It Only Gets Deeper

A Review of The Mystery of Life's Origin: The Continuing Controversy

In 1984, three scientists, chemist Charles Thaxton, physicist Walter Bradley, and geochemist Roger Olsen, published The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. They examined then-current origin-of-life theories and argued in extensive detail that all scenarios thus far proposed had failed. Moreover, there was a shortcoming in any theory involving purely chemical processes acting on non-living materials, and the flaw was not merely ancillary but fundamental. The central problem, they said, was the problem of the origin of the biological information necessary to build the first living cell. They concluded that an adequate theory required a source of information capable of building substantial chemical complexity. In other words, an intelligent cause was necessary.

Thirty-five years later, this central problem remains. And so, the book has been republished. The Mystery of Life's Origin: The Continuing Controversy contains the full text of the original, lightly updated, plus several new chapters elaborating on the state of the debate today. Here's a sampling:

• In "We're Still Clueless About the Origin of Life," synthetic chemist James Tour says that the problem is only getting bigger as more is learned about the complexity of the cell. He also sharply criticizes the overconfidence and exaggerations emanating from the origin-of-life community, which mislead the public about the state of current knowledge.

• In "Textbooks Still Misrepresent the Origin of Life," Jonathan Wells shows how high-school and college textbooks are still misleading students as well, especially with respect to the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment.

• In "Thermodynamic Challenges to the Origin of Life," physicist Brian Miller argues that all origin-of-life scenarios appear to be "thermodynamically implausible." In simple terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that, left alone, a system will always progress from order to disorder, never the reverse. Yet, all origin-of-life theories propose some manner of "the reverse."

In the final chapter, Stephen Meyer expands on the central problem of biological information. When biologists use the term "information," they are referring to two real features of living systems—complexity and functional specificity. The two are related. By the 1960s, biologists had discovered that proteins had extraordinarily complex, irregular, three-dimensional shapes, and that a given protein's unique shape determined its function. They also knew that the instructions for building proteins lay in the arrangement of nucleotide bases along a section of the DNA molecule. Put differently, the coding regions of DNA contain information that functions like a software program specifying the precise form and function of a protein molecule. This is what is meant by functional specificity.

From there, Meyer evaluates the competing types of explanations proposed to date and shows that all are inadequate. And finally, like the three original authors before him, he puts forth intelligent design as a more causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified complexity we see in large biomolecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins. This is not, as ID critics say, a "God of the gaps" argument or an argument from ignorance. Rather, as Meyer explains, "Experience shows that large amounts of such information (especially when digitally or alphabetically encoded) invariably originate from an intelligent source . . . intelligent activity is the only known cause of the origin of functionally specified information."

Mystery is a devastating critique of naturalistic origin-of-life science, made all the more formidable by the 35-year history behind it. It's an excellent resource for equipping a new generation of scientists to consider intelligence as the source of the information at the heart of life.