Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, makes another appearance (see the first here) on The 700 Club, this time for the show’s interactive web broadcast.

In this interview, Meyer discusses the recent hype concerning Craig Venter’s claims to have produced artificial life. While praising the ingenuity of Venter’s research team, Meyer explains that Venter did not really succeed in producing artificial life at all. Rather, Venter’s team inserted a synthetically sequenced chromosome into a non-synthetic cell. The cell’s machinery was then able to successfully read the instructions on the chromosome and transform the cell into the specified organism. Meyer highlights the indispensability of rational deliberation — intelligent purposive design — in the sequencing of the one million base pairs that are necessary to produce the organism.

Meyer also talks about the hierarchical nature of the information controlling the morphogenesis of organismal form and its implications for both neo-Darwinism and ID, before ending with a discussion of how the unique dimension of the mind and our conscious subjective experience, in combination with our experience of the causal requisites of information, is suggestive of the non-reductionistic character of life.