Dr. John Ankerberg: There are some scientists that are saying, "Hey, you can take a crystal and you can come back with a pretty complex form." Is there a difference, David, between form and complexity?

Dr. David Menton: Life has often been associated with the process of crystallization, although one investigator once suggested that crystallization was perhaps a better model of death than it was of life. Since it’s hardly a creative process, it tends to lock into a rather fixed pattern.

In fact, I’m told that there are really only 32 fundamentally different crystal lattices in nature. Whether this is true or not, crystals reflect the organization of the atoms that make them up. This has led some people to conclude that life itself is merely a matter of chemistry. That is, chemical reactions do occur. If you put zinc metal into hydrochloric acid, you will, under standard conditions, produce zinc chloride (which is now a new chemical), and free hydrogen gas. And this reaction will continue to go in the direction of producing hydrogen gas until you’ve used up all the components. And so it’s been argued that since living organisms, living cells, are made of chemicals, then we ought to be able to account for the origin of cells and the origin of life from what we know about ordinary chemistry.

But what this argument overlooks, in my view, is the important role of the informational macromolecule. The sequence of bases, which is the code in DNA, determines the sequence of amino acids, which we now know makes protein. Typical protein contains about 500 of these amino acids and they have to be in a particular order. And that order is dictated by the DNA. There are four different bases in the DNA and they are put together in groups of three and this triplet code is able to then code for more than enough amino acids to account for the 20 different amino acids that have to be dealt with. Thus, we call it a redundant code—that is there is one more than one combination that can code for a particular amino acid.

But if we use our ordinary experience in life, if we use our experience of chemistry, there is nothing that we know about chemistry to suggest that chemistry can produce information. We’re not simply talking about order, such as in a crystal. We’re talking about information.

Now what’s the difference? Suppose, if you will, that you have two neighbors. One neighbor has put up a picket fence, and we can admire his craftsmanship. He has carefully alternated long boards, short boards, long board, short board. We would call this certainly a well-ordered fence. It’s the neighbor next door we are kind of wondering about. He has also put up a picket fence, but his looks entirely different. There appear to be boards missing. Sometimes there are two short boards together, sometimes a long and a short, sometimes we see a little group of long boards and a little group of short boards.

Which of these two fences has the most order, in the sense of the crystal? Well, the first one has the most order. But is the other one chaos? Well it could be. It could just be chaos. But if we looked carefully at these fences and we applied modern information theory to them, we would see that there is in fact a coding convention being used in the second fence.

And this coding convention is kind of interesting because the second neighbor isn’t just trying to build a simple fence. He is trying to make a point. He has used boards to write International Morse Code. He’s used short boards for dots and he’s used long boards for dashes. And so, using International Morse Code, he has spelled out a message.

Now, imagine the information set that would be necessary to describe these two things. The first fence would be like a crystal: a very, very short information set. That is, instructions for building this fence would be simple. We could reduce the instructions for building this fence to the following total amount: "Take a stack of long boards and short boards, then put up a long board, then equal distance away put up a short board, and continue in this fashion until you run out of boards." That’s the entire information set of this highly ordered crystal-like structure.

What’s the information set for the second fence? Well, first of all we have to have a language. What language did you want to work with? English, French, Italian? Once we have a language, we have to have logic and thought. Using the example Dr. Gish gave us of "S-O-S", we have to know what distress signals are all about, the meaning assigned to "s-o-s", and what it means to be distressed and what it means to send help and all that.

And what is the information set for putting this fence together? Well, first of all, you would have to spell out the language you’re going to use. Then you would have to spell out a coding system for each of the letters of this language. How many letters do we have in English? Twenty six letters, then if we count the space as a 27th, we would then be able to generate a code.

And with this code, International Morse Code, which is nothing but dots and dashes, we can spell out all the literature written by mankind. Think of it, with no more than dots and dashes, all of the literature, all of the sonnets of Shakespeare, for starters could be written with dots and dashes. Now tell me, if we could synthesize dots and dashes in the laboratory, which is basically what we’ve done in synthesizing amino acids, could we say that we are very close to Shakespeare’s sonnets? How close do dots and dashes get us to the sonnets of Shakespeare? Not close at all. Because the dots and dashes, in and of themselves, are totally unrelated to the sonnets of Shakespeare. We can use them and impose on them the complexity and the coding system.

Now, what do we conclude from this? We conclude that, just as from ordinary experience we can identify coding systems, and coding conventions, and we know something about language and the grammar of language, and just as we can see this in International Morse Code, so also, when we look at living organisms, from bacteria to man, we see a common coding mechanism, that is consistent throughout, that uses a code of, not dots and dashes, but it uses a code of four different chemicals called bases, that are arranged in groups of three. And each of these groups of three of the four different possibilities codes for an amino acid.

And by putting the DNA in a sequence, and as you can see it would take at least three times as many bases of the DNA as it would take amino acids because you need a code of three for each amino acid—so to make a protein 500 long we would need a minimum of 1,500 bases arranged in a string and they would have to be arranged according to a coding convention and when you have this code there has to be a translating mechanism now to translate this. And when you translate it the information has to make sense. It has to work in a coordinated way with other words and other information to finally tell you these are indeed the beautiful sonnets of Shakespeare.

And I propose that we know nothing on the basis of ordinary chemistry to tell us how we get information. This is not simple chemistry. In fact, I understand that some physicists have come to the conclusion, or cosmologists, that in addition to matter, energy, time, and space, we have another very basic ingredient called information. And as far as we know there is nothing about matter, energy, time, and space which, if left to itself, produces information. Information is something that can use matter, energy, time, and space.

I often like the analogy of a book. And it’s been raised before except I’d like to add an additional thought to it. This book is only chemistry. There is nothing here physically except chemistry. There is a great deal of cellulose in here which is what? carbon and hydrogen basically, and the ink. What do we make that out of, basically carbon? Is it carbon black material? So there is a great deal of carbon and hydrogen that is this book. And there is nothing here but carbon and hydrogen perhaps a few other elements, some oxygen? Right? Some carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

So we ought to be able to take this book, put it in a beaker of water or weak acid and dissolve it. And when we dissolve it, you can imagine, we would have a gray, slurry inside the beaker, a completely dissolved book. Then we’d have another copy on the outside. And we’d say, the chemistry in this beaker, this gray slurry, is the very same chemistry as the chemistry out here. What is the probability we can take these chemicals—because nothing is missing—and go back to the book, or perhaps to a different book, maybe a better book, or a book on a different subject?

Is there anything about the chemistry in the beaker which, if left to itself, will just naturally, in the course of time, generate or regenerate another book? I don’t think so. We have to have an intelligent mind, use the raw material, or ingredients of nature, in this case cellulose. We make paper. Once we have the paper, we use carbon black for ink. And an intelligent mind and author, if you will, has to decide what it is he or she wishes to say and then arrange the letters in a way that produces information.

When we dissolve this book, what do we lose? Do we lose any weight? No. You see, you can ask yourself, how much does information weigh? If you take information away when you dissolve the book, do we lose any weight? No. Do we lose any mass, length, anything? No. Yet, we’ve lost something that cannot be restored from the mere chemistry of which the book is made.