Stephen C. Meyer Philosopher of Science
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Blown Away by Signature in the Cell

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The new issue of American Spectator is out with a rave review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. Writer Dan Peterson opens with the revelation that this book wasn’t just good — it was a game-changer:

When I learned that Dr. Stephen Meyer had written a new book on the evidence of design displayed in living cells, I expected to be impressed by it. I wasn’t prepared to have my mind blown — which is what happened.

We’ve heard before that Dr. Meyer’s book is more than dangerous to the Darwinist case; it’s comprehensive and devastating:

Meyer’s argument is a comprehensive one, rooted in multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines, and he is perhaps uniquely qualified to make it. His background is in physics and earth science, and he earned his PhD from Cambridge University in philosophy of science, with a thesis on origin of life research. Although not himself a biologist, the detailed facts of molecular biology Meyer presents in the book, on which he bases his principal arguments, are sound and accurate scientifically…

Signature in the Cell takes readers on a tour of scientific history from Darwin to Watson and Crick…

And that’s where the book becomes mind-blowing. In a few chapters, Meyer lays out with admirable clarity the chemical processes by which information is stored in the DNA molecule and details the tightly integrated cell machinery for transcription of that information. He describes the built-in error correction mechanisms that allow that information to be read and duplicated with astounding accuracy. He shows how the primary code in DNA (which is not suited to forming proteins directly) is translated into a higher-level code, which in turn specifies the sequencing of the 20 amino acids used to form proteins, and he delineates the mechanism by which amino acids are then assemble in precise order in the cell’s ribosome to become functional proteins.

These and other cellular processes are set forth in considerable technical detail. It takes a big of concentration, but with the help of the book’s many illustrations and Meyer’s lucid writing style, the technical scientific descriptions are remarkably easy to follow. 

By the time the reader is done with them, an unbidden conviction takes shape: these astonishingly intricate molecular machines, and the informational software that drives them, could not have arisen, even in a vastly simpler form, as a result of chance combinations of chemicals on the primitive earth.

Read the whole review for yourself here, or download it as a PDF here.