Stephen C. Meyer

Background

Stephen C. Meyer (b. 1958) is an American philosopher of science, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and the Intelligent-Design movement's principal theorist of the origin-of-life design inference. Trained in the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, Meyer argues in Signature in the Cell (2009) that the sequence-specified information carried in DNA is of a kind that, everywhere else in our experience, traces to a mind — and is therefore best explained by an intelligent cause rather than by undirected chemistry.

Meyer's is the most abiogenesis-specific statement of the ID program: where Michael Behe argues from molecular machines and William Dembski from probability theory, Meyer targets the origin of biological information itself. His primary works are copyright-locked and absent from this public-domain corpus, so his argument can only be represented, not quoted, here.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Origin of Life — the fullest ID case that the specified information in the first replicators points to design. The origin-of-life article flags this precisely as a corpus gap: his work "is not in the corpus (copyright-locked) and cannot be quoted here" ({{UNSOURCED: an open-access statement or peer-reviewed critique of Meyer's DNA-information argument is needed; the corpus represents ID only via Behe/Dembski on molecular machines}}). The DNA-information inference is noted, not evidenced, at SEP 'Teleological Arguments' §4.2.

Key works in our corpus

Corpus gap: Signature in the Cell (2009) is not ingested (copyright-locked). No primary-source quotation of Meyer's origin-of-life argument is available; the ID design inference is represented in the wiki only through Behe and Dembski via SEP 'Creationism' §7. See meta/ingestion-queue.md and meta/gap-report.md.

Principal critics

• Charles Darwin — mainstream biology treats the origin of biological information as a research problem for undirected chemistry, not a signature of design; the "overwhelming consensus" is that the ID challenges "can be met" (SEP 'Fine-Tuning' §1.3).
• Mainstream critics — press the recurring charge that ID is "just disguised creationism, God-of-the-gaps arguments, religiously motivated" (SEP 'Teleological Arguments' §4.2).

See also

• Michael Behe — irreducible complexity.
• William Dembski — specified complexity and the explanatory filter.
• Phillip E. Johnson — the movement's founding strategist.