Codes, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

I'm not sure that I would agree with this statement with regard to DNA. It seems to require the assumption that the 'message' is independent, I think you would need to make a case for this. This seems a lot of room for the defintion of instructions to the point that any particular state could be seen as encoding the instructions for the evolution of that state in line with normal physical and chemical interactions, indeed this is the basis of chemically based quantum computing, that the quantum evolution of the molecules involved will produce an answer to the question encoded in their initial state. While a specific state may be imposed on the molecules to allow us to pose a question they are always in the position of encoding the question relevant to their own quantum evolution. Similarly the chemical constituents of DNA are always interacting chemically with their environment in such a way as for the state of the DNA and its environment to encode the evolution of that state including the production of mRNA's etc...Again you seem to be front loading with the assumption that there was an 'experimenter' as it were who specified information for the initial state of the DNA, but this doesn't need to be the case any more than someone needs to specify any state for it to subsequently evolve in line with physical laws.Would you not consider the rings in a tree to be encoded with data relating to the seasons during which those rings developed?TTFN,WK

Indeed it does, and the chemical properties of DNA allow many interactions other than those that produce a double helix. The rest of your response about messages only serves to show what a rubbish analogy it is. Contrary to your analogy in the case of DNA the medium is the message and its chemical properties allow for its perpetuation and propagation.Are tree rings not a product of the design of a tree?No more so than the the geologic layers are a product of the 'design' of the planet.Have you posted on IIDB as pmarshall? This line of argument and a number of your quotes, especially those from Yockey, remind me strongly of this thread I participated in.Since Yockey acscribes the generation of the information encoded in DNA to a standing Markov process why do you think you can ignore the opinion of 'the foremost living specialist in bioinformatics', using what I can only assume is a really unusual meaning of bioinformatics which generally is not overly concerned with information theory in its day to day use, in this particular regard?TTFN,WK

Actually doesn't Yockey's mapping of Shannon's general communication system to the communication of genetic messages put DNA in the position of the source message rather than the code? In fact it portrays transcription as the encoding process and translation as the decoding. This is clearly inconsistent with your portrayal.Using this scheme Yockey is saying absolutely nothing at all about any coding of DNA but rather how any 'message' in DNA is transmitted to a 'message' in protein. There is absolutely nothing about the generation of this 'message' in the DNA although as I mentioned previously Yockey has suggested the information of the 'message' is generated by stochastic processes.TTFN,WK

Would you consider your coin sorting machine to be equivalent to a sorting algorithm?TTFN,WK

Presumably a cart with a horse behind it.TTFN,WK