Editor

Signature in the Cell continues to stir up debate and attract attention as Thomas Nagel’s selection of SITC as one of the Books of the Year brought on an interesting series of letters, where Nagel was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia. This week, author Stephen Meyer himself responds in a letter, with a shortened version published yesterday. (Nagel himself responded with a letter that is published on the same page by TLS.) >> see full response here

Signature in the Cell continues to stir up debate and attract attention as Thomas Nagel’s selection of SITC as one of the Books of the Year brought on an interesting series of letters, where Nagel was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia. This week, author Stephen Meyer himself responds in a letter, with a shortened version published yesterday. (Nagel himself responded with a letter that is published on the same page by TLS.) Below is Meyer’s letter in its entirety: To the Editor The Times Literary Supplement Natural Selection and the Origin of Biological Information I’ve been honored by the recent attention my book Signature in the Cell has received in your letters section Read More ›

Over at Evolution News & Views, Dr. Jay Richards is weighing in with his thoughts on Signature In The Cell, in response to the beginning of a series of thoughtful reviews and discussion of the book over on Scott McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog at Beliefnet. Richards responds in part:  I’m familiar with McGrath and Conway Morris’s views, and think they have some merit; but I don’t think they offer an alternative that Meyer fails to address. Smoothing for inconsistencies in their proposals, their idea is basically that God hard-wired or “front-loaded” everything “in the beginning” as it were to give rise to complex life somewhere, while allowing for a lot of “freedom” and variation within the cosmos. (So they’re not hard determinists.)

Dr. Darrel Falk, biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, reviewed Signature in the Cell for The Biologos Foundation’s blog, “Science & the Sacred.” Below is Dr. Meyer’s response. In 1985, I attended a conference that brought a fascinating problem in origin-of-life biology to my attention—the problem of explaining how the information necessary to produce the first living cell arose.  At the time, I was working as a geophysicist doing digital signal processing, a form of information analysis and technology. A year later, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Cambridge, where I eventually completed a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science after doing interdisciplinary research on the scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. In the ensuing years, I Read More ›

Those who follow the debate over evolution will remember 2009 as the year Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell convincingly made a new scientific case for intelligent design. In fact, according to Doug Groothuis, “Its publication may prove to be a decisive moment for the Intelligent Design movement. One could not ask for more in a philosophy of science treatise than what we find in The Signature in the Cell. The book is no less than magisterial, an adjective that curmudgeons such as myself seldom use. At every level—philosophical, scientific, historical and literary—it is a superb treatise. Reading every word of its 508 pages of text (not counting end notes)—as I did—repays the reader greatly. Meyer thoroughly examines a most significant topic—how life Read More ›

Salvo magazine has an excellent review of SITC in its latest issue, from science writer Heather Zeiger.  In what would be typical British understatement, Dr. Stephen Meyer calls DNA replication a “curiosity.” Here is the conundrum: DNA needs proteins to replicate, but these same proteins are encoded in DNA. So which came first? In his magnum opus, Signature in the Cell, Dr. Meyer puts on the table what went through my mind when I took my first biochemistry class: How did this closed loop get started? Whatever made the loop could not have made the first DNA molecule the same way that it is made now. And the DNA and protein interaction is just one of many closed loops in perhaps the Read More ›

[This response is crossposted from Biologos.org] No doubt it happens all the time. There must be many book reviews written by reviewers who have scarcely cracked the pages of the books they purport to review. But those who decide to write such blind reviews typically make at least some effort to acquire information about the book in question so they can describe its content accurately—if, for no other reason, than to avoid embarrassing themselves. Unfortunately, in his review of my book Signature in the Cell (titled ironically, “On Reading the Cell’s Signature”), eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala does not appear to have even made a search for the crib notes online. Indeed, from reading his review it appears that he did little more than crack Read More ›

Dr. Meyer’s first appearance on The Dennis Miller Show, where he talked about Signature in the Cell, Francis Crick’s sequence hypothesis, and more: https://www.discovery.org/v/stephen-meyer-on-dennis-miller/ Dr. Meyer’s second appearance on the Dennis Miller Show to talk about his book: https://www.discovery.org/v/dr-stephen-meyer-on-the-dennis-miller-show/

Last week on Dec. 2nd, Dr. Meyer was on Dennis Miller’s radio program to talk about his book. You can listen to the interview here.