文档介绍：DNA and the Origin of Life:
Information, Specification, and Explanation
Stephen C. Meyer
QQQ
heories about the origin of life necessarily presuppose knowledge of the
Tattributes of living cells. As historian of biology Harmke Kamminga has
observed, “At the heart of the problem of the origin of life lies a funda-
mental question: What is it exactly that we are trying to explain the origin
of?”1 Or as the pioneering chemical evolutionary theorist Alexander
Oparin put it, “The problem of the nature of life and the problem of its ori-
gin have e inseparable.”2 Origin-of-life researchers want to explain
the origin of the first and presumably simplest—or, at least, minimally
complex—living cell. As a result, developments in fields that explicate the
nature of unicellular life have historically defined the questions that origin-
of-life scenarios must answer.
Since the late 1950s and 1960s, origin-of-life researchers have increas-
ingly recognized plex and specific nature of unicellular life and the
biomacromolecules on which such systems depend. Further, molecular biol-
ogists and origin-of-life researchers have characterized plexity and
specificity in informational terms. Molecular biologists routinely refer to
DNA, RNA, and proteins as carriers or repositories of “information.”3 Many
origin-of-life researchers now regard the origin of the information in these
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224 Stephen C. Meyer
biomacromolecules as the central question facing their research. As Bernd-
Olaf Kuppers has stated, “The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically
equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”4
This essay will peting explanations for the origin of the in-
formation necessary to build the first living cell. To do so will require de-
termining what biologists have meant by the term information as it has
been applied to biomacromolecules. As many have noted, “information”
can denote several theoretically distinct concepts. This essa