Why is it that every time genetic "information" is brought up to argue in favor of design...

[pshun2404]

Okay, I'll consider it. "A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis" was published in Rivista d Biologia. That's not a good sign, since that journal is noted for publishing a wide range of crackpots. Davison's paper was published 12 years ago, and in that time it's been cited once, by Davison in another of his papers. In fact, that's what all of Davison's papers from at least 2000 on look like -- cited by no one, or by Davison himself. It's true that one was cited by someone else, in another Rivista paper, titled "Photons and evolution: Quantum mechanical processes modulate sexual differentiation", which is a completely nutso piece of numerology. (Take a look at it here.)

So it's clear that Davison is not exactly an influential scientist, and there's a good chance he's a crackpot (or was -- I believe he's dead now).

Skimming the paper, I find it to be vague and pretty much devoid of evidence supporting its conclusion. It also ignores almost everything that's been learned about genetics in the last hundred years. I see no reason to take this seriously as a source of information on evolution.

Where do you find these guys?

Yeah! Skimming will do that. Powlidge, Kaskow, Davison, and all others I have cited, along with 100s of others that I have read over the past 3 decades, all have evidence based opinions though their "interpretation" of the data may (but for the most part do not) differ from one another in some places. Most scientists I have ever talked to, or had the good pleasure to read, agree and are of the opinion that DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce (and voila, here we are).

 

[Speedwell]

Yeah! Skimming will do that. Powlidge, Kaskow, Davison, and all others I have cited, along with 100s of others that I have read over the past 3 decades, all have evidence based opinions though their "interpretation" of the data may (but for the most part do not) differ from one another in some places. Most scientists I have ever talked to, or had the good pleasure to read, agree and are of the opinion that DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce (and voila, here we are).

"Codes" don't have intention.

 

[pshun2404]

We know that there is a blueprint for each specific protein and it is specified by genetic codons. The pre-specified arrangement with which these amino acids are ordered determine the exact type of proteins produced. In turn, this pre-encoded process determines the functions each subsequent cell will have. Mostly all cellular structure and function are pre-encoded in this DNA blueprint.

They are made in just this way with a further goal indicated, which is the resulting organism complete with all its interacting and inter-dependent forms, forces, and functions. “WE” are the result of this process, the instructions for which are all pre-coded into our DNA from the beginning (long before we become this final product). DNA is literally a storage house of all our most essential biological information.

All the information for the formation of the entire organism is contained in the chromosomes. This information directs the physical unfolding of what we will become and what we are, and it does so by biochemical processes. However NO biological model (even computer models) can tell us how that information got into DNA in the first place.

 

[sfs]

Yeah! Skimming will do that.

So will reading every word, which I just did. Scientifically, it's complete rubbish.

Most scientists I have ever talked to, or had the good pleasure to read, agree and are of the opinion that DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce (and voila, here we are).

Here's a radical idea: try reading scientists you don't agree with. And try to make them competent.

 

[Speedwell]

Yeah! Skimming will do that. Powlidge, Kaskow, Davison, and all others I have cited, along with 100s of others that I have read over the past 3 decades, all have evidence based opinions though their "interpretation" of the data may (but for the most part do not) differ from one another in some places. Most scientists I have ever talked to, or had the good pleasure to read, agree and are of the opinion that DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce (and voila, here we are).

"Codes" don't have intention.

 

[pshun2404]

So will reading every word, which I just did. Scientifically, it's complete rubbish.

Here's a radical idea: try reading scientists you don't agree with. And try to make them competent.

I have been reading science for 50 years (had alternate subscriptions to both Science and Nature and presently to AAAS)...applied for and received and read 100s of NIH publications and more...I always explore the many views (and consider why they hpd these views), and blanketly reject none (something you should try), but rather peruse for the reasoning, logic, and foundation of their opinions...I know Ben Stein is pro ID, but that is still hillarious.

I was a strict science nut (totally rejecting anything that even smelled of theism) far before I came to be a believer, and even in theologies (as well as in scientific articles) I try to separate subjunctive language (could be, might be, we can assume that, we believe that, and so on) from actual facts, and have always suggested people separate the actual data from the story told to explain what it means (its called critical thinking as opposed to thinking up ever newer criticisms) which relies so heavily on world view, alleged authorities, and consensus (all of which are unrelaible) as "proof").

So I assume you know the answer? Please provide it. Was DNA formed by random processes? If so how? Show me, I am open to learning new things always.

The DNA dilemma states no functional DNA outside of a cell, and yet no DNA containing cell without DNA already being there and being functional. So could one have evolved first leading to the other? Any evidence of this?

 

[sfs]

I have been reading science for 50 years (had alternate subscriptions to both Science and Nature and presently to AAAS)...applied for and received and read 100s of NIH publications and more.

So which of those NIH publications stated that 'DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce'?

So I assume you know the answer? Please provide it. Was DNA formed by random processes? If so how? Show me, I am open to learning new things always.

I have no idea how DNA formed. The scant evidence we have suggests that it was preceded by RNA, but that could easily be wrong. We don't know whether it was or could be formed by random processes. No alternative mechanism has been proposed that I know of.

That's a very different issue, though, than this:

All the information for the formation of the entire organism is contained in the chromosomes. This information directs the physical unfolding of what we will become and what we are, and it does so by biochemical processes. However NO biological model (even computer models) can tell us how that information got into DNA in the first place.

We don't know where the first DNA came from. We do know quite well where most of the information in modern DNA came from, however. It came from mutations filtered by natural selection.

 

[SkyWriting]

... those arguing are completely unable to define what constitutes "information" in that context?

I think in all the examples of this I've ever seen, nobody has ever attempted to actually define what information is as it applies to genetics.

Usable data.

 

[Mediaeval]

The evolutionary model does that very well, and explains the distribution in levels of intelligence (creative problem solving) across the various species we observe it in.

So if you feel you can't currently account for it, you simply define it into existence a-priori? Sounds like 'God of the gaps'...

This sounds like an argument from intuition, similar to claiming that order can't come from disorder. It may be the assumption that intelligence and non-intelligence are semantic 'opposites' and therefore one can't arise from the other, or perhaps a ontological error in assuming that intelligence is a clearly bounded category; but that isn't the case - intelligence is a description we give to behaviours of a certain level of complexity, and its boundaries are ill-defined.

To me it says that we can have a greater degree of confidence in our assumptions of knowledge and make better judgements if we have a better awareness and understanding of the processes underlying our reasoning and their characteristic flaws and biases.

What do you mean by 'the problem of error' ?

Not really, no. I think that's a crude simplification. Just because a system has identifiable flaws doesn't mean it can't function effectively and/or compensate for those flaws to some extent.

What we see in humans and across the various species is a level of intelligence that a creationist or theistic evolutionary model could justify, but not a model where atheistic materialism (AM) is assumed, and that for the reason already belabored in previous posts. Other reasons why AM could not justify our power to know include the fact that mind cannot be deduced from matter by any necessary implication and the fact that under AM physiology would determine psychology, which would mean that reason and free will are illusive.

Empirically speaking, we do not see non-intelligence producing intelligence—and by intelligence and non-intelligence I am simply contrasting mind and not-mind. As a result, positing matter as the cause of intelligence would indeed be a kind of “gaps” solution, where it is assumed that matter must have properties that can explain everything and fill every gap in knowledge. But to posit a theistic solution is not a gaps solution, however intuitive it might also be. Rather, it is to assimilate intelligent products to our own empirical experience, where we find intelligence as the cause of intelligent contrivances like watches and computers. There is, besides, no other empirical experience of causation apart from the intelligent and volitional.

Error in philosophy is sort of the analog to sin in religious thought. The problem of error is simply the question of how we account for error. Under Christian theism, we have generally reliable faculties that can be carelessly used or willfully misused to produce error. Thus the question of error reduces to a question of free will. But under AM, there is no free will. Erroneous and truthful conclusions alike would be merely products of electro-chemical processes in the brain. Error, then, is cosmic and necessary. Cognition is flawed and unreliable from the outset, and the crude simplification mentioned earlier cannot be avoided. This also is not an especially controversial conclusion. Under AM, not only are our basal experiences of reason and free will illusive, but so is the experience of ourselves as a unitary thinking self with an single, abiding identity. With such deceptions at the root of our cognition, it is not surprising that Daniel Dennett should call consciousness a "user illusion" or that Nietzsche should say that "there simply is no true world." If trust in our power to know was only undermined before, it is now out of reach.

 

[Speedwell]

What we see in humans and across the various species is a level of intelligence that a creationist or theistic evolutionary model could justify, but not a model where atheistic materialism (AM) is assumed, and that for the reason already belabored in previous posts. Other reasons why AM could not justify our power to know include the fact that mind cannot be deduced from matter by any necessary implication and the fact that under AM physiology would determine psychology, which would mean that reason and free will are illusive.

Empirically speaking, we do not see non-intelligence producing intelligence—and by intelligence and non-intelligence I am simply contrasting mind and not-mind. As a result, positing matter as the cause of intelligence would indeed be a kind of “gaps” solution, where it is assumed that matter must have properties that can explain everything and fill every gap in knowledge. But to posit a theistic solution is not a gaps solution, however intuitive it might also be. Rather, it is to assimilate intelligent products to our own empirical experience, where we find intelligence as the cause of intelligent contrivances like watches and computers. There is, besides, no other empirical experience of causation apart from the intelligent and volitional.

Error in philosophy is sort of the analog to sin in religious thought. The problem of error is simply the question of how we account for error. Under Christian theism, we have generally reliable faculties that can be carelessly used or willfully misused to produce error. Thus the question of error reduces to a question of free will. But under AM, there is no free will. Erroneous and truthful conclusions alike would be merely products of electro-chemical processes in the brain. Error, then, is cosmic and necessary. Cognition is flawed and unreliable from the outset, and the crude simplification mentioned earlier cannot be avoided. This also is not an especially controversial conclusion. Under AM, not only are our basal experiences of reason and free will illusive, but so is the experience of ourselves as a unitary thinking self with an single, abiding identity. With such deceptions at the root of our cognition, it is not surprising that Daniel Dennett should call consciousness a "user illusion" or that Nietzsche should say that "there simply is no true world." If trust in our power to know was only undermined before, it is now out of reach.

Over-reductionist, IMO. But even so, what are the implications for the faith?

 

[Mediaeval]

Over-reductionist, IMO. But even so, what are the implications for the faith?

Getting at first principles is necessarily reductionistic. The main implication I had in mind was God as the foundation of knowledge--though not as if faith needed philosophy to tell it that.

 

[Speedwell]

Getting at first principles is necessarily reductionistic. The main implication I had in mind was God as the foundation of knowledge--though not as if faith needed philosophy to tell it that.

In this case, philosophy is the weaker voice. It looks at what is, and reasons backwards from it to a single conclusion, then proclaims, "If our conclusion is not true then things can't be the way they are..."

 

[pshun2404]

Anyone read Turner's The Tinkerer's Accomplice...his applications of the words designedness and intentionality are causing some stir. He describes "intention" as not needing a brain as we think of it. I just got it and it looks exciting. Can't wait...

 

[tas8831]

Yeah! Skimming will do that. Powlidge, Kaskow, Davison, and all others I have cited, along with 100s of others that I have read over the past 3 decades, all have evidence based opinions though their "interpretation" of the data may (but for the most part do not) differ from one another in some places. Most scientists I have ever talked to, or had the good pleasure to read, agree and are of the opinion that DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce (and voila, here we are).

Davison was, as sfs indicates, a crackpot. He apparently suffered some sort of major family trauma (death of a child? Not sure) in the mid-1980s, and after a several year lack of activity, started churning out angry anti-Darwin essays based primarily on the rantings of people like PP Grasse. I spent time - too much time - debating Davison on several forums, and in the end, the ONLY actual evidence he could produce was that in some rare cases in 1 kind of turkey, they sometimes are able to engage in parthenogenesis. That and his claim that because mutations occur instantaneously, evolution is instantaneous and that 1 new organism = speciation.

If you found his claims compelling, then perhaps it was you that was doing the skimming?

I am curious, though - in all the 100s of others that you have read over the past 3 decades, how many of them presented actual evidence for Intelligent Design or Creation? Please keep in mind, that rejecting evolution, bible verses, claims that evolution 'cannot explain this', etc., is not evidence.

And these scientists that you have read and talked to - how many agreed that some 'intelligent designer' - that also happens to be the Christian deity - created information and stuck it into DNA?

 

[tas8831]

So which of those NIH publications stated that 'DNA is an "information" packed code which produces what that code intended to produce'?

Come now, sfs - he's been reading science for 50 years AND has had subscriptions to scientific journals! He MUST know what he is talking about!

Weird, then, that with all this amassed scientific expertise, such folk are still often reduced to engaging in plagiarism and simplistic copy-pasting of archived 'arguments'...

 

[pshun2404]

Come now, sfs - he's been reading science for 50 years AND has had subscriptions to scientific journals! He MUST know what he is talking about!

Weird, then, that with all this amassed scientific expertise, such folk are still often reduced to engaging in plagiarism and simplistic copy-pasting of archived 'arguments'...

Hold it Tas...I never claimed "expertise", I was merely responding to a false accusation (that I know nothing and should actually read and learn science). I can know a lot about science and even loved doing it but that does not necessitate I have to accept all that some of them conclude. Appeal to authority is a logic flaw. It is good thing to examine arguments for and against (and the reasons for their differences) and then actually think for yourself.

Welcome, have you actually read all the posts on this thread (or any)? There are many references. Perhaps you could look into a few...

 

[pshun2404]

I am curious, though - in all the 100s of others that you have read over the past 3 decades, how many of them presented actual evidence for Intelligent Design or Creation? Please keep in mind, that rejecting evolution, bible verses, claims that evolution 'cannot explain this', etc., is not evidence.

And these scientists that you have read and talked to - how many agreed that some 'intelligent designer' - that also happens to be the Christian deity - created information and stuck it into DNA?

Who brought up God? Not me...! Did I quote Bible verses? Why more false accusations? Does it make you feel you win? Great! Go with that.

 

[tas8831]

I believe as we learn more and more it will turn out that we will come to realize through science that it is information that fuels the Universe. This is all NOT the result of chance whatsoever.

Information directs the formation of all structure and form (through the physical and chemical laws that matter/energy follows and conforms to), and directs and commands the principles governing all innate function.

Existence as we know it is not the cause of this information (though it does produce additional information), but rather it is the effect of it. This information is a sort of predetermination of parameters that thingness (matter and energy) must follow and adhere to resulting in purposed subsequence.

Biologist George Williams (see Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenge, 1992) begins the realization of this, within biological processes, when he says “Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter.

He also says in an interview later, that...

“These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms, because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can't do that with information and matter. Information doesn't have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn't have bytes. You can't measure so much gold in so many bytes. It doesn't have redundancy, or fidelity, or any of the other descriptors we apply to information. This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.

The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, it's not the message. Maintaining this distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution.

In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality. They're patterns.

In cultural evolution, obviously, the idea of a coffee cup or a table is something that persists. The coffee cups and tables don't persist, they recur as a result of the persistence of the information that tells people how to make coffee cups and tables. It's the same way in biology: hands and feet and noses and so on don't persist, they recur as a result of genetic instructions for making hands and feet and noses. It's the information that lasts and evolves. Obviously, it's because of the physical manifestations of the information that we know about the information.”

Are there Any arguments you post here that you have not already been trounced in on Topix?

Is Creationism and Intelligent Design debunked forever?

I do love the creationist tendency to portray (either implicitly or explicitly) someone from which they have plucked a 'juicy quote' as some kind of ultimate authority.

And I also love how others responded there:

"Obstruction by grandiose verbosity is exactly what he loves to do."

 

[tas8831]

Who brought up God? Not me...! Did I quote Bible verses? Why more false accusations? Does it make you feel you win? Great! Go with that.

False accusation? Egotist much? Did I accuse YOU of using bible verses? Are you denying that creationists do not do those very things? Yours is a more sophisticated version, to be sure, but in the end, it is not that different.

Of course, I note the dodging...

 

[pshun2404]

Most genes contain the information needed to make functional molecules called proteins.

During the process of transcription, the information stored in a gene's DNA is transferred to a similar molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid) in the cell nucleus.

The flow of information from DNA to RNA to proteins is one of the fundamental principles of molecular biology.

How do genes direct the production of proteins?

The genetic information of an organism is stored in DNA molecules.

The sequence of these four bases can provide all the instructions needed to build any living organism.

The information stored in the order of bases is organized into genes: each gene contains information for making a functional product.

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As Dr. Ananya Mandal describes it, “Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the chemical information database that carries the complete set of instructions for the cell as to the nature of the proteins produced by it, its life span, maturity, function and death. Genes are the working subunits of DNA. Each gene contains a particular set of instructions, usually coding for a particular protein or for a particular function.”

So therefore, Genes influence what we will look like and how we function. HOW? Because they contain the information our bodies need to make chemicals called proteins. In effect, they are responsible on the physical level of becoming what we end up being (a fish versus a reptile...or a human). They contain all the INFORMATION necessary to perform this end all function.

Surely you deny none of this....