Over on this thread we’ve had a lively discussion, primarily about common descent. However, one of the key side discussions has focused on the information required to build an organism.
Remarkably, some have argued that essentially nothing is required except a parts list on a digital storage medium. Yes, you heard right. Given the right sequence of digital characters (represented by nucleotides in the DNA molecule), each part will correctly self-assemble, the various parts will make their way automatically to the correct place within the cell, they will then automatically assemble into larger protein complexes and molecular machines to perform work, the various cells will automatically assemble themselves into larger structures, such as limbs and organs, and eventually everything will automatically come together into a completely-assembled, fully-integrated, functioning organism.
It all happens purely naturally and automatically. Just by force of chemistry. No additional information is necessary; no plan or programming are required.
Just the right sequence along the DNA spine to specify the various parts, and we’re done.
Move along, folks. Nothing more to see here. The nucleotide sequences that specify the gene products are all we need. Chemistry does all the rest.
It’s just “basic biology.”
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For those who might be tempted to buy into the above storyline, let me share a recent news story. Actually I should have shared it on April 1st, but I’m sharing it today.
Evolutionary Theorists Discover How mp4 Videos Work
April 1, 2016. Somewhere on Planet Earth.
Recently a group of evolutionary theorists – specifically, theorists who claim that the cellular functions of biological organisms can be explained by chemistry alone – found a laptop with a number of video files contained on the hard drive.
Knowing little about computers and even less about systems engineering, the intrepid theorists began to examine the laptop and discovered a number of icons on the desktop. The icons in question had various names, but they all ended in “.mp4.” Upon pressing an icon, the theorists were amazed to discover that the desktop view disappeared, the screen went momentarily black, and then a movie began to play.
Much speculation ensued about how this was possible, but after a particularly valiant effort, they were able to determine that each icon referenced a long string of digital characters stored on the laptop’s hard drive. Further, each icon pointed to a different sequence of digital characters, thus explaining how a different movie was played for each icon.
After much careful thought, the evolutionary theorists announced the results of their discovery: Each sequence of digital characters on the hard drive represented a series of still images, thus containing all the information required for the movie.
It was an impressive result, to be sure, but some observers noted that the discovery still did not explain how it was possible for mp4 videos to be played.
When pressed for more details, the evolutionary theorists loudly reasserted that they had already solved the puzzle of how mp4 videos worked and wondered aloud how anyone could be so foolish as to question their results.
“It’s all there in the string of characters for the images,” one theorist confidently stated. “We can identify the sequences for the images right there. There is no other software or programming required to play an mp4 video. You just press the icon and everything happens automatically – all by the force of electrical impulses. There is no need for intervention, or intelligence, or design, or anything of the kind. The video simply plays as a result of a series of automatically-triggered electrical impulses, and nothing more is needed to explain how it works.”
Some skeptics questioned whether this explanation made sense, but the evolutionary theorists would have none of it, and roundly accused the skeptics of not having the proper background or education to question the Electrical-Impulse theory.
Confident that the Electrical-Impulse theory fully explained the operation of the mp4 files on the laptop, several of the theorists also concluded that everything else on the storage medium was unnecessary. “It isn’t needed,” one dryly remarked. “The image sequences are sufficient to account for the videos, so everything else on the hard drive is probably just junk.”
Finally, when asked where the laptop, the storage medium, and the processor came from in the first place, the theorists noted that they had also found a copy of the laptop’s parts list on the hard drive, so naturally it can be assumed, they reasoned, that the parts list was the source of the laptop itself.
of related note, David L. Abel has thought fairly deeply about formal causes that transcend any material medium
George Ellis has also thought fairly deeply about these issues and has an interesting paper on the subject of ‘top down causation’:
Of related note to causes that transcend physicality, Ellis asks whether Einstein, or whether lower level physical processes, were responsible for discovering the theory of Relativity?
In other words, if you don’t believe in causes that transcend physicality then you are forced to deny that you really exist as a real person, i.e. there was no Einstein that discovered relativity. There were only lower level physical processes that discovered it and informed the illusion of Einstein of it after the fact. 🙂
And although Dr. Nelson alluded to writing an e-mail, (i.e. creating information), to tie his ‘personal agent’ argument into intelligent design, Dr. Nelson’s ‘personal agent’ argument can easily be amended to any action that ‘you’, as a personal agent, choose to take:
Dr. Craig Hazen, in the following video at the 12:26 minute mark, relates how he performed, for an audience full of academics at a college, a ‘miracle’ simply by raising his arm,,
What should be needless to say, if raising your arm is enough to refute your supposedly ‘scientific’ worldview of atheistic materialism/naturalism, then perhaps it is time for you to seriously consider getting a new scientific worldview?
No “wires in the transistors” on the die of an I.C.
George Ellis excerpt:
That chemical processes arising bottom up from DNA is not the be all, end all, that Darwinists imagine it to be is made evident by the following:
Also of note to top down causation, completely contrary to materialistic thought, mind has been now also been shown to be able to reach all the way down and have pronounced, ‘epigenetic’ effects on the gene expression of our bodies:
Very interesting analogy. However MP4, like biology, is more complex than this — a lot more. There aren’t a series of discrete images, instead there is a list of instructions to modify the previous frame to get the current frame. This is part of the MP4 compression magic. MP4 is highly compressed, there is no bitmap of the image. There is no byte alignment to the image. Nothing about the image makes very much sense at all unless you have the MP4 algorithm. I think our stupid scientists wouldn’t get past “there’s a bunch of data” and “this program over here converts it to pictures on the display”. Of course, that’s just about how far biologists are along with their analysis of DNA. They’ve figured out genes — ‘sept most of the folding. I think they have a fairly good idea how introns get separated out. But what goes on in the “junk”, well, they’re pretty sure the correct answer is “nothing”. Well, it used to be “nothing”, now they agree that there is more functional non-coding DNA than coding DNA, but still, there’s a lot of junk — a lot of nothing.
BA77:
The Abel and Ellis quotes are helpful and well worth pondering. Thanks.
bFast:
Absolutely. This just starts to give us the barest sense of the magnitude of the issue. If people will take a moment to step back and think through the matter, they will quickly realize there is a lot more going on, almost none of it explainable solely on the basis of pure physics and chemistry.
Perhaps in a handful of specific cases, but even then, any understanding is rudimentary at best. Furthermore, there are many genetic sequences that code for multiple proteins, sometimes dozens or hundreds, resulting from different concatenation routines. We’re barely scratching the surface in hazarding a guess as to how that is accomplished. But one early conclusion is clear: it is not the sequence itself that is making the determination. It is a top-down determination, not bottom-up.
Of related note to top down causation: Darwinists apparently think that ‘bottom up’ chemistry runs the show in life, i.e. ‘by force of chemistry’ as you put it Eric. Whereas the ID advocate holds that ‘top down’ information is running the show in life.
Another piece of evidence that strongly hints that the ID advocate is right in his presumption of ‘top down causation’ for life is what is termed ‘Quarter Power scaling’. Quarter Power indicates that there is a mysterious ‘higher dimensional’ component to life. A ‘higher dimensional’ component that is certainly very friendly to the entire notion of ‘top down causation’:
The reason why ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling laws are impossible for Darwinian evolution to explain is that Natural Selection operates at the 3-Dimensional level of the organism and the ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling law are simply ‘invisible’ to natural selection. The reason why 4-Dimensional things are, for all practical purposes, completely invisible to 3-Dimensional things is best illustrated by ‘flatland’:
Though Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini rightly find it inexplicable for Natural Selection to be the rational explanation for the invariant scaling of the physiology, metabolism, and anatomy, of living things to four-dimensional parameters, they do not seem to fully realize the implications that this ‘four dimensional scaling’ of living things presents.
This 4-D scaling is something we should rightly expect from a Intelligent Design perspective. This is because Intelligent Design holds that ‘higher dimensional information’ is more foundational to life, and even to the universe itself, than either matter or energy are. This higher dimensional ‘expectation’ for living organisms, from a Intelligent Design perspective, is directly opposed to the expectation of the Darwinian framework which holds that information, and indeed even consciousness itself, is merely an ’emergent’ property of the 3-D material realm.
In making this point clear, it is important to note the ‘transcendent’ nature of information:
Moreover, Dr. Andy C. McIntosh, who is the Professor of Thermodynamics Combustion Theory at the University of Leeds (which I believe is the highest teaching/research rank in U.K. university hierarchy), has written a peer-reviewed paper in which he holds that it is ‘non-material information’ which is constraining the local thermodynamics of a cell to be in such a extremely high non-equilibrium state:
Moreover, Dr. McIntosh holds that regarding information as independent of energy and matter ‘resolves the thermodynamic issues and invokes the correct paradigm for understanding the vital area of thermodynamic/organisational interactions’ for living organisms.
Of related note to Dr. McIntosh’s contention that it must be information which is constraining life to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, information has now experimentally been shown to have a ‘thermodynamic content’
Moreover, it is important to learn that ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement (A. Aspect, A. Zeilinger, etc..) can be used as a ‘quantum information channel’,,,
And this ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement/information is now found in molecular biology on a massive scale, in every DNA and protein molecule:
Thus the Intelligent Design advocate has some fairly strong empirical support for his claim that ‘top down causation’ is primary in life, and that it is information, not just chemistry, that is primarily running the show in living organisms.
Hi Eric,
Nice post;
It prompts me to repost this old post of mine:
(nearly 10 years old, and probably similar to older ones previously posted – I apologize, but, just had to get it our of my system)