information please

In his "letter Nature wouldn't print," Stephen C. Meyer, after citing his own work in defense of his position, adds a little zinger from a late Brookhaven researcher:

...design theorists argue for intelligent design not only because natural selection and other materialistic mechanisms seem incapable of explaining, for example, the origin of digital information and complex machines in cells, but also because we know from experience that systems possessing such features do invariably arise from intelligent causes. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed, "information habitually arises from conscious activity."

Now, if only he had included Quastler's own speculation that his new (for the 1960s) idea

...establishes the possibility of the creation of new information... by an organism much simpler than man, even by a single cell, and even by a prebiological macromolecular system.

Quastler thought the last scenario was improbable, and tried working out the probability of its occurrence, but died before seeing the fruits of the next forty years of scientific discovery.

(Meyer, ostensibly, was alive during much of that time.)



Also: Who says scientists are a humorless lot?