Show 1013 An Extended Interview of Dr. Stephen Meyers about his new book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life & The Case For Intelligent Design
 
Dr Stephen Meyers Intelligent Design Interview 6-19-2013
 
The Origins of Information: Exploring and Explaining Biological Information
 
In the 21st century, the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is comprised of information rich systems, such as the complex digital code encoded in DNA. Groundbreaking discoveries of the past decade are revealing the information bearing properties of biological systems.
 
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge trained philosopher of science is examining and explaining the amazing depth of digital technology found in each and every living cell such as nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval and storage systems, and genomic operating systems.
 
Meyer is developing a more fundamental argument for intelligent design that is based not on a single feature like the bacterial flagellum, but rather on a pervasive feature of all living systems. Alongside matter and energy, Dr. Meyer shows that there is a third fundamental entity in the universe needed for life: information.
 
In Meyer's new book, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life & The Case For Intelligent Design, he addresses Darwin's most significant doubt and what has become of it.
 
He examines an event during a remote period of geological history in which numerous animal forms appear to have arisen suddenly and without evolutionary precursors in the fossil record, a mysterious event commonly referred to as the "Cambrian explosion." Darwin saw this event as a troubling anomaly and one that future fossil discoveries would eventually eliminate and give more answers to.
 
This problem has generated a crisis in evolutionary biology and gave Darwin his own doubt with the fossil evidence that elicited it.
 
Meyers has divided his new book into three parts (shared by World Mag):
 
Part One, "The Mystery of the Missing Fossils," describes the problem that brought Darwin's doubt in the first place, the missing ancestors of the Cambrian animals in the earlier Precambrian fossil record. Meyers then shares about the successive, but unsuccessful, attempts that biologists and paleontologists have made to resolve that mystery.
 
Part Two, "How to Build an Animal," explains why the discovery of the importance of information to living systems has made the mystery of the Cambrian explosion more acute. Biologists now know that the Cambrian explosion not only represents an explosion of new animal form and structure but also an explosion of information-that it was, indeed, one of the most significant "information revolutions" in the history of life. Part Two examines the problem of explaining how the unguided mechanism of natural selection and random mutations could have produced the biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animal forms. This group of chapters explains why so many leading biologists now doubt the creative power of the neo-Darwinian mechanism and it presents four rigorous critiques of the mechanism based on recent biological research.
 
Part Three, "After Darwin, What?" evaluates more current evolutionary theories to see if any of them explain the origin of form and information more satisfactorily than standard neo-Darwinism does. Part Three also presents and assesses the theory of intelligent design as a possible solution to the Cambrian mystery. A concluding chapter discusses the implications of the debate about design in biology for the larger philosophical questions that animate human existence. As the story of the book unfolds, it will become apparent that a seemingly isolated anomaly that Darwin acknowledged almost in passing has grown to become illustrative of a fundamental problem for all of evolutionary biology: the problem of the origin of biological form and information.
 
Meyer has also written,