 Harper Audio presents Darwin's Doubt, the Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer, performed by Derek Shetterly. Prologue. When people today hear the term information revolution, they typically think of silicon chips and software code, cellular phones and supercomputers. They rarely think of tiny one-celled organisms or the rise of animal life. But while writing these words in the summer of 2012, I'm sitting at the end of a narrow medieval street in Cambridge, England, where more than half a century ago a far-reaching information revolution began in biology. This revolution was launched by an unlikely but now immortalized pair of scientists, Francis Crick and James Watson. Since my time as a PhD student at Cambridge during the late 1980s, I have been fascinated by the way their discovery transformed our understanding of the nature of life. Indeed, since the 1950s, when Watson and Crick first illuminated the chemical structure and information bearing properties of DNA, biologists have come to understand that living things as much as high-tech devices depend upon digital information, information that, in the case of life, is stored in a four-character chemical code embedded within the twisting figure of a double helix. Because of the importance of information to living things, it has now become apparent that many distinct information revolutions have occurred in the history of life, not revolutions of human discovery or invention, but revolutions involving dramatic increases in the information present within the living world itself. Scientists now know that building a living organism requires information, and building a fundamentally new form of life from a simpler form of life requires an immense amount of new information. Thus, wherever the fossil record testifies to the origin of a completely new form of animal life, a pulse of biological innovation, it also testifies to a significant increase in the information content of the biosphere. In 2009, I wrote a book called Signature in the Cell about the first information revolution in the history of life, the one that occurred with the origin of the first life on Earth. My book described how discoveries in molecular biology during the 1950s and 1960s established that DNA contains information in digital form with its four chemical subunits, called nucleotide bases, functioning like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. And molecular biology also revealed that cells employ a complex information processing system to access and express the information stored in DNA as they use that information to build the proteins and protein machines that they need to stay alive. Scientists attempting to explain the origin of life sample complete, ready to continue?