Stephen C. Meyer > Quotes

“The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwinism, Design and Public Education

“With odds standing at 1 chance in 10164 of finding a functional protein among the possible 150-amino-acid compounds, the probability is 84 orders of magnitude (or powers of ten) smaller than the probability of finding the marked particle in the whole universe. Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specified particle among all the particles in the universe.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Since natural selection “selects” or preserves functionally advantageous mutations or variations, it can explain the origin of systems that could have arisen through a series of incremental steps, each of which maintains or confers a functional advantage on a living organism. Nevertheless, by this same logic, selection and mutation face difficulty in explaining structures or systems that could not have been built through a close series of functional intermediates. Moreover, since selection operates only on what mutation first produces, mutation and selection do not readily explain appearances of design that require discrete jumps of complexity that exceed the reach of chance; that is to say, the available probabilistic resources.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“In China,” he said, “we can criticize Darwin, but not the government. In America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Biochemist David Goodsell describes the problem, “The key molecular process that makes modern life possible is protein synthesis, since proteins are used in nearly every aspect of living. The synthesis of proteins requires a tightly integrated sequence of reactions, most of which are themselves performed by proteins.”41 Or as Jacques Monod noted in 1971: “The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell’s translating machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA: the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Although DNA does not convey information that is received, understood, or used by a conscious mind, it does have information that is received and used by the cell’s machinery to build the structures critical to the maintenance of life. DNA displays a property—functional specificity—that transcends the merely mathematical formalism of Shannon’s theory. Is”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“Augustine captured the two ideas in two Latin coinages, which prima facie cut against each other: imago dei and peccatum originis. The former says that humans are unique as a species in our having been created in the image and likeness of God, while the latter says that all humans are born having inherited the legacy of Adam’s error, “original sin.”61”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“To complicate matters further, proteins must catalyze formation of the basic building blocks of cellular life such as sugars, lipids, glycolipids, nucleotides, and ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the main energy molecule of the cell).”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“constructed with the help of specific enzymes. For example, each of the systems involved in the processing of genetic information requires energy at many discrete steps.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Darwin’s picture of the history of life “contradict[ed] what the animal forms buried in the rocky strata of our earth tell us of their own introduction and succession upon the surface of the globe.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“early theories of the origin of life did not need to address, nor did they anticipate, this problem. Since scientists did not know about the information-bearing properties of DNA, or how the cell uses that functionally specified information to build proteins, they did not worry about explaining these features of life.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Agassiz explained his reasons for doubting the creative power of natural selection. Small-scale variations, he argued, had never produced a “specific difference” (i.e., a difference in species). Meanwhile, large-scale variations, whether achieved gradually or suddenly, inevitably resulted in sterility or death. As he put it, “It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“At the close of the nineteenth century, most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy. But after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“This absence of clear affinities has led an increasing number of paleontologists to reject ancestor-descendant relationships between all but (at most) a few of the Ediacaran and Cambrian fauna.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“For many, his reference to the work of a transcendent mind merely demonstrated that he was unable to abandon an outmoded idealistic approach.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several Parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent?”84”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“...if God did not at least direct the process of mutation and selection (and/or other relevant evolutionary mechanisms), but instead merely sustained the laws of nature that made them possible, then it follows that he could not know and does not know, what those mechanisms would (or will) produce, including whether they would have produced human beings.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique

“Over the years, as paleontologists have reflected on the overall pattern of the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record in light of Walcott’s discoveries, they too have noted several features of the Cambrian explosion that are unexpected from a Darwinian point of view11 in particular: (1) the sudden appearance of Cambrian animal forms; (2) an absence of transitional intermediate fossils connecting the Cambrian animals to simpler Precambrian forms; (3) a startling array of completely novel animal forms with novel body plans; and (4) a pattern in which radical differences in form in the fossil record arise before more minor, small-scale diversification and variations. This pattern turns on its head the Darwinian expectation of small incremental change only gradually resulting in larger and larger differences in form. THE”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“...if living organisms are the result of a directed process, then it follows that the appearance of design in living organisms is real, not merely apparent or illusory. Nevertheless, chief proponents of theistic evolution reject the theory of intelligent design with its claim that the appearance of design in living organisms is real. Thus, any proponent of theistic evolution who affirms that God is directing the evolutionary mechanism, and who also rejects intelligent design, implicitly contradicts himself.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique

“Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz thought the evidence of abrupt appearance, and the absence of ancestral forms in the Precambrian, refuted Darwin’s theory.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Within a decade, Borde, Vilenkin, and a third physicist, Alan Guth, one of the original proponents of inflation, had come to a startling conclusion: the universe must have had a beginning, even if inflationary cosmology is correct.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“Given the known scientific inadequacy of the neo-Darwinian mutation/natural selection mechanism, and the absence of any alternative evolutionary mechanism with any sufficient creative power to explain the origin of major innovations in biological form and information, we argue that theistic evolution devolves into little more than an a priori commitment to methodological naturalism--the idea that scientists must limit themselves to strictly materialistic explanations and that scientists may not offer explanations making reference to intelligent design or divine action, or make any reference to theology in scientific discourse.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique

“A PUZZLING PATTERN Over the years, as paleontologists have reflected on the overall pattern of the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record in light of Walcott’s discoveries, they too have noted several features of the Cambrian explosion that are unexpected from a Darwinian point of view11 in particular: (1) the sudden appearance of Cambrian animal forms; (2) an absence of transitional intermediate fossils connecting the Cambrian animals to simpler Precambrian forms; (3) a startling array of completely novel animal forms with novel body plans; and (4) a pattern in which radical differences in form in the fossil record arise before more minor, small-scale diversification and variations. This pattern turns on its head the Darwinian expectation of small incremental change only gradually resulting in larger and larger differences in form.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“Those who rejected it wholesale, as Agassiz did, consigned themselves to increasing irrelevance. AGASSIZ”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“that there are no biological forms left to discover. He means, rather, that we have good reason to conclude that such discoveries will not alter the largely discontinuous pattern that has emerged.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.25”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

“The discovery of the fine tuning of the universe, like the discovery of the beginning of the universe itself, represents an effect that requires a cause with specific attributes, including both transcendence and intelligence.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

“requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains “only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.”
― Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design