Thursday, August 29, 2019

Embryogenesis and Information

Do you have six minutes? Watch this time lapse video of a fertilized egg developing into a newt, and ask yourself as you're watching how each of the cells in this embryo "knows" where to go and how to get there.

That the migrating cells wind up in the right place is crucial lest the newt have a leg grow out of its head or an eye grow out of its tail. Obviously, there's an enormous amount of information directing this process, so it's worthwhile to ask where the information comes from that coordinates everything you see happening. Complex information that programs a specific process is uniquely the product of minds. It's never the product of blind, random forces like those posited in the Darwinian hypothesis.

But if purposeless biochemical processes are inadequate to explain the complex, specified information that guides embryogenesis, if only minds can provide an adequate explanation, where did the information responsible for the development of this newt and, indeed, of every living thing, come from and how did it arise in biological history?

This is a very difficult and perplexing problem for anyone holding a materialistic, naturalistic worldview, one that's causing a lot of folks who hold to that worldview to have second thoughts about Darwinian evolution.