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

by Stephen C. Meyer

For the mathematically minded scientists at Wistar, doubts about the creative power of the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection stemmed from the elucidation of the nature of genetic information and the confirmation of Francis Crick’s sequence hypothesis during the early 1960s. The discovery that DNA stores information as a four-character digital code raised questions about the efficacy of random mutational changes in producing such information—or at least enough of it to produce a novel protein structure and therefore any major innovation during the history of life. Murray Eden (Fig. 10.3), one of the MIT professors who convened the event, emphasized that in all computer codes and written texts specificity of sequence determines function. Thus, random changes in sequence consistently degrade function or meaning. Indeed, no computer programmer wants random changes introduced into a program that he or she has written. Such changes will inevitably degrade and ultimately destroy the function of the existing program long before a new program would emerge through such a process. As Eden explained, “No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed.”9 He suspected that the need for specificity in the arrangement of DNA bases would also render any random mutational “search” for a new functional gene or protein inevitably unsuccessful as well.