Be your own intelligent designer! Specifically, create life from simple chemicals, information from nothing! You have to create a genetic code from simple chemicals:
Wealthy investors are offering a $10m prize to the first scientific team that can create a genetic code from simple chemicals — reproducing the unknown process that led billions of years ago to DNA as the vehicle for transmitting information in life on Earth. The Evolution 2.0 prize is an initiative by Perry Marshall, an online marketing entrepreneur based in Chicago. It will be judged by prominent scientists, including George Church, genetics professor at Harvard university, and Denis Noble, the Oxford university biologist who was the first to model the human heart on a computer…
Clive Cookson, “Entrepreneurs offer $10m prize for cracking mystery of DNA” at Financial Times
The entire $10 million will go only to a “patentable” coding system, with the sponsors of the prize as partners with the winner in commercialization.
Here’s the official Natural Code Prize vid:
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
See also: Even viruses have complex origins now
and
Yes! Oparin’s coacervates again!
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I swear to God they’ve done this before
Perry Marshall’s “challenge” is a dishonest scheme to promote his book. He has identified something that is unique to living
organisms, namely communicating with a language ( he calls it a code) and is asking for an example of it where is is not associated
with any life form. That’s basically saying ” show me life that is not life” which is a contradiction, and cannot, by definition, be
demonstrated.
As an added safeguard against anyone actually winning the prize, anyone who submits an entry must sign a form that gives Marshall
complete control over the information. So, even if someone came up with a valid solution, Marshall can suppress it and never
release it to the public.
Talk about a huckster!
My understanding is he is looking for the code that generates life. Which, if identified, is going to be worth much more than $10M. So, I think Marshall will gladly part ways with $10M for ownership of the code.
Of course, the premise of this idea is flawed, since it assumes life is computable, which is quite a big assumption in itself.
Wow. Pater’s response is that of the fox and the sour grapes. Talk about the ultimate attempt at a Jedi handwave!
Pater Kimbridge huffs
Actually, the only blatant dishonesty surrounding Origin Of Life (OOL) research has been from the researchers themselves, (many who are taxpayer funded through grants), who have repeatedly dishonestly claimed to the public that they have the OOL problem well in hand:
James Tour exposed just how dishonest some OOL researchers are in the following video:
In fact, instead of getting closer to solving the OOL problem, the more we know about the details of the problem, the worse the OOL problem gets for atheistic materialists:
Pater Kimbridge further huffs
Well not exactly. He is asking for a demonstration that inanimate matter can generate a code. As he explained in the first part of the video, Human Intelligence can generate a code at will, but no one has ever seen a code being generated from brute chemistry. Yet, this is exactly what atheistic materialists say happened.
Pater Kimbridge further huffs
Ha ha ha.,,, Well no again. He is asking anyone to show, (not only him, but to show the judges George Church of Harvard and Denis Noble of Oxford), an example of inanimate matter, via brute chemistry, generating a code.
If that, to use your words, “cannot, by definition, be demonstrated” then you have basically conceded that it is impossible for atheistic materialists to ever explain the origin of life.
Pater Kimbridge finishes his tirade with
Ha ha ha,, Ha ha ha,,, That takes the cake. So say some hypothetical super genius has figured out how to generate a code, via brute chemistry, from inanimate matter. A monumental technological breakthrough that will rival other monumental technological breakthroughs in terms of importance for mankind. And yet, in the deep recesses of Pater’s imagination, he believes that Perry Marshall is somehow fervently scheming to prevent this monumental technological breakthrough from ever reaching the light of day?
HA HA HA HA 🙂
That takes the cake.
Talk about conspiracy theorists. Even moon landing deniers would give you a face palm.
.
>>> He has identified something that is unique to living organisms, namely communicating with a language ( he calls it a code) and is asking for an example of it where is is not associated with any life form.
Were you actually aiming for your foot when you pulled the trigger?
@BA77 said “…he believes that Perry Marshall is somehow fervently scheming to prevent this monumental technological breakthrough from ever reaching the light of day?”
No, he has just found a way to insure he will never have to part with his $10 million, while using his God-of-the-Gaps Gambit to get his name out there so he can sell books.
Don’t believe me? Read the fine print: https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0/guidelines
I will believe this is not a scam when I see proof that $10 million has been put in trust.
Pater Kimbridge tries to further his outlandish conspiracy theory with this,
Ha Ha Ha,,, so it is a vast conspiracy to further the “God-of-the-Gaps Gambit”. LOL Ha Ha Ha. 🙂
By golly those Christians are such a dishonest lot. They are the ones who have been hiding, for all these years, all the empirical evidence that Darwinists need to validate their theory! 🙂 Ha Ha Ha,, You take the friggin cake.
Get a grip man, Perry Marshall, and all the minions of Christians in the world, could not stop such a hypothetical monumental discovery from seeing the light of day.
You asked me to read the fine print.
Perhaps you should read the fine print. First, it is not solely his money. And second he is not the judge of the prize.
I take it that you are not aware of exactly who George Church and Denis Noble are? If you were aware of their stellar reputations in science you certainly would not be throwing around such false accusations of widespread dishonesty as you have done.
There are ways to go about that. But we all know you won’t even try.
According to them, Nature supposedly did what Perry is asking for without wanting to and without trying to. So it’s sad when the other side’s bluff is called and all they can do is squawk like chickens.
There is a recent round the table talk at the Royal Society with Denis Noble here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJSCBeLD05M
One of the investors is also there, and gives a short talk at the end of the video
PK, a financial fraud promoted in Financial Times and with the names of reviewers like that given? Not likely, I think the shoe is on the other foot. Put it this way, if someone succeeds the principals stand to make vastly more than $10 mn, so I read this as a take option giving first refusal on the results of the successful research. Publicity alone would greatly exceed US$ 10 mn in value so raising a contingent sum is no problem. As is overwhelmingly more likely, there will be no solution as the informational school of thought on thermodynamics would immediately suggest. Though much less lucrative, that result is also valuable. Whatever else he is Mr Marshall is a canny financial operator. KF
BA77, precisely. KF
As to Pater Kimbridge’s claim that Marshall is using the ““God-of-the-Gaps Gambit” to get his name out there so he can sell books.”
When an atheistic materialist claims that a Christian Theist is using the ““God-of-the-Gaps Gambit” he is claiming that the more that our knowledge in science has progressed, then the more we have found materialistic and/or naturalistic answers to the mysteries of the universe, and the more that the requirement for God as an explanation is science has receded. The atheist believes that the Christian Theist is merely fallaciously sticking God into the gaps of our present ignorance in science and that a materialistic and/or naturalistic answer, as in times past, will be forthcoming as our knowledge in science expands.
When looking at the actual progress of science, particular in the 20 and 21st century, that oft repeated narrative is found to be completely false.
First off, the fact of the matter is that, as science has progressed, it is the Atheist himself who has had to retreat further and further into ‘Materialism/Naturalism of Gaps’ style arguments. i.e. retreat into what is known as the ‘argument from ignorance’, (which is a logical fallacy). Examples of this retreat into ignorance on the part of Atheistic materialists include the origin of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe, the falsification of local realism by quantum mechanics, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, the origin of consciousness, etc. etc… Here is a video that goes over many of the failed scientific predictions of the Materialist’s naturalistic philosophy in regards to what we have actually found in science.
Secondly, as Stephen Meyer points out in the following video, when it comes to the origin of life, we are not arguing from our ignorance, but we are arguing from our present knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world
As atheists, and even Stephen Meyer himself, would be quick to point out, just because we know that Intelligence can produce the effect in question, namely functional digital information, and that unguided materialistic processes are grossly insufficient to produce the effect in question, i.e. to produce functional digital information, that does not automatically mean that God did it.
And I wholeheartedly agree that it does not ‘automatically’ imply that God did it. We would have to put some further scientific evidence behind what we already have in order to imply that “God did it’.
So, let’s see if we find that scientific evidence.
Advances in quantum biology have now shown us that Atheistic materialists, with their reductive materialistic framework, are not even on the correct theoretical foundation in order to properly understand molecular biology in the first place.
Specifically, quantum entanglement and/or quantum coherence has now been found in every important biological molecule of life:
What is so devastating to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, with the finding pervasive quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement within molecular biology, is that Quantum coherence and/or quantum entanglement is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, ““Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
Moreover, as the following study found, the greater the number of particles in a quantum hypergraph state, (which is exactly the type of quantum coherence that we have with protein and DNA molecules), the more strongly it violates local realism, with the strength increasing exponentially with the number of particles.
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence and/or entanglement of the cell. Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
On top of that, in the following video, Dr James Tour, (who is very well respected for his breakthroughs in synthetic chemistry, and who is regarded as one of the top ten synthetic chemists in the world), states the insurmountable problem for the Origin of Life (OOL) for atheistic materialists as such:
What Dr. Tour briefly touched upon in that preceding comment is the fact that having the correct sequential information encoded in DNA is not nearly enough in order to explain life. Besides the sequential information in DNA there is also a vast amount of ‘positional information’ that must be accounted for as well.
The amount of positional information that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be on the order 10 to the 12 bits,,, which is several orders of magnitude more information than the amount of sequential information that is encoded on the DNA of a ‘simple’ bacterium.
,,, Which is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
And again, in comparison, the sequential information encoded on DNA of ‘simple’ bacterial life is merely around 10^6 bits. Thus that is a huge, ‘orders of magnitude’ disparity between the positional information and sequential information of a ‘simple’ cell.
And also recall that the amount of positional information contained within a ‘simple’ bacterium was derived from thermodynamic considerations.
And in regards to this vast amount of ‘thermodynamic’ positional information that must somehow be accounted for in order to explain the Origin of Life, in the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, it was demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,”
Think about that statement for a second.
These experiments completely blow the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution, (presuppositions about information being merely ’emergent’ from some material basis), out of the water.
In other words, contrary to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, information, particularly this ‘thermodynamic positional information’, is now experimentally shown, via quantum information theory, to be its own distinct physical entity that, although it can interact with matter and energy, is its own independent, ‘non-local’ beyond space and time, entity that is separate from matter and energy. On top of all that, this ‘thermodynamic positional information’ is found, via quantum information theory, to be “a property of an observer who describes a system.”
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a direct inference to God as the Intelligence behind life, has, for all intents and purposes, achieved experimental confirmation.
Of related note, it is also very important to note that classical information is now shown to be a subset of quantum information.
Classical sequential information is shown to be a subset of ‘non-local’ quantum ‘positional’ information by the following method. Specifically, in the following 2011 paper, researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.
Also of related note, it is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following video, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Thus contrary to the “God of the gaps”, i.e. argument from ignorance, objection that Pater Kimbridge and other atheists try to invoke against ID proponents, the fact of the matter is that the Christian Theist is not arguing from a position of ignorance, of what we do not know about the world, but is instead arguing from a position of knowledge about what we do know about the cause and effect structure of the world.
In fact, in order to hold onto his position, the atheist is forced to deny this evidence and to choose to remain in his ignorance.
In other words, in order to deny that Intelligence, and particularly God, is behind the quantum information in life, the atheist himself is forced to make an ‘argument from ignorance’. Which is exactly what the atheist had falsely accused the Christian of doing in the first place.
Verses:
Somebody accidentally crashed a satellite on Earth carrying thousands of dried tardigrades. Experiment now being replicated on the Moon to test its validity.
https://www.livescience.com/66109-tardigrades-moon-israeli-lander.html
Surely, ‘non-locality’, not to speak of the Singularity, itself, (‘originating, even concurrently “existing” beyond space and time, i.e. subject to a different reference-frame from space-time, while yet interacting with it), quite literally signifies a ‘supernatural’ realm, ‘beyond the limits of the natural world’? And certainly beyond the scope of empirical science.
On a related note, does anyone recall when prof szostak began his research project on ool at Harvard? Iirc he said he’d have results iedn 5 years. Must be more than that by now. And probably spent more than $10m by now.
I’m sure there are lots of wannabe emperors who would give all the money in the world to learn how to clone soldiers.