Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

A prediction I made in 2006 is coming to fruition

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I wrote here in 2006 that the Designer of life has put steganography (hidden messages in DNA) to help scientists understand DNA. The steganography cannot have emerged via selection or neutral evolution, it is just there, it is a design feature. We typically call them “conserved” sequences, but I’ve argued that “conserved” is the wrong term on empirical and theoretical grounds in Larry almost get’s it right. The prediction I made was at some point biotechnology industry will make money studying the steganography, they could care less about the phylogeny. They have done this unwittingly, but done it they have.

Who is making money off of the Designer’s steganography? The ENCODE consortium, they’ve made 288 million dollars because of the Designer’s steganography. The bulldozer of steganography is running over the junk DNA advocates like Dan “growling” Grauer and Larry Moran. They’ll continue to get run over because the money is pouring in. Why should anyone want to study junk? But if people believe it has function they will study it. If it will advance medical science, there will be a stampede to see who can interpret the designs of nature fastest. That is today.

This is what I said in 2006:

Geron noticed a correlation between the “age” of a cell (its closeness to senescence) and the amount of junk DNA at the end of a chromosome (telomeres). They must have thought something like, “it’s always hard to tell cause from effect, but ‘what the heck’, let’s see if playing with telomere length will affect longevity”

What they did was work the hTRT gene that affected telomere length, and then “voila”, the cell became immortalized! The junk DNA essentially served as a road map for the researchers. How hard would it have been to uncover this without “junk DNA”!

Geron’s work may lead to important medical advances in curing burn victims and spinal chord victims and help us understand the keys to longevity. Thus, already, some biotech firms are inadvertently happening upon the “user manual” qualities of junk DNA as Dembski envisioned in his steganography speech.

It was also very satisfying to see one or our IDEA members who is a protein engineer apply the concepts of comparing sequences across species to assist her in elucidating the structure of proteins she was researching. Indeed, were it not for how proteins were architected across various species, the elucidation would have been exponentially more difficult. Thankfully those “conserved” regions led her quickly to where the treasures would be found.

These are early developments in the ID conception, and if biotech companies ever seize on this view of reality and make serious money, it won’t matter how the rest of academia handles the peer-review process as ID will be part of a far more profitable enterprise, and the de facto paradigm for biology.

A way ID can win the war is to get profit-oriented biotech companies on their side.

Salvador

what I wrote was to emphasize something Bill Dembski said even earlier:

Steganography

Finally, we come to the research theme that I find most intriguing. Steganography, if you look in the dictionary, is an archaism that was subsequently replaced by the term “cryptography.” Steganography literally means “covered writing.” With the rise of digital computing, however, the term has taken on a new life. Steganography belongs to the field of digital data embedding technologies (DDET), which also include information hiding, steganalysis, watermarking, embedded data extraction, and digital data forensics. Steganography seeks efficient (that is, high data rate) and robust (that is, insensitive to common distortions) algorithms that can embed a high volume of hidden message bits within a cover message (typically imagery, video, or audio) without their presence being detected. Conversely, steganalysis seeks statistical tests that will detect the presence of steganography in a cover message.

Consider now the following possibility: What if organisms instantiate designs that have no functional significance but that nonetheless give biological investigators insight into functional aspects of organisms. Such second-order designs would serve essentially as an “operating manual,” of no use to the organism as such but of use to scientists investigating the organism. Granted, this is a speculative possibility, but there are some preliminary results from the bioinformatics literature that bear it out in relation to the protein-folding problem (such second-order designs appear to be embedded not in a single genome but in a database of homologous genomes from related organisms).

While it makes perfect sense for a designer to throw in an “operating manual” (much as automobile manufacturers include operating manuals with the cars they make), this possibility makes no sense for blind material mechanisms, which cannot anticipate scientific investigators. Research in this area would consist in constructing statistical tests to detect such second-order designs (in other words, steganalysis). Should such second order designs be discovered, the next step would be to seek algorithms for embedding these second-order designs in the organisms. My suspicion is that biological systems do steganography much better than we, and that steganographers will learn a thing or two from biology, though not because natural selection is so clever, but because the designer of these systems is so adept at steganography.

Such second-order steganography would, in my view, provide decisive confirmation for ID. Yet even if it doesn’t pan out, first-order steganography (i.e., the embedding of functional information useful to the organism rather than to a scientific investigator) could also provide strong evidence for ID. For years now evolutionary biologists have told us that the bulk of genomes is junk and that this is due to the sloppiness of the evolutionary process. That is now changing. For instance, Amy Pasquenelli at UCSD, in commenting on long stretches of seemingly barren DNA sequences, asks us to reconsider the contents of such junk DNA sequences in the light of recent reports that a new class of non-coding RNA genes are scattered, perhaps densely, throughout these animal genomes. (microRNAs: Deviants no Longer. Trends in Genetics 18(4) (4 April 2002): 171-3.) ID theorists should be at the forefront in unpacking the information contained within biological systems. If these systems are designed, we can expect the information to be densely packed and multi-layered (save where natural forces have attenuated the information). Dense, multi-layered embedding of information is a prediction of ID.

It’s time to bring this talk to an end. I close with two images (both from biology) and a final quote. The images describe two perspectives on how the scientific debate over intelligent design is likely to play out in the coming years. From the vantage of the scientific establishment, intelligent design is in the position of a mouse trying to move an elephant by nibbling at its toes. From time to time the elephant may shift its feet, but nothing like real movement or a fundamental change is about to happen. Let me emphasize that this is the perspective of the scientific establishment. Yet even adopting this perspective, the scientific establishment seems strangely uncomfortable. The mouse has yet to be squashed, and the elephant (as in the cartoons) has become frightened and seems ready to stampede in a panic.

The image that I think more accurately captures how the debate will play out is, ironically, an evolutionary competition where two organisms vie to dominate an ecological niche (think of mammals displacing the dinosaurs). At some point, one of the organisms gains a crucial advantage. This enables it to outcompete the other. The one thrives, the other dwindles. However wrong Darwin might have been about selection and competition being the driving force behind biological evolution, these factors certainly play a crucial role in scientific progress. It’s up to ID proponents to demonstrate a few incontrovertible instances where design is uniquely fruitful for biology. Scientists without an inordinate attachment to Darwinian evolution (and there are many, though this fact is not widely advertised) will be only too happy to shift their allegiance if they think that intelligent design is where the interesting problems in biology lie.

Comments
The mouse has yet to be squashed, and the elephant (as in the cartoons) has become frightened and seems ready to stampede in a panic.
No, as in reality. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3RP7NJUE5gorigin_surgeon
April 29, 2014
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Imagine the reaction to the story of a researcher in the gematria and cryptography who found that by examining the distances between the same bases in the human Y chromosome, assigning them the corresponding value in the Hebrew alphabet (doubled pairs at the location multiplies it ten and triples, by one hundred) was able to retrieve the 613 Hebrew letters in the Ten Commandments---the sequence being found in several places depending on what base was started with, and noting that some sequences actually overlapped each other. Also reported were various Psalms, treatises on several theological subjects, and a Bible commentary on Genesis. Further decoding was said to be in progress. The results, being highly controversial, had been submitted and verified by a several Hebrew scholars. Would the reaction to such a discovery be one of joy and delight by the Dawkins crowd?
And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. Matthew 24:30 (NASB)
See also Zechariah 12:10. -QQuerius
April 21, 2014
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