Data, Information, and all that....

Joralex,I, for one, think Peter overstated the case by saying that the letter-jumbling exercise doesn't work with Hebrew. English has separate vowel letters, but Hebrew uses little marks below the consonant letters to stand for the vowel sounds. In newspapers and such, these marks are omitted entirely, so only readers familiar with the language already would recognize the words. If the consonant letters were jumbled (and the vowel marks missing), it would be much more difficult to reassemble the words. This is a matter of degree and not of kind. I'd say Spanish would be a more difficult language than English in which to play this game, due to the percentage of words that end in -o or -a. That's not to say the exercise wouldn't work.However, linguists have pretty well established the interrelations among modern languages and the ways these derive from previous languages. I'm baffled by the last sentence of your post. Are you saying that languages have not evolved from common ancestors either?------------------
The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall

Loudmouth,This is an excellent point. We've said before that Behe and Dembski make a lot out of 'specificity' but the concept is still vague. Usually, they use the analogy of an archer shooting arrows into a target: the specificity comes in the arrow hitting the target, not just shooting an arrow into the wall and painting a target around it.In theory (Peter has argued), there's no way to determine that the target was there before the arrow, so intelligent design creationism loses all hope of empirical relevance. Thanks for giving us a concrete example of this from the very field that Joralex and the IDC crew treat like ready-made creationist propaganda.I wonder what Joralex will make of geneticists documenting 'complex, specified information' coming about through that silly notion of Darwinian evolutionary process.------------------
The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall

DNAunion,

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Anyone who claims that DNA does not contain information - and then goes on to stress that such is the case - gives the impression of being totally ignorant of biology: it's as simple as that.

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The ignorance belongs to people who take a useful analogy like DNA-as-information and stretch it beyond any realistic significance. Look, lots of scientists love the information analogy, because it makes biology seem cutting edge and gives bored students and laymen an exciting way to visualize the not-particularly-sexy subject of biochemistry. If that's overstating the case, so be it. At least it beats trying to make us believe that since DNA is the software for the cellular computer, God must be the necessary techno-geek responsible for writing the code for life itself.DNA is a self-replicating molecule, unlike any human invention. If you claim to be informed in biochemistry, you must understand that near-miraculous things occur all the time in the microuniverse of biomolecules. There's no purposeful intelligence required to make adenine curl into a helix: it's merely seeking hydrostatic equilibrium. There's no intelligent design necessary to separate the chromosomes during mitosis, it's just one of millions in biochemistry's bag of tricks.I know someone else on this site has made the analogy that DNA isn't a recipe for making a cake, it's the cake mix that makes itself. We're not talking about a 'program' that the cell uses, it's the cell itself. The only reason that you and other intelligent design creationists want to get carried away with the information analogy is so you can use it to prove your point that design requires a designer. If you're impressed with DNA, join the club. But realize that unlike human information, biological 'information' creates itself. The designs we see in nature are the product of this mechanistic miracle.------------------
The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall

For the record, DNAunion has put it like this in the Behe's 'IC' Is Refuted thread:

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At this site I’ve not committed to how information got into DNA because HOW has not been my point...just that there IS information in DNA.

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But now I’ll go ahead and state my position: purely natural processes, such as random mutation and natural selection, can increase the information content of DNA. The information needed to produce extant organisms, encoded in DNA base sequences, was produced from natural manipulations of the DNA information needed to produce yesterday’s organisms, which arose in a similar fashion, and so, back through time until reaching a single common ancestor (if we are going to get technical, possibly a single community in the Woese sense). In other words, common descent of all extant life from a universal common ancestor by means of undirected evolution, with the new information entering the collective genome by means of undirected mutation and natural selection.

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Am I the only one who sees a gaping hole in this? How magnanimous of him to state that he accepts that natural processes produced the additional information necessary to get us from the common ancestor(s) to today's organisms, but what about before that?This is the creationism that dares not speak its name. Despite his denials, it's clear that the 'information' he's talking about wouldn't be in DNA unless someone put it there. Why else would he care what definition of information we accept? Note he puts the word "random" in scare quotes, like there's any reason to think that point mutations are anything but random. And I wonder what sort of processes put the information into that proto-DNA, since 'purely natural' ones are supposed to be so inadequate once we get to the common ancestor.Again, if undirected mutation and selection is good enough to explain the amazing diversity of life that exists today, I think it could very well explain the origin of life itself. And if anyone has any better scientific explanation, they should provide us with it instead of trying to make us believe that we're being presumptuous by going with has worked so far.regards,
Esteban Hambre

Abby,I think anyone who proposes miraculous or supernatural mechanisms as being necessary for any natural phenomenon is a creationist.regards,
Esteban "Funk'n'Wagnall's" Hambre

Abby,Please note that I said that a creationist believes miraculous intervention is necessary to explain natural phenomena. I think the crux of the issue is the sufficiency of natural law. I think there is good reason to believe in the universal application of natural law, and creationists do not.Someone brought up a good point about design or intention as it applies to the lottery. Maybe it only seems random, but in fact the process is controlled by the intention of the divine will. Is there any good reason to believe this? Does it constitute an affront to honest religious belief to assert that the outcome of a lottery is random and unpredictable?I think the regularity of natural laws is reason enough to suspect that they are not merely the whims of the Creator. It's for that reason that we'd consider something 'miraculous' if it violated scientific laws.regards,
Esteban "Law Abiding" Hambre

DNAunion,Thanks ever so much for calling me a Nazi and asking if I can read.I assure you that I, like most of those here, can read. We've read all your eloquent arguments in defense of Michael Behe and his concept of 'irreducible complexity.' We've read your persistent arguments that DNA contains information, and your assertion that it's a different subject than how the information 'got' there. We've read your declarations that you believe that undirected processes are enough to explain evolution from the LUCA, but that you're not convinced that abiogenesis was the product of the same undirected processes. However, we've also read that you ascribe my suspicion that you're an ID creationist to my 'stupidity,' my 'delusion,' and my inability to read.I'd assume a rational and honest person like yourself would admit if he feels 'purely natural processes' are the original source of the information in the genome of the ancestor of extant life forms. Try as I might to find that here, though, it seems like you're just repeating that these undirected processes are only responsible for our evolution from the LUCA:

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But now I’ll go ahead and state my position: purely natural processes, such as random mutation and natural selection, can increase the information content of DNA. The information needed to produce extant organisms, encoded in DNA base sequences, was produced from natural manipulations of the DNA information needed to produce yesterday’s organisms, which arose in a similar fashion, and so, back through time until reaching a single common ancestor (if we are going to get technical, possibly a single community in the Woese sense). In other words, common descent of all extant life from a universal common ancestor by means of undirected evolution, with the new information entering the collective genome by means of undirected mutation and natural selection.

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Thanks again for the compliment, and looking forward to your characteristic rationality and honesty.regards,
Esteban "Frickin Retard" Hambre

DNAunion,As expected, you have answered the charge that you are an ID creationist with the mere assertion that you are not one. I guess nobody should wonder why you go to such great lengths to defend an ID creationist like Behe, or why you only seem able to give credit to undirected processes for evolution from the first organisms onward, and not for the origin of life itself. Nobody should wonder why you make this distinction, or why you subsequently evade the question of why you make it.The only thing I've lost is the interest in making you clarify your position. The only one playing here is you.regards,
Esteban "Ceci n'est pas un Creationist" Hambre[This message has been edited by MrHambre, 03-22-2004]

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DNAunion: See, you're confused. You claim that you didn't ask me what you did in fact ask, and you also claim that you asked me what you in fact did not.

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Anybody get the feeling DNAunion didn't get enough attention as a child?regards
Esteban "Losing Respect" Hambre