Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

To understand why it has been so difficult to explain the origin of the information in DNA and other biomacromolecules in living cells, it’s important to take a closer look at exactly what kind of information DNA, RNA, and proteins contain. In so doing, we’ll see that DNA does not contain information in just the mathematical sense described by modern information theory as developed during the late 1940s by the MIT scientist Claude Shannon (Fig. 9.6).9 Shannon’s theory equated the amount of information with the amount of uncertainty that was reduced by a series of symbols or characters.10 In Shannon’s theory, the more improbable an event or sequence, the more uncertainty it eliminates and thus the more information it conveys.