Sketching the History

The Last Days of Darwin A Brief History of the Revolution is one of several articles appearing in Salvo Magazine about intelligent design. The following paragraph notes a little known tidbit:

As early as 1951, biophysicist Harold Morowitz was trying to find the cell’s “information content.” He eventually concluded that it was impossible for life to have arisen without some large infusion of information. Not a theist, he nonetheless created space for an Intelligent Designer.

A failure in accounting for the capacity to store and utilize life enabling information is a key indicator for many, if not most IDists, that something is amiss with mainstream thinking. Author James M. Kushiner goes on to note that both Ernst Mayr and Sewall Wright (among many others) believed that gradualism was a central tenet of evolution. But before genomic changes can occur a genome must exist. Yet life appears to have spontaneously emerged without leaving a trail as to what kind of process would have led to its gradual formation.

Kushiner identifies problems with existing evidence and cites the landmark book by Walter Bradley, Roger Olsen and Charles Thaxton- The Mystery of Life’s Origin. This book and Australian biochemist Michael Denton's bestseller Evolution: A Theory in Crisis brought about a subsequent chorus of critcs which solidified intelligent design as part of the analytical landscape. Dembski, Behe et. al. follow. So too do other articles in this issue that are worth reading.