Perguntas ....

Claim: DNA is a product of material, chemical processes with no evidence of being intelligently designed.



Response: DNA is a physical medium encoded with Complex Specified Information which prescribes the features and biochemistry of organisms.1 This verifies they are adenine, cytozine, guinine, or thymine, are able to bond to any of the binding sites of the ribose backbone of DNA. Therefore, chemical determinacy has not organized the nucleotides of DNA as information-bearing symbols.

Information is a non-material entity which cannot be produced by material processes.
Information is a product of intelligence.
Therefore, DNA is a product of intelligence and not material processes.
Since all organisms are prescribed by information, all organisms are a product of Intelligent Design.
The properties of genetic information which verify that DNA is impirical evidence of Intelligent Design are:
It has an intended purpose which has been preconceived - the process of forethought
The intended purpose is to cause the recipient to have an intended response
The intended response is to assemble proteins or regulate cell processes
The instructions to assemble proteins and regulate cell processes employ a coded language that both the sender (designer) and recipient (cell) understand
The instructions are organized syntaxically and grammatically so that the assembly or regulation occurs as specified and in a prescribed order
The end result is that the intended purpose is achieved
Intentionality, purpose, instruction, code, language, and forethought are mental processes, not material ones
The value of the information is it's meaning and purpose, not in a material quantity, such as the number of digits or characters in a sequence
Examples:

A pound of gold is of greater value that a pound of sand
A string of 9 unvarying characters such as "AAAAAAAAA" does not convey meaning. However, a string of 9 characters such as "TURN_LEFT" conveys meaning.
A varying string 19 of letters such as "AFGOPHRQLBNCMRIDAKX" does not convert convey meaning because no syntax or grammar (languge) is present. However, a varying string of only 9 characters such as "TURN_ONCE" conveys meaning because it is organized syntaxically and grammatically (linguistically)
Information is a non-material entity. It is not comprised of matter or a property of matter - it is not a material quantity such as mass or the number of digits or characters in a string
Material processes cannot produce that which is non-material
The intentional volition of the sender to convey knowledge is the origin of information
The sender creates information by mental processes which are non-material
Intentional volition and mental processes are properties of intelligence
The origin of information is intelligence
Conclusion:  Since information is created by intelligence, and since all biological forms are prescribed by genetic information, the Intelligent Design of all biological forms is empirically demonstrated, and all theories of abiogenesis and the evolution of biological forms are empirically false.
Genetic information is a product of a mind.
It is prescriptive - it prescribes the structural design and biochemistry of organisms
It prescribes function of proteins by prescribing their structural design, which determines their functions and relationships with other proteins and cell structures
It prescribes organismal features, such as organs, their arrangement in a body plan, and their relationship to each other
It prescribes the regulation of information expression in time (4th dimension of genetic information) to maintain and operate an organism
It possesses a code system which is the alphabet of it's language system
It possesses linguistics properties - phonetics, semantics, punctuation, syntax, and grammar
Language is physically represented by symbols
Symbolism is non-material - symbols represent objects, processes, or concepts which are external to themselves
The application of meaning to a symbol and interpretation of meaning from a symbol is a mental process, not a material process.
Minds apply meaning to matter, not the other way around.
It is illogical to apply mental properties to matter
Information is a non-material entity
Information is purposeful - it describes something meaningful such as data, function, concept, or process.
Information cannot be physically measured because it has no physical dimensions or mass - the concept of measuring one pound or one meter of information is nonsensical.
Information is not bound to whatever medium upon which it is encoded.
Example: The information in a book can be copied onto any other medium without the information changing in any way and without relocation of the material medium upon which it is encoded:

Reading a book: If information and minds were both physical, it would be impossible to receive (read) the information in a book without relocating the material of the book into the brain of the reader.
Reading a printed message to another person: If information and minds were both physical, it would be impossible to convey (read aloud) the information in a book without relocating the material of the book into the brain of the listener.
Speaking to an audience: If information and minds were both physical, it would be impossible to share information with an audience without relocating the material of the provider's brain to the brains of the each member of the audience.
10 Laws of Nature Regarding Information which verify that creation is true and evolution is false:
The following is a transcript of Dr. Werner Gitt from his book, "In the Beginning Was Information".

Premises:

Anything material, such as physical/chemical processes, cannot create something non-material
Information is a non-material fundamental entity and not a property of matter
Information requires a material medium for storage and transmission
Information cannot arise from statistical processes
There can be no information without a code - no thought or idea can be shared without a code
All codes result from an intentional choice and agreement between sender and recipient
The determination of meaning for and from a set of symbols is a mental process that requires intelligence
There can be no new information without an intelligent, purposeful sender
Any given chain of information can be traced back to an intelligent source
Information comprises the non-material foundation for all:
technological systems
works of art
biological systems
Therefore,

Since the DNA code of all life is clearly within the definition domain of information, we conclude that there must be a sender
Since the density and complexity of the DNA encoded information is billions of times greater than man's present technology, we conclude that the sender must be supremely intelligent
Since the sender must have
encoded (stored) the information into the DNA molecules,
constructed the molecular biomachines required for the encoding, decoding, and synthesizing process and,
designed all the features for the original life forms,
We conclude the sender must be purposeful and supremely powerful,

Since information is a non-material fundamental entity and cannot originate from material quantities, we conclude that the sender must have a non-material component
Since information is a non-material fundamental entity and cannot originate from material quantities, and since information also originates from man, we conclude man's nature must have a non-material component (spirit)
Since information is a non-material entity, we conclude that the assumption "the universe is comprised solely of mass and energy" is false.
Since:
biological information originates only from an intelligent sender and,
all theories of chemical and biological evolution require that information must originate solely from mass and energy alone (without a sender), we conclude that all theories or concepts of biological evolution are false.
Anyone who disagrees with these laws and conclusions must falsify them by demonstrating the initial origin of information from purely material sources. Therefore, the laws of nature about information have,

refuted the assumption of scientific materialism and the theories of chemical and biological evolution
all philosophies or theories based on the assumption of scientific materialism including chemical and biological evolution are falsified by the laws of nature about information.
Shannon Information
Shannon Information is not the type of information that DNA possesses, and does not require intelligence to be produced. Unlike Shannon Information, genetic information is complex, specified, prescriptive, functional, meaningful, purposeful, semiotic, and linguistic.

Information scientist Dr. Werner Gitt on Shannon Information:

"Shannon's definition of information exclusively concerns the statistical properties of sequences of symbols; meaning is completely ignored. It follows that this concept of information is unsuitable for evaluating the information content of meaningful sequences of symbols. A message which has been subject to interference or "noise", in general comprises more information than an error-free message, according to Shannon's theory. It follows that this concept of information is unsuitable for evaluating the information content of meaningful sequences of symbols."

- In the Beginning Was Information, Werner Gitt, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig). Seven years later he was promoted to Director and Professor at PTB.


Sources
"The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Human DNA consists of about 3 billion bases, and more than 99 percent of those bases are the same in all people. The order, or sequence, of these bases determines the information available for building and maintaining an organism, similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet appear in a certain order to form words and sentences." - What is DNA?, Genetics Home Reference, NLH, U.S. National Library of Medicine


"It should now be clear that information, being a fundamental entity, cannot be a property of matter, and its origin cannot be explained in terms of material processes. We therefore formulate the following fundamental theorem: Theorem 1: The fundamental quantity information is a nonmaterial (mental) entity. It is not a property of matter, so that purely material processes are fundamentally precluded as sources of information." - Werner Gitt, In the Beginning was Information. 2000, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


"If there are more than several dozen nucleotides in a functional sequence, we know that realistically they will never just "fall into place"'. This has been mathematically demonstrated repeatedly. But as we will soon see, neither can such a sequence arise randomly one nucleotide at a time. A pre-existing "concept" is required as a framework upon which a sentence or a functional sequence must be built. Such a concept can only pre-exist within the mind of the author." - Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, Dr, Johnathon Sanford, geneticist, Cornell University, 2005, pp. 124-125.


"No matter how many "bits" of possible combinations it has, there is no reason to call it "information" if it doesn't at least have the potential of producing something useful. What kind of information produces function? In computer science, we call it a "program." Another name for computer software is an "algorithm." No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organisms with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms' genomes programmed?" - , David L. Abel1 and Jack T. Trevors" Three subsets of sequence complexity and their relevance to biopolymeric information, David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, 2005


"The Common Fund's 4D Nucleome program aims to understand the principles behind the three-dimensional organization of the nucleus in space and time (the 4th dimension), the role nuclear organization plays in gene expression and cellular function, and how changes in the nuclear organization affect normal development as well as various diseases." - The 4D Nucleome Project, National Institutes of Health, https://commonfund.nih.gov/4Dnucleome


"There are no specific choices to be found anywhere within this mathematical definition of a "bit." Shannon worked only on general communication engineering problems. He deliberately made no attempt to quantify intuitive/semantic information by measuring specific functional choices with fixed units. That would be impossible." - Dichotomy in the definition of prescriptiveinformation suggests both prescribed data and prescribed algorithms: biosemiotics applications in genomic systems, David J D'Onofrio, David L Abel and Donald E Johnson, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modeling, 2012


The human genome takes shape and shifts over time, Sarah Schwartz, August 24, 2015 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/human-genome-takes-shape-and-shifts-over-time


"The digital linear coding carried by the base pairs in the DNA double helix is now known to have an important component that acts by altering, along its length, the natural shape and stiffness of the molecule. In this way, one region of DNA is structurally distinguished from another, constituting an additional form of encoded information manifest in three-dimensional space. These shape and stiffness variations help in guiding and facilitating the DNA during its three-dimensional spatial interactions. Such interactions with itself allow communication between genes and enhanced wrapping and histone-octamer binding within the nucleosome core particle. Meanwhile, interactions with proteins can have a reduced entropic binding penalty owing to advantageous sequence-dependent bending anisotropy. Sequence periodicity within the DNA, giving a corresponding structural periodicity of shape and stiffness, also influences the supercoiling of the molecule, which, in turn, plays an important facilitating role. In effect, the super-helical density acts as an analogue regulatory mode in contrast to the more commonly acknowledged purely digital mode."

http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1969/2960


"The creation of information is habitually associated with concious activity" - Henry Quastier, information theorist


Information is useless unless it can be read. But the decoding machinery is itself encoded on the DNA. The leading philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1902-1994), expressed the huge problem:

"What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: the genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But . . . the machinery by which the cell (at least the non-primitive cell, which is the only one we know) translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code. Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of physics) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a residue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics." - 1974. Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science. In Ayala, F. and Dobzhansky, T., eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 270


"Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidences could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle surely would have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation." - C. Haskins, "Advances and Challenges in Science" in American Scientist 59 (1971), pp. 298.


"The information content of amino acid sequences cannot increase until a genetic code with an adapter function has appeared. Nothing which even vaguely resembles a code exists in the physiochemical world. One must conclude that no valid scientific explanation of the origin of life exists at present." - H. Yockey, "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory," in Journal of Theoretical Biology 91 (1981), p. 13.


"On the possibility that random material causes could be the origin of proteins: If we have a tiny chain of only 10 amino acid molecules, and because there are 20 amino acid molecules that can be used to produce the chain, there are 10 trillion possible combinations! The probability that a sequence of amino acids could arise to produce even such a tiny protein are astronomical, and therefore beyond improbable. By the science of statistical analysis, this would be considered impossible times impossible times impossible. . . An average protein however, is 300-500 amino acid molecules in length and may be thousands, and results in trillons times trillions of potential combinations! Here we see that the improbability of material causes to arrange a sequence for a typical protein is far beyond improbable, so as to be unworthy of being considered possible by any manner of reasoning." - Stephen C. Meyer, PhD in Philosophy of Science and Mathematics, former geophysicist for Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). His PhD thesis offered a methodological interpretation of origin-of-life research. Meyer discovered that the odds of a protein forming naturally is 1:10^164 There are only 10^80 elementary particles in the known universe. There are only 10^18 seconds in the imagined 13.5 billions years since the big bang.


"Representation and processing of digital information in the form of DNA is essential to life in all organisms, no matter how large or tiny. Computing tools and computational thinking help us understand how DNA stores information and how that information directs activity in the cell." - Module 6: Digital DNA, University of British Columbia http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~condon/cpsc101/notes/digital-dna.pdf


"Genomes [all the DNA of a species] are remarkable in that they encode most of the functions necessary for their interpretation and propagation." - Anne-Claude Gavin et al., "Proteome Survey Reveals Modularity of the Yeast Cell Machinery," Nature, Vol. 440, 30 March 2006, p. 631.


"The discovery of the structure of DNA transformed biology profoundly, catalysing the sequencing of the human genome and engendering a new view of biology as an information science. Two features of DNA structure account for much of its remarkable impact on science: it's digital nature and its complementarity, whereby one strand of the helix binds perfectly with its partner. DNA has two types of digital information -- the genes that encode proteins, which are the molecular machines of life, and the gene regulatory networks that specify the behavior of the genes." - Hood L1, Galas D. The digital code of DNA, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12540920


"Biologic systems and processes cannot be fully accounted for in terms of the principles and laws of physics and chemistry alone, but they require in addition the principles of semiotics - the science of symbols and signs, including linguistics." - Rutgers University professor Sungchul Ji's, "The Linguistics of DNA: Words, Sentences, Grammar, Phonetics, and Semantics"


The Information Theory textbook, "T. M. Cover and J. M. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory, 2nd, Wiley-Interscience, 2006." states information is knowledge transmitted from sender to receiver using a code.


"We now know that genes are made of DNA, a magnificently simple/complex molecule which actually encodes a language. It carries information just as a book does. The language has 4 letters which form 64 three letter words." The digital code of DNA http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12540920


"There is no such thing as physical information. Information is a nonmaterial fundamental entity and not a property of matter. Information is knowledge conveyed from a sender to a receiver using a language agreed upon by both parties. Nature has no potential to create information, and therefore cannot be the origin of living things. Information is a non-physical fundamental entity, which the laws of physics and matter cannot produce. Information is a product of a non-physical mind. No physical thing is itself information. Observing something allows us to gain knowledge of it's properties, which we can convey to someone else, thus producing information by sharing the knowledge we have gained by observation, investigation, or study." - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


"Information is information, not matter or energy." - Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1948), p. 132.


"There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter." - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


"In all systems, there can be no new information without an intelligent, purposeful sender." - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


"No matter how many "bits" of possible combinations it has, there is no reason to call it "nformation" if it doesn't at least have the potential of producing something useful. What kind of information produces function? In computer science, we call it a "program." Another name for computer software is an 'algorithm.' No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organisms with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms' genomes programmed?" Abel and Trevors, p. 8.


How can we measure information? A computer file might contain information for printing a story, reproducing a picture at a given resolution, or producing a widget to specified tolerances. Information can usually be compressed to some degree, just as the English language could be compressed by eliminating every "u" that directly follows a "q". If compression could be accomplished to the maximum extent possible (eliminating all redundancies and unnecessary information), the number of bits (0s or 1s) would be a measure of the information needed to produce the story, picture, or widget.


Each living system can be described by its age and the information stored in its DNA. Each basic unit of DNA, called a nucleotide, can be one of four types. Therefore, each nucleotide represents two (log24 = 2) bits of information. Conceptual systems, such as ideas, a filing system, or a system for betting on race horses, can be explained in books. Several bits of information can define each symbol in these books. The number of bits of information, after compression, needed to duplicate and achieve the purpose of a system will be defined as its information content. That number is also a measure of the system's complexity.


"No matter how many 'bits' of possible combinations it has, there is no reason to call it 'information' if it doesn't at least have the potential of producing something useful. What kind of information produces function? In computer science, we call it a 'program.' Another name for computer software is an 'algorithm.' No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organisms with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms' genomes programmed?" Abel and Trevors, p. 8.


"If there are more than several dozen nucleotides in a functional sequence, we know that realistically they will never just 'fall into place.' This has been mathematically demonstrated repeatedly. But as we will soon see, neither can such a sequence arise randomly one nucleotide at a time. A pre-existing 'concept' is required as a framework upon which a sentence or a functional sequence must be built. Such a concept can only pre-exist within the mind of the author." Sanford, pp. 124-125.


"The creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity" - Henry Quastier, information theorist


On the possibility that random material causes could be the origin of proteins: If we have a tiny chain of only 10 amino acid molecues, and because there are 20 amino acid molecules that can be used to produce the chain, there are 10 trillion possible combinations! The probability that a sequence of amino acids could arise to produce even such a tiny protein are astronomical, and therefore beyond improbable. By the science of statistical analysis, this would be considered impossible times impossible times impossible. . . An average protein however, is 300-500 amino acid molecules in length and may be thousands, and results in trillons times trillions of potential combinations! Here we see that the improbability of material causes to arrange a sequence for a typical protein is far beyond improbable, so as to be unworthy of being considered possible by any manner of reasoning.


Stephen C. Meyer earned a PhD in Philosophy of Science and also Mathematics, former geophysicist for Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). His PhD thesis offered a methodological interpretation of origin-of-life research. Meyer discovered that the odds of a protein forming naturally is 1:10^164 There are only 10^80 elementary particles in the known universe. There are only 10^18 seconds in the imagined 13.5 billions years since the big bang.


Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), former chairman of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester (UK) who turned to philosophy, affirmed a very important point -- the information was something above the chemical properties of the building blocks:

"As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule. It is this physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces the improbability of any particular sequence and thereby enables it to have a meaning - a meaning that has a mathematically determinate information content."


University of British Columbia - Module 6: Digital DNA: "Representation and processing of digital information in the form of DNA is essential to life in all organisms, no matter how large or tiny. Computing tools and computational thinking help us understand how DNA stores information and how that information directs activity in the cell." http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~condon/cpsc101/notes/digital-dna.pdf


In 2010, another level of complexity was discovered in the genetic code. On a strand of DNA, a sequence of three adjacent nucleotides forms a unit in the genetic code called a codon. Prior to 2010, some codons were thought to have the same function as others. That turns out to not be the case:

"... synonymous codon changes can so profoundly change the role of a protein [that it] adds a new level of complexity to how we interpret the genetic code. Ivana Weygand-Durasevic and Michael Ibba, "New Roles for Codon Usage," Science, Vol. 329, 17 September 2010, p. 1474. Also see Fangliang Zhang et al., Differential Arginylation of Actin Isoforms Is Regulated by Coding Sequence-Dependent Degradation, Science, Vol. 329, 17 September 2010, p. 1734-1537.


"Genomes [all the DNA of a species] are remarkable in that they encode most of the functions necessary for their interpretation and propagation." Anne-Claude Gavin et al., "Proteome Survey Reveals Modularity of the Yeast Cell Machinery," Nature, Vol. 440, 30 March 2006, p. 631.


TRANSLATION PACKAGE NEEDED AT BEGINNING - The amount of information in the genetic code is so vast that it would be impossible to put together by chance. But, in addition, there must be a means of translating it so the tissues can use the code. "Did the code and the means of translating it appear simultaneously in evolution? It seems almost incredible that any such coincidences could have occurred, given the extraordinary complexities of both sides and the requirement that they be coordinated accurately for survival. By a pre-Darwinian (or a skeptic of evolution after Darwin) this puzzle surely would have been interpreted as the most powerful sort of evidence for special creation." - C. Haskins, "Advances and Challenges in Science" in American Scientist 59 (1971), pp. 298.


"Not only did the DNA have to originate itself by random accident, but the translation machinery already had to be produced by accident - and also immediately! Without it, the information in the DNA could not be applied to the tissues. Instant death would be the result. "The code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell's translation machinery consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves encoded in DNA [!]; the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of translation. It is the modern expression of omne vivum ex ovo ['every living thing comes from an egg']. When and how did this circle become closed? It is exceedingly difficult to imagine." - J, Monod, Chance and Necessity (1971), p. 143.


"The discovery of the structure of DNA transformed biology profoundly, catalysing the sequencing of the human genome and engendering a new view of biology as an information science. Two features of DNA structure account for much of its remarkable impact on science: it's digital nature and its complementarity, whereby one strand of the helix binds perfectly with its partner. DNA has two types of digital information--the genes that encode proteins, which are the molecular machines of life, and the gene regulatory networks that specify the behaviour of the genes." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12540920


Shannon was keen to point out that the type of information he described did not relate to function. It was a reductionist approach to reducing improbability, and that the more possibilities of an event, the more information it could provide. An example might be the rolling of a die. Since the die has 5 sides, it provides 6 possible outcomes, and therefore 6 seperate pieces of information. When the die is rolled, the outcome has been reduced from 6 to 1, and the information has been reduced to 1 piece of information. However, genetic information is not based upon chance, necessity as it relates to chemistry, or statistical analysis. In fact, statistical analysis itself cannot produce information, but rather is a process of studying information. Genetic information is complex and specific, and relates to function. Shannon information does not describe genetic information. Complex specified information is a critical component of life and is not statistical or produced by chance events. Complex specified information is a product of mind and not random associations or events. Protein synthesis, gene expression, the precise structure of proteins which determines function, and meta-information of the cell are therefore not products of chance or random associations, but instead a feature of intentional design.


Receiver (information theory): The receiver in information theory is the receiving end of a communication channel. It receives decoded messages/information from the sender, who first encoded them. Sometimes the receiver is modeled so as to include the decoder. Real-world receivers like radio receivers or telephones can not be expected to receive as much information as predicted by the noisy channel coding theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_(information_theory)


Information: Information is that which informs. In other words, it is the answer to a question of some kind. It is thus related to data and knowledge, as data represents values attributed to parameters, and knowledge signifies understanding of real things or abstract concepts.[1] As it regards data, the information's existence is not necessarily coupled to an observer (it exists beyond an event horizon, for example), while in the case of knowledge, the information requires a cognitive observer. Information is conveyed either as the content of a message or through direct or indirect observation of anything. That which is perceived can be construed as a message in its own right, and in that sense, information is always conveyed as the content of a message. Information can be encoded into various forms for transmission and interpretation (for example, information may be encoded into a sequence of signs, or transmitted via a sequence of signals). It can also be encrypted for safe storage and communication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information


DNA, RNA, and the Flow of Genetic Information http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21171/


Genetics - information properties https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/basics/dna


"Biologic systems and processes cannot be fully accounted for in terms of the principles and laws of physics and chemistry alone, but they require in addition the principles of semiotics - the science of symbols and signs, including linguistics." - Rutgers University professor Sungchul Ji's, "The Linguistics of DNA: Words, Sentences, Grammar, Phonetics, and Semantics"


The Information Theory (textbook), "T. M. Cover and J. M. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory, 2nd, Wiley-Interscience, 2006." states information is knowledge transmitted from sender to receiver using a code.


"We now know that genes are made of DNA, a magnificently simple/complex molecule which actually encodes a language. It carries information just as a book does. The language has 4 letters which form 64 three letter words." The digital code of DNA http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12540920


Websters Dictionary, Definition of algorithm: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation; broadly :a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer


DNA is information organized to conform to linguistics laws which are more complex than Zipf's Law of Linguistics, it is digital code, is posesses algorithmic operations, and the human language properties of semantics, puntiuation, grammar, phonetics, and aprobatics.


INFORM: to communicate knowledge, to inform Definition of -ation: action or process flirtation : something connected with an action or process discoloration INFORM -ATION = INFORMATION


Websters Definition of knowledge 1 a (1): the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association (2): acquaintance with or understanding of a science, art, or techniqueb (1) : the fact or condition of being aware of something (2): the range of one's information or understanding answered to the best of my knowledgec: the circumstance or condition of apprehending truth or fact through reasoning: cognitiond: the fact or condition of having information or of being learned a person of unusual knowledge 2 a: the sum of what is known: the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankindb archaic: a branch of learning


The Heavy Hammer of Information http://nephilimfree.blogspot.com/


"Information is information, not matter or energy." - Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1948), p. 132.


"There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter." - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


"In all systems, there can be no new information without an intelligent, purposeful sender." - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


Proceedings of the Symposium, Cornell University, USA, 31 May - 3 June 2011 http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/8818#t=toc"


"In the spring of 2011, a diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information. This symposium brought together experts in information theory, computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. This volume presents new research by those invited to speak at the conference.

The contributors to this volume use their wide-ranging expertise in the area of biological information to bring fresh insights into the many explanatory difficulties associated with biological information. These authors raise major challenges to the conventional scientific wisdom, which attempts to explain all biological information exclusively in terms of the standard mutation/selection paradigm.

Several clear themes emerged from these research papers: 1) Information is indispensable to our understanding of what life is; 2) Biological information is more than the material structures that embody it; 3) Conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life. By exploring new perspectives on biological information, this volume seeks to expand, encourage, and enrich research into the nature and origin of biological information."


In the Beginning was Information - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig


DNA Study Forces Rethink of What It Means to Be a Gene, Eliizabeth Pennisi, Science 15 June 2007, Vol. 316 no. 5831 pp. 1556-1557: "According to a painstaking new analysis of 1% of the human genome, genes can be sprawling, with far-flung protein-coding and regulatory regions that overlap with other genes." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5831/1556


Anzai, T. et al. 2003. Comparative sequencing of human and chimpanzee MHC class I regions unveils insertions/deletions as the major path to genomic divergence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 100 (13): 7708-13.


Yale News: Yale Symposium Will Explore New Evidence Supporting The Theory of Intelligent Design http://news.yale.edu/2000/10/31/yale-symposium-will-explore-new-evidence-supporting-theory-intelligent-design


SYMPOSIUM PRELIMINARY PROGRAM Intelligent Design & Artificial Intelligence: The Ghost in the Machine http://sophiawarsaw.ippt.gov.pl/Symposium%202009%20Pasadena.pdf


The 2016 International Conference on Biological Information and Biomedical Engineering http://www.icbibe.org/


"Many biologists think of the developmental processes by which organisms progress from egg to adult in terms of the execution of a "developmental program" - Biological Information, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


"Since the 1950s, the concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in many parts of biology." - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-biological/


Biological Information, New Perspectives, Proceedings of the Symposium, Cornell University, USA, 31 May - 3 June 2011


John W. Oller, Jr (2013) Pragmatic Information. Biological Information: pp. 64-86. doi: .1142/9789814508728_0003


Section one: Information Theory & Biology: Introductory Comments, Pragmatic Information, John W. Oller, Jr, Doris B. Hawthorne Board of Regents Support Fund Professor IV, Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA 70504, USA

The goal of this paper is to define pragmatic information with a view toward measuring it. Here, pragmatic information means the content of valid signs - the key that unlocks language acquisition by babies and to human communication through language - also the content that enables biological "codes" in genetics, embryology, and immunology to work. In such systems, the inter-related layers appear to be ranked as in a hierarchy. Sounds are outranked by syllables, in turn outranked by words, and so on. In DNA, nucleotide pairs are outranked by codons, which are outranked by genes, and so on. As signs of lower rank combine to form signs of any higher rank, combinatorial "explosions" occur. With each increase in rank, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially, but the constraints on valid strings and, thus, their pragmatic value, sharpens their focus. As a result with each explosive increase in the number of possible combinations the relative proportion of meaningful ones diminishes. Consequently, random processes of forming strings or changing them must tend increasingly toward meaninglessness (invalid and nonviable) strings. The consequent outcome of random mutations is mortality of individuals and in deep time an increasing number of disorders, diseases, and the eventual extinction of populations.


Computational Aspects of Biological Information 2016 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/computational-aspects-biological-information-2016/#


9th International Conference on Bioinformatics, November 13-14, 2017 Paris, France http://bioinformatics.conferenceseries.com/


Signal Transduction in the Immune System http://www.faseb.org/src/micro/Site/SigImm/home.aspx


Biochemistry. 5th edition: Chapter 5DNA, RNA, and the Flow of Genetic Information http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21171/


Biological Information, New Perspectives, Proceedings of the Symposium, Cornell University, USA, 31 May - 3 June 2011 Edited by: Robert J Marks II (Baylor University, USA), Michael J Behe (Lehigh University, USA), William A Dembski (Discovery Institute, USA), Bruce L Gordon (Houston Baptist University, USA), John C Sanford (Cornell)

Biological Information, New Perspectives http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/8818#t=toc%22n the spring of 2011, a diverse group of scientists gathered at Cornell University to discuss their research into the nature and origin of biological information. This symposium brought together experts in information theory, computer science, numerical simulation, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, whole organism biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, genetics, physics, biophysics, mathematics, and linguistics. This volume presents new research by those invited to speak at the conference.

The contributors to this volume use their wide-ranging expertise in the area of biological information to bring fresh insights into the many explanatory difficulties associated with biological information. These authors raise major challenges to the conventional scientific wisdom, which attempts to explain all biological information exclusively in terms of the standard mutation/selection paradigm.

Several clear themes emerged from these research papers: 1) Information is indispensable to our understanding of what life is; 2) Biological information is more than the material structures that embody it; 3) Conventional chemical and evolutionary mechanisms seem insufficient to fully explain the labyrinth of information that is life. By exploring new perspectives on biological information, this volume seeks to expand, encourage, and enrich research into the nature and origin of biological information.

Session One - Information Theory & Biology: Introductory Comments (Robert J Marks II): Biological Information - What is It? (Werner Gitt, Robert Compton and Jorge Fernandez), A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search (William A Dembski, Winston Ewert and Robert J Marks II), Pragmatic Information (John W Oller, Jr), Limits of Chaos and Progress in Evolutionary Dynamics (William F Basener), Tierra: The Character of Adaptation (Winston Ewert, William A Dembski and Robert J Marks II), Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation (George Montanez, Robert J Marks II, Jorge Fernandez and John C Sanford), Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems (Granville Sewell), Information and Thermodynamics in Living Systems (Andy C McIntosh)

Session Two - Biological Information and Genetic Theory: Introductory Comments (John C Sanford): Not Junk After All: Non-Protein-Coding DNA Carries Extensive Biological Information (Jonathan Wells) Can Purifying Natural Selection Preserve Biological Information? (Paul Gibson, John R Baumgardner, Wesley H Brewer and John C Sanford), Selection Threshold Severely Constrains Capture of Beneficial Mutations (John C Sanford, John R Baumgardner and Wesley H Brewer)

Using Numerical Simulation to Test the "Mutation-Count" Hypothesis (Wesley H Brewer, John R Baumgardner and John C Sanford), Can Synergistic Epistasis Halt Mutation Accumulation? Results from Numerical Simulation (John R Baumgardner, Wesley H Brewer and John C Sanford), Computational Evolution Experiments Reveal a Net Loss of Genetic Information Despite Selection (Chase W Nelson and John C Sanford), Information Loss: Potential for Accelerating Natural Genetic Attenuation of RNA Viruses (Wesley H Brewer, Franzine D Smith and John C Sanford), DNA.EXE: A Sequence Comparison between the Human Genome and Computer Code (Josiah Seaman), Biocybernetics and Biosemiosis (Donald Johnson)

Session Three - Theoretical Molecular Biology: Introductory Comments (Michael J Behe): An Ode to the Code: Evidence for Fine-Tuning in the Standard Codon Table (Jed C Macosko and Amanda M Smelser), A New Model of Intracellular Communication Based on Coherent, High-Frequency Vibrations in Biomolecules (L Dent), Getting There First: An Evolutionary Rate Advantage for Adaptive Loss-of-Function Mutations (Michael J Behe), The Membrane Code: A Carrier of Essential Biological Information That is Not Specified by DNA and is Inherited Apart from It (Jonathan Wells), Explaining Metabolic Innovation: Neo-Darwinism Versus Design (Douglas D Axe and Ann K Gauger)

Session Four - Biological Information and Self-Organizational Complexity Theory: Introductory Comments (Bruce L Gordon): Evolution Beyond Entailing Law: The Roles of Embodied Information and Self Organization (Stuart Kauffman), Towards a General Biology: Emergence of Life and Information from the Perspective of Complex Systems Dynamics (Bruce H Weber)


Werner Gitt (Professor of Information Systems) describes man as the most complex information processing system on earth. Gitt estimated that about 3 x 1024 bits of information are processed daily in an average human body. That is thousands of times more than all the information in all the world's libraries. [See Werner Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information, 2nd edition (Bielefeld, Germany: CLV, 2000), p. 88.]


The discovery of the structure of DNA transformed biology profoundly, catalysing the sequencing of the human genome and engendering a new view of biology as an information science. Two features of DNA structure account for much of its remarkable impact on science: its digital nature and its complementarity, whereby one strand of the helix binds perfectly with its partner. DNA has two types of digital information--the genes that encode proteins, which are the molecular machines of life, and the gene regulatory networks that specify the behaviour of the genes.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12540920


"The basic flaw of all evolutionary views is the origin of the information in living beings. It has never been shown that a coding system and semantic information could originate by itself in a material medium, and the information theorems predict that this will never be possible. A purely material origin of life is thus precluded." - Werner Gitt, former Director, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig

Three prerequisites must be fulfilled in order for the German Ministerium to award the title "Director and Professor" at a German research institute, on the recommendation of the Praesidium. The person concerned must be: 1. A scientist (i.e., it is most definitely an academic title). 2. One who has published a significant number of original research papers in the technical literature. 3 .Must head a department in his area of expertise, in which several working scientists are employed.


"It was already clear that the genetic code is not merely an abstraction, but also the embodiment of life's mechanisms; the consecutive triplets of nucleotides in DNA (called codons) are inherited but they also guide the construction of proteins. So it is disappointing, but not surprising, that the origin of the genetic code is still as obscure as the origin of life itself." - John Maddox, "The Genetic Code by Numbers," Nature, Vol. 367, 13 January 1994, p. 111.


"We estimate that approximately 73% of all protein-coding SNVs and approximately 86% of SNVs predicted to be deleterious arose in the past 5,000-10,000?years." - Analysis of 6,515 exomes reveals the recent origin of most human protein-coding variants http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7431/full/nature11690.html


The Linguistics of DNA Words, Sentences, Grammar, Phonetics and Semantics http://www.genetics.org/search?fulltext=information&submit=yes&x=0&y=0


Quantitative linguistic study of DNA sequences "A new family of compound Poisson distribution functions from quantitative linguistics is used to study the linguistic features of DNA sequences that go beyond the Zipf's law." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437102017879


Linguistics Features of Noncoding DNA Sequences http://cps.bu.edu/hes/articles/mbghpss94.pdf Complexity Matters "Evolutionary biologists have been loosely divided into two camps. One group believes that all characteristics of an organism are equally malleable by evolutionary pressures, with the result that an organism can in theory take any shape. The other camp has the view that there are fundamental properties of each organism that are quite immutable. In his commentary, Wagner discusses new work on the complexity of organisms and a paper by Waxman and Peck in this week's issue and argues that these results tip the balance in favor of the group that believes in a fundamentally immutable set of characteristics for each organism." http://www.sciencemag.org/content/279/5354/1158.summary


Scientists discover double meaning in genetic code: "Scientists have discovered a second code hiding within DNA. The second code contains information that changes how scientists read the instructions contained in DNA and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. Genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131212142151.htm


Module 6: Digital DNA http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~condon/cpsc101/notes/digital-dna.pdf


The digital code of DNA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12540920


"Information theory tells us that the only known way to decrease the entropy of an isolated system is by having intelligence in that system. [See, for example, Charles H. Bennett, "Demons, Engines and the Second Law," - Scientific American, Vol. 257, November 1987, pp. 108-116.] Because the universe is far from its maximum entropy level, a vast intelligence is the only known means by which the universe could have been brought into being. [See also "Second Law of Thermodynamics" on page 31.]


"Any living being possesses an enormous amount of "intelligence," very much more than is necessary to build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this "intelligence" is called "information," but it is still the same thing. It is not programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA or in that of any other organelle in each cell. This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it." - Pierre P. Grasse, The Evolution of Living Organisms, 1977, p. 168


"Information is a non-physical fundamental entity, which the laws of physics and matter cannot produce. Information is a product of a non-physical mind. No physical thing is itself information. Observing something allows us to gain knowledge of it's properties, which we can convey to someone else, thus producing information by sharing the knowledge we have gained by observation, investigation, or study." - Gitt Werner, former head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig https://www.ptb.de/cms/en.html). Seven years later he was promoted to Director and Professor at PTB. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA0Ojxr4pv0


"Information is information, neither matter nor energy. Any materialism which disregards this, will not survive one day." - Norbert Wiener, Mathematician, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1948), p. 132.


"Even the biology based on a materialistic philosophy, which discarded all vitalistic and metaphysical components, did not readily accept the reduction of biology to physics ... Information is neither a physical nor a chemical principle like energy and matter, even though the latter are required as carriers." - East German scientist J. Peil

I shall argue that it is not enough to know how life's immense structural complexity arose; we must also account for the origin of biological information. As we shall see, scientists are still very far from solving this fundamental conceptual puzzle. Some people rejoice in such ignorance, imagining that it leaves room for a miraculous creation.


http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf

Ibid., p. 148.

“No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material.”


Not mentioned by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe is the simple fact that even a few correct words typed by the hordes of monkeys would decay long before a complete sentence of Shakespeare was completed. Correspondingly, a few correct sequences of amino acids would decay long before a protein was completed, not to mention the thousands of proteins that must be in their proper place to have a living cell. Finally, the most complex requirement of all is the presence of functioning DNA.

Question: How could these rules emerge by natural means, and why should they?

The charge that information is a teleological concept is simply false, notwithstanding the fact that it is repeated fairly often. The truth is precisely the other way round. Information has all the defining features of a scientific concept because it has been defined in two different ways and in both cases there is nothing teleological about it.

Thats simply a baseless assertion. How does the author prove his view? Here comes his striking answer :

We simply cannot describe the transmission of genes or the synthesis of proteins without their sequences, and we cannot replace these sequences with anything else, which means that using information to describe living systems is perfectly equivalent to using space, time, mass and energy to describe physical systems.

Its not. The big question is how these information-bearing sequences could emerge without conceptualizing first the code per se, and secondly, the information, or special sequence and arrangement of the coding letters, that bear the instructional information to produce proteins, and life.

Sequences (biological information) and coding rules are descriptive entities and are absolutely essential for life.

The truth, in other words, is that there is no more teleology in information and in the genetic code than there is in the quantities of physics and chemistry.

Objection: Information flow, from sender to receiver, involves always a conscious mind.
Reply: Although DNA does not convey information that is received, understood, or used by a conscious mind, it does have information that is received and used by the cell’s machinery to build the structures critical to the maintenance of life.

How can the author compare them? What do " quantities of physics and chemistry " have to do with information? Or how do they compare? They don't. These quantities do not require special arrangements, do not bear information. They are just ... quantities.   

1. Marcello Barbieri Code Biology A New Science of Life

Mayr (1982, 106), “all manifestations of development and life are controlled by genetic programs,” noting that “nothing comparable to it exists in the inanimate world, except for manmade computers”

http://biologos.org/blog/evolution-and-origin-of-biological-information-part-1-intelligent-design

In the conclusion to a pivotal chapter entitled “The Best Explanation” Meyer presents the following summary of his case:

http://www.doesgodexist.org/NovDec09/Information-Function.html

Literature from those who posture in favor of creation abounds with examples of the tremendous odds against chance producing a meaningful code. For instance, the estimated number of elementary particles in the universe is 10^80. The most rapid events occur at an amazing 10^45 per second. Thirty billion years contains only 10^18 seconds. By totaling those, we find that the maximum elementary particle events in 30 billion years could only be 10^143. Yet, the simplest known free-living organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has 470 genes that code for 470 proteins that average 347 amino acids in length. The odds against just one specified protein of that length are 1:10^451.

http://godevidence.com/2013/05/how-atheism-relies-on-special-pleading-2/

Put another way, just as the chemistry of the ink and paper that constitute a newspaper cannot explain the arrangement of the letters in the words of a newspaper, the chemistry of a DNA molecule cannot explain the arrangement of letters in a DNA molecule. This is because the arrangement of the DNA letters cannot be accomplished by physical or chemical processes.

It would be just as absurd to assert that mindless chemical or physical processes could write a newspaper article as it would be to assert that such processes could produce a DNA sequence.

The arrangement of symbols (such as letters) according to a language is not something that can be accomplished, even in principle, by unintelligent chemical or physical processes.


The substitutive function of the the symbols in a code or language is something that can only be set up by the activity of a conscious and intelligent mind. Gitt skillfully explains this crucial point:

   “An abstract symbol set provides for an immense number of combinations of basic symbols to form words. These words may then be arranged in near-limitless ways to form phrases and sentences that, in turn, are used to form larger bodies of text/messages such as paragraphs. Thus, for example, the English letters ‘a, c, and t’ may be used to form the word ‘cat’ (a mammal that purrs and meows).

   The very same letters may also be used to form the word ‘act’ (a word that, depending on the context, will have any one of a number of meanings; e.g., consider the phrases ‘caught in the act‘, ‘the second act of the play’, ‘an act of Congress’, ‘performed a heroic act‘ and others). The point to notice is that the letters ‘a,c, and t’ by themselves do not have a one-to-one relationship with the entity that they are combined to represent. These letters acquire function and meaning only after they are combined in agreed-upon sequences and assigned meanings.”
   (underlining mine)

Simply put, what a symbol serves to represent must be decided upon by a conscious and intelligent agent. Symbolic representation is by necessity a mental process. Biologists with less rigid ideological commitments to atheism (or at least more intellectual integrity) have been frank enough to admit the necessity of mind (a conscious and intelligent agent) in the origin of life.

The Origin of Information 1

By Mark Eastman, M.D. and Chuck Missler

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE -


"And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so" 
Genesis 1:11 (KJV)


     When George Wald and Francis Crick stated that the spontaneous origin of life was "impossible," they were speaking primarily about the origin of the cellular "hardware." Indeed, when we consider the effect of equilibrium, the reversibility of biochemical reactions in water and the fact that the building blocks of life are not safe in the air or on the land,¹ spontaneous biogenesis stands shoulder to shoulder with raising the dead and walking on water - events which also defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Chemical Equilibrium - something which cannot be explained by natural law. However, for the purpose of this chapter we will allow that sometime on the earth the oceans became filled with spontaneously derived DNA.
     The question we must now answer is this: Would a DNA molecule that arose by chance possess any information, codes, programs, or instructions? To put it another way - can information, codes, or programs arise by chance? In the last half of the twentieth century, evidence has accumulated which has decisively answered this question. The answer profoundly impacts the debate on the existence of God.


Encyclopedia on a Pinhead: Chance or Design
     At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pin head. Yet, it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it! If all the DNA chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times! The source of this information (the "software") is at the very core of the debate on the origin of life.
     When Carl Sagan said, "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be," he was expressing the materialists' position that the universe is a closed system.² That is, they believe that no information or matter can be inserted into our universe from outside our space-time domain. Consequently, with no intelligent source, materialists are forced to conclude that the sum total of the information on the DNA molecule arose by chance.
     On the other hand, creationists believe that a transcendent Creator pierced the veil of our universe and infused information and order onto the chains of the DNA molecule. Again we see that the debate boils down to chance or design. To settle this debate we must look at the nature of information as defined in the field of information science.


The Nature of Information Systems
     The modern field of information science has revolutionized our daily lives in the last four decades. Computers, fax machines, cellular phones and many other daily conveniences would not have been possible without the rapid advances in the field of information theory.
     In recent years information engineers have examined the nature of the genetic code and concluded that it is an error correcting digital coding system. While digital coding systems can be very complex, error correcting digital codes are much less common and much more complex. Furthermore, the DNA molecule has built-in redundancy. That is, the same packet of information (called a gene) is often located in more than one place in the organism's DNA. Consequently, if one gene becomes corrupted with informational errors, the backup gene will take over the function of that gene! This level of complexity is found in only the most sophisticated computer system.
     The DNA coding system can be compared to that of a compact disc. The music on a compact disc is stored in a digital fashion and can only be appreciated if you have a knowledge of the language convention used to create the information on the disc. Appropriate machinery, which functions to translate that code into music, is also required for the music to be played. In a compact disc player this decoding process involved dozens of electronic and moving parts.
     It isn't much different in the living cell. The information carried by the DNA molecule contains the instructions for all the structures and functions of the human body. Within each cell resides all the necessary hardware to decode and utilize that information.
     When we look at a compact disc, we see no evidence of the musical information stored on the disc's surface. We see only the rainbow effect on the surface of the disc. Without the knowledge of the language convention used to create the disc and the machinery to translate it, we must simply be content with the colorful surface. This is exactly the same dilemma we face with spontaneously derived DNA or any information storage system.³
     If we examine the sequence of nucleotides on the DNA molecule, they simply have the appearance of a long chain of chemicals and not the appearance of a message system or a code. It is only when one possesses a knowledge of the language convention (the genetic code) and the appropriate machinery to translate the coded information on the DNA molecule, that the nucleotide sequence becomes understandable. Without such knowledge and machinery, the sequences on a spontaneously derived DNA molecule are meaningless.
     Consequently, the enormous challenge facing the scientific materialist is to explain how a language convention (the genetic code) and the necessary cellular machinery to translate the information stored on the DNA molecule arose independently without intelligent guidance.
     The chicken-egg dilemma has confounded scientists for decades. Chemist John Walton noted the dilemma in 1977 when he stated:
     "The origin of the genetic code presents formidable unsolved problems. The coded information in he nucleotide sequence is meaningless without the translation machinery, but the specification for his machinery is itself coded in the DNA. Thus without the machinery the information is meaningless, but without the coded information, the machinery cannot be produced. This presents a paradox of the 'chicken and egg' variety, and attempts to solve it have so far been sterile."⁴
     By allowing the spontaneous generation of long chains of DNA, what would you have? Do those chains of nucleotides possess a code or a program? Of course not. What you have is an admittedly complex chemical which has the potential of carrying a code or information. However, there is no inherent information on such spontaneously generated DNA unless a system of interpreting those sequences exists first. A couple of simple examples will help us to understand the nature of this dilemma.


"Save Our Souls!"
     If I were to show you a sign which had painted on it the sequence, dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot, and if you were knowledgeable in Morse Code, you would know that this means S-O-S, and that I am in trouble. However, if I take that same sign to an isolated tribe of South American Indians, they will see the unlikely arrangement of dots and dashes, but there will be no information content transmitted to them without the knowledge of the language convention we call Morse Code.


The English Language
     Similarly, if I take a book written in English and hand it to an Australian Bushman, it will make absolutely no sense without a prior knowledge of the English language convention. Just like the dots and dashes, the 26 letters of the English language have no inherent information in them. Their shapes have the appearance of order (reduced entropy) but by themselves they are meaningless. It is when you "sheperd" or gather the letters into specific sequences, as determined by the rules of the previously existent language convention, that their arrangement begins to have meaning. Unless the language convention and the hardware (the human brain) to interpret it exists first, the arrangement of the letters can transmit no meaning.


Primordial Disk Soup
     The magnetic disks used to store and retrieve information in computers provides another fascinating analogy to the DNA molecule. When I purchase a blank computer disk, have I purchased a code or a program? No. I have only purchased a chemical medium which has the potential to carry a code or a program. However, to possess real information the blank disk must be formatted and programmed by a computer which was in turn built for this purpose.
     While the disk is being formatted a "program" is placed on it from an intelligent source (the computer) that exists outside and separate from the disk. This is accomplished by arranging the iron atoms on the disk in a predetermined fashion according to the rules of the computer's language convention. Once the disk is formatted and imputed with information, it weighs no more than it did before this procedure was done. This is because information has no mass or weight.
     As in the case of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the structure or shape of the iron atoms on the disk does not convey or possess any information in and of itself. Rather, information ( a code or program) is conveyed by the orderly arrangement of the iron atoms. This arrangement of atoms is then interpreted by the computer's hardware according to the predetermined rules of the its language convention. Without the hardware and the pre-existent language convention, the arrangement of the iron atoms is meaningless.
     Does the computer create its own language convention? Obviously not. Just as the hardware requires intelligent design, so does the computer's language convention require an intelligent source - a computer programmer.
     By allowing an ocean of spontaneously derived DNA, I have given you the equivalent of an ocean full of blank floppy disks! In order for the DNA molecule to carry information, its molecules need to be arranged in a specific sequence as predetermined by the chemical code or language convention. But the language convention must exist first. According to the principles of modern information theory, language conventions come only from an intelligent source - a mind!
     Miller and Urey were able to produce the unlikely, ordered building blocks of proteins. In the future someone may even produce nucleotides by chance chemical processes. However, without a pre-existent language convention, these chemical letters will be no more effective in transmitting information than a random sequence of beads on a string, iron atoms in a disc, or letters on a page.


Codes by Chance?
     In the twentieth century, theories on the origin of the chemical hardware in living systems have come and gone with each generation.⁵ However, theories on the origin of codes and programs are few and far between. The claim by creationists that codes, programs and languages conventions, such as the genetic code, arise only from intelligent sources is often protested by scientific materialists (although most information engineers have no problem with this statement). Yet no one has come up with a rational theory on how true information, which is the antithesis of chance, can arise by random chance processes. As we will see, however, this problem has led to some irrational solutions.
     One of the most celebrated theories on the origin of information by chance comes from materialist Manfried Eigen. In his book Das Spiel, Eigen attempts to show how a code or program might develop by chance. Eigen argues that if the letters of the genetic code can arise by chance, then why not the words, the sentences, the paragraphs and entire book.
     Eigen envisions a machine that possesses the remarkable ability to generate, by chance, the letters of the English language and then randomly shuffle and combine those letters for millions of years. After examining the volumes of randomly generated letters we find some rather amazing combinations. The machine has generated "AND," "MAN," "DOG," "CAT," "The Lord is my sheperd, I shall not want..." We stand back and see that indeed, this machine has generated meaningful sentences. Eigen argues that this is proof of the random chance production of information. Is this true?
     In his book, The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution, A.E. Wilder-Smith demonstrated the fallacy of Eigen's argument. Wilder-Smith invites a non-English speaking friend from Switzerland to examine the output of the machine. Again the machine puts out the random sequences such "HAT," "FISH," "BOY," etc. His Swiss friend stares at the machine with a blank look, quite unlike the smile an Englishman might carry. While the Englishman stands amazed at the randomly generated information, our Swiss friend points out that the sequences have no meaning to him at all because he has no knowledge of the English language convention.
     Eigen's argument that "true information" has been generated by chance, is erroneous because he interprets his sequences by the rules of a previously existing language convention we call the English language. But where did the rules of English come from?
     Wilder-Smith points out that the sequence of letters has meaning only when we "hang" the rules and the conventions of the English language on the sequences themselves. Just as dots and dashes are meaningless without a knowledge of the Morse Code, so too are the random arrangements of any letters, chemicals, beads, or magnetic medium meaningless without rules and conventions by which we interpret the sequences. But the rules of any language system are themselves arbitrary (i.e. man-made), abstract agreements between at least two intelligences which declare that a specific sequence of letters has a certain meaning.⁶ Put another way, the rules of any language system are neither a part of nor conveyed by any natural laws of nature. Therefore, a language convention, with its rules and regulations, must be devised first.
     Information engineers know that language conventions will not, cannot, and do not arise by chance. Every information engineer or computer programmer knows that chance must be eliminated if one is to successfully write a code or program. In fact, chance is the very antithesis of information.
     If Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation commissioned you to write a new software program and you simply began to type randomly on your computer with the hope that a new language or program might result, you would likely be assisted to a psychiatric facility for an extended medical leave of absence. We know intuitively that this method will never result in the generation of new information.
     Yet, according to evolutionary dogma, the random shuffling of nucleotides for millions of years supposedly produced not only the DNA molecule but the code which governs the storage and retrieval of the information it carries as well. If we make such a claim, are we not, in effect, asserting that formatted computer floppy disks, which are filled with millions of bits of information, can arise by the random combining of iron oxide and plastic rather than being the product of an intelligent source which is outside and separate from the floppy disk?


The Monkey and the Typewriter
     For centuries scientists have suspected that living systems contain a mechanism for the storage and retrieval of information used for cellular metabolism and reproduction. With the elucidation of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent deciphering of the genetic code in the 1960's this was finally confirmed. However, the debate on the origin of this cellular information predates the actual discovery of the DNA molecule by at least 100 years.
     As in the case of the cellular "hardware," evolutionists have also appealed to the magic ingredient of time to explain the origin of the information, the "software," stored by living systems. Since the 1700's scientific materialists have argued that, given enough time, anything was possible, even the origin of the complex programs necessary for the production of life. Creationists, on the other hand, have argued that where there is design there must be a designer and where there are codes or language conventions there must be an architect for such information.
     On June 30, 1860, at the Oxford Union in England, this was the very topic in the "Great Debate" between the Anglican Archbishop of Oxford University, Samuel Wilberforce and evolutionist and agnostic, Thomas Huxley.
     Bishop Wilberforce, a Professor of Theology and Mathematics at Oxford University, applied the logic of the teleological argument for God. He argued, as did William Paley, that the design we see in nature required a Designer. Therefore, the information (an evidence for design) found in living systems could not arise by chance.
     Huxley, on the other hand, declared that given enough time all the possible combinations of matter, including those necessary to produce a man, will eventually occur by chance molecular movement. To prove his point Huxley asked Wilberforce to allow him the service of six monkeys that would live forever, six typewriters that would never wear out and an unlimited supply of paper and ink. He then argued that given an infinite amount of these monkeys would eventually type all of the books in the British Library including the Bible and the works of Shakespeare!
     Applying the mathematical law of probability, Huxley showed that if time (T) is infinite, then the probability (P) of an event happening is equal to one, i.e., one hundred percent.⁷ Consequently, he argued that with an infinite amount of time any and all combinations of letters, including the necessary chemical combinations to produce life, will eventually be typed out purely by chance, without the necessity of a Creator.
     Bishop Wilberforce, a skilled mathematician, was forced to concede the truth of Huxley's point. To this very day the Monkey/Typewriter argument is frequently applied by evolutionists when confronted with the question of the origin of life.
     Bishop Wilberforce lost the debate because he was unable to see the flaw in Huxley's argument. At the time of this debate the nature of biochemical reactions and the genetic code was not understood. Consequently, Huxley's argument seemed reasonable. When time is infinite the probability formula does indeed predict that all possible combinations of letters will occur. However, with the revolutionary discoveries in molecular biology and information science in the last four decades, Huxley's use of a typewriter to simulate the chemical reactions in living systems has, in fact, been shown to be erroneous.
     In the last chapter we saw that the chemical reactions in living systems, such as the combining of amino acids and nucleotides, are reversible. The reversibility of these chemical reactions is quite unlike those simulated by Huxley's typewriter.
     A century after the "Great Debate," Professor A.E. Wilder-Smith, who also studied at Oxford University, demonstrated the fallacy of Huxley's argument. Wilder-Smith points out that because the chemical reactions upon which our bodies run are reversible, for Huxley's argument to be valid, his monkeys would need to use typewriters which also type reversibly!⁸ With each key stroke such a typewriter places the ink on the paper, and when the key is released the inks jumps back onto the hammer of the typewriter leaving the paper reversibly without a trace!
     This is, in fact, a more accurate demonstration of what happens in biological reactions. The building blocks of life continually combine ("type in") and come apart ("type out") as the solution approaches a state of equilibrium. With a typewriter that types reversibly-typing in (bonding) and typing out (uncombining)-we will have typed as much in one minute as we would have in 5 billion years!⁹
     Huxley's argument is invalidated by the fact that the building blocks in biological reactions do not stay combined. The building blocks of DNA and proteins are driven (by the Second Law and chemical equilibrium) to break down (come apart) in the watery environment in which they supposedly arose.
     On the other hand, the hypothetical books typed by Huxley's monkeys are stable end products. They do not decompose (come apart) into their individual letters as do the building blocks of life. Therefore, Huxley's illustrations is an erroneous and inaccurate representation of biological systems.
     Finally, we saw that Stanley Miller's spark and soup experiment generated 50% right-handed and 50% left-handed amino acids. We saw that right-handed amino acids are, in many cases, poisonous to enzymes and living cells. Consequently, if the keys in Huxley's typewriter represent a true primordial soup, every other key stroke would be potentially lethal! How far do you think the monkeys would get toward typing the genetic code with such odds?
     In his character style, Sir Fred Hoyle comments on the improbability that Huxley's monkeys might type the genetic code:
     "No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material."¹⁰


Time: Magic Bullet for Unlikely Villain
     When confronted with the many evidences against the spontaneous origin of life, the scientific materialist will inevitably and repeatedly appeal to the magic ingredient of prolonged time periods to accomplish biochemical possibilities. However, as in the case of the chemical "hardware," the addition of prolonged time periods does not increase the likelihood of spontaneously derived information.
     In the previous chapter on the origin of the cellular "hardware," we saw that the laws of thermodynamics and chemical equilibrium demand that all systems tend toward disorder with the advance of time. In the field of information science, these laws have enormous implications as well.
     When applied to the field of information science, the Second Law demands that the total amount of information in a closed system decreases as time advances.¹¹ Put another way, as time advances the sum total of the information stored on magnetic tape, the pages of a book, or the sequences of a DNA molecule always degrades. This is, in fact, exactly what we observe with these media. As time advances, DNA molecules collect informational errors (mutations) and the organism eventually dies. Ancient scrolls lose their ink. Old recordings become filled with informational noise. In each case the result is always the same-loss of information.
     The Theory of Evolution demands that just the opposite occurs. To change an amoebae into a human being requires a million-fold increase in the information stored in the DNA of each cell. According to evolutionary theory, this increase in information must also occur without any intelligent guidance. Such an occurrence would not only breach a foundational truth of information theory-that true information comes only from a mind-it would also defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics which demands that the information stored on the DNA molecule must degrade and not increase.¹²
     In their book Evolution from Space, materialists Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe address the problem of the origin of the information carried on the DNA molecule:
     "From the beginning of this book we have emphasized the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. The information cannot in our view be generated by what are often called 'natural' processes, as for instance through meteorological and chemical processes occurring at the surface of a lifeless planet. As well as a suitable physical and chemical environment, a large initial store of information was also needed [for the origin of life]. We have argued that the requisite information came from an 'intelligence,' the beckoning spectre."¹³ (Emphasis added)
     In this remarkable statement, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe admit that living systems require "enormous" amounts of information for their construction. This information, they conclude, cannot be generated by "natural" or random chemical processes. Consequently, they assert that the source of the information is from an "intelligence."
     The implications of this admission by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are mind boggling. Since, in their opinion, chance "chemical processes occurring at the surface of a lifeless planet [earth]" cannot create new information, then the source of information found in living systems must have been of extraterrestial origin!


ET: The Sower of Life?
     By the end of the 1960's the evidence from thermodynamics, mathematical probability and information theory were taking their toll on the Oparin-Haldane-Miller paradigm. With each new discovery in molecular biology the concept of spontaneous generation gradually took on the appearance of a miracle, rather than an unlikely accident of chemistry.
     In the 1970's speculation on the origin of life took an unexpected and bizarre turn. Because the laws of chemistry, physics and mathematical probability so mitigate against the possibility of spontaneous generation, scientists began to look for an extraterrestrial source for the origin of life!
     Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, and one of the most respected molecular biologists in the world, has conceded that the spontaneous origin of life on earth is "almost a miracle." Consequently, since life could not have arisen by chance, he proposed that the first life forms on earth were single-celled "spores" delivered here from interstellar space!¹⁴,¹⁵ This theory, called "Directed Panspermia," then asserts that these "interstellar spores" subsequently evolved into all the life forms on earth. Similar conclusions were drawn by Hoyle in his book Evolution From Space.¹⁶
     These men recognized that something beyond the bounds of planet earth was required to generate the information and complexity found within living systems.
     Scientists recognize that there are only two options for the origin of life: intelligent design or spontaneous biogenesis. Faced with the apparent impossibility of spontaneous biogenesis on earth, one might have suspected that these men would invoke a supernatural, extra-dimensional, intelligent Creator for the origin of life. However, this was not the case. Crick, and others, have concluded that since life could not have arisen by chance on planet earth, the laws of chemistry and physics must, therefore, be more favorable elsewhere in the cosmos and that life arose there first and was later delivered to earth.
     Michael Denton comments on this bizarre twist:
     "Nothing illustrates more clearly just how intractable a problem the origin of life has become than the fact that world authorities can seriously toy with the idea of panspermia."¹⁷
     The dramatic shift from a theistic, Judeo-Christian world view to a secularized, neo-Darwinian "age of reason" was accomplished, in part, by those who desired to explain away the biblical miracle of creation. It is ironic, therefore, that as we approach the end of the twentieth century some of the world's most prominent scientists are forced to conclude that life on earth had an extraterrestial origin. This is, in theory, exactly what the Bible has said all along. However, the "Extraterrestial" the Bible speaks of is not just from beyond earth, but from beyond time and space as well!
     The assertion that elsewhere in the universe the laws of physics and chemistry are more favorable for the origin of life is not supported by even a shred of scientific evidence. To invoke such an explanation is, in effect, an appeal to something outside the bounds of natural laws, i.e., a metaphysical, supernatural cause.
     In 1981 Sir Fred Hoyle commented on this appeal to metaphysics:
     "I don't know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the combinatorial arrangement of not even one among the many thousands of biopolymers [DNA, RNA, proteins] on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on the Earth. Astronomers will have a little difficulty at understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that this is not so, the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The 'others' are a group of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles. They advocate the belief that tucked away in nature, outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). This curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations of biblical miracles."¹⁸ (Emphasis added)
     If we are to assume that the laws of physics and chemistry are essentially uniform throughout the physical universe, then we must logically conclude that life could not have arisen by chance anywhere in the universe.
     Even if the laws of physics were found to be more favorable in a distant corner of the universe, there would still be no explanation for the coded information (which does not arise by chance) that is carried by the DNA molecule.
     Consequently, the source of the cellular "hardware" as well as the information carried by the DNA molecule must have been an intelligent, extra-dimensional one - beyond the bounds of space and time.


"Of the Dust of the Ground"
     The evidence presented thus far has brought us to a remarkable conclusion. As we have seen, the order and complexity in the universe is well beyond the reach of chance. We have seen that to "wind up" and order the physical universe requires the introduction of energy and intelligent guidance from a source outside the bounds of the space-time domain. Furthermore, the enormous complexity of living systems and the nature of the information on the DNA molecule cannot be explained by natural laws within the dimension of our universe.
     Surely, at the dawn of the twentieth century, few scientists would have anticipated that their quest to explain the existence of the universe on natural grounds would have brought us to the point where their own discoveries now demand the existence of the very Creator they were trying to explain away! Any yet, this is exactly what has occurred.
     To create the universe and its life forms the Creator must, of necessity, be transcendent. To create the universe in the first place He must have preceded it. Secondly, to order and establish the matter within galaxies, solar systems and living beings, He would need to "enter," in effect, the arena of space-time that He created. This ability to simultaneously exist inside and outside the dimensions of the universe demands a transcendent, supernatural Creator.
     To many, invoking a supernatural cause for the origin of the universe is abhorrent. However, to invoke the god called "chance" is, according to many, a belief in "mathematical miracles." So we must choose between mathematical miracles, without a supernatural agent to perform them, or a transcendent Creator-the "First Cause," who ordered and established the universe and its life forms. The god called "chance" or intelligent design? You must choose.
     For thousands of years the Bible has revealed a transcendent Creator who acted prior to the origin of our space-time domain.¹⁹ To create the universe and life on earth, He transcended time and space, then inserted information or know-how onto matter. The result was the birth of an ordered, energized universe filled with information and every appearance of contrivance and design.
     The Bible declares that this same Creator entered time and space physically in the person of Jesus Christ. Finally, the Bible authenticates the authority of its message by demonstrating that its text came from a transcendent, supernatural Being who exists beyond time and space. 



Footnotes:
1.Due to the destructive effects of oxygen and UV radiation
2. Carl Sagan, Cosmos. (Random House, New York, 1980). pg. 4.
3. During the time of recorded history there have been dozens of information storage and retrieval systems developed by man. The use of clay tablets, ink on paper, beads on a string and modern computers have all been used to store and retrieve information. No matter what medium mankind has used, all of these systems share two vital elements. Each of the systems uses a material medium (air molecules to carry voice, clay tablets, beads, etc...) to carry the information. Secondly, each of the systems employs the use of specific rules and regulations which determine the meaning of the arrangement of the letters on a page, beads on a string or impressions on a tablet. Consequently, the information in the Encyclopedia Britannica can just as surely be stored by beads on a rope as it can with a compact disc.
4. John Walton, "Organization and the Origin of Life" Origins, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1977, pp. 30-31.
5. In the last decade a number of scientists have proposed that RNA and not DNA was the first self duplicating molecule upon which life arose. The function of information storage was later transferred to DNA which evolved later. However, RNA is even more unstable in water. Its chemical bonds are even more sensitive to the destructive effects of equilibrium in a watery environment. All of the processes that are destructive to DNA are even more destructive to RNA. Furthermore, spontaneously derived RNA would also contain NO information. Others have claimed that the first life forms were clay based self reproducing systems (See Shapiro). However, no rational system of converting silica or clay based life to carbon based life is imaginable. Further, where did the information for reproduction, growth, metabolism and repair come from in clay based systems?
6. This is one of the fascinating evidences that God exists in at least two personages.
7. According to the probability formula Pt=l-(l-Pl)^t , when time (t) is infinity then the probability of any event happening Pt approaches 100%.
8. A.E. Wilder-Smith, The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution, The Word for Today, Costa Mesa, Ca.
9. The problem is even worse for biological systems. Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Law of Mass Action, amino acids and nucleotides "type out" far more readily than they "type in" in a watery environment.
10. Sire Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), pgs. 148.
11. In the field of information science, this is actually a corollary to the Second Law. Applied to information storage and retrieval systems the Second Law demands that the net amount of information in a closed system always decreases as time advances. A closed system is an environment in which no information, matter or energy can be added or removed from beyond its boundaries. Applied to biology, the sum total of genetic information within an interbreeding pool of genes will degrade with the advance of time. This is the very cause of extinction in biological systems. In breeding situations bringing in "new blood" (new alleles) into an isolated breeding population has the effect of stabilizing the population and delaying the inevitable extinction. In this situation new information is "injected" into the a gene pool that was, in effect, previously a closed system.
12. The Second Law, applied to information theory, demands that in order for the information in a system to increase it must be inserted from outside the system from an intelligent source. Since the net amount of information in a closed system decreases with the advance of time and since, according to materialists, our universe is a closed system, then at the beginning of time, the total amount of information in the universe was at a maximum. Since information does not arise by chance, the challenge for the materialist is to determine where it came from in the first place?
13. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, op. cit., pg. 150.
14. Francis Crick, Life Itself, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1981.
15. Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, "Directed Panspermia", Icarus, 19:341-46.
16. Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space; 1981.
17. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pg. 271, Adler and Adler, 1986.
18. Hoyle, Sir Fred, "The Big Bang in Astronomy, New Scientist, 19 November 1981, p. 526.
19. II Timothy 1:9 "who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began." Also, Ephesians 1:4 "just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love."

1) http://xwalk.ca/origin2.html

Whether you’re creating codes or adapting them to new circumstances, you must create new rules. The only thing we know of that creates or re-creates codes is volitional beings. In all man-made systems, the only thing that makes them evolve is . . . intelligence.” Codes are not mattered and they’re not energy. Codes don’t come from matter, nor do they come from energy. Codes are information, and information is in a category by itself.

"All *life forms* definitely must have an enormous amount  of information to keep all their structures functioning."
                                                               
1.  No information can exist without a code.
2.  No code can exist without a free and deliberate convention.
3.  No information can exist without the five hierarchical levels:
    statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and apobetics.
4.  No information can exist in purely statistical processes.
5.  No information can exist without a transmitter.
6.  No information chain can exist without a mental origin.
7.  No information can exist without an initial mental source;
    that is, information is, by its nature, a mental and not a material quantity.
8.  No information can exist without a will.

These theorems are similar to the laws of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics, in that no counterexample has 'ever' been found.

A typical gene contains over one thousand precisely arranged bases. For any specific arrangement of four nucleotide bases of length n, there is a corresponding number of possible arrangements of bases, 4n. For any protein, there are 20n possible arrangements of protein-forming amino acids. A gene 999 bases in length represents one of 4^999 possible nucleotide sequences; a protein of 333 amino acids is one of 20^333 possibilities. 1

Since the 1960s, some biologists have thought functional proteins to be rare among the set of possible amino acid sequences. Some have used an analogy with human language to illustrate why this should be the case. Denton (1986, 309-311), for example, has shown that meaningful words and sentences are extremely rare among the set of possible combinations of English letters, especially as sequence length grows. (The ratio of meaningful 12-letter words to 12-letter sequences is 1/10^14, the ratio of 100-letter sentences to possible 100-letter strings is 1/10^100.) Further, Denton shows that most meaningful sentences are highly isolated from one another in the space of possible combinations, so that random substitutions of letters will, after very few changes, inevitably degrade meaning. Apart from a few closely clustered sentences accessible by random substitution, the overwhelming majority of meaningful sentences lie, probabilistically speaking, beyond the reach of random search.

The “Wow! signal” of the terrestrial genetic code

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf

http://urbanshakedowns.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/mathematical-patterns-in-dna/


Title: Creation of the Genetic Code

http://www.craigdemo.co.uk/geneticscode1.pdf



Here's a new paper that can be added to the growing stack of intelligent-design articles in peer-reviewed journals. Even though the authors do not use the phrase "intelligent design," their reasoning centers on the detection of an intelligent signal embedded in the genetic code -- a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by a natural cause, "be it Darwinian, Lamarckian," chemical affinities or energetics, or any other.

Blog of the authors

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103513000791?np=y

Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature, if that conforms to biological and thermodynamic requirements. As the actual scenario for the origin of terrestrial life is far from being settled, the proposal that it might have been seeded intentionally cannot be ruled out. A statistically strong intelligent-like “signal” in the genetic code is then a testable consequence of such scenario. Here we show that the terrestrial code displays a thorough precision-type orderliness matching the criteria to be considered an informational signal. Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of the same symbolic language. Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing rather than of stochastic processes (the null hypothesis that they are due to chance coupled with presumable evolutionary pathways is rejected with P-value < 10–13). The patterns are profound to the extent that the code mapping itself is uniquely deduced from their algebraic representation. The signal displays readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality, among which are the symbol of zero, the privileged decimal syntax and semantical symmetries. Besides, extraction of the signal involves logically straightforward but abstract operations, making the patterns essentially irreducible to any natural origin.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/03/a_wow_signal_of069941.html

From there, the authors explore a number of fascinating patterns they find in the genetic code itself  -- i.e., the relationship between the base pairs of DNA and the 20 amino acids. They are driven to the conclusion of design not only by what they observe, but also "by the fact that how the code came to be apparently non-random and nearly optimized remains disputable and highly speculative." This reasoning is similar to Stephen Meyer's in Signature in the Cell in which all the possible natural causes for a phenomenon were considered before inferring design.

The signal of intelligent origin, they reasoned, was strong because both arithmetic and ideographic signals are apparent, both using the same symbolic language. They predicted that a signal, if it exists, should be robust from modification. They did their best to avoid arbitrariness, considering what natural causes could be available to explain their findings. They identified two dimensionless integers -- redundancy of codons and number of nucleons in the amino acid set -- as "ostensive numerals" forming the basis of the signal, showing in detail how the patterns in those numerals satisfy the conditions for intelligent signals.

Considerations of brevity prohibit giving a complete analysis of their arguments, but let an example suffice. Of the 20 amino acids, only proline holds its side chain with two bonds, and has one less hydrogen in its block. The effect of this is to "standardize" the code to a 73 + 1 block nucleon number. Yet the distinction between block and chain is "purely formal," they argue, since there is no stage in amino acid synthesis where the block and side chain are detached.

Therefore, there is no any [sic] natural reason why nucleon transfer in proline; it can be stimulated only in the mind of a recipient to achieve the array of amino acids with uniform structure. Such nucleon transfer thus appears artificial. However, exactly, this seems to be its destination: it protects the patterns from any natural explanation. Minimizing the chances for appealing to natural origin is a distinct concern of messaging of such kind, and this problem seems to be solved perfectly for the signal in the genetic code. Applied systematically without exceptions, the artificial transfer in proline enables holistic and precise order in the code. Thus, it acts as an "activation key". While nature deals with the actual proline which does not produce the signal in the code, an intelligent recipient easily finds the key and reads messages in arithmetical language....

In addition, they find a decimal system including zero (via stop codons), and many other fascinating signs of intelligent origin. They examine possible criticisms, such as the claim that the patterns could be due to unknown natural causes:

But this criterion is equivalent to asking if it is possible at all to embed informational patterns into the code so that they could be unequivocally interpreted as an intelligent signature. The answer seems to be yes, and one way to do so is to make patterns virtual, not actual. Exactly that is observed in the genetic code. Strict balances and decimal syntax appear only with the application of the "activation key".

In effect, the proline nucleon transfer is like a decoder ring that makes the signal apparent and all the blocks balance out. Some other signs of artificiality are the fact that nucleon sums are multiples of 037; the stop codons act as zero in a decimal system, and all the three-digit decimals (111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999) appear at least once in the code, "which also looks like an intentional feature."

Could these patterns be due to selection or any other natural process? Could they be mere "epiphenomena" of chemical pressures for mass equalities, or something else?

But it is hardly imaginable how a natural process can drive mass distribution in abstract representations of the code where codons are decomposed into bases or contracted by redundancy.... no natural process can drive mass distribution to produce the balance ... amino acids and syntactic signs that make up this balance are entirely abstract since they are produced by translation of a string read across codons.

Even more convincing, no natural cause can produce semantics -- particularly the kind involving "interpretive or linguistic semantics peculiar to intelligence," they write. "Exactly the latter kind of semantics is revealed in the signal of the genetic code." Here's a summary of the patterns they conclude show design:

In total, not only the signal itself reveals intelligent-like features -- strict nucleon equalities, their distinctive decimal notation, logical transformations accompanying the equalities, the symbol of zero and semantic symmetries, but the very method of its extraction involves abstract operations -- consideration of idealized (free and unmodified) molecules, distinction between their blocks and chains, the activation key, contraction and decomposition of codons. We find that taken together all these aspects point at artificial nature of the patterns.

What's most notable about this paper is the similarity in design reasoning between the authors and the more familiar advocates of intelligent design theory. No appeals to religion or religious texts; no identifying the designer; just logical reasoning from effect to sufficient cause.

http://www.whatabeginning.com/Misc/Genetics/Rakbou.htm

GENETIC CODE AS A HARMONIC SYSTEM

In this paper however we will present seve
ral other harmonic structures such that
they altogether show that the genetic code is a kind of harmonic system.
Thereby, the harmonicity itself represents a specific unity and coherence of
physico-chemical properties of amino acid
(AA) molecules and of the number of
atoms and/or nucleons in them (in the form of typical balances)

From the presented facts and given discussion in previous eight sections
follows that it make sense to speak about genetic code as a harmonic system. On
the other side, presented harmonic structures which appear as the unity and
coherence of form (atom and nucleon number balances) and essence
(physicochemical properties) provide evidence to support the hypothesis, given
in a previous paper (Rakočević 2004), that genetic code was complete from the
very beginning as the condition for origin and evolution of the life.

http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full

Fazale Rana, Cell's design, page 182

the genetic code originated at the time when life first appeared on Earth. And, it must have been deliberately programmed. No matter how much time there might have been, the code's complexity makes it virtually impossible that natural selection could have stumbled upon it by accident. Such elaborate rules require forethought and painstaking effort. The message they carry adds an important piece to the analogy that logically compels a Creator's existence and role in life's origin and history

http://www.finetuneduniverse.com/finetunedcelluniverse.html

How did the DNA code originate? The code is a sophisticated language system with letters and words where the meaning of the words is unrelated to the chemical properties of the letters—just as the information on this page is not a product of the chemical properties of the ink (or pixels on a screen). What other coding system has existed without intelligent design? How did the DNA coding system arise without it being created?

How could mutations—accidental copying mistakes (DNA ‘letters’ exchanged, deleted or added, genes duplicated, chromosome inversions, etc.)—create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things? How could such errors create 3 billion letters of DNA information to change a microbe into a microbiologist? There is information for how to make proteins but also for controlling their use—much like a cookbook contains the ingredients as well as the instructions for how and when to use them. One without the other is useless.

Mutations are known for their destructive effects, including over 1,000 human diseases such as hemophilia. Rarely are they even helpful. But how can scrambling existing DNA information create a new biochemical pathway or nano-machines with many components, to make ‘goo-to-you’ evolution possible?

One remarkable feature of the natural world is that all of its phenomena obey relatively simple laws. The scientific enterprise exists because man has discovered that wherever he probes nature, he finds laws shaping its operation.

If all natural events have always been lawful, we must presume that the laws came first. How could it be otherwise? How could the whole world of nature have ever precisely obeyed laws that did not yet exist? But where did they exist? A law is simply an idea, and an idea exists only in someone's mind. Since there is no mind in nature, nature itself has no intelligence of the laws which govern it.

Modern science takes it for granted that the universe has always danced to rhythms it cannot hear, but still assigns power of motion to the dancers themselves. How is that possible? The power to make things happen in obedience to universal laws cannot reside in anything ignorant of these laws.

Would it be more reasonable to suppose that this power resides in the laws themselves? Of course not. Ideas have no intrinsic power. They affect events only as they direct the will of a thinking person. Only a thinking person has the power to make things happen. Since natural events were lawful before man ever conceived of natural laws, the thinking person responsible for the orderly operation of the universe must be a higher Being, a Being we know as God.

Authority Carl Woese has also observed that these problems extend well beyond the base of the tree of life, stating: “Phylogenetic incongruities [conflicts] can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves.”4 To reiterate, even among higher organisms, as the New Scientist article explains that “The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,” therefore leading one scientist to say regarding the relationships of these higher groups, “We’ve just annihilated the tree of life.” Many studies have reported such problems:
A 2009 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution notes that: “A major challenge for incorporating such large amounts of data into inference of species trees is that conflicting genealogical histories often exist in different genes throughout the genome.”5 Similarly, a paper in the journal Genome Research studied the DNA sequences in various animal groups and found that “different proteins generate different phylogenetic tree[s].”6
A study published in Science in 2005 tried to construct a phylogeny of animal relationships but concluded that “[d]espite the amount of data and breadth of taxa analyzed, relationships among most [animal] phyla remained unresolved.” Again, the problem lies in the fact that trees based upon one gene or protein often conflict with trees based upon other genes. Their study tried to avoid this problem by using a many-gene technique, yet still found that “[a] 50-gene data matrix does not resolve relationships among most metazoan phyla.”7
Striking admissions of troubles in reconstructing the “tree of life” also came from a 2006 paper in the journal PLoS Biology, entitled “Bushes in the Tree of Life.” The authors acknowledge that “a large fraction of single genes produce phylogenies of poor quality,” observing that one study “omitted 35% of single genes from their data matrix, because those genes produced phylogenies at odds with conventional wisdom.” The paper suggests that “certain critical parts of the [tree of life] may be difficult to resolve, regardless of the quantity of conventional data available.” The paper even contends that “[t]he recurring discovery of persistently unresolved clades (bushes) should force a re-evaluation of several widely held assumptions of molecular systematics.”8 Unfortunately one assumption they were not willing to re-evaluate is that of universal common ancestry.
Another study published in Science found that the molecular data implied that six-legged arthropods, or hexapods (i.e. insects) are not monophyletic, a conclusion that differed strikingly from virtually all previous wisdom. The article concluded “Although this tree shows many interesting outcomes, it also contains some evidently untenable relationships, which nevertheless have strong statistical support.”9
A paper in the Journal of Molecular Evolution found that molecule-based phylogenies conflicted sharply with previously established phylogenies of major mammal groups, concluding that this anomalous tree “is not due to a stochastic error, but is due to convergent or parallel evolution.”10 Likewise, a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA explains that when evolutionary biologists tried to construct a phylogenetic tree for the major groups of birds using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), their results conflicted sharply with traditional notions of bird relationships. Strikingly, they even find “convergent” similarity between some bird mtDNA and the mtDNA of distant species such as snakes and lizards. The article suggests bird mtDNA underwent “multiple independent originations,” with their study making a “finding of multiple independent origins for a particular mtDNA gene order among diverse birds.”11
When testifying before the TSBOE, professor Hillis also made the inaccurate claim that “there’s overwhelming correspondence between the basic structures we have about the tree of life from anatomical data, from biochemical data, molecular sequence data.” Yet many evolutionary scientists have recognized that evolutionary trees based upon morphology (physical characteristics of organisms) or fossils, commonly conflict with evolutionary trees based upon DNA or protein sequences (also called molecule-based trees).

For example, a review paper by Darwinian leaders in this field stated, “As morphologists with high hopes of molecular systematics, we end this survey with our hopes dampened. Congruence between molecular phylogenies is as elusive as it is in morphology and as it is between molecules and morphology.”12 Another set of pro-evolution experts wrote, “That molecular evidence typically squares with morphological patterns is a view held by many biologists, but interestingly, by relatively few systematists. Most of the latter know that the two lines of evidence may often be incongruent.”13

The widespread prevalence of disagreement and non-correspondence between molecule-based evolutionary trees and anatomy-based evolutionary trees led a review article in Nature to report that “disparities between molecular and morphological trees” cause “evolution wars” because “Evolutionary trees constructed by studying biological molecules often don’t resemble those drawn up from morphology.”14

http://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/news/2010/05/100513-science-evolution-darwin-single-ancestor/

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/07/03/evolutionary-origins-of-the-nervous-system/

vertebrates, worms and insects are all believed to be descended from a common ancestor – a worm-like organism, named Urbilateria


http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/icc-2013-paul-nelsons-keynote-address/

even if a pair of organisms are 90% similar, that 10% difference could be sufficient to falsify common ancestry if the gap in differences are sufficiently large to be bridged by mindless processes.

IF it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

   Charles Darwin

So how much difference is needed to challenge common descent? Consider if you had 90% of the characters correct in a 5000 character cryptographic key, is it reasonable to assume chance processes will resolve the final 10%? It is probably very easy to make a biological organism 10% different from another in terms of destructive processes, but not so easy in terms of constructive process since new protein systems are like new login/password, lock-and-key systems.

Common Ancestry: Wikipedia vs. the Data

Does the molecular data give evidence of common ancestry? Representing a common view among Darwinian evolutionists, Wikipedia says yes: "Universal biochemical organization and molecular variance patterns in all organisms also show a direct correlation with common descent." Did you get that? -- "all organisms"! To show why this statement is wildly false, I could give numerous examples to the contrary. Let's consider two:

First, consider a recent paper in Annual Review of Genetics which observes that huge percentages of eukaryotic genes do not show a "direct correlation with common descent," but rather tell directly conflicting stories about supposed phylogenetic history. Here's a recreation of Table 2 from the paper:

Eukaryotic genes and their closest prokaryotic relative.
Closest eukaryotic relative Percent of total
Cyanobacteria 15.3
Alphaproteobacteria 8.5
Gammaproteobacteria 6.3
Betaproteobacteria 2.3
Probable proteobacteria 8.4
Other bacteria 12.8
Archae 9.6
No prokaryotic homolog 36.6

(From Table 2, Michael Syvanen, "Evolutionary Implications of Horizontal Gene Transfer," Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 46:339-356 (2012).)

This table shows that eukaryotic genes send extremely mixed messages about the supposedly closest prokaryotic relative of eukaryotes. (Of course "closest prokaryotic relative" merely means "which prokaryote's version of a gene has the highest sequence similarity to the eukaryotic version of the gene?") Some eukaryote genes are most similar to one type of prokaryote, whereas other eukaryote genes are most similar to another. There's no consensus from eukaryote genes about eukaryote ancestry.

In fact, the largest category of genes here is eukaryotic genes that have no homolog among prokaryotes -- they don't even have any possible candidate ancestors to explain where these genes came from, much less a consistent pattern of similarity pointing to one particular ancestor. All this is the opposite of "a direct correlation with common descent."

Darwinian evolutionists will try to retain common descent and explain away this data by ad hoc appeals to horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or by inventing hypothetical ancestors as needed to donate these homologue-lacking genes. In fact, this paper explains that evolutionary biologists typically treat phylogenetic conflicts as a very "test" for the presence of HGT:

   The classic test for inferring HGT is the phylogenetic congruency test, whereby a gene tree is compared with a species tree (or possibly some other reference tree made up of different genes) and the question is posited: Are the two topologies different and is the difference significant?

   (Michael Syvanen, "Evolutionary Implications of Horizontal Gene Transfer," Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 46:339-356 (2012).)

In other words, if two phylogenetic trees aren't congruent, the problem isn't that common descent is wrong, but rather the conflict is simply evidence of HGT. Let me put it another way: most evolutionary biologists do not treat common descent in a scientific fashion where it is capable of being falsified. If the data doesn't fit with common ancestry, they simply take that as evidence for ad hoc fallback explanations like HGT. Syvanen invokes widespread HGT, but he's uncommonly honest about the data and its implications, offering the radical suggestion that "life might indeed have multiple origins."

Regardless, one thing is clear: this data does not show that "Universal biochemical organization and molecular variance patterns in all organisms also show a direct correlation with common descent." If there was such a "direct correlation with common descent," then they wouldn't be resorting to invoking HGT.

Second, let's now look within eukaryotes. Can biochemical similarities between plants and animals be explained by common ancestry? It turns out that they have a highly similar biochemical organization of their respective innate immune systems, but their common ancestor didn't have an innate immune system. Common descent cannot explain these "unexpectedly similar" systems. Consider these striking comments from a paper in Nature Immunology:

   "Although it seems to be generally accepted that the innate immune responses of plants and animals share at least some common evolutionary origins, examination of the available data fails to support that conclusion, despite similarities in the overall 'logic' of the innate immune response in diverse multicellular eukaryotes."

   "Although the underlying logic of multicellular development in plants and animals is unexpectedly similar, it seems that multicellularity evolved independently in plants and animals and that the basic molecular mechanisms specifying pattern formation were independently derived."

   "Although adaptive immunity is unique to vertebrates, the innate immune response seems to have ancient origins. Common features of innate immunity in vertebrates, invertebrate animals and plants include defined receptors for microbe-associated molecules, conserved mitogen-associated protein kinase signaling cascades and the production of antimicrobial peptides. It is commonly reported that these similarities in innate immunity represent a process of divergent evolution from an ancient unicellular eukaryote that pre-dated the divergence of the plant and animal kingdoms. However, at present, data suggest that the seemingly analogous regulatory modules used in plant and animal innate immunity are a consequence of convergent evolution and reflect inherent constraints on how an innate immune system can be constructed."

   (Frederick M Ausubel, "Are innate immune signaling pathways in plants and animals conserved?," Nature Immunology, Vol. 6 (10): 973-979 (October, 2005) (internal citations omitted).)

The biochemical organization of the innate immune systems of plants and animals is strikingly similar -- but this is a direct non-correlation with common descent. Under their evolutionary thinking, these are forced to call the systems "unexpectedly similar," postulating that the similarities were "independently derived." This type of data is neither anticipated nor explained by Darwinian evolution and common descent. It is anticipated and explained by common design.

http://www.judgingpbs.com/dfp-slide9.html

The nice, neat, nested hierarchy of a grand Tree of Life predicted by Darwinian theory has not been found. Evolutionary biologists are increasingly appealing to epicycles like horizontal gene transfer, differing rates of evolution, abrupt molecular radiation, convergent evolution (even convergent molecular evolution), and other ad hoc rationalizations to reconcile discrepancies between phylogenetic hypothesis. Darwinian biology is not explaining the molecular data; it is forced to explain away the data. PBS paints a rosy picture of the data, when the data isn't good news for Darwinism.

Are Rotifers Gene Stealers or Uniquely Engineered?

http://designed-dna.org/blog/files/category-microbial-oddities.php

The tools of DNA sequencing are becoming cheaper to use and more productive than ever, and the deluge of DNA comparison results between organisms coming forth are becoming a quagmire for the evolutionary paradigm. To prop it up, biologists resort to ever more absurd explanations for discrepancies. A prime example of this trickery is in a recent DNA sequencing project performed in a microscopic aquatic multi-cellular animal called a rotifer .

In this effort, the researchers targeted those gene sequences that are expressed as proteins for DNA sequencing because the genome was too large and complex to sequence and assemble all of its DNA.

Are Rotifers Gene Stealers or Uniquely Engineered?


http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1615-common-descent?highlight=common


They recorded over 61,000 gene sequences that were expressed from rotifers grown in stressed and non-stressed conditions. Of these, they could only find sequence similarities between rotifers and other creatures for 28,922 sequences (less than half). The researchers tossed the unknown DNA sequences out of their analysis since the non-similar genes were novel, apparently specific to rotifer, and essentially difficult for evolution to explain.

Of the 28,922 sequences for which they could obtain a match in a public database of other creature's DNA and protein sequences, a significant proportion (more than in any other creature sequenced) did not fit evolutionary expectations of common descent. Further complicating this picture, the rotifer gene sequences were found in a diverse number of non-rotifer creatures!

Some of the creatures that had gene matches to rotifers included a variety of plants, other multicellular animals, protists (complex single celled animals), archaea, bacteria, and fungi.

Evolutionists have two options in which to categorize these unusual gene matches based on their naturalistic presuppositions. First, they can say that these genes evolved independently in separate creatures in a hypothetical process called "convergent evolution." However, in cases where there are literally hundreds of these DNA sequences popping up in multiple organisms, this scenario becomes so unlikely that even evolutionists have too much difficulty imagining it. The second option is called "horizontal gene transfer," or HGT. This involves the transfer of genes, perhaps via some sort of microbial host vector such as a bacterium (2).

In the present report, the rotifer under study was asexual, limiting heredity as an option for aiding in gene transfer. So the researchers concluded that it stole hundreds of genes via HGT from a plethora of other creatures.

HGT is considered somewhat common among bacteria because they form connective tubes (called pili) and exchange little bits of DNA, like sharing software. Also, HGT can occur rarely between a bacterium and a multicellular host that it interacts with during its life cycle .

How will rotifer researchers account for the massive transfer of hundreds of genes from a broad range of hosts that they believe includes 533 supposed source genomes for which no biological host-based relationships exists? Some sort of causal host relationship must occur for the transfer of one gene, let alone hundreds of genes from hundreds of sources .

Another problem is that the researchers showed that the so-called "stolen genes" were well-integrated into the rotifer cell biochemistry and its environmental adaptation mechanisms. A separate 2012 study showed that highly expressed native genes could not be shared via HGT, even among bacteria, because they would severely disrupt essential cell biochemistry . And these are exactly the types of genes that were surveyed in the rotifer.

In this case, evolutionary biologists have resorted to fictional stories cloaked in technical terminology to escape the straightforward conclusion that rotifer DNA was purposefully crafted. If a large bunch of newly discovered genes don't make evolutionary sense, then evolution proponents ascribe their origin to HGT despite the fact that HGT is not known to operate without any host-based relationship. HGT is also not known to occur en masse, and HGT of essential genes is in theory impossible .

The unique mix of rotifer genes along with their flawless biochemical integration into the rotifer's cell system, clearly and abundantly supports the special creation described in the Bible.

Common Descent? - Some Insurmountable Problems (for gradualism and/or transformation)

“Evolution, in the sense of common descent, is not a theory of similarity. Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Agassiz knew all about similarity, yet they denied common descent. Evolution is a theory of transformation.”,,,
Paul Nelson - What Evolution Is, and What It's Not - October 30, 2015
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/what_evolution100501.html

To highlight why the approach of appealing to mutations to DNA is ‘not even wrong’ in regards to explaining how the unique human ‘form’ came about, no one has EVER even changed one creature into another creature by mutations to DNA as is presupposed in neo-Darwinian thought:

‘No matter what we do to a fruit fly embryo there are only three possible outcomes, a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly. What we never see is primary speciation much less macro-evolution’ –
Jonathan Wells
Darwin’s Theory – Fruit Flies and Morphology – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJTIwRY0bs

Response to John Wise – October 2010
Excerpt: A technique called “saturation mutagenesis”1,2 has been used to produce every possible developmental mutation in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster),3,4,5 roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans),6,7 and zebrafish (Danio rerio),8,9,10 and the same technique is now being applied to mice (Mus musculus).11,12 None of the evidence from these and numerous other studies of developmental mutations supports the neo-Darwinian dogma that DNA mutations can lead to new organs or body plans–because none of the observed developmental mutations benefit the organism.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/10/response_to_john_wise038811.html

“While it may be an adequate scenario for the refinement of some already-existing characters — the beaks of finches, color intensity of moths — the “microevolutionary” process envisioned by Darwin and his successors does not account in any plausible way for “macroevolutionary” patterns such as the differences between oysters and grasshoppers, fish and birds. ”
~ Stuart Newman, “Where do complex organisms come from.”

Nor, despite the fact that Darwinists claim their theory is on par with gravity, has anyone ever even seen one creature change into another creature:

Scant search for the Maker
Excerpt: But where is the experimental evidence? None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another. Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes, and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another, in spite of the fact that populations have been exposed to potent chemical and physical mutagens and that, uniquely, bacteria possess extrachromosomal, transmissible plasmids. Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.
– Alan H. Linton – emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=159282

A review of The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
The numbers of Plasmodium and HIV in the last 50 years greatly exceeds the total number of mammals since their supposed evolutionary origin (several hundred million years ago), yet little has been achieved by evolution. This suggests that mammals could have “invented” little in their time frame. Behe: ‘Our experience with HIV gives good reason to think that Darwinism doesn’t do much—even with billions of years and all the cells in that world at its disposal’ (p. 155).
http://creation.com/review-michael-behe-edge-of-evolution

Natural Selection and Evolution’s Smoking Gun, – American Scientist – 1997
Excerpt: “A matter of unfinished business for biologists is the identification of evolution’s smoking gun,”…
“Perhaps the most obvious challenge is to demonstrate evolution empirically. There are, arguably, some 2 to 10 million species on earth. The fossil record shows that most species survive somewhere between 3 and 5 million years. In that case, we ought to be seeing small but significant numbers of originations (new species) .. every decade.”
(“the smoking gun of evolution is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations.”)
Keith Stewart Thomson, Professor of Biology and Dean of the Graduate School, Yale University (Nov. -Dec. American Scientist, 1997 pg. 516)
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27856885?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

“The closest science has come to observing and recording actual speciation in animals is the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky in Drosophilia paulistorium fruit flies. But even here, only reproductive isolation, not a new species, appeared.”
from page 32 “Acquiring Genomes” Lynn Margulis.

Selection and Speciation: Why Darwinism Is False – Jonathan Wells – 2009
Excerpt: there are observed instances of secondary speciation — which is not what Darwinism needs — but no observed instances of primary speciation, not even in bacteria. British bacteriologist Alan H. Linton looked for confirmed reports of primary speciation and concluded in 2001: “None exists in the literature claiming that one species has been shown to evolve into another.”
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/05/selection_and_speciation_why_d.htm l

Meyers puts the one of the primary reasons why mutations to DNA cannot change one creature into another creature like this

‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’
Stephen Meyer – (excerpt taken from Meyer/Sternberg vs. Shermer/Prothero debate – 2009) (52:57 minute mark)
https://youtu.be/7yqqlZ29gcU?t=3177

Jonathan Wells recently wrote some papers highlighting many of those higher levels of information, that are above the DNA coding, that Dr. Meyer alluded to in his debate with Shermer and Prothero:

Membrane Patterns Carry Ontogenetic Information That Is Specified Independently of DNA – Jonathan Wells – 2014
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2014.2/BIO-C.2014.2

podcast – Dr. Jonathan Wells explains the concept of codes in living things, and how they affect the debate over neo-Darwinism and intelligent design. (at least 5 different codes in life besides the genetic code) – Oct. 2015
http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2015/10/id-inquiry-jonathan-wells-on-codes-in-biology/#more-31141

Not Junk After All: Non-Protein-Coding DNA Carries Extensive Biological Information – Jonathan Wells – published online May 2013
Conclusion:,, Recent discoveries of multiple overlapping functions in non-protein-coding DNA show that the biological information in the genome far exceeds that in the protein-coding regions alone. Yet biological information is not limited to the genome. Even at the level of gene expression – transcription and translation — the cell must access information that is not encoded in DNA. Many different RNAs can be generated from a single piece of DNA by alternative splicing, and although some splicing codes occur in intronic DNA there is no empirical justification for assuming that all of the information for tissue- and developmental-stage-specific alternative splicing resides in DNA.,, even after RNA has specified the amino acid sequence of a protein, additional information is needed: Protein function depends on three-dimensional shape, and the same sequence of amino acids can be folded differently to produce proteins with different three-dimensional shapes [144–147]. Conversely, proteins with different amino acid sequences can be folded to produce similar shapes and functions [148,149]. Many scientists have pointed out that the relationship between the genome and the organism – the genotype-phenotype mapping – cannot be reduced to a genetic program encoded in DNA sequences. Atlan and Koppel wrote in 1990 that advances in artificial intelligence showed that cellular operations are not controlled by a linear sequence of instructions in DNA but by a “distributed multilayer network” [150]. According to Denton and his co-workers, protein folding appears to involve formal causes that transcend material mechanisms [151], and according to Sternberg this is even more evident at higher levels of the genotype-phenotype mapping [152]. So non-protein-coding regions of DNA that some previously regarded as “junk” turn out to encode biological information that greatly increases the known information-carrying capacity of DNA. At the same time, DNA as a whole turns out to encode only part of the biological information needed for life.
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814508728_0009

1) http://mmbr.asm.org/content/75/3/423.full.pdf

The biggest problem phylogenetic has is Incomplete Linear Sorting also termed deep coalescence, retention of ancestral polymorphism, or trans-species polymorphism describes a phenomenon in population genetics when ancestral gene copies fail to coalesce (looking backwards in time) into a common ancestral copy until deeper than previous speciation events.

This creates phylogeny trees that are not aligned with the evolutionist inferred version of a specific evolutionary lineage.
The data that doesn't align with the inferred phylogenetic tree is deemed "rogue data" which is cut out or eliminated until the inferred three and the resulting tree are in alignment.

The best example is the phylogenetic tree for human lineage. The inferred version places a divergent node with the common ancestor to humans and great apes, with the closest relative to humans being the chimpanzee. When the new data from the human, chimpanzee, ape, and orangutan genome sequence was entered the result was that humans are very distant from chimpanzees and closer to apes.

To align the inferred phylogenetic tree with the results they pruned, cut out, some of the genome data to make the model result match the inferred.
To do this they deemed this data as "rogue data." Much like when geologists date rock samples and throw away the specimens that do not conform to their deep-time worldview by claiming that the specimens that give younger dates are contaminated.

You want others to back up their claims with scientific papers, but YOU don't have to back up ANY of your claims/// The dishonest one here is YOU. We had this already. I asked you back up the no-God hypothesis, and you sneaked out, claiming that you were making no claim, and you had no case. So you are an utter timewaster and empty bag, in the business to drag down believers to non-belief. You are an evil person, and on top of that, immature and childish. You behave like a 15yr old trapped in an adult body ( Yes, i am full DD mode here ). Furthermore, you are also a despicable pervert, as shown in many occastions, where you get pornographic, even bringing anal things to the game. You also ridiculed my voice several times. I entirely despise you. Might the Lord have mercy upon you.


What's the Mechanism of Intelligent Design?

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1794-how-exactly-did-god-create-the-universe-and-the-world-what-process-was-involved

It's still worth considering how a mind might act in the world to cause change. The answer is we don't know. I sit here typing. My mind, mediated by my brain, is putting words into a computer program (designed by other minds, by the way), using my fingers to type. But how does it happen, really? Where does the impulse to press one key instead of another come from? And how do these words, products of my mind, communicate to others through their computer screens? We can't really say how our own minds work to interact with the world, yet we know they do. It is our universal, repeated, personal experience that shows us that our consciousness interacts with our bodies to produce information, but exactly how it works is not known. So why should we expect to know how the agent(s) responsible for the design of life or the universe may have worked? The theory of intelligent design does not propose a mechanism (a strictly or necessarily materialistic cause) for the origin of biological information. Rather, it proposes an intelligent or mental cause. In so doing, it does exactly what we want a good historical scientific theory to do. It proposes a cause that is known from our uniform and repeated experience (to borrow a phrase) to have the power to produce the effect in question, which in this case, is functional information in living systems.



http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/11/more_on_the_mec100891.html


University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran has issued a challenge at his blogSandwalk, a challenge that advocates of intelligent design have heard before.We've answered it before as well, but it's not unreasonable and is therefore worth addressing again. He asks: Tell me the way information is incorporated into living things. Give a detailed explanation. What's the mechanism?
Indeed, I would bet that some readers have wondered the same thing. Taking Moran's post as a welcome occasion for revisiting the question, let me expand on it in a slightly different way than it's posed. Let me also say that this is my personal view, and does not necessarily reflect the approaches others might take to these questions. I'm going to have to explain the hidden meaning behind his request, and it's going to get a little deep, but bear with me.
The first question to be addressed is why Dr. Moran insists I provide a mechanism.


Science based on  methodological naturalism  claims that science must limit itself to strictly materialistic causes to explain all phenomena in nature, even things like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and causes of human consciousness. But does the rule work? The requirement for a material cause, a mechanism, can lead to the odd conclusion that Isaac Newton's law of gravity is not scientific because he famously refused to provide a mechanistic explanation for action at a distance. Likewise Einstein's E = mc2 has no mechanism. But these laws are certainly scientific. So what other criteria do methodological naturalists use to define science? Defenders of methodological naturalism often invoke definitional or "demarcation criteria" that say that all science must be observable, testable, falsifiable, predictive, and repeatable. Most philosophers of science now dismiss these criteria because there are too many exceptions to the rules they establish in the actual practice of science. Not all science involves observable entities or repeatable phenomena, for example --you can't watch all causes at work or witness all events happen again and again, yet you can still make inferences about what caused unique or singular events based on the evidence available to you. Historical sciences such as archeology, geology, forensics, and evolutionary biology all infer causal events in the past to explain the occurrence of other events or to explain the evidence we have left behind in the present. For such inference to work, the cause invoked must now be known to produce the effect in question. It's no good proposing flying squirrels as the cause of the Grand Canyon, or a silt deposit as the cause of the Pyramids. Squirrels don't dig giant canyons or even small ones, and silt doesn't move heavy stone blocks into an ordered three-dimensional array. However, we know from our experience that erosion by running water can and does produce gullies, then arroyos, and by extension, canyons. We know that intelligent agents have the necessary design capabilities to envision and build a pyramid. No natural force does. These are inferences based on our present knowledge of cause and effect or "causes now in operation." The theory of intelligent design also qualifies as historical science. We cannot directly observe the cause of the origin of life or repeat the events we study in the history of life, but we can infer what cause is most likely to be responsible, as Stephen Meyer likes to say, "from our repeated and uniform experience." In our experience the only thing capable of causing the origin of digital code or functional information or causal circularity is intelligence and we know that the origin of life and the origin of animal life, for example, required the production of just such things in living systems. Even though other demarcation criteria for distinguishing science from non-science are no longer considered normative for all branches of science, it is worth checking to see how well intelligent design fares using criteria that are relevant for an historical science. Briefly, although the designing agent posited by the theory of intelligent design is not directly observable (as most causal entities posited by historical scientists are not), the theory is testable and makes many discriminating predictions. Steve Meyer's book Signature in the Cell, Chapters 18 and 19 and Appendix A, discusses this thoroughly.


Of course, the main challenge that Dr. Moran offers has to do with a different demarcation criterion: the idea that a scientific theory must provide a mechanism to qualify as a scientific theory. He wants us to detail what mechanism the theory of intelligent design proposes to explain the origin of biological information, thinking that if we offer no mechanism that our theory will fail to qualify as scientific.
Moran assumes that scientists may not invoke mind, or any intelligent cause, as an explanation for natural phenomena, at least if they want their theories to be considered scientific. He assumes, again, that science must limit itself to strictly materialistic causes in order to explain all phenomena, even the origin of biological information such as digital code in DNA, or the Cambrian explosion.
This is a self-imposed rule or limitation that not only keeps many scientists from considering the evidence for intelligent design, it may also keep them from discerning the true cause of the origin of biological information. Why? Because we know from our own experience that intelligent agents can and do interact with the universe to cause change and to produce functional information. Mind can cause things to happen in the material world. The origin of functional information invariably arises from the activity of minds rather than from strictly (or necessarily) material processes. Thus, to rule out the possibility that a mind may have produced the information present in DNA, for example, is to turn a blind eye to what we know about the causes of other information-rich systems such as computer code or spoken language.
Though Moran cannot rule intelligent design out of court as unscientific without asserting an arbitrary limitation on theorizing,

https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1794-how-exactly-did-god-create-the-universe-and-the-world-what-process-was-involved

It's still worth considering how a mind might act in the world to cause change. The answer is we don't know. I sit here typing. My mind, mediated by my brain, is putting words into a computer program (designed by other minds, by the way), using my fingers to type. But how does it happen, really? Where does the impulse to press one key instead of another come from? And how do these words, products of my mind, communicate to others through their computer screens? We can't really say how our own minds work to interact with the world, yet we know they do. It is our universal, repeated, personal experience that shows us that our consciousness interacts with our bodies to produce information, but exactly how it works is not known. So why should we expect to know how the agent(s) responsible for the design of life or the universe may have worked? The theory of intelligent design does not propose a mechanism (a strictly or necessarily materialistic cause) for the origin of biological information. Rather, it proposes an intelligent or mental cause. In so doing, it does exactly what we want a good historical scientific theory to do. It proposes a cause that is known from our uniform and repeated experience (to borrow a phrase) to have the power to produce the effect in question, which in this case, is functional information in living systems.


This answer about mechanism has been given before, most notably in Steve Meyer's book, Darwin's Doubt, which Moran claims to have read. In a future post, I'll give some key passages from the book.

3355884924 filippo marazzi

Public apologies.....



October last year, someone handed over to me a picture of pre-transition of a publicly well-known transgender woman, a host of various atheist youtube shows. It was a picture that this respective person posted on her own social media account, so it was public. I posted that picture on my Facebook timeline. The reaction was immediate, and some youtube content creators called me out of it and suggested that I should delete it. I realized that I should not have done that, and deleted the post soon afterward.

But the damage was already done, and several atheist Youtube content creators made a stream about the episode, complained about it, and called me a homophobe, and a bigot.

People have the right to pursue their desires in their lives, and how they live their sexuality is entirely their business, and I think nobody has the right to expose or ridicule their choices.

I am fully aware that this should not have happened. The consequences were immediate, and are echoing up to this day. Soon after this happened, i realized that i should apologize to the respective person, and i did so. Both, on her social media account, and as well in private, per messenger. Recently, i was contacted by someone from an atheist youtube channel , per email. He wanted to know about this story, and i told him that i was willing to have a direct public conversation with that person, and apologize directly to her. He did not get back to me, so i am taking the initiative to do the apology her on my channel. This was a one time episode. It did not happen again afterwards, and will not happen again.