchy. mutations in the gene. but if, to build a whole organism you need higher levels of organization. you can mutate dna indefinitely without respect to time and trials and never buil a new organism because you're not providing that higher level information, e blueprint information that is required. those gentlemen have exciting projects. doug atkin son has fantastic work both experimentally on proteins and, computation alley modeling what mutations can and can't do in 4 billion years of history this whole program of research is not just an argument for intelligent design. it is a whole research program that leads, we think very fruitful directions for science. >> thank you. steve. ladies and gentlemen, think about whether you would like to be a part of this program, by joining the discovery society and or discovery institute. we would welcome you. please thank you, steve, and

all of you for coming tonight. >> thank you, bruce. i also -- [applause] >> stephen meyer is director for the center of science and culture at discovery institute. his boo inexclude, darwinism, design and public education. for more information, visit discovery.org. >> michael jason overstreet is there a media bias against barack obama? >> i would say that it doesn't, it's not borne necessarily from the media but there is a perception out there that the information starts somewhere and, we're led to believe

that it is the media that is generating it. i don't know if it is the media per se but i think my book says, that because, that is only place we can get our information from, there must be. and, so, ihink the answer, very long answer is y. i believe there is a media assault on obama. i would say this. for 71 days my book covers from the democratic convenon to election day i lt there was endless information that was out there that was completely unacceptable, from him being possibly domestic tearist to, i don't want to get into quoting individual people from various networks, there was just informational loud to float out there. and i absolutely think it didome damage. i think he won despite that. but had he not, maybe the book would be bigger. i think there is still, history will show there were a lot of things said during those 71 days that barack

obama had to overcome. >> what's an exale of those things? >> i think one of the examples is, i'm a big fan of chris matthews. i like chris matthews. one particular day i was watching and he mentioned word immigrant and obama in the same sentence. this is the story aut an immigrant. i think person on the panel said, no, obama was born in hawaii. no this is a story about an immigrant. he is not an immigrant. the casual viewer may take that information, say, not going to vote for obama, he is an immigrant. that is lazy journalism. i was a broadcast journalism major. i think the question, i think the idea, concept of immigrant just floated out there is not responsible. now granted, most of us you into he wasn't but i don't think it was story about an immigrant. hawaii i a state. where did the word immigrant come from? if i'm correct his father was not even an immigrant. he was an exchange student. he wasn't an immigrant.

so it is words that are used can form to be the assault. it is not in your face like "fox news". obviously that is an assault. i mean that is and in your face, barack obama is this, this, and this. well, it isasual subtle stuff like maybe, showing a republican ad that shows obama with a photo of children behind him, about a sex ed, some concept of sex ed that went on during the election, and then, cnn ran that actual ad that the repuican party had a right to put out. i don't believe cnn or any of the other networks had a right to, it is not responsible journalism. that ad, that ad,o me, showed oma, looking like a pedophile. i mean he is standing there like this. there's children behind him and it is barack obama wants to teach children about sex education. well, fine. show that. if you're the republican party but cnn, msnbc, fox,

no, don't show that. i think that was very damaging. >> now, mr. overstreet, you self-published this book. what was that process like? >> i had to self-publish it, because the idea came to me from watching gore debate george bush actually, previously. and i watched the debates and i would always think, wow!, george bush, didn't really do well. gore won the debate. he was professorial and very informative. and i at end of the debate wait for the postdebate coverage. sure enough, boy, george bush waseally funny. did a good job in that debate. w!, i'm looking going, did they just watch, the media is telling people that, so i get calls from people saying wow!, jason, i don't know, looks like, george bush won that debate. they're getting that information from the media. so i got the idea then. then once i saw obama at the convention give his speech back in '04, i just thought, wow!, if he ever got a chance to run i would be interested to see how the media tries to parse whate says and take him on. the book just wrote itself,

i mean the first day of the democratic convention on. the first chapter in the book is called, these people. every network i would check, i just kept hearing that theme, these people. who are these people. so i said to myself, it would be interesting to see if next week at republican convention, who are these people, john and cindy mccain, i never heard that, these people. i'm talking about, i heard it from, i heard jud woodruff say that and i love judy woodruff. i herder say the use the words, these people. for african-americans, i myself birashal, my father is black, my mother is right. i consider myself a black man. to hear that word, just, these people, i don't want to hear that. you know, so, it definitely was a passionate project of mine. and so when i woke up the morning of that docratic convention i said this is the first day i will write and write for 71 straight days. i kind of held myself hostage i had had to write for 71 straight days.

each chapter in the book is a. they have a different theme. a lot of people, remember, lipstick on a pig is theme for the day. and so, it was a very fascinating interesting project. if i hadn't self-published i don't think i got it out in time. most of the publishers wanted me to wait at least three months. >> explain the self-publishing process for us. >> for me, it was, it's, i would say it is an easy process at first because i went through book surge. they were very good. they allowed me to really kind of be creative. then i would send off to them, e-mail, via e-mail, et cetera. they would get back to me with information. that kind of process went back and forth for about a month after i finished the book on election day. after that, i was able to go through an editing process with my editor, yuma michaels. we wenthrough an editing process for about another month. all in all i was able to get the book out by late january, early february, on-line at

amazon.com. slowly there is has been this growing momentum for the book. people are very interested the book. you know, it is in some local bookstores in l.a. but i think the more i hear people at the festival here, the more i realize, this is hot button issue. people really remember the specific days. he remember that. i remember that. i remember that. so it is a history book. it is fantastic because years fm now people will look back and go, you know what, maybe i shouldn't have said that. maybe tom brokaw shouldn't have said that. no one has ever taken on the media as far as i'm concerned. i'm not a member of media. if i worked for cnn ioubt i would have written by cnn i don't work for everybody. i wrote about everyone, "l.a. times" writing article, headline that said, stars flock to see sarah palin. i opened up "the l.a. times." who are the stars that went to see sarah palin. there was jon voight i think and two others i didn't know. three people in an "l.a. times" article and headline is stars flock to see sarah palin?

when is three people a flock? that's misleading. the headline itself. that is the kind of stuff i write about. i don't write about the stuff that ox news" says that much because it is, kind of easy to do. sean hannity is not a hard rget. let's be honest and love to go on hiss show and talk to him. that was myself publishing process. it was very fun. anyone who wants to self-publish, be ready to do a lot of work. i gained a lot of respect for publishers. amount of editing. if you can find any mistakes in my book, please, let me know. but it was probably, six or seven editing process. i would encourage anybody out there idea they're passionate about. go for it. don't wait. >> help us out a little bit. you've got a booth at "l.a. times" festival. you had to put this together. it cost a little bit. how much have you put into it? >> my, all in all, probably been, a couple, two, 3,000. to get to this point. i would say that it's, if i

had to do it over again i would do it exactly the same way. i think i would prefer to selfublish this book. it is a little bit, in the book i refer to myself as a political activist. self-publishing is part of the political activist process. so i would encourage those out there, if you're passionate about it, you can't wait. you got to do it. >> what is a political activist in your view? >> i think someone stays involved in current events. someone stays on top of daily events and boisterous about it. i have 20 people at a time coming up to the booth and i talk loud enough for people around to bring them in. i can disagree. there is book out called the slobbering love affair. it's good book. >> bernard goldberg. >> it is a good book book. about two or three chapters of my book. the book is this big. i talk about the media loved obama the one day. but next day. to bernard goldberg, you did a great job on your book but there is much more to tell than just the part where the

media loves him. the american people led him. i don't know so much if the media loved him. i meai think barack obama would argue that the there are certain members of the media love him. i just, i don't agree with that. >> what do you do when you're not publishing books? >> i write screen place. i live here in los angeles. my girlfriend, cathy, is many so one who is very supportive of everything i want to do. she's been someone who has really pushed me forward. she was a big part, part of the self-publishing process having someone to suppo you in terms of emotionally and push you keep you going. that is a very important thg. and, so, between my writing screenplays and, now doing a book, and, hopefully doing a lot of talking on talk shows about my book, i'm very passionate about this book, that's my life. d i love it. >> and if somebody is interested in purchasing your book, where can they find isn't. >> right now get it at amazon.com. actually quite