I mentioned the other day that an underappreciated weapon in the ID movement’s intellectual arsenal is it strength internationally. Stalwarts of Darwinian evolution deny this, insisting that intelligent design is exclusively an American and Christian phenomenon. Nonsense!

Hard on the heels of learning about the upcoming launch of Brazil’s first major scientific conference on ID, set for November 14-16 this year in Campinas, S�o Paulo, we received a copy of the Chinese translation of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. It looks good. The Chinese edition includes an insightful new Foreword from translator Tang Li-ming, who compares strictly materialist efforts to explain the emergence of life on Earth to the equally strenuous and hopeless drive in previous centuries to invent a perpetual motion machine. What follows is a translation from the Chinese, which I’ve touched up only minimally:

Some people may ask, after translating the book, what thoughts I have of it. My answer is, I view the book as a collection of natural methodologies, the operations of which attempt to solve the first principles problem of the origin of information in life. Having eliminated the protein first theory and the DNA first theory, as they both proved to be failures, the RNA first theory is gaining popularity. Scientists have researched these theories, wave after wave, scrambling, one after another, devoting intellectual resources and effort and pouring out fiscal resources, for the above purposes.� The spirit is admirable. But they are doing so without seeing the root cause of their forbearers’ failure. I cannot help but close the book and sigh deeply. To make a comparison, they are like researchers in the 18th century: When, in 1775, the French Royal Paris Academy of Sciences stopped accepting perpetual motion machine inventions, a perpetual motion machine invention movement still continued unabated over a long period of time before ceasing. Nevertheless, the failure to invent a perpetual motion machine was still valuable. From their failure, plus other evidences, the scientific community gradually established the law of conservation of energy in the 19th century.

The law of conservation of energy and law of conservation of mass are called the two physical and chemical laws of the 19th century. The scientific community of the 19th century understood the nature of these two entities, energy and mass. By the middle of the 20th century, another big entity began to be detectable. This is intelligent information. This entity confused people for a while; they did not know how to deal with it, or measure it, yet it could not only be bought and sold (databases, software, etc.), but also protected by the law (copyright law).� Intelligent information finally, gradually became recognized as an entity and achieved the status it deserved.

Now if intelligent information as an entity can be compared to energy and mass, does it have a similar law of conservation?� In the chapters of this book dealing with computer simulations, we see that the Law of Conservation of Intelligent Information has emerged above the horizon (see Chapter 13). And it has a tendency to extend beyond the computer realm. I think that, once the "intelligence" conservation law, like the law of conservation of energy, is widely accepted by the scientific community, the thinking that random mutations can produce complex-specific information (CSI) will be abandoned.

Find the Chinese translation of Signature on Amazon here.