Late nineteenth-century scientists knew nothing, of course, about the importance of information to living systems. They assumed that the universe consisted of two fundamental entities: matter and energy. But during the 1950s and 1960s molecular biologists discovered a third fundamental entity at the foundation of life—information. Moreover, the functional digital information in the “machine code of the genes,” as Dawkins put it, does not seem—based upon our experience—“to be the kind of quality we should expect to observe” if there was “no design, no purpose . . . nothing but blind, pitiless
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