DNA, CSI and vertical causality

We continue in this series of posts our review of Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle)

For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

One of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century, says Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., was that DNA actually stores information—the detailed instructions for assembling proteins—in the form of a four-character digital code.

Signature in the Cell, by Dr Stephen Meyer (HarperOne, 2009).



Meyer states that research has demonstrated the complete absence of any attraction between the four letters of the DNA code themselves. From this, he concludes that, there being nothing chemically that forces them into any particular sequence, the sequencing has to come from outside the system.

Dr Smith adds another dimension to the arguments discussed by Meyer and others, when he writes:

The connection between free will and vertical causation came to light abruptly in 1998 when a mathematician named William Dembski published a remarkable theorem. Having introduced the decisive concept of “complex specified information” or CSI, Dembski stunned the scientific world by proving—with complete mathematical rigour—that no physical process, be it deterministic, random or stochastic, can produce CSI. But this means, in our terminology, that what has thus been disqualified from producing CSI is none other than horizontal causality! Wherever, therefore, we encounter the production of CSI, we have documented an act of vertical causation.

To be continued