so one of the major discoveries of the 20th century in biology was the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule or the elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule and that occurred in 1953 when Watson and Crick determined that the DNA what had a double helix structure along the inside of which were these four chemical subunits called bases or nucleotides a PSA's then four years later Crick took that discovery one step further and realized that those those chemical subunits on the inside of the molecule we're functioning just like alphabetic characters in a written
language or digital characters like the zeros and ones we use in software in other words it wasn't the structure of those the chemical structure of those subunits or their molecular weight or their shape that mattered what mattered was their arrangement in accord with an independent code that was later discovered called the genetic code so inside the DNA molecule what we have is literally information or instructions inscribed digitally or alphabetically typographically in a way that provides the information that's necessary to build the important proteins and protein machines that keep all cells alive so this is a
stop press moment in the history of biology people have wondered for centuries why does like B get like and at least in case of Y we get new proteins that are like the old proteins the question or the answer is the DNA contains the information for building them and that's what keeps living cells alive well we're here in Seattle and we have you know a lot of great companies here especially tech companies that we've got the famous Microsoft company that writes code in the form of software we also have the Boeing Company and other companies
that use a technology known as computer assisted design and manufacture and that's a technology where information in a digital form is used to direct the construction of mechanical parts or physical systems so if you're a Boeing engineer you might sit at a console and write code that code will go down a wire it will be translated into another machine code that can be read at a manufacturing arm or Center and then that information will be used for example to take rivets and put them on the airplane wing at just the right place so you have
digital information directing the construction of a mechanical system something very much like that is going on inside the cell where the information inside DNA is being used to direct the construction of the proteins and protein machines that are necessary for all cellular life natural selection and random mutation don't seem to be a very good explanation for the origin of new genetic information and the reason for that can be understood by reference to our own experience with digital code with software if you're a computer programmer you know that if you start randomly changing the sections of
functional code you're gonna degrade that code long before you ever come up with a new program or operating system and the same thing applies in the biological case because the information in DNA is essentially digital or typographic and because there are far more ways to arrange those a C's GS and T's along the DNA molecule that will result in gibberish then will result in functional information capable of building a new protein inevitably as random changes accumulate they're going to find those non-functional combinations and the process of evolution is going to have the process of natural
selection it's going to have nothing to select remember natural selection can only select for functional advantage if the code is degraded by random mutations before you ever get to something new and functional then the evolutionary process is going to terminate so the natural selection random mutation process is very good for preserving existing function in an existing form it can preserve slight variations on that form but it can't generate anything fundamentally new and that's why you have a lot of evolutionary biologists themselves today saying things like natural selection and random mutation can explain the survival but
not the arrival of the fittest they explain the small scale variations or changes but not they do not explain where major innovation comes from in the history of life alright the reason that random changes inevitably degrade the information in a DNA sequence is the same reason that random changes inevitably degrade information in a section of computer code or English text for every sequence of 12 letters in English language that does convey a meaning there are a hundred trillion other possible ways of arranging those same characters that don't and the same thing turns out to be
true in the dna-protein case for a modest protein of about a hundred and fifty amino acids long for every sequence that produces a functional protein there are about 10 to the 77th other possibilities that don't and what that means is then there's a huge search space that has to be searched by the random mutation mechanism to try to find the functional sequences in that in that vast array of possibilities and it turns out when you do the math there isn't enough time even assuming a four billion year history of life on this planet to have
enough replication events enough copying events to search that space effectively you're going to end up with a time even if all of those every time an organism replicates from the beginning of the first life till now a new mutation occurred searching for a new protein you'd only search a tiny fraction of the total number of possibilities and so it becomes much more likely that such a random search will fail than it is that such a search will succeed the bottom line is the neo-darwinian mechanism is just not a plausible mechanism for generating new functional biological
information as it's become clear that the various evolutionary mechanisms do not account for the origin of genetic information there's naturally people have wondered well what might and we've proposed an alternative explanation and that is the idea of intelligent design and the reason that intelligent design provides a good scientific explanation for the origin of the new information necessary to build new proteins and new forms of animal life is that we know from our experience that information always arises from an intelligent source whether we're looking at a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information
in a section of software code or even information embedded in a radio signal whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source it always comes to a mind not an undirected material process so the discovery of information at the foundation of life and the discovery that big infusions of information are necessary to explain the origin of new forms of life suggests the activity of it designing intelligence in the history of life that inference to intelligent design is based on our uniform and repeated experience of cause and effect which is the basis of
all scientific reasoning we know from experience not only that the neo-darwinian mechanism and other similar more recent evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed have failed to generate the information the digital and functionally specified information necessary to build new proteins and new forms of animal life we also know that there is a cause we know of a cause that does generate functional digital code or digital information and that causes intelligence and we have experience of that in our own realm of software technology or or our human experience in fact here locally our our hero Bill Gates
has said that DNA is like a software program only much more complicated than any we've ever created now what we know from experience is that it takes a programmer to make a program to make a computer program in fact more generally we know that whenever we see information whether it's a software program or a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source we always come to a mind not a material process so the discovery of information at the foundation of life in every living
cell of every organism and the evidence of big infusions of new information coming into the biosphere in the fossil record both suggest that a designing intelligence has played a role in the construction of the information necessary to life throughout the history of life and so the the inference to intelligent design is is not just an argument from ignorance it's not just a we're not just saying that a natural selection and random mutation can't generate new information or various chemical evolutionary processes have failed to explain the origin of information we're also saying we know of a
cause that does produce information that causes mind and therefore based on that now that positive knowledge of cause and effect we can infer intelligent design as the best explanation because in fact it's the only known cause of the generation of functional information especially in a digital or in an alphabetic form one of the great information scientists of the 20th century said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity that's what we know and therefore the inference of design is a really strong inference from what we know both about the facts of biology
and about what it takes to generate information a lot of scientists because of the influence of materialism are in a way in ered to the reality of their own minds and therefore of minds in general there's a kind of computer simulation known as a genetic algorithm where evolutionary scientists tried to show how the mutation selection mechanism would work in a and they do this in a computational environment they write a little program they try to get something that simulates mutation in selection to generate a particular sequence of characters or a phrase from Shakespeare was Richard
Dawkins his preferred way of doing it methinks it is like a weasel but in order to get the computer to generate the sequence Dawkins has to first give the computer the sequence and then he writes the program his computer program in such a way that as different randomize crops of letter strings are generated the program selects the ones that are closest in function that are closest to the the future function that he wants now none of the original strings have any linguistic function at all they don't have any meaning but the program selects the ones
that have the that are closest to the future function that that's desired so he's selecting for proximity to future function not actual function now that's problematic because natural selection selects for functional advantage it doesn't have foresight to tell you what might eventually result in some future function so the program that Dawkins generates is not actually analogous to what's going on in biology at all or how the natural selection mechanism must work but notice also the extent to which it does work is entirely a function of his own mind his own intellect he gave the program
the target sequence he programmed the computer to select for proximity to future function so these genetic algorithms invariably end up illustrating the need for mine to generate information a similar thing happens with what are known as ribozyme engineering experiments they're chemists attempt to generate RNA molecules that are capable of copying themselves and thus could conceivably get something like natural selection going because there would be an element of self-replication the problem is as the RNA chemist the ribozyme engineers have done their work they've had to sequence the RNA molecules in very specific ways to get any
copying capability out of them at all as it turns out they've only been able to generate RNA molecules that can copy about 10% of themselves but even that limited self replication capability is the product of intelligence because it was the intelligent agent who essentially nucleotide base by nucleotide base determined the informational sequence that the RNA molecule RNA ribozyme has so again what's being simulated what it appears to us that what's being simulated is the need for intelligence to generate information so far from the idea that intelligent design is the only known cause of information and
that far from the idea that are the connection between intelligence and information is only a kind of common-sense thing that has no scientific basis we actually see that the attempt to simulate evolution is providing additional scientific basis for that connection a lot of people reject the idea of intelligent design because they think that if you invoke the activity of a mind you're invoking some unintelligible entity of which we have no real knowledge or an entity the conscious mind which is not materialistic but in fact I want to argue that we know that we have conscious
minds we know our own consciousness better than we know anything else in fact all of our knowledge of the world around us is mediated to us through our senses and comes to us in our minds so if the mind isn't a real entity then we don't have any knowledge let alone scientific knowledge so mind is presupposed in all scientific inquiry and and getting rid of the mind as an explanatory entity is contrary to everything we actually know we know from direct introspective activity better than we know anything else that we have minds and we also
know from our introspective activity the causal powers that our minds have what our minds can do and one of the things we know our minds can do is generate information I'm doing it right now as we're speaking so mind is a real entity it's part of the world and we've become in order to its reality but it does really exist and a good science will open itself up to all that takes place in the world all the causes that are at work including mental or conscious causes causes that are generated by minds
