If life’s beginning was a historical event rather than a natural law, it may never be possible to recover the exact sequence of steps. That would be true no matter what we believe about anything else about the universe.
Tag: Paul Davies
Origin of Life: A review of Paul Davies’ Demon in the Machine
Fernandez: Throughout Demon, Davies injects comments always in support of the Materialistic Darwinist position.
Can life’s mysteries really be solved by claims about hidden webs of information?
All the real problems occur at the boundaries, which means that they are not contained by anything.
Does the answer to the origin of life lie in quantum mechanics?
Sheldon: As a way out of this [origin of life] dilemma, many physicists reach into the religion bag and pull out spooky QM-at-a-distance. But it isn’t a solution, it is an admission of failure. For if they had reached a trifle deeper into the bag they would have pulled out Genesis 1. Instead, they have loosed this uncontrollable “dark matter”, “dark energy”, “dark QM” chaos god on the ordered universe of laws and purpose.
“Junk DNA” can really matter
If there were a prize for the Darwinian idea that has proven least helpful to Darwinism, would junk DNA be the winner?
Darwin skeptic Robert Shedinger calls out Paul Davies
Shedinger, author of The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms: Darwinian Biology’s Grand Narrative of Triumph and the Subversion of Religion (Cascade, 2019), offers some thoughts on origin-of-life theorist Paul Davies’ decades-long dance around design in nature.
Davies and Walker on Origin of life: Life as information
Walker and Davies, 2013: The manner in which information flows through and between cells and sub-cellular structures is quite unlike anything else observed in nature. If life is more than just complex chemistry, its unique informational management properties may be the crucial indicator of this distinction [13]. Unfortunately, the way that information operates in biology is not easily characterized.
An ID guy writes to ask us why this new paper ISN’T ID…
Sure sounds like it. But hey, no one owns a general idea. No dispute there. But if people are going to start talking like ID guys, they had better remember the troll spray.
Paul Davies: Incorporating information into science as a physical quantity
In a world where some believe that consciousness must be a material thing, perhaps it’s not surprising that others seek to see information as a physical quantity. Computer scientist Robert J. Marks would ask, what is the weight difference between a full CD and an empty one? Could we start there?
Physicist Rob Sheldon on Paul Davies’ “life writes its own software” claim
Sheldon: If Davies believes that a hierarchy of information can pack more information in, and possibly explain the incredible information content of biology, then there must be something “outside” or “above” the biology that is responsible for the compression algorithm. The only thing Davies hasn’t done is name this attribute. Should we suggest a name? How about … intelligent design?
Paul Davies: The really tough question is how life’s hardware can write its own software
Davies, author of The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life thinks we overlook the difficulty and offers a solution: Nature got there first.
Paul Davies and the “struggle to define life”
Information is the key? Wait till they discover the Law of Conservation of Information and try applying it to the hapless popular Darwinism that dominates biology today.
Paul Davies: Life’s defining characteristics “better understood as information”
The problem with taking information seriously in the evolution of life, as in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, is that it may rule out favorite “evolution” claims. Taking it seriously and discounting it whenever it matters is a fancy dance.