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 Dr. Gitt is a director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology. While the content of his book definitely represents cutting edge scientific theory, the presentation is dry and almost unreadable in the English edition. The author originally published the book in his native language, German, and I can't really comment on that edition. But the English translation by Prof. Dr. Jaap Kies is almost painful to get through.
HOWEVER...I did it, aided by my fascination for the subject and by occasional skimming. Without question, I am in awe of Dr. Gitt's intellect and how far he has pushed science forward with the development of a real scientific theory about the role of an intelligent designer in the origin of life. I recommend learning more about the theory he explains, but I have reservations about recommending this book as the best way to get it.
I'll attempt to save some of you a few bucks by giving a short synopsis of his main theme here. For those who are as fascinated as I am by the subject, or who are involved professionally in mathematics, physics, genetics, or cell biology, you might want to pick up the book and trudge, or at least skim, through it.
Cells contain both matter and information
Probably one of the most profound ideas Dr. Gitt explains in great detail is that living cells contain both matter and information. Think of a cell using the analogy of a computer. The matter is analogous to hardware. The "genetic code" of a cell, however, is more like software than hardware. It is information. It is a program, and only thinking programmers can write code that actually works.
One might argue (foolishly, in my opinion) that biological matter evolved from the "building blocks of life," amino acids, to the humans, animals, and plant life that we see now. But what Dr. Gitt points out is that this is a purely materialistic theory that completely disregards the question of where the information came from that is contained in cells. Information exists separately from matter, begging the question, "Who wrote the code?"
What is the mechanism for information to evolve?
The origins of the information contained in living cell is one question, but Dr. Gitt further asks evolutionary biologists to explain what mechanism can be argued for it increasing in its complexity over the millennia.
Computer programs are not written without a writer. Neither can they gain complexity, unaided by an intellect of some sort. Likewise, the information that "programs" how living cells behave cannot have been written without an author, nor could it have gained complexity through any natural process besides random mutation. And random mutuations are almost without exception detrimental to the organism.
Natural selection is a reductive process, not an additive process. When all available genes are present in a gene pool, natural selection can only eliminate unneeded genes from the gene pool. It does not add new genetic information to the species.
For instance, if all the white moths are getting eaten by birds because they are more visible on the grimy buildings of industrial London, then the gene pool of the moths is losing genetic information. Moths with white genes are dying, unable to pass on their genetic information to another generation. Over enough time, there would be no genetic possibility of breeding white moths, because the genetic information to do it would simply not be present.
Similarly, it would be impossible to breed a full-size line of dogs from a miniature breed without re-introducing new genetic material from larger dogs. The genetic information for "largeness" has been bred out of the miniaturized dogs' gene pool, and there is no natural process that can add more "lines of code" back into the programming of that line's collective cells.
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