Orthomyxo Types on Keyboard; When Letters Appear on Screen “It’s Physical!”

Chris Messier, Thanks, those comments help. I'll take a look at the videos today.daveS

May 7, 2020

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And to get a bit more technical, but hopefully not too technical, classical sequential information, (such as what is encoded on DNA), is now shown to be a subset of ‘positional’ quantum information,,,,

Image: Classical information is a subset of quantum information https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf00101/images/figure1.gif

,,, classical sequential information, (such as what is encoded on DNA), is now shown to be a subset of ‘positional’ quantum information by the following method. Specifically, “when the bits 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 an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. ”

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy – June 1, 2011 Excerpt: The new study revisits Landauer’s principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits 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 an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.htm

The fact that classical sequential information is a subset of ‘positional’ quantum information is further driven home by looking at the physical relation of quantum information to sequential information in DNA. As Dr Reiper remarks in the following video, “practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.”

“What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state.” Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176

Thus we now have many lines of empirical evidence, (particularly from quantum information theory and from the recent experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment), establishing the fact that information, regardless of the fact that it is immaterial, is, none-the less, physically real and that it has, of all things, a ‘thermodynamic content’ that can be imparted, in a ‘top-down’ manner. onto material substrates by an intelligent, and immaterial, mind.. As far as empirical science is concerned, these experiments establishing the physical reality of immaterial information are direct empirical falsifications of the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, Materialistic presuppositions that hold immaterial information, (as well as immaterial mind), to be merely ’emergent’ from some material basis. Of supplemental note, perhaps the simplest, non-technical, way to demonstrate that immaterial information is a physically real entity that is separate from matter and energy is with quantum teleportation, As the following article states, “the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,,”

Quantum Teleportation Enters the Real World – September 19, 2016 Excerpt: Two separate teams of scientists have taken quantum teleportation from the lab into the real world. Researchers working in Calgary, Canada and Hefei, China, used existing fiber optics networks to transmit small units of information across cities via quantum entanglement — Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”,,, This isn’t teleportation in the “Star Trek” sense — the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,, ,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2016/09/19/quantum-teleportation-enters-real-world/#.V-HqWNEoDtR

And as the following article states. “scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart,,, information,,, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium.”

First Teleportation Between Distant Atoms – 2009 Excerpt: For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing. Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, but without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances. Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance https://jqi.umd.edu/news/first-teleportation-between-distant-atoms

Simply put, if the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought were actually true, then the preceding quantum teleportation experiments that demonstrated the transfer of information without the particles ever physically interacting, should have been impossible. Quote and Verses:

“There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly” Adam Sedgwick – quoted from a letter that he wrote to Charles Darwin – 1859 Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul? John 1:1-4 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

bornagain77

May 7, 2020

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In a nutshell, Darwinists in this thread are trying to claim that life is reducible to 'chemical reactions interacting with other chemical reactions'. Whereas IDists are claiming that information lies at the heart of life. and that chemistry alone simply can never explain information in life. As Paul Davies stated in 2002, "Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won't work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level. "

How we could create life - The key to existence will be found not in primordial sludge, but in the nanotechnology of the living cell - Paul Davies - 2002 Excerpt: the living cell is best thought of as a supercomputer - an information processing and replicating system of astonishing complexity. DNA is not a special life-giving molecule, but a genetic databank that transmits its information using a mathematical code. Most of the workings of the cell are best described, not in terms of material stuff - hardware - but as information, or software. Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won't work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/dec/11/highereducation.uk

And as Paul Davies stated in 1999, ""How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing."

"How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software … ? Nobody knows … … there is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing." - Paul Davies, Life force, New Scientist 163(2204):27–30, 18 September 1999

And as Paul Davies reiterated in 2020, (after a few decades of thinking about the problem), "Asking chemistry to explain coded information is like expecting computer hardware to write its own software." and "The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer). "

Hey, Paul Davies — Your ID is Showing - Robert F. Shedinger - March 6, 2020 Excerpt: With a nod toward James Clerk Maxwell’s entropy-defying demon, (Paul) Davies argues that the gulf between physics and biology is completely unbridgeable without some fundamentally new concept. Since living organisms consistently resist the ravages of entropy that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, there must be some non-physical principle allowing living matter to consistently defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And for Davies there is; the demon in the machine turns out to be information.,,, "Semantic information is a higher-level concept that is simply meaningless at the level of molecules. Chemistry alone, however complex, can never produce the genetic code or contextual instructions. Asking chemistry to explain coded information is like expecting computer hardware to write its own software." - Paul Davies https://evolutionnews.org/2020/03/hey-paul-davies-your-id-is-showing/ (Paul) Davies And Walker On Origin Of Life: Life As Information - March 7, 2020 Excerpt: However, the genome is only a small part of the story. DNA is not a blueprint for an organism:1 no information is actively processed by DNA alone [17]. Rather, DNA is a (mostly) passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins. The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer). - per uncommondescent

The reason why it is impossible, in principle, for the physical, i.e. reductive materialistic, explanations of Darwinists to ever explain the origin of information in life is that information is, in its foundational nature, immaterial. As Stephen Meyer explains,

“One of the things I do in my classes, to get this idea across to students, is I hold up two computer disks. One is loaded with software, and the other one is blank. And I ask them, ‘what is the difference in mass between these two computer disks, as a result of the difference in the information content that they posses’? And of course the answer is, ‘Zero! None! There is no difference as a result of the information. And that’s because information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin? And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce. In the nineteenth century we thought that there were two fundamental entities in science; matter, and energy. At the beginning of the twenty first century, we now recognize that there’s a third fundamental entity; and its ‘information’. It’s not reducible to matter. It’s not reducible to energy. But it’s still a very important thing that is real; we buy it, we sell it, we send it down wires. Now, what do we make of the fact, that information is present at the very root of all biological function? In biology, we have matter, we have energy, but we also have this third, very important entity; information. I think the biology of the information age, poses a fundamental challenge to any materialistic approach to the origin of life.” -Dr. Stephen C. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin-of-life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. – Intelligent design: Why can’t biological information originate through a materialistic process? – Stephen Meyer – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqiXNxyoof8

In short, it is impossible, in principle, for the unguided material processes of Darwinian evolution to ever produce information since information is, by nature, immaterial. The fact that information is immaterial is easily demonstrated by the fact that we can inscribe information on an almost endless variety of material substrates, using on almost endless variety of different languages, and yet the meaning of the information never changes between the material substrates as long as the information is faithfully encoded and decoded on the almost endless variety of material substrates. In other words, there is something profoundly immaterial about information that refuses to be reduced to materialistic descriptions.. As George Williams pointed out, “Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes…”

“Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter… These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term ‘reductionism.’… Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes… This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.” George Williams – Evolutionary Biologist – “A Package of Information” https://books.google.com/books?id=V3x1YPgvOJcC&pg=PA43

And as George Ellis pointed out, information is a ‘top down’ “higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves.” and Ellis goes on to note “The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities.”

Recognising Top-Down Causation – George Ellis Excerpt: Causation,,, Definition 2: Existence If Y is a physical entity made up of ordinary matter, and X is some kind of entity that has a demonstrable causal effect on Y as per Definition 1, then we must acknowledge that X also exists (even if it is not made up of such matter).,,, Causal Efficacy of Non Physical entities: Both the program and the data are non-physical entities, indeed so is all software. A program is not a physical thing you can point to, but by Definition 2 it certainly exists. You can point to a CD or flashdrive where it is stored, but that is not the thing in itself: it is a medium in which it is stored. The program itself is an abstract entity, shaped by abstract logic. Is the software “nothing but” its realisation through a specific set of stored electronic states in the computer memory banks? No it is not because it is the precise pattern in those states that matters: a higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves. It’s a relational thing (and if you get the relations between the symbols wrong, so you have a syntax error, it will all come to a grinding halt). This abstract nature of software is realised in the concept of virtual machines, which occur at every level in the computer hierarchy except the bottom one [17]. But this tower of virtual machines causes physical effects in the real world, for example when a computer controls a robot in an assembly line to create physical artefacts.,,, The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities. http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Ellis_FQXI_Essay_Ellis_2012.pdf

In other words, it is the ability of the immaterial mind to have knowledge of a particle’s position, and to then arrange that particle’s position in relation to other particles, that allows us to impart immaterial information into material substrates in a ‘top-down’ manner. To repeat what George Ellis stated, information is a ‘top down’ “higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves.” And indeed, it has now been empirically demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.

Maxwell’s demon demonstration turns information into energy – November 2010 Excerpt: Scientists in Japan are the first to have succeeded in converting information into free energy in an experiment that verifies the “Maxwell demon” thought experiment devised in 1867.,,, In Maxwell’s thought experiment the demon creates a temperature difference simply from information about the gas molecule temperatures and without transferring any energy directly to them.,,, Until now, demonstrating the conversion of information to energy has been elusive, but University of Tokyo physicist Masaki Sano and colleagues have succeeded in demonstrating it in a nano-scale experiment. In a paper published in Nature Physics they describe how they coaxed a Brownian particle to travel upwards on a “spiral-staircase-like” potential energy created by an electric field solely on the basis of information on its location. As the particle traveled up the staircase it gained energy from moving to an area of higher potential, and the team was able to measure precisely how much energy had been converted from information. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-maxwell-demon-energy.html

And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”

Demonic device converts information to energy – 2010 Excerpt: “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,” says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. “This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale,” says Jarzynski. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=demonic-device-converts-inform

As if that was not bad enough for the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, the recent experimental realizations of the ‘Maxwell’s Demon” thought experiment go even further than that. Quote-unquote, “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.”,,,

The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017 Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.” In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,, Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. 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.”,,, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

To repeat, “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.”,,, This experimental realization of the Maxwell Demon thought experiment is simply shattering to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists!bornagain77

May 7, 2020

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Who selected those base pairs to represent that particular protein? Don’t you wonder about the Who that is just as much a part of the processes in the cell as the who was that picked that key?

Wait, are you suggesting the Intelligent Designer is Roger Daltrey (on cells) and Pete Townshend (on proteins)?

Bob O'H

May 7, 2020

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Latemarch @ 11

Who selected those base pairs to represent that particular protein? Don’t you wonder about the Who that is just as much a part of the processes in the cell as the who was that picked that key?

I have no problem with the possibility that some extraterrestrial intelligence may have seeded or even created life on Earth. If it could be demonstrated, it would be a fascinating discovery. But it would raise inevitable questions about the nature and origins of such a being as well. Would such a designer employ a medium for conveying information over many generations that is subject to continuous and largely unpredictable mutation?Seversky

May 6, 2020

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Bornagain77 @ 4

Seversky and Orthomyxo, I have a question for you guys, I wonder if you guys will be brave enough to answer it honestly. ,,, Here it is, ‘Did you write your posts or did the laws of physics write your posts for you and inform you of that event after the fact?’

I had the conscious experience of writing the post. The laws of physics don't "do" anything. They are the observed regularities in the behavior of the physical universe. Do you accept that there is a lot of mental activity which we think of collectively as "the mind" but which happens outside our conscious awareness? I'm thinking of the extensive processing of data input from the eyes which result in what we see and the same is true for the other sensory channels. There is also the processing which converts an intention to move to the command signals to our muscles by which we actually move or the proprioception system by which we know our orientation to the outside world. Doesn't this suggest that the conscious "I" is not the whole of "me" and that, given the relatively slow speed at which signals propagate through our nervous system and the processing involved, our conscious perception lags slightly behind reality?Seversky

May 6, 2020

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Barry Arrington @ 3

Of course there is a physical chain of events between you pressing the ‘A’ key on your keyboard and the letter ‘A’ appearing on your screen. No one denies that.

Good, so we agree thus far.

Do you deny that that the reason an “A” appears on your screen instead of nothing or gibberish is that your computer employs a code that translates the pressing of a particular key on your keyboard to a particular arrangement of pixels on your screen?

No, I agree with that as well. So where do we differ?Seversky

May 6, 2020

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First of all, thank you to BA77 for all the amazing info I've gleaned from your comments over the years. So much of the material you cite is _way_ over my head, but I take what I can manage DaveS wrote: "I’m severely underqualified for this discussion, but I wouldn’t mind seeing more detail on this" I'm also very unqualified, so maybe I can give it a try, since I really like the whole DNA coding-mRNA-tRNA-protein pathway. If I'm understanding what the author meant, //There is a point in time and space where an association is made between a codon and an anticodon.// That is, inside the ribosome the mRNA codon is 'read' by a tRNA molecule with the matching anticodon. That's the first 'association'. The next one //There is also a point in time and space when there is an association made between an anticodon and an amino acid.// Simply put, that is accomplished by the tRNA molecule. But to get tRNA you need the aminoacyl tRNA synthetases, one for each of the 20 tRNA molecules An animation of protein synthesis https://youtu.be/kmrUzDYAmEI A short one on aminoacyl tRNA synthetases https://youtu.be/180_sM9iYVk Two related montages I made. The first one Joe DeWeese covers tRNA https://youtu.be/sOI5u01LwyQ The second one Stephen Meyer describes Francis Crick's elucidating the need for translation of DNA in order to get to proteins, through what he called the 'adaptor hypothesis' https://youtu.be/rDLPjxzt1YEChris Messier

May 6, 2020

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I sometimes want to throw up my hands in exasperation watching you all talk past each other. Let me approach it another way though I don't expect success. Let's return to Sev's original comment to the OP. (Edited for brevity.) Seversky@1

Seriously?? You are both denying the material/physical structure and functions of the genome and a computer, that there is no physical chain of events between me pressing the ‘A’ key on my keyboard and the letter ‘A’ appearing on my screen? ....

Yes Sev, there is a nice neat physical chain of events from the 'A' key to the pattern of pixels that are displayed on my screen. Odd the pattern I see on the keyboard looks nothing like what shows up on the screen. It's gone from an upside down 'V' with a bar across the middle to a small circle with a bar on the right. Encoded one way, output completely different. We'll set that aside for just a bit. Now let's compare that to the cell. Again what's happening is physical. There's a series of DNA bases that when physically read by the right enzyme in the presence of enough of the right kind of amino acids will output a protein. There's a vague similarity in your example to the transfer of the 'A' key (plastic with inlaid white marks) to its unlike 'a' (with light and dark pixels). But wait! We've left something out. Who selected the 'A' key before pressing it? Why it was Sev. He's an integral part of the whole process. And who recognized the output as having meaning? Of the thousands and thousands of possible shapes (fonts) that could represent the concept of 'A' who recognized 'a' as a representative of the concept of 'A'? I believe that was Sev again! Who selected those base pairs to represent that particular protein? Don't you wonder about the Who that is just as much a part of the processes in the cell as the who was that picked that key? Col. 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.Latemarch

May 6, 2020

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Ed George, you could almost argue that it was 'Intelligently Designed' for you, and the other Darwinists on this thread, to see this video that came out today,

Message from the Molecules – They Say “Intelligent Design” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Jdyuh27b0 Biology, cosmology, physics, mathematics, computer engineering, chemistry… You could have an interesting argument among proponents of intelligent design about which field of science will ultimately clinch the argument for ID. Famed chemist Marcos Eberlin claims the honor will go to chemistry. Chauvinism, you say? Perhaps. You could take that up with the three Nobel laureates who endorsed his recent book, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. https://www.discovery.org/store/product/foresight/ “The molecules speak for themselves,” says Dr. Eberlin here. “The molecules will speak louder and louder and louder and finally we will have to surrender to the message that the molecules are sending to us. They say clearly, ‘Intelligent design is the source of life.’”

bornagain77

May 6, 2020

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LOL, 'nothing to see here' eh Ed George? Just 'chemicals interacting with other chemicals', eh Ed George? On top of what I've already posted at 7 showing just how naive Ed George's "just chemicals interacting with other chemicals' view of the cell is, the cell is certainly NOT "just chemicals interacting with other chemicals.' Aside from molecules performing chemical reactions, the molecules of the cell also use light and electricity in a very sophisticated way so at to communicate with one another.

Electric DNA Excerpt: unbroken DNA conducts electricity, while an error blocks the current. Now Dr Barton has found that some repair enzymes exploit this. One pair of enzymes lock onto different parts of a DNA strand. One of them sends an electron down the strand. If the DNA is unbroken, the electron reaches the other enzyme, and causes it to detach. i.e. this process scans the region of DNA between them, and if it’s clean, there is no need for repairs. http://creation.com/electric-dna#endRef5 Care for Appetizers? Electric Proteins, Spidey Sense, and More - January 2, 2020, Excerpt: Electron transport has been well known in the cases of photosynthesis and metabolism. But a few years ago, his team was astonished to find that a run-of-the-mill protein conducted electricity. The protein was acting like a wire! Further observations revealed that all proteins conduct electricity — even the ones that had “weren’t designed to do this”— "Until quite recently, proteins were regarded strictly as insulators of electrical current flow. Now, it seems, their unusual physical properties may lead to a condition in which they are sensitively poised between an insulator and a conductor. (A phenomenon known as quantum criticality may be at the heart of their peculiar behavior.)" https://evolutionnews.org/2020/01/care-for-appetizers-electric-proteins-spidey-sense-and-more/ Cellular Communication through Light Excerpt: Information transfer is a life principle. On a cellular level we generally assume that molecules are carriers of information, yet there is evidence for non-molecular information transfer due to endogenous coherent light. This light is ultra-weak, is emitted by many organisms, including humans and is conventionally described as biophoton emission. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005086 Symphony of Life, Revealed: New Imaging Technique Captures Vibrations of Proteins, Tiny Motions Critical to Human Life - Jan. 16, 2014 Excerpt: To observe the protein vibrations, Markelz' team relied on an interesting characteristic of proteins: The fact that they vibrate at the same frequency as the light they absorb. This is analogous to the way wine glasses tremble and shatter when a singer hits exactly the right note. Markelz explained: Wine glasses vibrate because they are absorbing the energy of sound waves, and the shape of a glass determines what pitches of sound it can absorb. Similarly, proteins with different structures will absorb and vibrate in response to light of different frequencies. So, to study vibrations in lysozyme, Markelz and her colleagues exposed a sample to light of different frequencies and polarizations, and measured the types of light the protein absorbed. This technique, , allowed the team to identify which sections of the protein vibrated under normal biological conditions. The researchers were also able to see that the vibrations endured over time, challenging existing assumptions. "If you tap on a bell, it rings for some time, and with a sound that is specific to the bell. This is how the proteins behave," Markelz said. "Many scientists have previously thought a protein is more like a wet sponge than a bell: If you tap on a wet sponge, you don't get any sustained sound." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116084838.htm The Real Bioinformatics Revolution - Proteins and Nucleic Acids 'Singing' to One Another? Excerpt: the molecules send out specific frequencies of electromagnetic waves which not only enable them to ‘see' and ‘hear' each other, as both photon and phonon modes exist for electromagnetic waves, but also to influence each other at a distance and become ineluctably drawn to each other if vibrating out of phase (in a complementary way).,,, More than 1 000 proteins from over 30 functional groups have been analysed. Remarkably, the results showed that proteins with the same biological function share a single frequency peak while there is no significant peak in common for proteins with different functions; furthermore the characteristic peak frequency differs for different biological functions. ,,, The same results were obtained when regulatory DNA sequences were analysed. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/TheRealBioinformaticsRevolution.php

Again, as David Berlinski puts it:

“…applying Darwinian principles to problems of this level of complexity is like putting a Band-Aid on a wound caused by an atomic weapon. It’s just not going to work.” – David Berlinski

bornagain77

May 6, 2020

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BA77

Ed George, you saying that “DNA functions through chemical reactions”, and leaving it at that, is just as naive as saying that a Chemical Factory functions solely through chemical reactions.

Apples and aardvarks. DNA is a chemical, residing in an environment full of other chemicals, interacting (ie, reacting) with these chemicals, facilitating (through chemical reactions) the formation of proteins, which interact (ie, react) with other chemicals in the cell, etc. Biochemistry 101.Ed George

May 6, 2020

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Ed George, you saying that "DNA functions through chemical reactions", and leaving it at that, is just as naive as saying that a Chemical Factory functions solely through chemical reactions. Here is what a Darwinist termed to be a ‘horrendously complex’ biochemical metabolic pathway chart of a 'simple' cell:

ExPASy - Biochemical Pathways - interactive schematic http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

Moreover, "In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power."

Cell-inspired electronics - February 25, 2010 Excerpt: "A single cell in the human body is approximately 10,000 times more energy-efficient than any nanoscale digital transistor, the fundamental building block of electronic chips. In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power." http://phys.org/news/2010-02-cell-inspired-electronics.html Life Leads the Way to Invention - Feb. 2010 Excerpt: a cell is 10,000 times more energy-efficient than a transistor. “In one second, a cell performs about 10 million energy-consuming chemical reactions, which altogether require about one picowatt (one millionth millionth of a watt) of power.” This and other amazing facts lead to an obvious conclusion: inventors ought to look to life for ideas.,,, Essentially, cells may be viewed as circuits that use molecules, ions, proteins and DNA instead of electrons and transistors. That analogy suggests that it should be possible to build electronic chips – what Sarpeshkar calls “cellular chemical computers” – that mimic chemical reactions very efficiently and on a very fast timescale. https://crev.info/2010/02/life_leads_the_way_to_invention/

Also of interest is that the integrated coding between the DNA, RNA and Proteins of the cell apparently seem to be ingeniously designed and/or programmed along the very stringent guidelines laid out in Landauer’s principle, (by Charles Bennett from IBM of Quantum Teleportation fame), for ‘reversible computation’ in order to achieve such amazing energy/biochemical efficiency as it does.

Notes on Landauer’s principle, reversible computation, and Maxwell’s Demon - Charles H. Bennett - September 2003 Excerpt: Of course, in practice, almost all data processing is done on macroscopic apparatus, dissipating macroscopic amounts of energy far in excess of what would be required by Landauer’s principle. Nevertheless, some stages of biomolecular information processing, such as transcription of DNA to RNA, appear to be accomplished by chemical reactions that are reversible not only in principle but in practice.,,,, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135521980300039X

As the following article, which looked at 'Landauer's Bound", put it, "biological translation,,, is,,, about 100,000 times more efficient than a computer."

The astonishing efficiency of life - November 17, 2017 by Jenna Marshall Excerpt: All life on earth performs computations – and all computations require energy. From single-celled amoeba to multicellular organisms like humans, one of the most basic biological computations common across life is translation: processing information from a genome and writing that into proteins. Translation, it turns out, is highly efficient. In a new paper published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, SFI researchers explore the thermodynamic efficiency of translation.,,, To discover just how efficient translation is, the researchers started with Landauer's Bound. This is a principle of thermodynamics establishing the minimum amount of energy that any physical process needs to perform a computation. "What we found is that biological translation is roughly 20 times less efficient than the absolute lower physical bound," says lead author Christopher Kempes, an SFI Omidyar Fellow. "And that's about 100,000 times more efficient than a computer." https://phys.org/news/2017-11-astonishing-efficiency-life.html

Yet even the comparison to a Chemical Factory does not do the 'simple' cell justice, A 'simple' cell is far more complex than any Chemical Factory that has ever been Intelligently Designed by man.

"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 equaled 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.” Michael Denton PhD., Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, pg.328

As David Berlinski puts it:

“…applying Darwinian principles to problems of this level of complexity is like putting a Band-Aid on a wound caused by an atomic weapon. It’s just not going to work.” - David Berlinski

bornagain77

May 6, 2020

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Sev

BTW, has Ed George been banned?

Nope. Just placed in moderation limbo. :) I guess Barry took exception to something I said. Maybe it was when I said that DNA functions through chemical reactions. Something every school kid knows to be true.Ed George

May 6, 2020

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Remember that this started because you are incredulous at the idea the genetic code could when through a series of chemical reactions. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees the association between a specific tRNA and its amino acid of achieved by a chemical reaction. The binding of amino acids into peptides is a chemical reaction, and the sequence of amino acids is determined by a chemical affinity between the loaded tRNA and mRNA (which was itself produced in a chemical reaction between DNA and RNApol). That's how the genetic code works, and I really don't think it's credible to claim that's not a series of chemical reactions. Upright thinks that saying the reactions are discontinuous is changing something, but I honestly have no idea why that is relevant. Finally, you have a bad habit of assigning anyone who disagrees with you to some opposition tribe. I've never mentioned anything about materialism or any other religious position here.orthomyxo

May 6, 2020

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Seversky and Orthomyxo, I have a question for you guys, I wonder if you guys will be brave enough to answer it honestly. ,,, Here it is, 'Did you write your posts or did the laws of physics write your posts for you and inform you of that event after the fact?'

Assessing the Damage MN Does to Freedom of Inquiry Epistemology — how we know — and ontology — what exists — are both affected by methodological naturalism. If we say, "We cannot know that a mind caused x," laying down an epistemological boundary defined by MN, then our ontology comprising real causes for x won’t include minds. MN entails an ontology in which minds are the consequence of physics, and thus, can only be placeholders for a more detailed causal account in which physics is the only (ultimate) actor. You didn’t write your email to me. Physics did, and informed you of that event after the fact. "That’s crazy," you reply, "I certainly did write my email." Okay, then — to what does the pronoun "I" in that sentence refer? Your personal agency; your mind. Are you supernatural?,,, You are certainly an intelligent cause, however, and your intelligence does not collapse into physics. (If it does collapse — i.e., can be reduced without explanatory loss — we haven’t the faintest idea how, which amounts to the same thing.) To explain the effects you bring about in the world — such as your email, a real pattern — we must refer to you as a unique agent. - Paul Nelson https://evolutionnews.org/2014/09/do_you_like_set/

Or better yet, 'Did Einstein discover relativity or did the foundational laws of the universe discover themselves and inform Einstein of that event after the fact?'

Physicist George Ellis on the importance of philosophy and free will - July 27, 2014 Excerpt: And free will?: Horgan: Einstein, in the following quote, seemed to doubt free will: “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the Earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.” Do you believe in free will? Ellis: Yes. Einstein is perpetuating the belief that all causation is bottom up. This simply is not the case, as I can demonstrate with many examples from sociology, neuroscience, physiology, epigenetics, engineering, and physics. Furthermore if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense. Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation – if they have the free will to decide what they are doing. If they don’t, then why waste time talking to them? They are then not responsible for what they say. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/physicist-george-ellis-on-the-importance-of-philosophy-and-free-will/

bornagain77

May 6, 2020

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Sev,

Seriously?? You are both denying the material/physical structure and functions of the genome and a computer, that there is no physical chain of events between me pressing the ‘A’ key on my keyboard and the letter ‘A’ appearing on my screen?

Of course there is a physical chain of events between you pressing the ‘A’ key on your keyboard and the letter ‘A’ appearing on your screen. No one denies that. Do you deny that that the reason an "A" appears on your screen instead of nothing or gibberish is that your computer employs a code that translates the pressing of a particular key on your keyboard to a particular arrangement of pixels on your screen? Sev's statement is like saying: Do you deny that when a book is written that ink is actually put on paper? Barry Arrington

May 6, 2020

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I'm severely underqualified for this discussion, but I wouldn't mind seeing more detail on this:

There is a point in time and space where an association is made between a codon and an anticodon. There is also a point in time and space when there is an association made between an anticodon and an amino acid.

Is there an animation which shows this association being made? Does it occur when molecules come together or something along those lines? I'm used to thinking of associations as abstract things, so the notion of an association being made at a point in space and time is puzzling to me.daveS

May 6, 2020

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Seriously?? You are both denying the material/physical structure and functions of the genome and a computer, that there is no physical chain of events between me pressing the 'A' key on my keyboard and the letter 'A' appearing on my screen? I'm starting to wonder if UD is actually an AI Turing test. BTW, has Ed George been banned?Seversky

May 6, 2020

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