Signature in the Cell Quotes

“With odds standing at 1 chance in 10164 of finding a functional protein among the possible 150-amino-acid compounds, the probability is 84 orders of magnitude (or powers of ten) smaller than the probability of finding the marked particle in the whole universe. Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specified particle among all the particles in the universe.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Since natural selection “selects” or preserves functionally advantageous mutations or variations, it can explain the origin of systems that could have arisen through a series of incremental steps, each of which maintains or confers a functional advantage on a living organism. Nevertheless, by this same logic, selection and mutation face difficulty in explaining structures or systems that could not have been built through a close series of functional intermediates. Moreover, since selection operates only on what mutation first produces, mutation and selection do not readily explain appearances of design that require discrete jumps of complexity that exceed the reach of chance; that is to say, the available probabilistic resources.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Biochemist David Goodsell describes the problem, “The key molecular process that makes modern life possible is protein synthesis, since proteins are used in nearly every aspect of living. The synthesis of proteins requires a tightly integrated sequence of reactions, most of which are themselves performed by proteins.”41 Or as Jacques Monod noted in 1971: “The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell’s translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“constructed with the help of specific enzymes. For example, each of the systems involved in the processing of genetic information requires energy at many discrete steps.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“To complicate matters further, proteins must catalyze formation of the basic building blocks of cellular life such as sugars, lipids, glycolipids, nucleotides, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the main energy molecule of the cell).”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“early theories of the origin of life did not need to address, nor did they anticipate, this problem. Since scientists did not know about the information-bearing properties of DNA, or how the cell uses that functionally specified information to build proteins, they did not worry about explaining these features of life.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Although DNA does not convey information that is received, understood, or used by a conscious mind, it does have information that is received and used by the cell’s machinery to build the structures critical to the maintenance of life. DNA displays a property—functional specificity—that transcends the merely mathematical formalism of Shannon’s theory. Is”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“At the close of the nineteenth century, most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy. But after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“If intelligent design turned out to be the only known or adequate cause of the origin of specified information, then the past action of a designing intelligence could be established on the basis of the strongest and most logically compelling form of historical inference—an inference from the effect in question (specified information) to a single necessary cause of that effect (intelligent activity).”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Although the Greek philosophers thought that nature reflected an underlying order, they nevertheless believed that this order issued not from a designing mind, but from an underlying and self-evident logical principle. For this reason, many assumed that they could deduce how nature ought to behave from first principles without actually observing nature. In astronomy, for example, the Greeks (Aristotle and Ptolemy) assumed that planets must move in circular orbits. Why? Because according to the Greek cosmology, the planets moved in the “quintessential” realm of the crystalline spheres, a heavenly realm in which only perfection was possible. Since, they deduced, the most perfect form of motion was circular, the planets must move in circular orbits. What could be more logical?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Many historians of science have noted that Greek ideas about nature tended to induce a sterile armchair philosophizing unconstrained by actual observations.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“From ancient times, humans have known a few basic facts about living things. The first is that all life comes from life. Omne vivum ex vivo. The second is that when living things reproduce themselves, the resulting offspring resemble their parents. Like produces like. But what inside a living thing ensures that its offspring will resemble itself? Where does the capacity to reproduce reside?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“To explain how life originated, scientists first have to understand what life is. That understanding, in turn, defines what their theories of the origin of life must explain. The Victorians weren’t especially concerned with the origin-of-life problem because they thought simple life was, well, simple. They really didn’t think there was much to explain. Biologists during this period assumed that the origin of life could eventually be explained as the by-product of a few simple chemical reactions.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Yes, the origin of life was a missing link in that chain, but surely, it was thought, the gap would soon be bridged. Darwin’s theory, in particular, inspired many evolutionary biologists to begin formulating theories to solve the origin-of-life problem.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Who needs to invoke an unobservable designing intelligence to explain the origin of life, if observable material processes can produce life on their own?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Behind every double standard lies a single hidden agenda.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.25”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“If a substantive chance hypothesis necessarily negates or nullifies explanations involving physical-chemical necessity and design, then the presence of a pattern necessarily negates chance.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Many origin-of-life scientists have similarly recognized how difficult it is to generate specified biological information by chance alone in the time available on the early earth (or even in the time available since the beginning of the universe).”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Similarly, in 1968, Francis Crick suggested that the origin of the genetic code might be a “frozen accident.”3 Most”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Earlier, in 1954, biochemist George Wald argued for the causal efficacy of chance in conjunction with vast expanses of time. As he explained, “Time is in fact the hero of the plot…. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain.”2”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“The chance hypothesis in effect says, “There is nothing going on in this event to indicate any regular or discernable causal factors.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Darwin read Lyell’s magnum opus, The Principles of Geology, on the voyage of the Beagle and employed its principles of reasoning in On the Origin of Species. The subtitle of Lyell’s Principles”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“How do specific sequences in a four-character alphabet generate specific sequences in a twenty-character alphabet? Francis”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“How does the sequence of bases on the DNA direct the construction of protein molecules?”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“the kind of information that DNA contains, namely, functionally specified information.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content. (See Fig. 4.8.)”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Complex sequences exhibit an irregular, nonrepeating arrangement that defies expression by a general law or computer algorithm”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“In particular, the three-dimensional shape of a protein gives it a hand-in-glove fit with other equally specified and complex molecules or with simpler substrates, enabling it to catalyze specific chemical reactions or to build specific structures within the cell. Because of its three-dimensional specificity, one protein cannot usually substitute for another.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Proteins build cellular machines and structures, they carry and deliver cellular materials, and they catalyze chemical reactions that the cell needs to stay alive. Proteins also process genetic information.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design