My op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today discusses the eerie anticipation of ideas about the genetic code by Jewish mysticism, or kabbala. I cite the Tanya (1796) but the tradition on this — creation through the combination of letters — goes much further back, at least to the Sefer Yetzirah, attributed to Abraham and referenced in the Talmud, therefore presumably predating it. What to make of this? You tell me.

In [a] new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne), my colleague Stephen Meyer, a Cambridge University-trained philosopher of science, reminds us of the failure of every avenue by which science has tried to explain the origin of the genetic information required for the first life. Explanations depending on unguided material processes alone usually founder on a chicken-or-the-egg paradox: notably, that “specified information in DNA codes for proteins, but specific proteins are necessary to transcribe and translate the information on the DNA molecule.”

DNA acts like a computer code, or like a language consisting of letters and words, arranged in specific sequences to accomplish a specific task or convey a specific meaning. As Dr. Meyer observes, the only kind of source we know of that can produce a “functionally integrated information-processing system” like that in the cell is an intelligent source.

As a Jew, I find it intriguing, at the very least, that Jewish tradition anticipated precisely the kind of evidence that Meyer deals with in his book. DNA refers to the letters of a genetic “alphabet” that in the correct combinations encode the diversity of all life forms. Kabbala too speaks of such an alphabet, comprised of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, with which God continually speaks the world into existence.

Different combinations of letters produce different creatures. A century and a half before Watson and Crick, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi sought to make Kabbala accessible to ordinary readers. In the Tanya (1796), he writes of how “the creatures are divided into categories [both] general and particular by changes in the combinations, substitutions and transpositions [of the letters].”