Intelligent Design is Correct, in a Sense
An open letter to Stephen C. Meyer. Published June 1, 2023
Dr. Meyer,
Your lovely book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design outlines an illuminating argument for the premise that life was created by an intelligent designer. I found the book’s argument logical, parsimonious and valid. It makes no mention of Judeo-Christian theology in justifying its view, relying instead on a refutation of the existing theories of the origin of life and proposing intelligent design as the best alternative. If it is indeed true that there were insufficient opportunities (probabilistic resources) present in the early Earth for the specified information in even one long polypeptide to have arisen by chance, then I agree this is a logically sound refutation of the notion that there was no intelligence present at the origin of life.
There is, however, an alternative that the book does not consider. It is also possible that you are right that intelligence is required to produce specified information, but that every living cell has the requisite intelligence to do so. This is an idea I have nicknamed “epistolution,” but it might also be termed “intelligent self-design.”
Your book presupposes that the genome is a set of instructions. The genome may contain information, however information is not always in the form of an instructional code. It is also possible that the genome is just a list of templates for making proteins, and the specification for what template to use at what time arises from the interaction with the environment. Imagine these genetic sequences as the keys of a piano…alteration of the keys will change the tunes that are played, but the keys themselves do not contain the musical notation. The human genome contains roughly 25,000 different protein-coding sequences. As Denis Noble has argued in both of his books, The Music of Life and Dance to the Tune of Life, the number of ways these sequences could be uniquely combined to express proteins is a superastronomical number. It is now widely recognized that epigenetic markings, applied to the genome over the course of the active life of the cell, reduce those myriad possibilities down to only the tiny subset of expression rates that, in most cases, are consistent with life. This enormously specific rate of control may be precisely the intelligent mechanism you are searching for. If this process did not result in a form of intelligent selection then cells would express proteins at random, resulting in fatal dysfunction.
In your book you dismiss this concept hastily by referencing the Central Dogma of biology. This is the idea that information can only be read from the genome, not written to it by the cell. It is not widely recognized that this claim was refuted in the 1950s by the geneticist Conrad Waddington, who discovered the phenomenon called “genetic assimilation.” This is a process that inserts informational content into the genome without specifying particular amino acid sequences. Waddington found that fruit flies, when exposed to heat, applied particular epigenetic markings to their genetic material, and that these markings were passed on through transgenerational epigenetic inheritance if the heat stimulus remained. This epigenetic plasticity allowed the flies to continue to thrive in an altered environment. This new environment then provided a novel set of selection pressures for the genetic evolution of the flies. In the heat, through random mutation and natural selection, the genome of the flies then “assimilated” genes that were advantageous in that different context, and lost ones that were maladaptive. In this way, the knowledge of how to survive in a changed world was imbedded in the genetic material of the flies without any specific reverse transcription from protein to DNA.
Many examples of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (TEI) have now been found that prove that differential genetic expression in cells is a source of adaptation. But these striking results are not even necessary to prove this concept. All that is necessary in principle to show that organisms are not following genetic instructions is to determine whether organisms respond blindly to novel stimuli or whether they respond in a way that is biased toward survival. Machines follow specific code precisely to retain function, but organisms possess the ability to respond to perturbations in their own systems and in their environments with adaptive plasticity. This demonstrates that the instructions for their function are not contained in the genetic material, which never varies during active life. Imagine two monozygotic twins, separated and sent to France and Italy respectively during adolescence. Upon their return to the US, will they still speak only in a common, gene-derived dialect known only to themselves? Will their version of English speech have diverged in random ways from its initial conditions? Of course not… twins learn to speak English with slight variations based on their different life histories. After a study abroad, one twin will return more fluent in French and the other will return more fluent in Italian. Learning itself refutes the notion of genetic instructions.
There are also many other ways that the genome is both read from and written to by cells, violating the Central Dogma. Many of them were first collected by James Shapiro in his excellent book Evolution: A View from the 21st Century. The list grows much longer when we realize that any information passed along from parent to child through instruction, imitation, or imprinting also becomes imbedded in the genetic function of the child. This is logically necessary if we consider that all behavioral changes of any sort must involve changes in genetic function, since an organism is after all a large group of cells requiring proteins. Many of these pathways are elegantly described by Jablonka and Lamb in their book Evolution in Four Dimensions. I provided an overview of these recent evolutionary insights in my essay “Adaptive Plasticity as Causal Inference” published on my Medium account.
In my opinion, your arguments for intelligent design are scientifically legitimate and logically sound. But considering each cell as an intelligent designer respects your objections to the existing theories while providing us with a direction to search for the actual mechanism of intelligence. Though I agree that Dawkins “who designed the designer?” question is not a valid criticism of your conclusion, it is still true that referencing a supernatural designer removes the explanation beyond the realm of empirical investigation. I would agree with you that such metaphysical claims are often a necessary part of scientific investigation, but scientists must also, whenever possible, consider alternatives that can be tested. The idea of “intelligent self-design” would mean that every cell on earth embodies a process of context-specific intelligent gene selection. If this is true, we can probably make quick progress in identifying the mechanism of intelligence. We might ask ourselves what processes all life forms have in common that are particularly amplified in intelligent species. My hunch is that a Lamarckian response to use and disuse is guided by circadian rhythm and other oscillations. I suspect it can be best visualized by imagining what physiological mandate might require the damage and repair process of the sleep/wake cycle for cognitive function in higher animals. But these are, so far, just my speculations.
My sincere thanks for having written a very perceptive book. It is one of the best books I have ever read on the demarcation problem, the difficulty of separating science from non-science. I regret that the scientific reception has been so closed-minded and repressive. My best wishes to you on your various endeavors. I hope that one day soon unusual hypotheses like yours may be given a fair hearing in biology.
Sincerely,
Charlie Munford
charlie.munford@gmail.com
