DNA and the Origin of Life

原版英文文献By: Stephen C. MeyerDarwinism, Design, and Public EducationJune 30, 2007

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原版英文文献By: Stephen C. MeyerDarwinism, Design, and Public EducationJune 30, 2007

DNA and the Origin of Life:

Information, Speci cation, and Explanation

Stephen C. Meyer

QQQ

Theories about the origin of life necessarily presuppose knowledge of theattributes of living cells. As historian of biology Harmke Kamminga hasobserved, “At the heart of the problem of the origin of life lies a funda-mental question: What is it exactly that we are trying to explain the originof?”1Or as the pioneering chemical evolutionary theorist AlexanderOparin put it, “The problem of the nature of life and the problem of its ori-gin have become inseparable.”2Origin-of-life researchers want to explainthe origin of the rst and presumably simplest—or, at least, minimallycomplex—living cell. As a result, developments in elds that explicate thenature of unicellular life have historically de ned the questions that origin-of-life scenarios must answer.

Since the late 1950s and 1960s, origin-of-life researchers have increas-ingly recognized the complex and speci c nature of unicellular life and thebiomacromolecules on which such systems depend. Further, molecular biol-ogists and origin-of-life researchers have characterized this complexity andspeci city in informational terms. Molecular biologists routinely refer toDNA, RNA, and proteins as carriers or repositories of “information.”3Manyorigin-of-life researchers now regard the origin of the information in these

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原版英文文献By: Stephen C. MeyerDarwinism, Design, and Public EducationJune 30, 2007

224Stephen C. Meyer

biomacromolecules as the central question facing their research. As Bernd-Olaf Kuppers has stated, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basicallyequivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”4

This essay will evaluate competing explanations for the origin of the in-formation necessary to build the rst living cell. To do so will require de-termining what biologists have meant by the term informationas it hasbeen applied to biomacromolecules. As many have noted, “information”can denote several theoretically distinct concepts. This essay will attempt toeliminate this ambiguity and to determine precisely what type of informa-tion origin-of-life researchers must explain “the origin of.” What followswill rst seek to characterizethe information in DNA, RNA, and proteins asan explanandum(a fact in need of explanation) and, second, to evaluatetheef cacy of competingclasses of explanation for the origin of biological in-formation(that is,thecompetingexplanans).

Part I will seek to show that molecular biologists have used the term in-formation consistently to refer to the joint properties of complexity and func-tional specificityor specification.Biological usage of the term will becontrasted with its classical information-theoretic usage to show that “bio-logical information” entails a richer sense of information than the classicalmathematical theory of Shannon and Wiener. Part I will also argue againstattempts to treat biological “information” as a metaphor lacking empiricalcontent and/or ontological status.5It will show that the term biological in-formationrefers to two real features of living systems, complexity and speci- city, features that jointly do require explanation.

Part II will evaluate competing types of explanation for the origin of thespeci ed biological information necessary to produce the rst living sys-tem. The categories of “chance” and “necessity” will provide a helpfulheuristic for understanding the recent history of origin-of-life research.From the 1920s to the mid-1960s, origin-of-life researchers relied heavilyon theories emphasizing the creative role of random events—”chance”—often in tandem with some form of prebiotic natural selection. Since thelate 1960s, theorists have instead emphasized deterministic self-organiza-tional laws or properties—that is, physical-chemical “necessity.”

Part II will critique the causal adequacy of chemical evolutionary theo-ries based on “chance,” “necessity,” and the combination of the two.

A concluding part III will suggest that the phenomenon of informationunderstood as speci ed complexity requires a radically different explana-tory approach. In particular, I will argue that our present knowledge ofcausal powers suggests intelligent design as a better, more causally

原版英文文献By: Stephen C. MeyerDarwinism, Design, and Public EducationJune 30, 2007

DNA and the Origin of Life225

adequate explanation for the origin of the speci ed complexity (the infor-mation so de ned) present in large biomolecules such as DNA, RNA, andproteins.

I.

A. Simple to Complex: