1. Functional Information
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
DNA contains multi-layered information and metadata (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data) and is a more efficient storage medium than anything we’ve created. So here you have instructional data that must be translated to perform specific functions at specific times (a system that describes itself and interprets its description). This is a language that codes precise plans in a very specific order necessary to manifest this amazing thing we call life.
Consider the following posted by Eric Anderson at UncommonDescent:
In the euphoria of the tremendous success of the Apollo missions in the 1970’s, NASA commissioned several studies about what might be next: some relating to immediate projects, some more long term, some on the visionary edges of science fiction.One such study, presented at a conference held in the summer of 1980 belongs in the latter category. It was entitled “Advanced Automation for Space Missions,” and spans nearly 400 pages.
A somewhat more digestible web version was made available by Robert Freitas, one of the authors, here.
The central idea was to lay out what would be required for an automated robotic fleet to explore the galaxy. This is, it must be confessed, an impressive effort to put this much thought and effort into the actual details.
Yet even after the tremendous work and thought put into how to make a truly autonomous self-replicating robotic exploration system, there are hints that it still might not work without occasional intelligent guidance and intervention along the way.
In addition to possible intelligent guidance and intervention at certain stages, Freitas recognized the difficulty of closing the loop on the self-replication cycle itself. He calls this the “closure problem.”
This closure problem includes the difficulty of getting all of the materials processing machines, chemical elements, process chemicals, alloys, etc. in place. In particular, he noted that difficult items to close include some “hard-to-manufacture but lightweight items such as microelectronics . . . precision instruments and others which may not be cost-effective to produce via automation off-Earth” in the near term. Even after significant “bootstrapping”, Freitas notes that something on the order of 90-96% closure might be attainable.
90-96% is of course impressive. But in the context of what would actually be required for a truly autonomous self-replicator sent to a new planet to reproduce and explore, it isn’t quite there. 96% won’t get you 96% of the next generation. It won’t get you past the first generation.
As someone who has also spent some time analyzing what would be required for true self-replication in a real-world environment, I am impressed with Freitas’ efforts, nearly 50 years ago. And the other striking impression that comes to mind is just how difficult a proposition self-replication is.
The ability to send nano-scale self-replicators to Earth with the ability to faithfully and successfully populate the Earth is an engineering feat almost beyond comprehension. Anyone with a rational understanding of what we are witness to in biology would be inclined to a profound sense of awe and wonder at the genius behind it.
Self-replication lies at the end of an incredibly detailed, inter-related, integrated, precision process, driven at every step by deep levels of information.
The naive and evidence-free evolutionary narrative, on the other hand, has everything completely upside down. It isn’t just that the materialist creation story hasn’t yet discovered the naturalistic origin of biology. It isn’t just that important details have yet to be filled in. It isn’t even (as most critics of abiogenesis realize) that it won’t work.
No. The problem is deeper than that. Evolution’s claim that self-replication is the first attribute of a living organism, that self-replication is the beginning of the creative process is not just mistaken — it is utterly, completely backwards from the engineering realities. I discussed this fundamental issue previously, here - Thinking Upside Down – The Abiogenesis Paradigm
Or consider this from Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis with a brief commentary from Matt Chait:
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings with find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus of itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine – that is one single functional protein molecule – would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.
What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle.
To gain a more objective grasp of the level of complexity the cell represents, consider the problem of constructing an atomic model. Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid.
Copying nature, we could speed up the construction of the model by using small molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides rather than individual atoms. Since individual amino acids and nucleotides are made up of between ten and twenty atoms each, this would enable us to finish the project in less than five million years. We could also speed up the project by mass producing those components in the cell which are present in many copies. Perhaps three-quarters of the cell’s mass can be accounted for by such components. But even if we could produce these very quickly we would still be faced with manufacturing a quarter of the cell’s mass which consists largely of components which only occur once or twice and which would have to be constructed, therefore, on an individual basis. The complexity of the cell, like that of any complex machine, cannot be reduced to any sort of simple pattern, nor can its manufacture be reduced to a simple set of algorithms or programmes. Working continually day and night it would still be difficult to finish the model in the space of one million years.
- Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985)
And let me add my two cents to this astounding picture. The model that you would complete a million years later would be just that, a lifeless static model. For the cell to do its work this entire twenty kilometer structure and each of its trillions of components must be charged in specific ways, and at the level of the protein molecule, it must have an entire series of positive and negative charges and hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts all precisely shaped (at a level of precision far, far beyond our highest technical abilities) and charged in a whole series of ways: charged in a way to find other molecular components and combine with them; charged in a way to fold into a shape and maintain that most important shape, and charged in a way to be guided by other systems of charges to the precise spot in the cell where that particle must go. The pattern of charges and the movement of energy through the cell is easily as complex as the pattern of the physical particles themselves.Also, Denton, in his discussion, uses a tennis ball to stand in for an atom. But an atom is not a ball. It is not even a ‘tiny solar system’ of neutrons, protons and electrons’ as we once thought. Rather, it has now been revealed to be an enormously complex lattice of forces connected by a bewildering array of utterly miniscule subatomic particles including hadrons, leptons, bosons, fermions, mesons, baryons, quarks and anti-quarks, up and down quarks, top and bottom quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks, virtual quarks, valence quarks, gluons and sea quarks…
And let me remind you again, that what we are talking about, a living cell, is a microscopic dot and thousands of these entire factories including all the complexity that we discussed above could fit on the head of a pin. Or, going another way, let’s add to this model of twenty square kilometers of breath taking complexity another one hundred trillion equally complex factories all working in perfect synchronous coordination with each other; which would be a model of the one hundred trillion celled human body, your body, that thing that we lug around every day and complain about; that would, spread laterally at the height of one cell at this magnification, blanket the entire surface of the earth four thousand times over, every part of which would contain pumps and coils and conduits and memory banks and processing centers; all working in perfect harmony with each other, all engineered to an unimaginable level of precision and all there to deliver to us our ability to be conscious, to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to experience the world as we are so used to experiencing it, that we have taken it and the fantastic mechanisms that make it possible for granted.
My question is, “Why don’t we know this?” What Michael Denton has written and I have added to is a perfectly accurate, easily intelligible, non-hyperbolic view of the cell. Why is this not taught in every introductory biology class in our schools?
- Matt Chait
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DNA, how it is passed on, and what is being learned about what affects it, is beyond human comprehension. One interesting aspect is that extreme events do change ones DNA. Does that mean that people really can remember past lives, through their DNA? Does that mean that it just might be that you might meet someone who you're immediately attracted to because of a past-life experience? Do tribal cultures truly have shared cultural memories through shared DNA?
What is being learned is mind-boggling. I wish I had the capacity to better understand it all.
Let’s take this to the next level. I can demonstrate and explain scientifically that the soul is the life energy that instills life in physical matter.
It is consciousness itself that provides the intelligent design. Yes, even for animals and plants, it’s just a lower frequency of consciousness.
It’s a bit complicated to explain in this forum, but not difficult to understand.
Thanks for posting.
Wow, What he said!
I am always amazed at how really smart folks seem to often demonstrate such stupidness in regard to the author of life. Well, I suppose when one’s world view is a mishmash of accident and chance and time shaken up in some ridiculous manner to produce magnificent life!
Praise the creator God Almighty for His brilliance- surpassing our understanding age by age!
Creation
Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
Evolution
Romans 1:21-22 For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools,
BFLR
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Only very blind people cannot see God’s absolutely amazing design everywhere. An educated person knows that it is preposterous to think that all the fathomless complexity and near perfection (Was there, but lost in the fall, to be regained again.) goes infinitely (infinitely times infinity) beyond any possibility of chance. Where there is ever so obviously amazing, amazing design, it is no doubt that it is evidence of the designer.
Thank you so much for posting this!
(It is so information-dense that it has taken me a few days to get back to reading all of it!)