Alistair Noble on Intelligent Design

Dr Alastair Noble

(with apologies to Bill Clinton, American Presidential Election, 1992)

In 2010 I became a grandfather for the first time and there is something wonderfully reassuring about holding in your arms the first of your children's children.

When I hold the bundle of life which is my granddaughter I am overawed by the thought that she began as a single cell in which was contained all the potential to build this little person capable of living for up to 100 years.

In fact, all human beings began their life as a single cell - a fertilised egg whose unique DNA determines for better or worse the physical quality of our lives. It's remarkable how the wonder of this is so easily overlooked or forgotten in the quest to understand and modify the chemical structure of DNA.

Most people are oblivious to the vast information bank which is carried in the nucleus of each cell of our bodies - and we have about 100 trillion of them. Each cell carries the full complement of genetic information which is required to build a complete human being. No wonder Bill Gates of Microsoft has said that the programming of DNA is more sophisticated than his software programmes.

Now there's a serious question here and one to which science should rightly direct itself. What is the origin of this huge bank of functional information which overshadows even the most sophisticated work of modern software programmers? There is certainly no doubt that it is there, digitally coded on the spine of the molecule of DNA in the same sort of way that a PC is programmed with a variety of software.

If people think about this, they just assume that it assembled itself in some sort of Darwinian process. Indeed biologists encourage this view, but if pressed will acknowledge that they just don't know. Give us more time, they say, and we'll come up with something.

But it is not hard to find a source for information of this quality. Information is all around us, in print or in electronic media. We know that functional information only arises from intelligent mind. Indeed, it has no other known source.

It is, therefore, a thoroughly scientific position to propose that the source of genetic information is intelligent mind. Technically, this means making an inference to the best explanation. And this kind of deduction is at the heart of intelligent design theory.

It's noteworthy that Francis Collins, the Director of the Human Genome Project, entitled his book about his faith and his work on DNA, 'The Language of God'.

So next time you hear someone dismissing intelligent design as 'creationism', 'pseudo-science' or worse, say to yourself, no, it's the information stupid!