---
product_id: 1695408
title: "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design ― A Controversial Science Book on the Origin of Life and Molecular Machinery"
price: "¥7943"
currency: JPY
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.jp/products/1695408-signature-in-the-cell-dna-and-the-evidence-for-intelligent
store_origin: JP
region: Japan
---

# Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design ― A Controversial Science Book on the Origin of Life and Molecular Machinery

**Price:** ¥7943
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design ― A Controversial Science Book on the Origin of Life and Molecular Machinery
- **How much does it cost?** ¥7943 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.jp](https://www.desertcart.jp/products/1695408-signature-in-the-cell-dna-and-the-evidence-for-intelligent)

## Best For

- Customers looking for quality international products

## Why This Product

- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

“ Signature in the Cell is a defining work in the discussion of life’s origins and the question of whether life is a product of unthinking matter or of an intelligent mind. For those who disagree with ID, the powerful case Meyer presents cannot be ignored in any honest debate. For those who may be sympathetic to ID, on the fence, or merely curious, this book is an engaging, eye-opening, and often eye-popping read” — American Spectator Named one of the top books of 2009 by the Times Literary Supplement (London), this controversial and compelling book from Dr. Stephen C. Meyer presents a convincing new case for intelligent design (ID), based on revolutionary discoveries in science and the biological information stored in DNA. Tackling the central mystery of the origin of life, Meyer argues that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as expounded in The Origin of Species did not, in fact, refute ID. If you enjoyed Francis Collins’s The Language of God , you’ll find much to ponder—about evolution, the digital code in DNA, and intelligent design—in Signature in the Cell . What is the signature in the cell, and what does it reveal about the origin of life? The DNA Enigma: Delve into the mystery of how the digital information in DNA first arose—the question that materialistic evolutionary theories have been unable to answer. Specified Complexity: Discover the concept of specified information, the unique hallmark of intelligent agency, and see how it appears in the cell’s molecular machinery. Critique of Chemical Evolution: A comprehensive review of the failures of leading scientific theories—from chance to self-organization—to explain the origin of the first life. Evidence for Intelligent Design: Follow the step-by-step argument as Meyer makes a positive, evidence-based case for an intelligent cause as the best explanation for the information at the heart of life.

Review: Placing Intelligent Design right next to Darwinism for anyone to see - I read “Signature in the Cell” by Stephen Meyer. What a fantastic journey through his mind as he shepherded the idea of making “intelligent design” an acceptable explanation for the origin of life in the scientific community. (This was the man who they talked about taking away his doctorate because he didn’t really believe the answers he had to put on tests in order to pass). It was this article that I read about a dean of philosophy, Thomas Nagel, who had been convinced to give up his Darwinian faith after reading Stephen’s book that got me to pick it up and read it. The world has always been viewed through history by leading scientists and philosophers concluding “that behind the exquisite structures of the living world was a designing intelligence”. This all changed with Darwin. Natural selection and mutations would now become the explanations of how we came to be. The discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick would present a dilemma to the scientific world: what is the origin of the biological information in DNA? Meyer gives us a history of evolutionist attempts to explain the origin of life. One section entitled “Oparin to the Rescue” tells of us a young Soviet scientist who proposes in 1922 that the chemical reactions taking place long ago were the original building blocks of life and afterwards Darwinian natural selection took over creating life. I love his Marxist motivations in seeing evolution as a proof of Marxist materialism. It was in 1953 that a experiment by Stanley Miller showed the possibility that lightning mixing with the prebiotic soup of the planet could create amino acids the building blocks of protein. This was a crown of glory for evolutionists searching for the origin of life. It was the other discovery in 1953 of DNA that would shake that crown off of their heads. Meyer gives us a great description of the factory within the cell. The centerpiece is the DNA and its ability to produce and transmit the code to building proteins. This peek into the molecular world is well done, but it also explains the “chicken or the egg” problem of DNA. “The production of proteins requires DNA, but the production of DNA requires proteins”. The problem is bigger than that as Meyer explains: “The discovery of life’s information-processing systems…has made it clear that scientists investigating the origin of life must now explain the origin of at lest three key features of life. First, they must explain the origin of the system for storing and encoding digital information in the cell, DNA’s capacity to store digitally encoded information. Second, they must explain the origin of the large amount of specified complexity or functionally specified information in DNA. Third, they must explain the origin of the integrated complexity—the functional interdependence of parts—of the cell’s information-processing system.” He will spend 8 chapters looking into the various attempts to explain this information phenomenon. He is doing this with an eye upon what will become obvious: creating information requires intelligence. Meyer is going to use his knowledge of “historical sciences” to put “intelligent design” right next to “Darwinian evolution”. The same reasoning that would allow one to stand or fall is the same reasoning that would allow the other to stand or fall as a potential explanation for the origin of life. This may seem unnecessary or too wordy; but in fact he is doing a beautiful job in making “intelligent design” a theory that cannot be dismissed. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both used “causes now in operation” to legitimize their theories. He is setting up the criteria for how “historical sciences” can be used by their determination of the “best” explanation for how something happened in the past. That sets the stage for his discussion of the many tributes to chance, necessity or a combination of the two that evolutionists use to explain the origin of life. He will quote college textbooks that will enshrine in young minds “the chance association” that created life. One text says: “Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable and the probable virtually certain.” He will team up with William Demski’s knowledge of mathematical odds to show that it is impossible for chance to be the explanation of creating a string of functional arrangement of bases and amino acids. He will refer to Douglas Axe: “Axe has compared the odds of producing a functional protein sequence of modes (150-amino-acid) length at random to the odds of finding a single marked atom out of all the atoms in our galaxy via a blind and undirected search.” What I found interesting in this discussion is that by 1966 many mathematicians were shocked to find biologists so willing to hang their theories of the origin of life on chance alone. He described a conference entitled: “Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinism”. That conference ended with the biologists insisting that as long as their was a single possibility that it might of happened in a “cosmic jackpot” moment they were not willing to let go of that possibility as their official explanation. Not a lot has changed since then. He will deal with the ideas that DNA was a self organizing accident way back when. Even this accident if it could be shown to be chemically induced, cannot explain the intelligent data that the accident created. He refers to Michael Polanyi. “The flow of electricity obeys the laws of physics, but where the electricity flows in any particular machine depends upon the arrangement of its parts—which, in turn, depends on the design of an electrical engineer working according to engineering principles. And these engineering principles, Polanyi insisted, are distinct from the laws of physics and chemistry that they harness.” “The laws of acoustics and the properties of air do not determine which sounds are conveyed by speakers of natural languages. Neither do the chemical properties of ink determine the arrangements of letters on a printed page.” “Then he took a step that made his work directly relevant to the DNA enigma: he insisted that living things defy reduction to the laws of physics and chemistry because they also contain a system of communications—in particular, the DNA molecule and the whole gene-expression system…as with other systems of communication, the lower-level laws of physics and chemistry cannot explain the higher-level properties of DNA. DNA base sequencing cannot be explained by lower-level chemical laws or properties any more than the information in a newspaper headline can be explained by reference to the chemical properties of ink.” He shares his thinking of Polanyi’s thoughts that led him to his own breakthrough on the idea that laws of attraction brought the four different amino acids together which would create the information that makes living things what they are. His final dismissal of the theories of attraction came from a simple view of a DNA diagram that he had seen many times before but now, with Polanyi thoughts in his head, he sees that “there are no differential bonding affinities there. Indeed, there is not just an absence of differing bonding affinities; there are no bonds at all between the critical information-bearing bases in DNA…A force has to exist before it can cause something. And the relevant kind of force in this case (differing chemical attractions between nucleotide bases) does not exist within the DNA molecule.” It is great having Meyer give us a step by step evolution of his thinking as he marshals his thoughts to give us a great explanation of what he considers to be the best explanation of the information coded in DNA: intelligent design. The tone is always respectful as he describes the different ideas floated around. He does take the liberty of using a “Cat in the Hat” idea of the “voom”, something that cleans messes up as something that evolutionists are looking for so they do not have to deal with the explaining of origin of life information. He will go on to talk about “RNA world” where the RNA appears and creates the DNA. All worth reading, but I enjoyed his take on all of the computer simulations that are used to find ways of creating life. They all proved his point. They were only valid when the programmer set winning parameters or set targets for the chance to find. What all the programs had in common was the touch of “intelligent design” provided by the writers of the programs. I will list his headings that describe “intelligent design” as the best explanation for the origin of life as exemplified by the information in DNA. 1. No Other Causally Adequate Explanations 2. Experimental Evidence Confirms Causal Adequacy of ID 3. ID is the Only Known Cause of Specified Information That last point has been illustrated in the book with several descriptions of classroom exercises involving random letters and locking mechanisms. These personal touches of life experiences made the book so much more readable and personable to me. I already have been using his letter illustrations when I talk with kids at school about the book I am reading. I have read several books conveying this same information and have found each of them enlightening. Meyer has repeated the job they have done, but has not just refuted Darwinism as previous authors have done; he has carefully placed an alternative explanation, intelligent design, right next to Darwinism for everyone to compare. I cannot recommend this book too strongly!!!
Review: Thorough Discussion of Leading Evolutionary Origin of Life Research & ID Theory - The author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, is the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, a former tenured professor at Whitworth University, the author of two other best-selling books, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis, and a contributing author to several other books and articles.1 Meyer received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in 1991 after earning an M.Phil from Cambridge in 1987 and working as a geophysicist from 1981-1985.1 Meyer is a founder of the intelligent design movement alongside others such as Michael Behe and William Dembski.2 Meyer personally adheres to an old-age view of creation as part of his Christian faith.2 Signature in the Cell presents a thorough argument for intelligent design as the ultimate origin of life by examining the specified complexity of genetic information packaged as DNA. Meyer unveils the intricacies of DNA with a progressive narrative tracing the historical scientific discovery of the DNA enigma and the present state of research including the implications that point to a designer as the best scientific explanation for the origin of information essential for life. First, Meyer develops the history of origin of life research and explores the implications of biological information in DNA. He demonstrates the improbability of the existence of the long pieces of information encoded in DNA (Shannon information) based on Claude Shannon’s “The Mathematical Theory of Communications” before articulating the second additionally astounding component of DNA information: functional specificity. Meyer explains that “building a living cell not only requires specified information; it requires a vast amount of it—and the probability of this amount of specified information arising by chance is ‘vanishingly small.’”3 Beyond this, he reveals a final layer of complexity in the need for “a sizable preexisting suite of proteins for processing that [DNA] information”3 that could only have arisen from preexisting proteins and DNA – a chicken and egg type problem that even current research could not explain from a purely naturalistic approach. Moreover, Meyer clarifies the superior explanatory power of intelligent design when compared to naturalistic origin of life theories. He exposits the careful approach of the scientific method to infer the best causal explanations for observed phenomena and elimination of illegitimate explanations. He specifically elucidates the causal adequacy criterion in historical science where historical scientists “identify causes that are known to have the power to produce the kind of effect, feature, or event in need of explanation”3 and reveals how scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Michael Scriven all affirm the importance of causal adequacy. Meyer then proceeds to demonstrate how intelligent design is the superior explanation for the origin of life as he develops the relationship between the specified complexity of DNA and the only observed source of specifically complex information in the universe: intelligent agents. Lastly, Meyer begins to conclude the book with the three reasons that convinced him of the superior explanatory power of intelligent design. First, the lack of other causally adequate explanations pushed Meyer away from “chance-based” naturalistic theories that did not explain the generation of information and only ignored the problem. In fact, research according to these theories demonstrated that specified complexity could not arise from undirected chemical processes, but it could arise experimentally with artificial direction from intelligent agents—humans. Thus, Meyer’s second reason the causal adequacy of intelligent design confirmed by experimental evidence including prebiotic simulation experiments by Miller, evolutionary algorithms by Richard Dawkins, and ribozyme engineering.3 Third, the fact that intelligent design is the only known cause of specified information convinced Meyer to fully embrace intelligent design. To conclude his work, Meyer humbly but directly confronts claims that intelligent design is a pseudoscience and only a religious viewpoint by again demonstrating its scientific validity and explaining why philosophical implications of an intelligent designer do not contradict the scientific validity of the intelligent design theory. Meyer’s work demonstrates three primary strengths. First, the writing and argumentation are exhaustingly thorough with very detailed and direct articulation of each concept. Second, the entire book contains excellent evidence and appropriate citations both in supporting intelligent design and in equitably presenting naturalistic viewpoints on the origin of life. Third, the content engages the reader through personal accounts and vivid illustrations that adequately model the scientific concepts presented to allow laypeople to adequately grasp the core ideas necessary to understand some basics of science and origin of life research. Meyer’s work exhibits one primary weakness: its age. Having been originally published in 2009, over a decade of research has been conducted since the book’s publication. Consequently, the book cannot address certain specific research studies that have been published after the book’s publication. A second smaller weakness is the book’s lengthiness. Excluding the bibliography, appendices, prologue, and epilogue, the main content of the book is a grueling 452 pages long. However, as aforementioned, the beneficial tradeoff is Meyer’s thoroughness and extensive argumentation for every concept. This book strengthened my understanding of the analytical aspect of specified complexity and the simple yet amazingly detailed revelation in nature of the intelligent designer. I never previously had delved into how DNA is more than complex; it is specified and carefully patterned like the intricate blueprints necessary for any engineering marvel. I enjoyed how the book acted as a guide exposing the intricacies of the purposefully designed instructions and machinery of the miniature factory of each cell. Overall, this book excellently presents the case for intelligent design through a careful examination of the cell’s biological coding and subsequent functionality. I would highly recommend this book for laypeople and professionals looking for a clear-cut and relatively concise defense of the intelligent design theory and thorough discussion of the scientific method. Literature Cited: 1. About. (n.d.). Stephen C. Meyer. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://stephencmeyer.org/about/ 2. “Scripture and Science in Conflict?: An Interview with Stephen C. Meyer by Stephen Meyer.” (n.d.). Ligonier Ministries. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/scripture-and-science-in-conflict 3. Meyer, S. C. (2009). Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #25,989 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #26 in Science & Religion (Books) #84 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books) #119 in Christian Apologetics (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.8 out of 5 stars 1,739 Reviews |

## Images

![Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design ― A Controversial Science Book on the Origin of Life and Molecular Machinery - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61MHeDoZUaL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Placing Intelligent Design right next to Darwinism for anyone to see
*by H***N on December 20, 2013*

I read “Signature in the Cell” by Stephen Meyer. What a fantastic journey through his mind as he shepherded the idea of making “intelligent design” an acceptable explanation for the origin of life in the scientific community. (This was the man who they talked about taking away his doctorate because he didn’t really believe the answers he had to put on tests in order to pass). It was this article that I read about a dean of philosophy, Thomas Nagel, who had been convinced to give up his Darwinian faith after reading Stephen’s book that got me to pick it up and read it. The world has always been viewed through history by leading scientists and philosophers concluding “that behind the exquisite structures of the living world was a designing intelligence”. This all changed with Darwin. Natural selection and mutations would now become the explanations of how we came to be. The discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick would present a dilemma to the scientific world: what is the origin of the biological information in DNA? Meyer gives us a history of evolutionist attempts to explain the origin of life. One section entitled “Oparin to the Rescue” tells of us a young Soviet scientist who proposes in 1922 that the chemical reactions taking place long ago were the original building blocks of life and afterwards Darwinian natural selection took over creating life. I love his Marxist motivations in seeing evolution as a proof of Marxist materialism. It was in 1953 that a experiment by Stanley Miller showed the possibility that lightning mixing with the prebiotic soup of the planet could create amino acids the building blocks of protein. This was a crown of glory for evolutionists searching for the origin of life. It was the other discovery in 1953 of DNA that would shake that crown off of their heads. Meyer gives us a great description of the factory within the cell. The centerpiece is the DNA and its ability to produce and transmit the code to building proteins. This peek into the molecular world is well done, but it also explains the “chicken or the egg” problem of DNA. “The production of proteins requires DNA, but the production of DNA requires proteins”. The problem is bigger than that as Meyer explains: “The discovery of life’s information-processing systems…has made it clear that scientists investigating the origin of life must now explain the origin of at lest three key features of life. First, they must explain the origin of the system for storing and encoding digital information in the cell, DNA’s capacity to store digitally encoded information. Second, they must explain the origin of the large amount of specified complexity or functionally specified information in DNA. Third, they must explain the origin of the integrated complexity—the functional interdependence of parts—of the cell’s information-processing system.” He will spend 8 chapters looking into the various attempts to explain this information phenomenon. He is doing this with an eye upon what will become obvious: creating information requires intelligence. Meyer is going to use his knowledge of “historical sciences” to put “intelligent design” right next to “Darwinian evolution”. The same reasoning that would allow one to stand or fall is the same reasoning that would allow the other to stand or fall as a potential explanation for the origin of life. This may seem unnecessary or too wordy; but in fact he is doing a beautiful job in making “intelligent design” a theory that cannot be dismissed. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both used “causes now in operation” to legitimize their theories. He is setting up the criteria for how “historical sciences” can be used by their determination of the “best” explanation for how something happened in the past. That sets the stage for his discussion of the many tributes to chance, necessity or a combination of the two that evolutionists use to explain the origin of life. He will quote college textbooks that will enshrine in young minds “the chance association” that created life. One text says: “Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable and the probable virtually certain.” He will team up with William Demski’s knowledge of mathematical odds to show that it is impossible for chance to be the explanation of creating a string of functional arrangement of bases and amino acids. He will refer to Douglas Axe: “Axe has compared the odds of producing a functional protein sequence of modes (150-amino-acid) length at random to the odds of finding a single marked atom out of all the atoms in our galaxy via a blind and undirected search.” What I found interesting in this discussion is that by 1966 many mathematicians were shocked to find biologists so willing to hang their theories of the origin of life on chance alone. He described a conference entitled: “Mathematical Challenges to Neo-Darwinism”. That conference ended with the biologists insisting that as long as their was a single possibility that it might of happened in a “cosmic jackpot” moment they were not willing to let go of that possibility as their official explanation. Not a lot has changed since then. He will deal with the ideas that DNA was a self organizing accident way back when. Even this accident if it could be shown to be chemically induced, cannot explain the intelligent data that the accident created. He refers to Michael Polanyi. “The flow of electricity obeys the laws of physics, but where the electricity flows in any particular machine depends upon the arrangement of its parts—which, in turn, depends on the design of an electrical engineer working according to engineering principles. And these engineering principles, Polanyi insisted, are distinct from the laws of physics and chemistry that they harness.” “The laws of acoustics and the properties of air do not determine which sounds are conveyed by speakers of natural languages. Neither do the chemical properties of ink determine the arrangements of letters on a printed page.” “Then he took a step that made his work directly relevant to the DNA enigma: he insisted that living things defy reduction to the laws of physics and chemistry because they also contain a system of communications—in particular, the DNA molecule and the whole gene-expression system…as with other systems of communication, the lower-level laws of physics and chemistry cannot explain the higher-level properties of DNA. DNA base sequencing cannot be explained by lower-level chemical laws or properties any more than the information in a newspaper headline can be explained by reference to the chemical properties of ink.” He shares his thinking of Polanyi’s thoughts that led him to his own breakthrough on the idea that laws of attraction brought the four different amino acids together which would create the information that makes living things what they are. His final dismissal of the theories of attraction came from a simple view of a DNA diagram that he had seen many times before but now, with Polanyi thoughts in his head, he sees that “there are no differential bonding affinities there. Indeed, there is not just an absence of differing bonding affinities; there are no bonds at all between the critical information-bearing bases in DNA…A force has to exist before it can cause something. And the relevant kind of force in this case (differing chemical attractions between nucleotide bases) does not exist within the DNA molecule.” It is great having Meyer give us a step by step evolution of his thinking as he marshals his thoughts to give us a great explanation of what he considers to be the best explanation of the information coded in DNA: intelligent design. The tone is always respectful as he describes the different ideas floated around. He does take the liberty of using a “Cat in the Hat” idea of the “voom”, something that cleans messes up as something that evolutionists are looking for so they do not have to deal with the explaining of origin of life information. He will go on to talk about “RNA world” where the RNA appears and creates the DNA. All worth reading, but I enjoyed his take on all of the computer simulations that are used to find ways of creating life. They all proved his point. They were only valid when the programmer set winning parameters or set targets for the chance to find. What all the programs had in common was the touch of “intelligent design” provided by the writers of the programs. I will list his headings that describe “intelligent design” as the best explanation for the origin of life as exemplified by the information in DNA. 1. No Other Causally Adequate Explanations 2. Experimental Evidence Confirms Causal Adequacy of ID 3. ID is the Only Known Cause of Specified Information That last point has been illustrated in the book with several descriptions of classroom exercises involving random letters and locking mechanisms. These personal touches of life experiences made the book so much more readable and personable to me. I already have been using his letter illustrations when I talk with kids at school about the book I am reading. I have read several books conveying this same information and have found each of them enlightening. Meyer has repeated the job they have done, but has not just refuted Darwinism as previous authors have done; he has carefully placed an alternative explanation, intelligent design, right next to Darwinism for everyone to compare. I cannot recommend this book too strongly!!!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Thorough Discussion of Leading Evolutionary Origin of Life Research & ID Theory
*by E***N on December 15, 2021*

The author of Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, is the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, a former tenured professor at Whitworth University, the author of two other best-selling books, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and The Return of the God Hypothesis, and a contributing author to several other books and articles.1 Meyer received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in 1991 after earning an M.Phil from Cambridge in 1987 and working as a geophysicist from 1981-1985.1 Meyer is a founder of the intelligent design movement alongside others such as Michael Behe and William Dembski.2 Meyer personally adheres to an old-age view of creation as part of his Christian faith.2 Signature in the Cell presents a thorough argument for intelligent design as the ultimate origin of life by examining the specified complexity of genetic information packaged as DNA. Meyer unveils the intricacies of DNA with a progressive narrative tracing the historical scientific discovery of the DNA enigma and the present state of research including the implications that point to a designer as the best scientific explanation for the origin of information essential for life. First, Meyer develops the history of origin of life research and explores the implications of biological information in DNA. He demonstrates the improbability of the existence of the long pieces of information encoded in DNA (Shannon information) based on Claude Shannon’s “The Mathematical Theory of Communications” before articulating the second additionally astounding component of DNA information: functional specificity. Meyer explains that “building a living cell not only requires specified information; it requires a vast amount of it—and the probability of this amount of specified information arising by chance is ‘vanishingly small.’”3 Beyond this, he reveals a final layer of complexity in the need for “a sizable preexisting suite of proteins for processing that [DNA] information”3 that could only have arisen from preexisting proteins and DNA – a chicken and egg type problem that even current research could not explain from a purely naturalistic approach. Moreover, Meyer clarifies the superior explanatory power of intelligent design when compared to naturalistic origin of life theories. He exposits the careful approach of the scientific method to infer the best causal explanations for observed phenomena and elimination of illegitimate explanations. He specifically elucidates the causal adequacy criterion in historical science where historical scientists “identify causes that are known to have the power to produce the kind of effect, feature, or event in need of explanation”3 and reveals how scientists such as Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Michael Scriven all affirm the importance of causal adequacy. Meyer then proceeds to demonstrate how intelligent design is the superior explanation for the origin of life as he develops the relationship between the specified complexity of DNA and the only observed source of specifically complex information in the universe: intelligent agents. Lastly, Meyer begins to conclude the book with the three reasons that convinced him of the superior explanatory power of intelligent design. First, the lack of other causally adequate explanations pushed Meyer away from “chance-based” naturalistic theories that did not explain the generation of information and only ignored the problem. In fact, research according to these theories demonstrated that specified complexity could not arise from undirected chemical processes, but it could arise experimentally with artificial direction from intelligent agents—humans. Thus, Meyer’s second reason the causal adequacy of intelligent design confirmed by experimental evidence including prebiotic simulation experiments by Miller, evolutionary algorithms by Richard Dawkins, and ribozyme engineering.3 Third, the fact that intelligent design is the only known cause of specified information convinced Meyer to fully embrace intelligent design. To conclude his work, Meyer humbly but directly confronts claims that intelligent design is a pseudoscience and only a religious viewpoint by again demonstrating its scientific validity and explaining why philosophical implications of an intelligent designer do not contradict the scientific validity of the intelligent design theory. Meyer’s work demonstrates three primary strengths. First, the writing and argumentation are exhaustingly thorough with very detailed and direct articulation of each concept. Second, the entire book contains excellent evidence and appropriate citations both in supporting intelligent design and in equitably presenting naturalistic viewpoints on the origin of life. Third, the content engages the reader through personal accounts and vivid illustrations that adequately model the scientific concepts presented to allow laypeople to adequately grasp the core ideas necessary to understand some basics of science and origin of life research. Meyer’s work exhibits one primary weakness: its age. Having been originally published in 2009, over a decade of research has been conducted since the book’s publication. Consequently, the book cannot address certain specific research studies that have been published after the book’s publication. A second smaller weakness is the book’s lengthiness. Excluding the bibliography, appendices, prologue, and epilogue, the main content of the book is a grueling 452 pages long. However, as aforementioned, the beneficial tradeoff is Meyer’s thoroughness and extensive argumentation for every concept. This book strengthened my understanding of the analytical aspect of specified complexity and the simple yet amazingly detailed revelation in nature of the intelligent designer. I never previously had delved into how DNA is more than complex; it is specified and carefully patterned like the intricate blueprints necessary for any engineering marvel. I enjoyed how the book acted as a guide exposing the intricacies of the purposefully designed instructions and machinery of the miniature factory of each cell. Overall, this book excellently presents the case for intelligent design through a careful examination of the cell’s biological coding and subsequent functionality. I would highly recommend this book for laypeople and professionals looking for a clear-cut and relatively concise defense of the intelligent design theory and thorough discussion of the scientific method. Literature Cited: 1. About. (n.d.). Stephen C. Meyer. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://stephencmeyer.org/about/ 2. “Scripture and Science in Conflict?: An Interview with Stephen C. Meyer by Stephen Meyer.” (n.d.). Ligonier Ministries. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/scripture-and-science-in-conflict 3. Meyer, S. C. (2009). Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A fair and comprehensive treatment of the issues involved.
*by G***D on October 24, 2010*

Having spent most of my career working in applied science (electrical engineering, software engineering), it was the recognition of control-systems in nature (e.g., the flight of the hummingbird, dragonfly, and butterfly) and the design required to make them viable which, in part, led me to eventually reject the Darwinism in which I was inculcated from my youth and to seek a more viable explanation for our origin. This, in turn, led to a reexamination of the Bible - which I had thoroughly rejected in my earlier years - and my eventual arrival as a convinced creationist and born-again Christian at the age of 34. Since the question of origins figured so importantly in my unexpected conversion, upon initially becoming a Christian I had a fairly extensive library on the related subjects. However, as I grew in my time as a Christian, I came to understand my primary calling to be that of understanding and teaching the Bible itself. Thus, over time, my focus shifted away from science/apologetics and increasingly toward the Scriptures. Yet, over the years, I have maintained a healthy interest in the subject of origins and apologetic evidence that the world around us reveals compelling evidence for a Master Designer (Rom. 1:20), rather than being the unintentional achievement of chance over vast ages of time. And so it was with great interest that I purchased the kindle edition of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell at the recommendation of a colleague. I was not disappointed! It seems to me (and many others) that this book is destined to become a classic of our time. Not only is it very readable, but manages to take some fairly complex aspects of microbiology and genetics and make them (mostly) accessible to anyone who would care to spend the time to find out why the "open and shut case" for Darwinism, despite the media and educational system's best efforts to convince us, remains anything but "a fact." (To be fair, Meyer's treatment concerns information needed for the origin of life, not so much the possibility of subsequent descent with modification which is the domain Darwin's theory. Of course there is still the question as to whether such modifications produce or damage information - creationists asserting the latter. But this is not treated by Meyer as he has more than enough on his plate. If he can make the case that life cannot realistically arise by chance, then the case for intelligence as the best explanation stands.) At issue, is information. Two exciting technologically-driven developments are happening in tandem which have the potential to topple the reigning paradigm of Darwinism: 1) biotechnology has uncovered the stunningly complex world within the "simple cell"; 2) our information age is bringing an increasing appreciation among the general populace concerning the nature of information and how it is produced. Concerning this second aspect, Meyer observes: "We live in a technological culture familiar with the utility of information. We buy information; we sell it; and we send it down wires. We devise machines to store and retrieve it. We pay programmers and writers to create it. And we enact laws to protect the "intellectual property" of those who do. Our actions show that we not only value information, but that we regard it as a real entity, on par with matter and energy. [Par. 283]" The wonderful and mysterious thing about information is that it goes beyond the strictly material realm - pushing into regions which modern "science education" has often sought to rule as "off-limits" from rational investigation - seeking rulings in the court systems to prohibit the use of information as evidence as if it were purely the realm of fantasies and fairies. Far from such flights of fancy, it is this mysterious information which is at the heart of the computer revolution itself: "A blank magnetic tape, for example, weighs just as much as one "loaded" with new software--or with the entire sequence of the human genome. Though these tapes differ in information content (and value), they do not do so because of differences in their material composition or mass. [Par. 310]" Day-to-day, our culture completely relies on this mysterious immaterial entity: "When a personal assistant in New York types a dictation and then prints and sends the result via fax to Los Angeles, some thing will arrive in L.A. But that thing--the paper coming out of the fax machine--did not originate in New York. Only the information on the paper came from New York. No single physical substance--not the air that carried the boss's words to the dictaphone, or the recording tape in the tiny machine, or the paper that entered the fax in New York, or the ink on the paper coming out of the fax in Los Angeles--traveled all the way from sender to receiver. Yet something did. [Par. 303]" It turns out that one of the central points of the book concerns the question of where information originates? Meyer makes the case that the only known source of specified information is intelligence. In fact, the book becomes a guided tour of sorts where the reader accompanies Meyer turning over various popular stones (theories) to find whether the sort of information evident within biological systems can truly be said to be found under one of them. Of course, those with a Biblical conviction know that there is One Stone which contains the explanation for the origin of specified complexity, but this stone, as we know, is one which cannot be admitted into the classroom because it involves the realm of the supernatural which the hobbled "what we see is all there is"science of our day has ruled as outside of the realm of rationality and therefore as inadmissible for consideration. And so "common sense" has been ruled "nonsense": "Our commonsense reasoning might lead us to conclude that the information necessary to the first life, like the information in human technology or literature, arose from a designing intelligence. But modern evolutionary biology rejects this idea. [Par. 348]" And so we have this perplexing situation where the only known source of information is intelligence (which, interestingly, has no meaning except as it becomes evident to other intelligent agents), but the study of its origin and the obvious implications - intelligent design - is deemed as "unintelligent" and a simple repackaging of "creationism under the covers." (Meyer makes a sound and important case that intelligent design is not creationism, nor can or should it be.) Although the implications of information found in biology and living systems are off-limits in the classroom, the man-in-the-street is well equipped to recognize such implications in other areas more visible to the senses: "Visitors to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota infer the past action of intelligent design upon seeing some unusual shapes etched in the rock face. Why? The shapes on the hillside are certainly unusual and irregularly shaped, and thus, in this context, improbable. But beyond that, observers recognize a pattern in the shapes that they know from an independent realm of experience, from seeing the faces of ex-presidents in photographs or paintings. The patterns on the mountain match patterns the observers know from elsewhere. [Par. 5821]" For those of us with experience in the information sciences this inability to admit evidence of information pointing to intelligence into the classroom borders on lunacy. How can it be off-limits to talk about the implications of information in living systems in the classroom when the larger part of the technological revolution is entirely dependent on advances in information produced by the benefits of science and engineering through agents of rational intelligence? No, we are urged, the rational way to explain all this complexity is chance (which nobody has ever seen clean a garage!). Even worse, this is the best we hold out for the hope of a meaningful life to our students! Be motivated! Have a fulfilling and challenging life! Go out and change the world! But just remember: in the end, you are nothing more than random chemistry which slithered out of a pool of slime. Meyer draws upon the work of mathematician William Dembski in several chapters when discussing the type of information which Meyer and other intelligent design advocates are on about. This is very helpful information because it distinguishes between chance events which are sure to happen verses those which surpass available probabilistic resources. "Dembski illustrated this by asking me to imagine flipping a coin 100 times and then writing down the exact sequence of heads and tails that turned up. He pointed out that if I was bored enough to do this, I would actually participate in an incredibly unlikely event. The precise sequence that occurred would have a probability of 1 chance in 2 to-the-100th (or approximately 1 in 10-to-the-30th). Yet the improbability of this event did not mean that something other than chance was responsible. After all, some sequence of that improbability had to happen. Why not this one? [Par. 2950] . . . the occurrence of an improbable event alone does not justify eliminating the chance hypothesis. [Par. 3076]" The fact that we view the particular sequence of coin tosses that was generated as being insignificant is another indicator that intelligence was not involved. As Meyer makes plain in his discussion, we humans have a built-in baloney detector of sorts which we use everyday to distinguish between events which are realistically produced by chance from those which we deem to be "crooked" or "rigged." We deem chance outcomes to be crooked or rigged (unfairly influenced toward a decided outcome) when we notice patterns or specified (pre-determined) results: "How improbable does an event have to be to justify the elimination of a chance hypothesis? If we begin to detect a pattern in an improbable sequence of events, at what point should our doubts about the chance hypothesis lead us to reject it as untenable or unreasonable? As a blackjack player repeatedly wins against the house, or a ball repeatedly falls in the same hole, or as a die repeatedly comes up on the same side, or as we observe an event that implies that great odds were overcome in the past--at what point do we finally conclude that enough is enough, that something besides chance must be in play? How improbable is too improbable? The answer is, "That depends." It depends on the improbability of the event in question. But it also depends upon how many opportunities there are to generate the event. [Par. 3086]" This is a key theme of the book: the question is not whether chance can produce results, but what kind of results chance can realistically produce given the amount of time and the specificity of the required outcome. Chance can and does produce results -- indeed must produce a result whenever it operates. The question is whether the result squares with the odds required based on the time, resources, and intentional specificity (designed complexity or purpose) of the result. This specified information is the polar opposite of random noise -- which every communication engineer well knows. And it is precisely the difference between noise and specified patterns, in a communication signal for example, which encodes information which finds its origin (and any interpretive meaning) in intelligence. But this is saying nothing more than the SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project takes at face value: the reception of an encoded signal of specified complexity from deep space would rightly be deemed evidence of intelligence. So here we have a group of critical thinking scientists searching the skies on a project (often fawned over by the media and intelligentsia) seeking evidence and using methodology which has been ruled as "non-science" by our courts and deemed inadmissible to your average school classroom. Go figure! No wonder we are producing confused students these days?! Along the way, Meyer discusses the probability associated with generating a modest protein (which, by the way, is just a small part of what would be needed for life): The odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance from a prebiotic soup is no better than 1 chance in 10-to-the-164th. [Par. 3467]" "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. [Par. 3477]" He also produces a calculation by Demski, which generously allows a long-age universe with every observable particle dedicated to another chance attempt each second to show that the odds related to the simple protein far exceed the probabilistic resources of the universe. This rather sobering reality doesn't stop some cosmologists who retreat to mathematical theory in an attempt to envision an"inflationary cosmology" allowing for an essentially limitless number of parallel universes in a vain attempt to bolster the probabilistic resources. Never mind that much of the theory involved has more in common with a belief in pink elephants and Alice in Wonderland than reality. "Consider the "Boltzmann brain" phenomenon, for example, over which quantum cosmologists have been greatly exercised. Within inflationary cosmology, it is theoretically possible for a fully functioning human brain to pop spontaneously into existence, due to thermal fluctuations in the quantum vacuum, and then disappear again. Such an entity has been called a "Boltzmann brain." Under standard conditions for bubble-universe generation in inflationary cosmology, Boltzmann brains would be expected to arise as often, or more often, than normal occurrences in our universe. Indeed, calculations based upon some inflationary cosmological models lead to a situation in which these free-floating Boltzmann brains infinitely outnumber normal brains in people like us. [Par. 8511]" Because of Meyer's background in the history of science, some of the most interesting parts of the book discuss developments and approaches to science, including events leading to the famous discovery of the double-helix of DNA. Meyer is no slouch when it comes to biological systems, following a path through numerous alternative theories which have been put forth as the odds have continued to grow against a chance explanation for the origin of living systems. For example, one such theory which is presently thought to offer relief in the beleaguered quest to explain life without an intelligence cause (the "RNA world") is shown to be of little help in truly addressing issues of the origin of the needed information. An especially helpful aspect of the book is a brief analysis of algorithmic examples and computer programs which are put forth in an attempt to show that complex information can be produced without intelligence. In every case, the experiment itself is shown to be tainted by the introduction of the intelligence of the experimenters themselves, usually in subtle and unintentional ways which are not valid. It turns out to be a bit like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in that the study of the unintelligent origin of information by experiments set up by intelligent agents is fraught with the subtle coupling of intelligence into the experimental system or procedure. As a software developer, this is something I'd been convinced of when reading extravagant claims of computer-based "proofs of evolution" even before reading Meyer. "...the very fact that these experiments required so much intervention seemed significant. By involving "programming" and "engineering" in simulations of the origin of life, these new approaches had introduced an elephant into the room that no one wanted to talk about, especially not in the methods sections of scientific papers. [Par. 5303]" Meyer exposes similar experimental corruption in relation to "prebiotic soup" origin of life experiments where conditions are carefully controlled by the intelligence of the experimenters who are seeking to show how the results could all come about by chance. "Most origin-of-life researchers recognized that, even if there had been a favorable prebiotic soup, many destructive chemical processes would have necessarily been at work at the same time. Simulation experiments of the type performed by Stanley Miller had repeatedly demonstrated this. They have invariably produced nonbiological substances in addition to biological building blocks such as amino acids. Without intelligent intervention, these other substances will react readily with biologically relevant building blocks to form biologically irrelevant compounds--chemically insoluble sludge. To prevent this from happening and to move the simulation of chemical evolution along a biologically promising trajectory, experimenters often remove those chemicals that degrade or transform amino acids into nonbiologically relevant compounds. They also must artificially manipulate the initial conditions in their experiments. For example, rather than using both short-and long-wavelength ultraviolet light, which would have been present in any realistic early atmosphere, they use only short-wavelength UV. Why? The presence of the long-wavelength UV light quickly degrades amino acids. [Par. 3712]" Given the breadth and depth of the book, it is nearly impossible to touch on all that is valuable in the text. Suffice it to say that the book is a tour de force treatment of the secular (but not Biblical) puzzle of the origin of life and related topics. Time and time again, Meyer returns to the same quandary: intelligent design is admissible as applied in various venues of historical investigation (involving abductive reasoning), but for some reason it is ruled out in relation to biological analysis of how life came to be. One can sense his frustration at this unfairness in numerous passages. For example: "... anthropologists who discovered the ancient cave paintings in Lascaux, France, knew of only one cause capable of producing representational art. Consequently, they inferred the past activity and presence of intelligent agents. Moreover, they could make this inference confidently without any other evidence that intelligent agents had been present, because the presence of the paintings alone established the probable presence of the only known type of cause--intelligence--of such a thing. [Par. 5421]" "in hypothetical and real-world cases, the inference to intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of specified information is straightforward and unproblematic--except, for some, when considering the origin of life. [Par. 6545]" As important and needed as the intelligent design movement is, it can only go so far. It can point to the evidence for an active intelligence. It can even infer some of the attributes of that intelligence (e.g., the more sophisticated the information, its encoding, and its associated storage and transmission system, the higher the intelligence). But it can never escape beyond the "glass ceiling" of nature to the intelligence itself. As Christians, we know that this is where natural revelation reaches its limits and special revelation (the Bible) enter the picture. And the Bible makes plain that although God speaks through both (Ps. 19), where man has only natural revelation at his disposal, he is considered to be lost and in great darkness (Isa. 9:2; Luke 1:79). Thus, intelligent design can point to an intelligence, but cannot answer whether that intelligence be a Designer with a capital "D." Nor can it convey His self-revelation to His Creatures. This is the proper and admitted limit of the intelligent design movement. Without special revelation, it is unable to provide answers which only God's self-revelation can provide. Especially as to why it is that men admit information as evidence of intelligence in many venues of historical investigation except those of a cosmological nature with associated teleological implications? For these answers, we must turn to special revelation: "John 3:19-20 And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed."

---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.jp/products/1695408-signature-in-the-cell-dna-and-the-evidence-for-intelligent](https://www.desertcart.jp/products/1695408-signature-in-the-cell-dna-and-the-evidence-for-intelligent)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Japan*
*Store origin: JP*
*Last updated: 2026-10-04*