What Is Intelligent Design? — Science and God | 5 Minute Video — Transcript

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1. 0:01Chances are if you've heard  anything about intelligent design,
2. 0:05you’ve heard that it's a “faith-based,”  not a “science-based” idea.
3. 0:09Or maybe you’ve even heard it’s  “religion masquerading as science.”
4. 0:13Is that true?
5. 0:14Well, why don’t you decide?
6. 0:16According to evolutionary biologists such  as Richard Dawkins of Oxford University,
7. 0:21living systems “give the appearance of  having been designed for a purpose.”
8. 0:25But that appearance is merely an illusion.
9. 0:28Why?
10. 0:29Well, according to Dawkins and his followers,  undirected processes such as natural selection
11. 0:35and random mutations can produce the intricate  design-like structures in living systems.
12. 0:41In their view, natural selection can mimic  the powers of a designing intelligence
13. 0:45without being guided or directed in any way.
14. 0:49In contrast, the proponents of intelligent  design argue there are tell-tale features
15. 0:54of living systems and the universe that are  best explained by a designing intelligence.
16. 1:00So what tell-tale signs of  intelligence are we talking about?
17. 1:04There are many. But let’s focus here on just  one—the digital code stored in the DNA molecule.
18. 1:11In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick mapped  out the structure of the DNA molecule. Along
19. 1:19the interior of their famed double helix, they  discovered a four-character code at work.
20. 1:25They soon realized that sequences  of precisely positioned chemicals
21. 1:30called “nucleotide bases” store and transmit  the assembly instructions—the information—for
22. 1:36building the crucial protein molecules that cells  need to survive. No protein molecules, no life.
23. 1:44Crick later proposed that the  chemical constituents in DNA
24. 1:48function like letters in a written language  or digital symbols in a computer code.
25. 1:54Just as a well-functioning computer code depends  upon precise sequences of zeros and ones,
26. 2:00so too does the function of the DNA molecule  depend upon the specific arrangement
27. 2:04of chemical bases along the  spine of the double helix.
28. 2:09Famed biotech specialist Leroy Hood describes the  information stored in DNA as “digital code.” Even
29. 2:17Richard Dawkins has acknowledged, “the machine  code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.”
30. 2:23But where did this information, this digital  code, come from? Today this question lies at
31. 2:29the heart of a great scientific mystery:  the mystery of the origin of life.
32. 2:35Building a living cell requires many proteins.
33. 2:38And building proteins requires genetic information  in DNA or some other equivalent molecule.
34. 2:44Yet to date no theory of undirected chemical  evolution can explain the origin of the digital
35. 2:50information needed to build the first living  cell from simpler non-living chemicals—in
36. 2:57other words, the problem of  getting life from non-life.
37. 3:00Why is this a problem? There is simply too much  information in the cell to be explained by chance
38. 3:06alone. The probability of generating a section of  DNA code capable of building just one functional
39. 3:13protein by chance is vanishingly small, even  taking into account the multi-billion-year history
40. 3:20of the universe. And even the simplest  living cells require hundreds of proteins.
41. 3:26Thus, the “given enough time anything  is possible” argument no longer works.
42. 3:32Origin of life researchers agree:  the chance hypothesis has failed.
43. 3:37Chemistry doesn’t help us, either. Unlike basic  chemical compounds, like a crystal of salt, the
44. 3:44chemical letters in the DNA message do not arrange  themselves as a result of mutual attraction.
45. 3:50Saying otherwise would be like saying  that the message in a newspaper headline
46. 3:54could spontaneously emerge because  of the way that ink sticks to paper.
47. 3:59Clearly “something else” is at work.  In this case, a newspaper editor.
48. 4:04Yet, proponents of intelligent design do  not argue for the theory because all these
49. 4:08other theories—chance, chemical laws or some  combination—have failed. Instead, they argue
50. 4:15for intelligent design because our uniform and  repeated experience—the basis of all scientific
51. 4:20reasoning—shows that systems with digital  information invariably arise from intelligence.
52. 4:27DNA functions like a software  program. We know from experience that
53. 4:31software comes from programmers.  We know that  information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics,
54. 4:37written in a book or encoded in a radio  signal—always arises from an intelligent source.
55. 4:43So, the discovery of information at the foundation  of life in even the simplest living cells provides
56. 4:50strong grounds for inferring that a designing  intelligence played a role in the origin of life.
57. 4:56So, contrary to what you might have heard,  intelligent design is not based on religion
58. 5:01but on scientific discoveries. It is also based  upon the same method of scientific reasoning
59. 5:06that Charles Darwin used—a method that relies  on our uniform experience of cause and effect
60. 5:12to guide our theories about  what happened in the past.
61. 5:17You may still wish to dismiss the  theory of intelligent design—you’re
62. 5:20free to believe whatever you like — but you’ll  have a hard time doing so based on “The Science.”
63. 5:26I’m Stephen Meyer, of the Discovery Institute,
64. 5:29and author of Signature in the  Cell, for Prager University.