When does design become intelligent? (AS OF 8/2/10 - CLOSING COMMENTS ONLY)

I disagree, there is a lot more to it than that, if there wasn't then cloning would be a trivial practice rather than a highly difficult and technically challenging one. Also, mitochondria. No, it doesn't. What it 'encodes' is a wide repertoire of proteins and functional RNA molecules. It also contains numerous structural and regulatory regions. No, they don't. This is a pointless attempt at an equivalence. You can call a codon a word if you like but that doesn't make it one nor does it make a gene a sentence. The interaction between varying genetic patterns, such as those produced by mutation, and the environment. Successful patterns which promote their own replication tend to propagate.TTFN,WK

You don't have to, but apparently you do. If you take the media reporting of something to be definitive then you seem to be exactly taking the popular spin of the event, as opposed to its reality.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : mis-formatting

Yes, I absolutely am telling you that. That conception of a gene is a very out of date one, and has been for decades.Genes can encode information for multiple protein isoforms or for functional RNA molecules. Clearly information is not DNA. If you mean am I telling you that DNA does not contain information then I would say no, DNA certainly does contain infromation by a number of definitions, it is agreeing on the suitable definitions and subsequently quantifying the information that tends to be the tricky part. My answer still fits your question. As soon as there is a genetic medium capable of self replication there is the potential for the process I described.Exactly what the minimal form of such a system is is not clear but I see no reaon to simply assume it is one impossible to arise at naturally. It will certainly be orders of magnitude simpler than the 'first cell' that you posit.TTFN,WK

I personally don't have a definition. There are a number of different informational metrics that can be profitably used to analyse DNA.I know that Percy has an approach to Shannon information as it applies to population genetics, but I've never been convinced it was useful in terms of analysing information content in functional regions of DNA.It has been shown that protein coding sequences have lower levels of shannon entropy and shannon entropy has also been used to identify protein binding site in DNA (Schneider, 1997(PDF); Herman and Schneider, 1992 ).Jack Szostak has an alternative approach based on actually correlating sequence changes with changes in biological function (Hazen et al., 2007). I find this more in line with my own feelings about meaningful measures of information but it is very reliant of having a very detailed in depth knowledge of the many sequences which may perform a specific function and is limited in its ability to incorporate the development of novel function. I don't know, since you bring nature into it its hard to draw a clear distinction. I'd certainly stipulate that all pattern is not a product of intelligent design. Yes. Yes. I don't know that I would, in part this is related to your subsequent theme about Chaos theory. I would dispute this. You cannot perhaps set out an explicit abstract symbolic matching but you can certainly identify proxy measures which allow us to garner stored information about a system. Examples would be the stalactites you mentioned, also tree rings, patterns of sand on a tidal shore, geographical strata and also (in my opinion at least) the patterns of genetic information in living organisms. That isn't really what Chaos theory is, Chaos theory is principally about the way that even relatively simple deterministic rule sets can give rise to drastically different and essentially unpredictable outcomes based on very minute differences in starting conditions.In many ways this gives, rather than a way for apparent order to form from chaos, a way for high complexity to form from simple rule sets. Isn't this rather the point under discussion? You can't just sneak that past as a given I'm afraid. Information has to come from somewhere, I might just about go for that, but needing an intelligent entity as its source, I don't agree. I consider there to be thousands of natural sources of information in the universe, you seem to be getting the concept of information confused with that of an intentionally sent message, and it is the question of intentionality that is in question here.I realise of course that this approach, trying to sneak your desired conclusion in to the initial postulates, is the cornerstone of most creationist genetic information arguments like those of Werner Gitt. The same applies here as above. This also begs the question of how you define information, and more importantly how would you measure it in a genetic sequence. Mostly it seems to be a tendency to take as a given the point you are supposed to be arguing for. Obviously I am not going to accept a priori your contention that all information, including that in DNA, requires an intelligent source. Which you assume is impossible or requires an intelligent source, neither of which you seem to have any argumentation or evidence to support.TTFN,WK

Did you only read the last few lines of my post? I explicitly said that DNA contains information by several definitions. Do you mean what the total number of proteins produced by the human genome is? There are ~21,000 estimated protein coding genes in the genome, but this underestimates the number of different proteins that can be produced since a single gene can produce multiple different 'isoforms' of one protein. I have seen estimates of the 'complete human proteome', all the different proteins that a human genome can produce, as being ~1,000,000. I'll not answer each question then since you seem to be asking the wrong question overall, I thought you were interested in the source of the information in the genome, not how it was then transmitted once inside the genome.No one has said that genetic information is not transferred within the cell. Hubert Yockey has made an extensive formulation of genetic information transmission from gene to protein in terms of Shannon information. Again I get the impression you only skim read my last response. Some examples of information without an intelligent source would be the information about seasonal temperature we can extract from tree rings. The information about geological processes we can extract from studying geological strata, the information about recent tides we can extract from patterns of sand on a shore. Obviously I don't expect you to accept these examples but that is because you are using a restricted notion of information which you insist must include intelligence a priori.TTFN,WKP.S. I read through the blog post NWR linked to and it makes a good argument why DNA, and most of the other examples I put forward, should not be considered to be information. Which works for me as well, I view an informational approach to biology as a pragmatic rather than a fundamental one, it is useful to the extent it allows us to work out how biological systems function. Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.