DNA as Digital Technology

_{Barry Arrington

November 19, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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Which Bible thumping ID nutbag wrote the following:

There is a sense, therefore, in which the three-dimensional coiled shape of a protein is determined by the one-dimensional sequence of code symbols in the DNA…. The whole translation, from strictly sequential DNA ROM [read-only memory] to precisely invariant three-dimensional protein shape, is a remarkable feat of digital information technology.

Comments

A candidate would be an observed agent or phenomenon. So far the only observed phenomenon is variation and selection (including drift). What do you mean by observed agent? Why not just an agent? Besides, agency is the only observed source of functional digital code.
M. Holcumbrink_{November 20, 2011
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those who are willing to consider all of the possibilities and those who place the ideological assumption first even if it means excluding possible answers
There's a difference between possibilities and candidates. It's possible that the designer is an invisible pink unicorn. A candidate would be an observed agent or phenomenon. So far the only observed phenomenon is variation and selection (including drift). Simply asserting that an invisible agent having no attributes did some unspecified something at unspecified times and places is not a very compelling possibility.Petrushka_{November 20, 2011
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I guess those who are interested in perusing the way this mechanism came about are divided into those who are willing to consider all of the possibilities and those who place the ideological assumption first even if it means excluding possible answers. It reminds of "based on real life" movie I saw once called Citizen X. A Russian detective spent a decade hunting a serial killer. Early in the investigation he detained the killer as a suspect, but was forced to release him because the killer couldn't possibly be a member of the Communist Party. Frustrated and having arbitrarily excluded the correct answer for ideological reasons, years passed and more people died as he was forced to narrow his search to the permissible pool of possible suspects. Eventually two things happened: more bodies piled up and the evidence pointed back to the original suspect. In this case no one is dying, and plenty of people are making a good living off the research. There's little reason to expand the search for the keys from beneath the streetlight.ScottAndrews2_{November 20, 2011
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I can see Dawkins trying to weasel out of that statement by calling attention to his opening phrase "There is a sense, therefore..." I bet he'd say that there is a sense in which you can, for pedagogical purposes, view an atom as a planetary system, with the nucleus being the sun and the orbiting electrons being the planets. Isn't it amazing how close Darwinists can come to the truth without realizing it?Daniel King_{November 20, 2011
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I guess the world is divided into those who are interested in or perusing the way this mechanism came about, and those for whom the answer is obvious. At any rate, biochemistry has the property of emergence, and one cannot derive the properties of molecules from the properties of atoms. Nor can one derive the properties and phenomena of chemistry from the abstraction commonly referred to as information theory. To find out what is possible, one must do the chemistry.Petrushka_{November 20, 2011
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Is that p. 120?kairosfocus_{November 20, 2011
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H'mm: No responses overnight. So, let me do a fill in the blanks exercise:
That Bible-thumping fundy, professor Clinton R____d D ____kins of course! (And he got his D. Phil from that worthless fundy degree mill B________l College of O_ford.) Worse, he was writing in that 1986 Creationist screed T__ Blind W______ maker! Shocking! Shameless! Ignorant! Stupid! Insane! (Or, maybe Wicked!). . .
So, let's see if we can now deal with the issue on substance instead of the silly burn- the- ad- hominem- soaked- strawman tactics that seem to have become a habitual and uncivil resort of too many objectors to design thought. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{November 20, 2011
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