Stephen Meyer became embroiled in a vicious controversy when the Smithsonian Institution published his article about how information in the cell suggests intelligent life put it there. It was the first of its kind to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and it infuriated many. Learn more about what intelligent design theory is (and isn’t) and the enigmatic signature in the cell.

There’s great confusion regarding intelligent design (or ID). Intelligent design submits that there is scientific evidence to suggest that some kind of intelligence guided the emergence of certain features of nature. This is different than creationism, which takes its cues not from science but from religious authority. In 2005, the Smithsonian Institution published the first peer-reviewed article in favor of ID. The criticism evoked by its inclusion in their journal The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington was so intense that the journal’s editor was demoted, and public intellectuals and notable scientific institutions condemned the decision in the harshest terms. 

The backlash for the Smithsonian publication revealed (among other things) that most scientists consider intelligent design and creationism interchangeable, and that ID and evolution are mutually exclusive. What most people (including most scientists) don’t realize is that intelligent design can happily coexist with biological change over time and common ancestry. What intelligent design takes to task is the Darwinian argument that the process was blind and unguided.

ID is a theory that’s based on scientific evidence—not on a religious text. Whether it strengthens or weakens the claims of religious texts is incidental.

Let’s suppose a farmer realizes that some of his horses are noticeably faster than others, and so begins to create a thoroughbred line by pairing the fastest horses. This would be an example of artificial selection. The materialist scientist sees a similar phenomenon in nature, though without a farmer to guide the process. The wild horses are fast enough to outpace predators not because of some intentional force that made them so, but because the fastest ones survived and the slower wild horses competed unsuccessfully with the fittest. The fittest have progenies. Outrunning fast predators was the only way to continue passing on genetic material.

In Darwinism and now in Neo-Darwinism, design is not assumed, but only its appearance. The guiding force is not intentional but situational. Some evolutionary biologists consider this Darwin’s most significant contribution to the field: showing the development of living beings through a natural process—without relying on a Creator to explain things. Co-discoverer of the DNA double-helix structure, Francis Crick wrote that scientists must “constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”

Despite a culture of resistance to appeals among biologists, they have a hard time talking about systems of living organisms without relying on metaphors that imply intelligence and teleology:

The “function” of the shark’s dorsal fin

The “purpose” of the appendix

The moose’s antlers growing “in order” to intimidate competition.

These phrases are all suggestive of purpose and design. Evolutionary biologist (and atheist) Michael Ruse argues that biology is teeming with anthropomorphisms related to intention. Even the staunchest materialists resort to a vocabulary of intention for the sake of convenience. If metaphor is king where mystery abounds, it would be reasonable to assume that metaphor has become less and less necessary as we’ve discovered more. But biology has become even more reliant on purpose-driven language than ever. Look at the way molecular biologists borrow from communication theory, electrical engineering, and computer programming in order to explain the cell biology processes: information processing system, genetic information, transcription, editing enzyme, and so on.

For a long time, philosophers and scientists took nature’s intricacies and beauty as the result of some kind of intelligence. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Maimonides, Newton and many others saw purposive design in nature. As Darwin’s ideas gained currency beginning about 150 years ago, scientists began to explain this away as the mere “appearance of design.” Biologists resist teleological language and yet they have to resort to it to explain what is going on in nature—now more than ever.

When Crick and Watson discovered DNA’s structure in 1953, they answered one question, but their discovery raised many others: DNA is information kept in nucleotide bases that provides instructions for how the cell is to replicate. Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has remarked that genetic information presents quite like computer code: a long sequence of As, Gs, Ts, and Cs in place of ones and zeros. Bill Gates seconds this sentiment, marveling that not only is the genetic information packaged in a computer-like manner, but it is a program far more complex than any software programmer has developed.

DNA is a physical entity, but the information it carries is not. Information is not material, so what is it exactly? Some scientists would use thought and information interchangeably, but it is clear thought and information are two different things.

Matter and energy might not lend themselves to intelligence readily, but information sure does. When we see Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, we assume conscious intention behind the characters, that there is information that required intelligence to produce. The late radiologist and information theorist Henry Quastler once wrote that, “The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.”

Doing biology in the information age means we have more to consider than matter and energy. The relationship between matter and information is more complex. How is it that a purportedly random set of processes that serendipitously gave rise to life be driven by a digital code in the DNA molecules? How could chemicals begin to arrange themselves to create a consistent code? This is the “DNA Enigma.”

 Leading scientists concede that so-called leading theories fail to adequately explain the origin of life, but they also come vehemently against an alternative hypothesis that intelligence might be involved. The origin of biological information is a critical question, and the common sense intuition that information suggests intelligent thought means that intelligent design cannot be glibly dismissed.

There was a significant case in 2005 that involved a public school in Dover, Pennsylvania. The school had made resources explaining intelligent design theory available in the library. This rankled some local school officials and eventually the American Civil Liberties Union got involved in bringing a lawsuit.

One of the ACLU’s expert witnesses from the scientific community was Barbara Forrest, a professor from Southeastern Louisiana State University. Forrest claimed that there was no peer-reviewed scientific literature in favor of intelligent design because there’s no scientific data backing the theory. By this logic, science is as a scientist does: because publishing peer-reviewed scientific articles is what scientists do, and ID scientists have not done so (or have been barred from publication, or can’t find a journal willing to risk its reputation with an ID publication), intelligent design theory is therefore rejected as unscientific.

The Honorable Judge Jones presiding over the case took Forrest’s word for it that there were no legitimate studies supportingt ID because “they don’t have any scientific data,” citing this fact multiple times in his closing statement explaining this ruling against the school’s ability to let students know about certain books in its library.

 It’s an unfortunate Catch-22: intelligent design is not scientific on the grounds that there are no peer-reviewed scientific articles published about it. But when a peer-reviewed article proposing ID is published, the science community goes ballistic, and demands it be rescinded because it’s an unscientific theory.

And, ultimately, the question of peer review is a glaring red herring. The truth of a theory does not hinge upon its publication in certain kinds of journals. Most of the major scientific breakthroughs throughout history moved science forward without any kind of peer review process. Peer reviews are useful for fact checks, but they can also militate against certain ideologies, smother innovation, and shut down new insights. There have been plenty of scientists who found no support from publication and academic bodies, even though history would later exonerate their new, seemingly outlandish insights.

There are a number of reasons why ID is a legitimate scientific theory. For one, the theory is based on observable, empirical evidence. It takes its cues from the concrete world—not from creeds. This book is concerned with the digital signature present in the cell, but other scientists have found evidence suggestive of ID in different spheres of science: the irreducible complexity of cell processes and molecular structure, the fine-tuning and constancy of physics, the earth’s miraculously livable conditions, and the system of processing information in the cell—among others. People can disagree with the conclusions, but they can’t deny that design theory is based on the observable world.

Far from bucking scientific conventions to reach certain conclusions, intelligent design theory uses common, established scientific methods. One such method is the method of multiple competing hypotheses. Darwin himself used this method when assessing historical scientific theories—he just came to a different conclusion. Inference to the best explanation leaves intelligent design theory the clear winner, as it meets both causal-adequacy and causal-existence criteria—a feat that competing theories have partially or completely failed to achieve. The origin of specific biological information is an utter enigma without reference to some form of guiding intelligence.

Despite the dismissive remarks of some scientists and philosophers, ID is also a testable theory. It is just not testable in the way that most people think of when they think of “doing science.” Historical scientific theories are subject to different tests and driven by different questions. You can’t recreate a phenomenon that occurred billions of years ago in a laboratory. The events about which historical scientists hypothesize are not continually observable and replicable. 

The questions that historical scientists ask are not, “How does this phenomenon operate?” or “Why does that happen?” but “How did this get here?” Historical scientists make inferences, where non-historical sciences make generalizations based on particulars. Historical scientists used abductive reasoning rather than inductive reasoning, inferring about the past based on hints and clues from the present. The logical structures are very different.

ID theory is actually an exemplar par excellence of science—particularly historical science.