Dr. Stephen Meyer

Because what we know from experience is that information always comes from a mind.

And so that's one of the key arguments for design in my book, Signature in the Cell.

And also it's the third act in the film we have coming out.

Well, there was an argument for a while that said, well, look, there's a universality of the code, that all organisms use the same genetic code.

They have different text, different instructions, but the text is translated according to the same genetic code.

That turns out no longer to be the case.

There's, I think, something like 22 different codes that have been discovered.

So the idea that the universality of the code points to a common ancestor I don't think works.

There's other reasons, I think, to doubt the universal common ancestor thesis, and that's coming out in a lot of different branches of science.

One has to do with another thing that's been discovered in the genome, which is that these are called orphan genes.

And that is that if you look across the phylogenetic,

landscape, all the different kinds of animals and plants there are.

On a Darwinian view of things, every gene, every sequence of A, Cs, Gs, and Ts, the genetic letters, should have some closely related sequence in some other organism.

And what we're finding is that across the landscape of different types of plants and animals, that there are

These genes that have no known similarity to any other genes.

They're discontinuous.

And so that's not what you'd expect on a Darwinian view of things.

The Darwinian view of things, you'd expect everything to be closely related to something else so that you could depict the history of life as a great continuous branching tree.

Instead, we have these discontinuous branches.

representations of gene sequences that do completely unique things in different phylogenetic categories of life.