Physicist Paul Davies is a prolific popularizer of science, having written numerous books on scientific topics, most of which are accessible to the layman. His most recent offering is titled The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life and in it Davies makes a strong case for the emerging view among scientists and philosophers that the fundamental characteristic of life is not any of the biological processes that occur in living organisms, but rather information.
Davies discusses numerous cellular processes - the amazingly complex procedure by which the DNA code is translated into proteins, how signals are transmitted along neurons and many others - and argues that all of these marvels are choreographed, coordinated and controlled by information. If a cell is like a computer the molecular constituents are like the hardware and information is like the software.
In several places throughout the book the author pauses to remind us that all of these wonders as well as the information necessary for them to function are the product of eons of evolution, that mindless nature serves the same role in designing life as a computer engineer serves in designing a computer.
The analogy that Davies tacitly promotes, however, is of a computer that guides the development of its own hardware and software, from the fabrication of the substances used in the hardware components all the way to the construction of a functional PC and all without any input from an outside intelligence.
To continue the analogy, this computer starts out with minimal software capabilities but is able to develop more complexity with time, developing the ability to correct errors, repair itself, duplicate itself and program the increasingly complex computer to create more parts of itself as well as interface with peripherals. And all of that would be necessary just to produce the very first computer. There are no precursors.
That's somewhat analogous to what must have happened to get life started, but how does software, information, produce itself?
The primitive computer, would on Davies' telling, had to have had both foresight and knowledge (!) of its internal states, being able not only to sense when certain processes needed to be turned on and off, but also to both recognize damage to its organelles and sense threats to its well-being.
He acknowledges that this is not standard Darwinism, insisting that it's instead a "refinement" of standard evolutionary theory, but it seems that so far from being a refinement it's in fact a total falsification of the Darwinian hypothesis.
Regrettably, Davies never explains how evolution could have produced the wonders he describes. He never defends the theory. He simply waves a magic wand and declares it a fact.
He mentions that there are indeed mysteries along the evolutionary progression from prebiotic chemicals to human life. Scientists are at a loss, for example, to explain any of the following in standard Darwinian or naturalistic terms: The origin of life (abiogenesis), the origin of nucleated cells (eukaryogenesis), the origin of sexual reproduction, the origin of multicellularity and the origin of human consciousness.
We could add to this list the origin of metamorphosis, the link between genes and behavior and the origin of language, none of which has, as far as I'm aware, ever received a plausible Darwinian explanation.
It's also a mystery as to why humans haven't evolved longer life spans with longer periods of reproductive fertility. It would certainly would seem that both of these would be child's play for a process that has accomplished such astonishing wonders as metamorphosis and photosynthesis. The evolutionary selection pressure to extend human life spans and fecundity should've been immense, yet it's never happened to any significant extent. Why not?
Finally, he neglects to discuss the origin and source of biological information itself. Information is always generated by a mind. It doesn't arise by chance. Astrobiologists looking for extraterrestrial life have said that were they to find something as simple as a radio signal that repeated a sequence of prime numbers they would consider the information content of that signal to be dispositive evidence of an alien intelligence.
Yet whole libraries of information are found in even the simplest cells and are far more complex than a sequence of prime numbers, but that information is not considered to have an intelligent provenience. Why not?
Davies occasionally comes close to admitting that the wonders he describes must somehow have been the product of intelligent engineering. Several times he walks right up to that admission but at the last moment dances back away from it.
In fact, reading the book I had the feeling that Davies is either an undercover intelligent design provocateur seeking to undermine the Darwinian edifice from within or else he's a man who can look at the noonday sky on a clear summer's day and fail to see the sun.