Posted on 01/27/2009 6:59:07 AM PST by betty boop
Edited on 01/27/2009 7:16:52 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The AP Model and Shannon Theory Show the Incompleteness of Darwin’s ToE
By Jean F. Drew
“The commonly cited case for intelligent design appeals to: (a) the irreducible complexity of (b) some aspects of life. But complex arguments invite complex refutations (valid or otherwise), and the claim that only some aspects of life are irreducibly complex implies that others are not, and so the average person remains unconvinced. Here I use another principle—autopoiesis (self-making)—to show that all aspects of life lie beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. Autopoiesis provides a compelling case for intelligent design in three stages: (i) autopoiesis is universal in all living things, which makes it a pre-requisite for life, not an end product of natural selection; (ii) the inversely-causal, information-driven, structured hierarchy of autopoiesis is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry; and (iii) there is an unbridgeable abyss between the dirty, mass-action chemistry of the natural environmental and the perfectly-pure, single-molecule precision of biochemistry.”
So begins Alex Williams’ seminal article, Life’s Irreducible Structure — Autopoiesis, Part 1. In the article, Williams seeks to show that all living organisms are constituted by a five-level structured hierarchy that cannot be wholly accounted for in terms of naturalistic explanation. Rather, Williams’ model places primary emphasis on the successful transmission and communication of relevant biological information.
Note here that, so far, science has not identified any naturalistic source for “information” within the universe, biological or otherwise. And yet it appears that living organisms remain living only so long as they are “successfully communicating” information. When that process stops, the organism dies; i.e., becomes subject to the second law of thermodynamics — the consequences of which the now-deceased organism had managed to optimally distance itself from while alive.
Evidently Williams finds Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity arguments insufficiently general to explain biological complexity and organization, and so seeks a different explanation to generically characterize the living organism. Yet his proposed autopoietic model — of the “self-making,” i.e., self-maintaining or self-organizing and therefore living system — itself happens to be irreducibly complex. That is to say, on Williams’ model, any biological organism from microbe to man must be understood as a complete, functioning “whole,” transcending in the most profound way any definition of a particular organism as the “mere” sum of its constituting “material” parts.
Further, the idea of the “whole” must come prior to an understanding of the nature and function of the constituting parts. Williams terms this idea of the “whole” as inversely causal meta-information; as such, it is what determines the relations and organization of all the parts that constitute that “whole” of the living organism — a biological system in nature.
Just one further word before we turn to Williams’ autopoietic model. To begin with the supposition of “wholeness” flies in the face of methodological naturalism, the currently favored model of scientific investigation, and arguably the heart of Darwinist evolutionary theory. For methodological naturalism is classical and mechanistic (i.e., “Newtonian”) in its basic presuppositions: Among other things, it requires that all causation be “local.” Given this requirement, it makes sense to regard the “whole is merely the sum of its parts” as a valid statement — those parts being given to human understanding as the objects of direct observation of material events. The presumption here is that, given enough time, the piling up of the parts (i.e., of the “material events”) will eventually give you the description of the whole. Meanwhile, we all should just be patient. For centuries if need be, as a collaborator once suggested to me (in regard to abiogenesis. See more below).
Yet subsequent to classical physics came the astonishing revelations of relativity and quantum theory, both of which point to “non-local” causation. The transmission of information across widely spatially-separated regions (from the point of view of the biological organism as an extended body in time) so as to have causative effect in the emergence of biological life and its functions is decidedly a “non-local” phenomenon. Indeed, non-local causation seems ubiquitous, all-pervasive in the living state of biological organisms, as we shall see in what follows.
Williams’ Autopoietic Model
Williams lays out the five-level, autopoietic hierarchy specifying the living system this way (parenthetical notes added):
(i) components with perfectly pure composition (i.e., pure elements)
(ii) components with highly specific structure (i.e., molecules)
(iii) components that are functionally integrated (i.e., components work cooperatively toward achieving a purpose or goal)
(iv) comprehensively regulated information-driven processes (DNA, RNA)
(v) inversely-causal meta-informational strategies for individual and species survival (we’ll get to this in a minute)
Pictorially, the model lays out like this:
Figure 1 summarizes the five-level, hierarchical specification of any living organism, microbe to man. But how do we get a handle on what this hierarchy actually means?
An interesting way to look at the problem, it seems to me, is to look at the available potential “information content” of each of the five “levels” or “manifolds” of the hierarchy.
You’ll note that Figure 1 depicts an ascending arrow on the left labeled “complexity.” For our present purposes, we’ll define this as “algorithmic complexity,” understood as a function that maximally yields “information content.” If we can find complexity measures to plug into the model, we might gain additional insight thereby.
Fortunately, algorithmic complexity measures have been obtained for certain levels of the hierarchy; i.e., Level (i) and Levels (iv) and possibly Level (v). For the latter two, the measures were taken with respect to the living human being. Figure 1 can thus be expanded as follows:
Notes to Figure 2:
1 Gregory Chaitin: “My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s laws, the Schrödinger equation, and Einstein’s field equations for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving ‘motion-picture’ solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.”
On this basis, Chaitin has pointed out that the complexity we observe in living systems cannot be accounted for on the basis of the chemical and physical laws alone, owing to the paucity of their information content.
2 George Gilder: “In each of the some 300 trillion cells in every human body, the words of life churn almost flawlessly through our flesh and nervous system at a speed that utterly dwarfs the data rates of all the world’s supercomputers. For example, just to assemble some 500 amino-acid units into each of the trillions of complex hemoglobin molecules that transfer oxygen from the lungs to bodily tissues takes a total of some 250 peta operations per second. (The word “peta” refers to the number ten to the 15th power — so this tiny process requires 250 x 1015 operations.)
A Word about Abiogenesis
Darwin’s evolutionary theory does not deal with the origin of life. It takes life for granted, and then asks how it speciates. Moreover, the theory does not elaborate a description of the constitution of the individual living organism, such as Williams’ irreducibly complex/autopoietic (“IC/AP”) model proposes.It’s important to recognize that neither Darwin’s theory, nor Williams’ model, deals with the origin of life. It seems to me that evolution theory and ID are not necessarily mutually-exclusive. One deals with the species level, the other the biological structure of living individuals, the “building blocks” of species, as it were.
Yet there is tremendous hostility towards intelligent design on the part of many orthodox evolutionary biologists, which has gotten so bad in recent times that the more doctrinaire Darwinists have run to the courts for “protection” of their cherished beliefs (and interests personal and institutional), insisting that ID “is not science.” Judges are not scientists; in general they are ill-equipped to make judgments “on the merits” of scientific controversies. Yet they render judgments all the same, with profound implications for how science is to be taught. I fail to see how this redounds to the benefit of scientific progress.
If science is defined as materialist and naturalist in its fundamental presuppositions — the currently-favored methodological naturalism — then ID does not meet the test of “what is science?” For it does not restrict itself to the material, the physical, but extends its model to information science, which is immaterial. The problem for Darwinists seems to be that there is no known source of biological information within Nature as classically understood (i.e., as fundamentally Newtonian — materialist and mechanistic in three dimensions).
The problem of abiogenesis goes straight to the heart of this issue. Abiogensis is a hypothesis holding that life spontaneously arises from inert, non-living matter under as-yet unknown conditions. Although evolution theory does not deal with the problem of the origin of life, many evolutionary biologists are intrigued by the problem, and want to deal with it in a manner consistent with Darwinian methods; i.e., the presuppositions of methodological naturalism, boosted by random mutation and natural selection. That is, to assume that life “emerges” from the “bottom-up” — from resources available at Levels (i) and (ii) of the IC/AP model.
There have been numerous experiments, most of which have taken the form of laboratory simulations of “lightning strikes” on a properly prepared chemical “soup” (e.g., Urey, Miller, et al.). At least one such experiment managed to produce amino acids — fundamental building blocks of life (at the (ii) level of Williams’ hierarchy). But amino acids are not life. On Williams’ model, to be “life,” they’d need to have achieved at least the threshold of Level (iii).
For it is the presence of “functionally-integrated components” that makes life possible, that sustains the living organism in its very first “duty”: That it will, along the entire extension of its complete biological make-up (whether simple or highly complex), globally organize its component systems in such a way as to maximally maintain the total organism’s “distance” from thermodynamic entropy. An “organism” that couldn’t do that wouldn’t last as an “organism” for very long.
And so in order for the materialist interpretation of abiogenesis to be true, the “chemical soup” experimental model would have to demonstrate how inorganic matter manages to “exempt” itself from one of the two most fundamental laws of Nature: the second law of thermodynamics.
From cells on up through species, all biological organisms — by virtue of their participation in Levels (i) and (ii) — are subject to the second law right from creation. Indeed, they are subject to it throughout their life spans. A friend points out that the second law is a big arguing point for Macroevolutionists, who try to argue that the second law is irrelevent, i.e., doesn’t apply to living systems, because “it only applies to closed systems and not to open ones.” Thus they say that living systems in nature are “open” systems. But what this line of reasoning does not tell us is what such systems are “open” to.
And yet we know that every cell is subject to the second law — simply by needing to fuel itself, it subjects itself to the effects of entropy, otherwise known as heat death. And although it can and does stave off such effects for a while, doing so requires the cell or species constantly to deal with maintaining distance from entropy in all its living functional components, organized globally. Entropy plays a big part in all life — from cells to completed species.
When the successful communication of meta-information begins to slow down and break down, cells and species then begin to succumb to the effects of entropy, to which they have been subjected all their entire life. This is because they can no longer combat, or stay ahead of the “entropy curve,” due to inefficient communication processes and, thus, degradation of the maintenance procedures communicated to the cells via the meta-information system that is specific to each particular biological entity and to each particular species. After all, any species description is necessarily an informed description.
Yet another origin-of-life approach — the Wimmer abiogenesis experiment — is highly instructive. He managed to “create” a polio virus. He did so by introducing RNA information into a “cell-free juice,” and the polio virus spontaneously resulted.
Wimmer used actual DNA to synthesize polio RNA based on information about the polio virus RNA which is widely available, even on the internet. The RNA information was truly “pulled” from the DNA, which “resides” at the next-higher level. He could not synthesize RNA directly; he first had to synthesize the DNA from the raw information and then synthesize the polio RNA from the synthetic DNA.
Yet RNA information, like all information, is immaterial. In terms of the Williams’ hierarchy, clearly Wimmer had obtained an organism functioning at about Level (iii) — because it had sufficient information to propel it to that level, as “pulled” by the information available at the next-higher level where DNA information “resides” — Level (iv).
Unlike biological organisms expressing all five levels of the Williams model, the polio virus, though fully autonomous as an information processor (leading to its “successful communication” in Wimmer’s laboratory), somehow still doesn’t have everything it needs to be fully “autonomous” as a living being. A virus, for instance, is dependent on a living host in order to execute its own life program. As such, it is a sort of “quasi-life.” Shannon Information Theory helps us to clarify such distinctions.
Before we turn to Shannon, it’s worth mentioning that, according to H. H. Pattee and Luis Rocha, the issue of autonomy (and semiosis — the language and the ability to encode/decode messages) is a huge stumbling block to abiogenesis theory. For that kind of complexity to emerge by self-organizing theory, in the RNA world, the organism would have to involuntarily toggle back and forth between non-autonomous and autonomous modes, first to gather, and then to make use of information content as an autonomous living entity. The question then becomes: What tells it how and when to “toggle?” Further, it appears the source of the information content that can toggle non-life into life remains undisclosed.
Shannon Information Theory
The DNA of any individual life form is exactly the same whether the organism is dead or alive. And we know this, for DNA is widely used and proved reliable in forensic tests of decedents in criminal courts of law. And so we propose:
Information is that which distinguishes life from non-life/death.Information, paraphrased as “successful communication,” is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in a receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. It is the action which facilitates any successfully completed communication. Thus Shannon’s model describes the universal “mechanism” of communication. That is, it distinguishes between the “content” of a message and its “conduit”: The model is indifferent to the actual message being communicated, which could be anything, from “Don’t forget to put your boots on today — it’s snowing,” to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The value or meaning of the message being transmitted has no bearing on the Shannon model, which is the same for all messages whatever. Pictorially, the Shannon communication conduit looks like this:
Information is further defined by its independence from physical determination:
“I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of a computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or ‘source code’ used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.Referring to the Shannon diagram above, we can interpret the various elements of the model in terms of biological utility, as follows:“The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects Shannon’s concept of entropy and his measure of ‘news.’ Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes.” — George Gilder, “Evolution and Me,” National Review, July 17, 2006, p. 29f.
Note the head, “noise.” Biologically speaking, with respect to the fully-integrated, five-leveled biological organism, “noise” in the channel might be introduced by certain biological “enigmas,” which broadly satisfy the requirements of Williams’ model and, thus, are living organisms. Shannon Information Theory describes such “enigmas” as follows:
Bacteria — typified by autonomous successful communication; bacteria are single-cell organisms. Because they are autonomous entities, communications follow the normal flow in Shannon theory — source, message, encoder/transmitter, channel, decoder/receiver. The bacteria’s messages are not “broadcast” to other nearby bacteria but are autonomous to the single-cell organism.Bacterial Spores — typified by autonomous successful communication. Bacterial spores, such as anthrax, are like other bacteria except they can settle into a dormant state. Dormant bacterial spores begin regular successful communication under the Shannon model once an “interrupt” has occurred, for instance the presence of food. Anthrax, for instance, may lay dormant for years until breathed into a victim’s lungs, whereupon it actively begins its successful albeit destructive (to its host) communication, which often leads to the death of its host; i.e., the bacterium’s “food source.”
Mycoplasmas — typified as an autonomous bacterial model parasite successfully communicating. Mycoplasmas are akin to bacteria except they lack an outer membrane and so often attach to other cells, whereby they may cause such events as, for instance, the disease pneumonia. In the Shannon model, mycoplasmas are considered “autonomous” in that the communications are often restricted to the mycoplasma itself; e.g., self-reproduction. But because they also act like a parasite, they might alter the host’s properties and thus result in malfunctions in the autonomous communication of the host by, for instance, interfering with the channel.
Mimivirus — typified as an autonomous virus model parasite successfully communicating. Mimiviruses are gigantic viruses. They are viruses because they are parasites to their host, relying on the host for protein engineering. But the mimiviruses (unlike regular viruses) apparently do not need to be a parasite, and thus they are “autonomous” with regard to the Shannon model. But like the mycoplasmas, the presence of mimiviruses can alter properties of the host and thereby result in malfunctions in the autonomous communications of the host by, for instance, interfering with the channel.
Viroids — typified as non-autonomous virus-like noise/mutation contributing to successful/failed communication. Viroids have no protein coat. They are single strands of RNA that lack the protein coat of regular viruses. They are noise in the channel under the Shannon model; i.e., messages only that are not communicated autonomously within the viroids themselves. They can also be seen as “broadcast” messages, because viroids may cause their own message (RNA) to be introduced into the host.
Viruses — typified as non-autonomous virus noise/mutation contributing to successful/failed communication. Viruses feed genetic data to the host. They are strands of DNA or RNA that have a protein coat. Viruses are parasites to the host, relying on the host for communication; e.g., reproduction. In the Shannon model, viruses are either noise or broadcasts that are not autonomous in the virus and appear as noise messages to the host. It is possible that, unlike the polio virus which is destructive, there may be some viruses (and viroids) whose messages cause a beneficial adaptation in the host.
Prions — typified as non-autonomous protein noise/mutation contributing to successful/failed communication (protein crystallization). Prions are protein molecules that have neither DNA nor RNA. Currently, prions are the suspected cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy — Mad Cow Disease. In the Shannon model, prions would be incoherent in the channel because they have no discernable message; that is, neither DNA nor RNA. Thus the prion would lead to channel or decoding malfunctions.
So far there is no known origin for information (successful communication) in space/time. This should be visualized as activity represented by the arrows on the above illustration. Possible origins include a universal vacuum field, harmonics, geometry.
Shannon’s mathematical theory of communications applied to molecular biology shows genuine promise of having some significant implications for the theory of natural selection in explaining the rise of information (successful communication), autonomy, and semiosis (language, encoding/decoding). — S. Venable, J. Drew, “Shannon Information and Complex Systems Theory,” Don’t Let Science Get You Down, Timothy, Lulu Press, 2006, p. 207f.
It seems worthwhile to note here that, under Shannon’s model, the thermodynamic “tab” is paid when the “molecular machine” goes from the before state to the after state. At that moment, it dissipates heat into the surroundings. Level (v) meta-information successfully communicated to the organism provides it with strategies to counter and compensate for local thermodynamic effects. Ultimately, when the organism reaches a state in which it is no longer successfully communicating, the entropy tab must be paid by ordinary means. And so eventually, the living organism dies.
Putting Williams’ IC/AP Model into Context
So far, the autopoietic model — though it provides an excellent description of the information flows necessary to establish and maintain an organism in a “living state” — seems to be a bit of an abstraction. Indeed, in order to be fully understood, the model needs to be placed into the context in which it occurs — that is, in Nature.Each living entity as described by the model is a part and participant in a far greater “whole.” Niels Bohr put it this way: “A scientific analysis of parts cannot disclose the actual character of a living organism because that organism exists only in relation to the whole of biological life.” Including the species-specific meta-information unique to any particular species, which also controls and dictates how the entire biological system works as a “whole”; i.e., at the global level. And arguably, not only in relation to the entirety of biological life, but to the physical forces of nature, to inorganic entities, and to other biological beings, including the “enigmas” described above, which appear to be a sort of “quasi-life.” For even though they may be autonomous communicators, some of these “quasi-life” examples suggest an organic state that is somehow not “sufficiently informed” to stand on its own; i.e., they exemplify a state that needs to latch onto a fully-functioning biological entity in order to complete their own “program” for life — the very definition of a parasite.
The single most telling point that Williams’ model makes is that information is vital to the living state; that it flows “downward” from the “top” of his model — Level (v), meta-information — and not from the “bottom” of the model flowing “upwards” by the incremental means characterizing Levels (i) and (ii) — not to mention orthodox Darwinist expectation. On this model, Levels (i) and (ii) “do not know how to fit themselves” into the “biological picture.” For that, they need the information available at Levels (iii) to (v).
Many questions relevant to our exploration of the fundaments of biology have not been touched on in this article — e.g., what is the meaning of “emergence?” What is the manner in which “complexification” takes place in nature? What do we mean by “open” and “closed” systems? What do we mean by “self-ordered” or “self-organizing” systems in nature? (And what does the prefix “self” mean with respect to such questions?)
But since we’re out of time, we won’t be dealing with such problems here and now, though I hope we may return to them later. Instead, I’ll leave you, dear reader, with yet another depiction of Figure 1, this time elaborated to show the total context in which the irreducibly complex, autopoietic model is embedded:
Note the model now sits, not only with respect to its natural environment, but also with respect to the quantum domain of pure potentiality, and also with respect to a (proposed) extra-mundane source of biological information.
I think for the biological sciences to actually progress, a model such as Williams’ IC/AP model is worthy of serious consideration. Remember, Darwin’s theory is wholly classical, meaning dimensionally limited to 3-space, to local, mechanical, largely force-field-driven material causation. Relativity and quantum theory have both moved well beyond those precincts. It’s time for the Darwinian theory of evolution to “catch up” with the current state of scientific knowledge — and especially with the implications of information science.
©2009 Jean F. Drew
Thanks, svcw, for your kind words of support!
The brain doesn’t function like a digital computer, and no one has completely modeled a linked cluster of neurons, so estimates of computing power are, at the moment, garbage.
Even the rather rigidly wired visual cortex hasn’t been modeled. The temporal lobes — the ones most distinctively large in humans, have not been analyzed in any meaningful way.
There is a difference between someone who calculates probabilities and says something can't be done, and someone who does experiments that demonstrates it can be done.
Using radio transmission/reception as a metaphor – the airways have information content as things are being sent and received. But the content of the air is not the message. Likewise, the air does not constitute the communication - communication consists of message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, decoding and receiver. As with prions, things happening in the air (e.g. other pressure waves caused by storms) can foul the success of communications from sender to receiver.
The reason the Wimmer experiment to bootstrap the polio virus in the laboratory succeeded was precisely because he began with the message, e.g. text off the internet.
Conversely, the success of Urey/Miller (circa 1953) in simulating lightning strikes to bootstrap amino acids, whereas it caused quite a stir, went no further than amino acids. Following the air metaphor, they created turbulence not coherence.
They of course did not have the whole story. About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered information in life, i.e. DNA. But neither did they at the time understand the full import of information theory (Shannon, 1948) to molecular biology.
Only recently, circa 2002, in the Wimmer experiment was it made clear.
Wimmer began with the information sequence of RNA which he synthesized to DNA and then synthesized the message from DNA to RNA. When he added the message to a cell free juice, it began transmitting and duplicating.
The bottom line is that information (successful communication) is at the root of life v non-life/death in nature. But of course the evolutionary biologists (Darwin through Urey/Miller) were not aware of this.
Thank you for this delightful sidebar, dear allmendream!
Having said that, I am a Bible believing born again Christian, who does not get all weirded out about about 'evolution' or the concept of 'evolution'. I find it a fascinating study. Personally I don't care, it makes no difference to me, if God created everything in a single thought, 6 days or 6 trillion years. God can do what He wants in any fashion He wishes. I am certainly not going to tell Him what to do or how to do it.
So there you have it another prospective. I do find it amazing though how the people who swear by evolution get so agitated by differing opinions or thoughts. Oh, well. Maybe Bible believing Christians are just farther along on the evolutionary scale, with ability to accept more diversity and all.
The bottom line is that "the beast" supercomputer IBM just created is barely scratching the surface on biological equivalent computing power. The supercomputers however cause quite a bit of excitement for researchers in molecular biology because of their power to simulate things they haven't yet been able to simulate.
Do you want me to find a cite for that too?
If DNA and RNA are the “message” transmitted by radio wave, the “message” only conveys “information” if it results in an active functional protein.
Proteins are also able to convey “messages” as in the example of Signal Transduction.
Your writing about Prion is an absolute embarrassment, and it was the very first thing I read.
If you are actually interested in conveying a “message” to those able to understand it, it would behoove you to become more knowledgeable about the subject and clean up your language as the things you say make no sense to someone who understands the subject.
I think if you are going to write on the subject of abiogenesis you are going to have to master organic chemistry and study current research. You can’t simply do probability calculations when you don’t know what events form the basis of the calculation.
No one thinks RNA or DNA formed in one step. Calculations that assume this are simply wasted time. This is really in the hands of chemists now.
http://www.exploringorigins.org/nucleicacids.html
[[If DNA cannot be used to determine kinship, there are a lot of court decisions that need to be reversed.]]
you’ve made this statement several times in several threads- DNA comparison for court cases has absolutely no relevence to Genetic change that supposedly happeend in species- Common design accounts for similarities, however it does not need to ifner relatedness. Genetic comparisons in cases of relations shows FAR more similarities than does say even a man and ape comparison.
My assertion — not contradicted by any of your sources — is that brains cannot be compared to digital computers. It may be possible to build a computer that models brain activity, but it hasn’t been done yet.
My best sources tell me that the theory is in place, but the hardware is not, and it isn’t a matter of speed.
Neurons operate at something like 10 to 100 Hz. That’s firings per second. Whatever they are doing, it isn’t matched by the switching of a transistor.
It's not the quantity of similarities and differences, but the nesting that argues for kinship. The best evidence is not the nesting of common coding genes, but the nesting of retrovirus scars in the genome.
The nestability of non-coding DNA has other implications.
The whole premise of intelligent design and common design rests on the analogy with human designers. After all, humans are the only designers we can actually observe.
But we have many examples of genomes designed or modified by humans — plant crops, insulin producing bacteria and so forth — and all of them have an instantly identifiable characteristic: they don’t nest. They can’t be the product of common descent.
So if we are using the designer analogy, we can sort living things into two categories: those things that fit the nested hierarchy required by the common descent hypothesis, and those things that don’t. The things that don’t fit are known to have been designed by humans.
[[To put it another way, it deals with information (successful communication) in nature as the necessary element for increased complexity - and more startling than that, that the message being communicated anticipates that which has not yet occurred.]]
I need to expand htis to be a bit more precise and clear- if you don’t mind- the last part “and more startling than that, that the message being communicated anticipates that which has not yet occurred.”
Should read “and more startling than that, that the message being communicated anticipates that which has not yet occurred, and is species specific in nature- meaning that any changes that occure within hte species is species specific, and falls within species specific parameters.”
The importance of this distinction lies in the fact that change within a species is controlled by species specific parameters, which is why all lab tests and experiments to move a psecies beyond hteir own kind have failed- the metainfo for such change is simply NOT present i nthe species to allow such drastic changes. This is not to mean that ifnromation from an outside source that isn’t specific to hte species can not be itnroduced- experiments in ‘lateral gene transference’ have been ‘succesful’ i nthe sense that they were able to introduce foriegn genetic material and incorporate into the species genetic info- however, this resulted in degredation of the geentic info, and hte species own metaifno was at work tryign to eliminate this foriegn info as would be expected.
This issue of metainfo is quite an important issue to concider- it shows how species can handle foriegn invaders, can anticipate such changes, and can either utilize mistakes to the genome, or reject them all within a species specific paramter. We know for a fact that species have paramters- boundaries that dictate how far the genome can be altered- and we also know for a fact that the upper limits are still well within a species own kind. Whiel htere can be quite dramitic microevolutionary change within kinds, these fall far short of the drastic changes needed via complete itnroduction of new non species specific informaiton into hte genome- which, accordign hte metainfo ‘guidelines’ woudl be prohibited
The other important point brought up is the fact that this fully functional metainfo simply can not arise from a stepwise process of ‘change’. Simply altering info already present can not account for hte directive powers of metainfo in regards to the whole system.
Small changes don’t just affect the cell they work on- they affect entire systems, and htere NEEDS to be a controlling, governing metainfo inplace to make sure that ALL the changes brought about by mistakes don’t muck the whole works up. As mentioned, small cjhanges don’t simply affect single cells, and htrowing the numbers of changes that HAD to result in the introduction of NON species specific information into hte genome that macroevolution supposedly resulted in woudl have been absolutely dissasterous to the species
[[Why are you writing on the subject of abiogenesis if you aren’t familiar with the most important researchers?]]
Why are you tryign to derail the thread by ignoring hte FACT that this article exposes those ‘important researchers’ as clueless abotu how information could supposedly arise via natural processes? This whole article exposes the fact that it is impossible for metainfo to arise from non life- it can’t happen- IF you have soemthign worthwhile to contribute to the article’s precepts, do feel free to contribute- but tryign to discredit the article by pointign to abiogenisis researchers, and their ASSUMPTION driven claims that DEFY the actual observed science of information, and it’s observable limits and or abilites, isn’t a valid coutner argument.
Or to sum it up:
Information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver (or molecular machine) as it goes from a before state to an after state.
It is the action of successful communication not any particular element of it.
For instance, it is not the message. It doesn't matter whether the message is DNA, RNA, Hamlet, this reply, etc.
Nor is it the language, though the sender (encoding) and receiver (decoding) should speak the same language (semiosis) for the communication to be successful. It does no good to send a letter in Spanish to someone who only understands Greek. In our little sidebar, I am speaking in one language and you are speaking in another. But I'd wager the Lurkers on the Religion Forum are more apt to successfully receive what I have been broadcasting.
"Broadcast" brings up another element of Shannon's model that the Religion Forum Lurkers would find interesting. A successful communication is autonomous between sender and receiver. "Noise" in the model can also be a broadcast message from an external sender, e.g. God speaking creatures into being.
Personally, I see the unreasonable effectiveness of math as God's copyright notice on the cosmos.
That's for experimenters to decide. If ID proponents and creationists want to make such claims they need to get some lab work done and publish some experimental data.
[[The point was that the prion contains no message (DNA, RNA) and is not autonomous to the molecular machine. Under the Shannon model, it would a type of “noise.”
In sum, when the prion is introduced into the communication - it causes malfunctions either in the channel or decoding, e.g. blocking the successful communication of beneficial messages perhaps as you say by causing other proteins to misfold.]]
and here again we see the importance of metainfo- species specific metainfo controlling, directing, allowing or dissallowing change- all withint species specific parameters.
The changes that would have had to occure for macroevolution would have included introducing, not just simplistic /micro-changes accumulating harmlessly, that had no apparent effect on the species, but would out of necessity had to include drastic changes to bring about hte morphological and biological changes that would move a species beyond it’s own kind- even gradually this would have presented a HUGE problem for hte speices, and would have proven deadly, as htese changes woudl have broken the boundaries of allowable microevolutionary change, and would have affected many many systems and subsystems, and would not have had rthe proper metainfo to deal with al lthese changes- to control htem, intigrate them, coordinate, and utilize htem for hte preservation of the species. The info to do so would simply have been non existent- We know htis from experiments and breedign programs.
"...science has not identified any naturalistic source for “information” within the universe, biological or otherwise."js:
Programmed cell death is a rather modern invention in living things, a requirement of having specialized cells.
The teleological words in bold taken in their ordinary sense are inconsistent with naturalistic assumptions, but they are consistent with the fact that in every case where the origin of a code is known, it is without exception the product of intelligence. It doesn't really make any sense to speak of it otherwise, as there is no known example of a code originating from an unintelligent source. Not one. None. Zero.
All the naturalist has to do to show that a genetic code could arise naturalistically would be to provide an example of a code, defined as a communication channel with an input alphabet A and an output alphabet B, (outside of DNA or any of its derivatives, which would of course be begging the question) arising from a unintelligent source.
So why do naturalists continue to assume something which has none of the evidence to support it, and all of the available scientific and mathematical evidence against it; namely, that genetic code, which is a encoding / decoding mechanism isomorphic with Shannon's model, arose solely by the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?
Actually I posted links to laboratory work, not assumptions.
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