How does Complexity demonstrate Design

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Michael Polanyi noted some years ago, both machines and living systems transcend simple explanations based on the laws of chemistry and physics, requiring as they do highly improbable initial conditions or time independent boundary constraints (Polanyi 1967)....Polanyi argues that living systems are far more complicated than the machines of people...

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True, but also old news. This is from 1967!!! The ecological and data sciences approaches to complex systems have answered many of these concerns; as have the concepts of emergent phenomenon and synthesis. So sure; the explanations were not simple, they were complex... but thats normal enough.

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The similarity between such information in nature and the production of information by human intelligence argues persuasively for an intelligent creator or designer.

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No, it doesn't in any sense. The similarity of our designs and natures designs are unsuprising because... we are an expression of nature! We design things natures way... becuase we are ourselves a natural product.

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- The amount of information that could be stored in a pinheads volume of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books 500 times as high as the distance from the earth to the moon.

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Yep. Now, doesn't that make the bible a rather thin, meagre read by comparison? I reckon DNA is going to tell us more about the world than any alleged recordings of the alleged will of an alleged god.

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No one could believe a computer could make itself into such a complex almost thinking type machine,

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I do; in fact, I think computers (our brians) have already built themselves (that is, computers).

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The genetic code is not the outcome of raw chemistry, but of elaborate decoding machinery.

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I'm afraiod it does not look like that at all to me. DNA by all accounts is so full of junk that it can only consitute BAD code; the kind of code that works despite the author, not because. It is, in short, pretty much what you would expect from the output of a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters; it DOES look accretive, undesigned, unintelligent.

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Such a system must be fully in place before it could work at all, a property called irreducible complexity, this means that it is impossible to be built on natural selection working with small changes.

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The problem here is that the conditions that we observe the working system are not the same conditions as pertained when the system was built; thus, we may be missing something. For example, a bridge without a keystone will fall down - does that mean that the birdge always existed as a bridge and never consisted as individual stones? Clearly not; the keystone was raised with scaffolding, which is not present when we view the APPARENTLY irreducibly complex bridge.

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This complexity is evidence of a designer.

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I say its evidence of the ABSENCE of a designer; a designer makes things LESS complex.

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A house which can be built with just basic materials could never be believed well through natural processes it happen on its own

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Like say, "a cave"?

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This is why complexity is evidence of design, & design is evidence of a designer.

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I suggest by contrast, complexity is the evidence of the ABSENCE of a designer.This message has been edited by contracycle, 06-23-2004 06:36 AM

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The copying is far more precise than pure chemistry could manageonly about 1 mistake in 10 billion copyings, because there is editing (proof-reading and error-checking) machinery, again encoded in the DNA. But how would the information for editing machinery be transmitted accurately before the machinery was in place? Lest it be argued that the accuracy could be achieved stepwise through selection, note that a high degree of accuracy is needed to prevent ‘error catastrophe’the accumulation of ‘noise’ in the form of junk proteins. Again there is a vicious circle (more irreducible complexity).

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Nah. The way we do this in programming is a technique called "error trapping". Whenever there is an exchange of signals, you set up 'buckets' to catch an input that is erroneous. Signals can be erroneous in a multitude of ways, so sometimes you set up multiple buckets to do different things. One of the things you can do with multiple buckets is set up an logical cisruits that only allow a Write operation when you know the input is legit.Now I'm sure you're looking at thius and thinking that its all Design, but in fact we are building this precisely because there will be no intellect to make the decision when it needs to be made; we are getting the machine to ask and answer the question itself. We are removing the need for an Overseer to guard the purity of the data.And this is why despite the fact that computers make millions upon millions of decisions, BY AND LARGE, automatically, the intended data gets written and preserved. All automatically, all as a result of the laws of the universe as expressed through electronic circuits.

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Also, even the choice of the letters A, T, G and C now seems to be based on minimizing error... Rather, Dnall Mac Dnaill of Trinity College Dublin suggests that the letter choice is like the advanced error-checking systems that are incorporated into ISBNs on books, credit card numbers, bank accounts and airline tickets.

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Exactly. Thats what you would expect; that would be a required feature of a system that does what this system does.

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-Therefore, the genetic coding system is an example of irreducible complexity.

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Except, it clearly is not - else we would not have been able to derive it from first principles threough our investigation of the way data behaves.

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Primordial soup example:
Well... This computer analogy means that without an intelligence there would be nothing in this world -> only an intelligence can create a program.

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False, I'm afraid.All computer media, presently, both primary and secondary storage, comprise magnetic gates made out of passing electricity through semiconductors. These gates are subject to electromagnetic interference, and so modern computers are "hardened" against background radiation such as from radios, TV's, the sun, cosmic rays et al.IF you simply left a (powered up) computer alone for long enough, its quite conceivable that random radiation falling on the primary or secondary storage would cause changes to the states of magnetic gates that create a programme. And that programme would run and execute exactly as if it had been designed by an intelligent being.This argument is not 100% analogous with biology so I don't want to take it to far, but in fact a programme could be composed on the million monkeys principle just like the argument for DNA.