Some time ago now there was a loud noise, and after the dust settled it became apparent to all that whereas there had been nothing, now there was something. With the passage of significant amounts of time this something changed, expanded, morphed, mutated, developed, grew, survived, and advanced into everything there is, seen and unseen. It was not hard for scientists to explain the sequence, and basically it boiled down to a rather straightforward account of matter and energy and chance.

Scientists did not give an entirely satisfactory account of everything, but as defective an account as it was it was still preferable to the account we got from preachers which featured a Meddlesome Intruder.

Then I came along.

Yes; as I view it, my advent spurred two unpromising scientists to find some more suitable explanation for the miracle of life, and shortly thereafter Crick and Watson worked out what DNA looked like, and from their conclusions grew a realization that matter and energy could produce nothing without information.

Dr. Meyer doesn't give a full treatment of my involvement, but he compensates for this snub by telling a very interesting story about the essential rôle of information in the origin of life.

You ought to read this book. You should be able to find it in a bookstore, but it could take you billions and billions of years if you look in the Science section. If you go to Barnes&Noble, where I went, you will find it in the Comparative Religion section.

Silly me, I didn't think to look there first. I asked the nice lady behind the computer and she took me right to it.

There is also a programmer's rendering of the process here which is intended to help us visualize what Meyer is describing.

Chance and random mutation are looking more and more like a pathetic wheeze.

Meyer demolishes the materialist superstition at the core of evolutionary biology by exposing its Achilles' heel: its utter blindness to the origins of information. With the recognition that cells function as fast as supercomputers and as fruitfully as factories, the case for a mindless cosmos collapses. His refutation of Richard Dawkins will have all the dogs barking and the angels singing.

--- George Gilder

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Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
Stephen C. Meyer
Harper Collins, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7