Secrets of the Cell, Episode 5

In the final episode of Secrets in the Cell Biochemist Michael Behe sums up the evidence and concludes that the best explanation for the design in nature is not that it was the product of random accidents but that it's the product of intentional engineering.

An article at Evolution News explains how we detect intentional design or agency. The writer, philosopher Stephen Meyer states that:

.... rational agents often detect the prior activity of other designing minds by the character of the effects they leave behind.

Archaeologists assume that rational agents produced the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Insurance fraud investigators detect certain “cheating patterns” that suggest intentional manipulation of circumstances rather than a natural disaster. Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those carrying encoded messages, the latter indicating an intelligent source.

Recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference.

More importantly,...rational agents recognize or detect the effects of other rational agents and distinguish them from the effects of natural causes....systems or sequences with the joint properties of “high complexity” (or small probability) and “specification” invariably result from intelligent causes, not from chance or physical-chemical laws.

....complex sequences exhibit an irregular and improbable arrangement that defies expression by a simple rule or algorithm, whereas specification involves a match or correspondence between a physical system or sequence and an independently recognizable pattern or set of functional requirements.

By way of illustration, consider the following three sets of symbols:

• “nehya53nslbyw1`jejns7eopslanm46/J”
• “TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN”
• “ABABABABABABABABABABAB”

The first two sequences are complex because both defy reduction to a simple rule. Each represents a highly irregular, aperiodic, improbable sequence. The third sequence is not complex, but is instead highly ordered and repetitive. Of the two complex sequences, only the second, however, exemplifies a set of independent functional requirements — i.e., it is specified.

It's this "specified complexity" that's the indicator of an intelligence behind the sequence or message. It's an indicator of intentional design, and specified complexity is exactly what we find in the DNA code and the amino acid sequence in proteins.

In fact, the first cell must have been full of specified complexity, i.e. information, and it's getting more difficult with every new scientific discovery to think that nature, in producing the first living cell, accomplished the equivalent of a tornado in a junyard leaving in its wake a fully assembled, fully functional 747 jet airplane.