The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [126]
“Here’s an example. If you go north of here into Victoria Harbor in British Columbia, you’ll see a pattern on a hillside. As the ferry approaches, you’ll realize it’s a message: red and yellow flowers spell out WELCOME TO VICTORIA. That’s an example of an informational sequence.
“Notice you don’t have mere repetition—a W followed by an E, followed by another W and another E, and so on. Instead, there’s an irregular combination of letters that conform to an independent pattern or specific set of functional requirements—English vocabulary and grammar. So we immediately recognize this as informational. Whenever we encounter these two elements—irregularity that’s specified by a set of functional requirements, which is what we call ‘specified complexity’—we recognize this as information. And this kind of information is invariably the result of mind—not chance, not natural selection, and not self-organizational processes.”
“And this is the kind of information we find in DNA?” I asked.
“That’s correct. If all you had were repeating characters in DNA, the assembly instructions would merely tell amino acids to assemble in the same way over and over again. You wouldn’t be able to build all the many different kinds of protein molecules you need for a living cell to function. It would be like handing a person an instruction book for how to build an automobile, but all the book said was ‘the-the-the-the-the-the.’ You couldn’t hope to convey all the necessary information with that one-word vocabulary.
“Whereas information requires variability, irregularity, and unpredictability—which is what information theorists call complexity—self-organization gives you repetitive, redundant structure, which is known as simple order. And complexity and order are categorical opposites.
“Chemical evolutionary theorists are not going to escape this. The laws of nature, by definition, describe regular, repetitive patterns. For that reason one cannot invoke self-organizing processes to explain the origin of information, because informational sequences are irregular and complex. They exhibit the ‘specified complexity’ I talked about. Future discoveries aren’t going to change this principle.”
To me, this absolutely doomed the idea of chemical affinities accounting for the information in DNA. But Meyer wasn’t through. There was yet another devastating problem with this theory.
“If you study DNA,” he continued, “you will find that its structure depends on certain bonds that are caused by chemical attractions. For instance, there are hydrogen bonds and bonds between the sugar and phosphate molecules that form the two twisting backbones of the DNA molecule.
“However,” he stressed, “there’s one place where there are no chemical bonds, and that’s between the nucleotide bases, which are the chemical letters in the DNA’s assembly instructions. In other words, the letters that spell out the text in the DNA message do not interact chemically with each other in any significant way. Also, they’re totally interchangeable. Each base can attach with equal facility at any site along the DNA backbone.”
Sensing the need for an illustration, Meyer stood and reached over to the desk to grab another child’s toy—a metal chalkboard with several magnetic letters sticking to it. Sitting back down, he put the chalkboard on his lap and maneuvered the letters until they spelled the word information.
“My kids were young when I was first studying this, so I came up with this example,” he said. “We know that there are magnetic affinities here; that’s why the magnetic letters stick to the metal chalkboard.” To demonstrate, he picked up the letter R and let the magnetism pull it back to the board.
“Notice, however,