Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

Although fully aware of this range of mutational options at nature’s disposal, Eden argued at Wistar that such random changes to written texts or sections of digital code would inevitably degrade the function of information-bearing sequences, particularly when allowed to accumulate.3 For example, the simple phrase “One if by land and two if by sea” will be significantly degraded by just a handful of random changes such as those in bold: “Ine if bg lend and two ik bT Nea.” At the conference the French mathematician Marcel Schützenberger agreed with Eden’s concerns about the effect of random alterations. He noted that if someone makes even a few random changes in the arrangement of the digital characters in a computer program, “we find that we have no chance (i.e., less than 1/101000) even to see what the modified program would compute: it just jams.”