|
Author
|
Topic: Information Theory and Intelligent Design.
|
DarkEnergon
Inactive Junior Member
|
|
Message 1 of 102 (384774)
02-12-2007 11:41 PM
|
|
|
I just ran across this pair of web pages: 404: This page could not be found404: This page could not be found The first is pro-ID. The author mentions how information is always the product of an "intelligent mind" and how it "cannot develop of its own accord." And DNA is information and that proves it had to be designed. Then it makes like 8 more points. The second one is a response to the first web page. Its author goes on at LENGTH about information theory and ignores the rest of the first web page. It says that the "intelligent mind" condition for something to count as "information" is the idea of William Dembski. And it talks about Dembski and his theory and tries to show why it's wrong. So, is it wrong? I remember Dembski was one of the special witnesses that the Dover, PA school board was going to call in their court case about Intelligent Design. And he's got real credentials. PhD math from U. Chicago. So, what's the verdict? Is Dembski's information theory as good as Shannon's? And if you accept it, do you have to accept Intelligent Design? -DE
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 3 by subbie, posted 02-13-2007 1:08 AM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 5 by Doddy, posted 02-13-2007 1:58 AM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 7 by PaulK, posted 02-13-2007 2:54 AM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 9 by Percy, posted 02-13-2007 10:20 AM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 10 by Rob, posted 02-13-2007 8:31 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 11 by Rob, posted 02-13-2007 9:13 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 14 by Chiroptera, posted 02-13-2007 10:16 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied | | | Message 16 by jar, posted 02-13-2007 11:28 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
AdminNosy
Administrator Posts: 4754 From: Vancouver, BC, Canada Joined: 11-11-2003
|
|
|
Message 2 of 102 (384785)
02-13-2007 12:53 AM
|
|
|
Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.
|
subbie
Member (Idle past 1275 days) Posts: 3509 Joined: 02-26-2006
|
(Paraphrased from another thread) Here's the problem. This is how adding "information" by mutation works. We begin with a DNA molecule. In one of a number of different ways, when it is copied the new molecule is different from the old one, different because the gene sequences are no longer identical. Sometimes there's stuff missing, sometime there's extra stuff, sometimes some of the stuff has changed. Sometimes the change is meaningless, sometimes the change alters how the gene works. In the second situation, what creos call "new information" has been added. No laws of thermodynamics have been violated. There was no author. It was simply an error in copying, a mutation. That these changes occur is indisputable. That these different kinds of effects can result is indisputable. Creos can argue until they are blue in the face, but no matter how persuasive their analogies are, they cannot overcome readily observable facts.
Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 4 by iceage, posted 02-13-2007 1:47 AM | | subbie has not replied |
|
iceage 
Suspended Member (Idle past 5935 days) Posts: 1024 From: Pacific Northwest Joined: 09-08-2003
|
|
|
Message 4 of 102 (384795)
02-13-2007 1:47 AM
|
Reply to: Message 3 by subbie
02-13-2007 1:08 AM
|
|
Conservation of Information.
Admittedly I have not rtfa yet, but plan to when I can set aside an hour. But I find an exception in the very first paragraph of the first link:
quote:
One important argument against evolution is the fact that information always requires an intelligent mind. It appears to be a real law of nature that information can never develop of its own accord.
The author does not substantiates this. I remember reading something that Dembski has expressed this notion and created what he calls the "law of conservation of information". Does anyone have some simple examples or analogy to refute this claim? Off the top, I can think of some examples from geology. Geological formations and rock themselves contain "information" of their past. For example, ripple rock are ordered mineral grains that contain information of prior conditions. This information is not the product of an intelligent mind but records the passage of energy flow and transition. The ripple patterns are ordered and therefore the entropy is reduced as compared to surrounding flat seabed. The pattern contains information that allows a present day observer to make inferences of the conditions (direction, depth, velocity, etc) of the conditions. Am I missing something here. Are they talking about a different sort of "information".
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 3 by subbie, posted 02-13-2007 1:08 AM | | subbie has not replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 6 by Doddy, posted 02-13-2007 2:06 AM | | iceage has not replied |
|
Doddy
Member (Idle past 5930 days) Posts: 563 From: Brisbane, Australia Joined: 01-04-2007
|
Both mutation and selection may increase information
There's nothing inherent in information that means it must be designed, unless someone uses information to mean something strange. In particular, both elements of evolution (random mutations and natural selection) add information to the genome. For example, a random mutation will increase the randomness of the genome. But randomness is information, given that the information content can be defined as "shortest possible instructions for the replication of a structure"! The sequence "aaaaaaa" is not very information rich, because it can be compressed to "7 x a". The sequence "agtyri" is more rich in information then, because it is the shortest explanation for itself. So, the increase in randomness can in fact increase the information of the genome. Selection also adds information. After all, information is an exclusion of certain possible states. A letter 'x' can also be said as 'not other letters but x', so when I press the X key, I am excluding the other possible states in order to transfer the information of X into the computer. So, when something is selected for by natural selection, information from the environment is added to the genome. It's the cosmologists' problem to say where the information came from in the first place.
"Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will." (Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.) - Arthur Schopenhauer "If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods." - Arthur C. Clarke
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
Doddy
Member (Idle past 5930 days) Posts: 563 From: Brisbane, Australia Joined: 01-04-2007
|
|
|
Message 6 of 102 (384799)
02-13-2007 2:06 AM
|
Reply to: Message 4 by iceage
02-13-2007 1:47 AM
|
|
Re: Conservation of Information.
iceage writes: Does anyone have some simple examples or analogy to refute this claim? The claim is not that 'information' can't generate itself, but that 'complex specified information' (CSI). Which, in itself, implies that something else must specify it (as specificity is subjective), and that it must be complex (very improbable). So, he is really saying that designed improbable sequences are improbable and designed. How does one refute this self-evident claim?! Edited by Doddy, : fixed typo
"Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will." (Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.) - Arthur Schopenhauer "If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods." - Arthur C. Clarke
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 4 by iceage, posted 02-13-2007 1:47 AM | | iceage has not replied |
|
PaulK
Member Posts: 17825 Joined: 01-10-2003 Member Rating: 2.2
|
I think that they are confusing Dembski and Gitt. Dembski just defines information as improbability (and that's not going to replace Shannon information). Gitt is rather less qualified - his main claim to fame, apparently, is running the IT department at a German institute working on standards and measures.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
Brad McFall
Member (Idle past 5053 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: 12-20-2001
|
|
|
Message 8 of 102 (384818)
02-13-2007 7:15 AM
|
Reply to: Message 5 by Doddy
02-13-2007 1:58 AM
|
|
Re: Both mutation and selection may increase information
I would suspect that a biological change (evolution or not) perspective *may* (depends on one's ontology regardless of any given epistemology it seems to me)suggest that information (used in part to know biological change and form-making)is designable should a structural design provide invariants to a temporary functional design that may change by chance effects. So I would not say that there is something "in" information that makes it designed when it comes to any difference between a natural process (evolution and otherwise etc) and one man-made, but rather that functional designs of biological forms might be "reverse" engineered to extract "information" provided there were already structural desiins that "has design on"(an interest in) the information itself involved in the abduction/ordinating of the data in the process.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 5 by Doddy, posted 02-13-2007 1:58 AM | | Doddy has not replied |
|
Percy
Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: 12-23-2000 Member Rating: 4.7
|
The author of the first webpage ( Flaws in the evolution theory by Reiko Yukawa) is just making things up concerning information theory. He makes two significant errors:
- "One important argument against evolution is the fact that information always requires an intelligent mind."
If you read the landmark paper by Shannon that began the science of Information Theory (A Mathematical Theory of Communication) you'll see that this definition is incorrect. The author is making the mistake of confusing meaning with information. In Information Theory, information is a merely mathematical construct unrelated to meaning. As Shannon himself says
Shannon writes: "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." If you doubt this, just ask yourself where the information comes from for a star in the sky. Astronomers convert the information contained in the star's light (actually, all useful electromagnetic radiation we can receive from the star is analyzed, not just visible light) into information on a computer hard disk or words in technical papers they write. But the astronomers did not create that information. They merely translated it from one form to another.
- "Linguistics shows that DNA is literally a language containing four letters, and comparisons to computer science show that DNA is the most compact form of information that we know of, more compact that any form of data storage that humans have made."
This is patently false. DNA is not the most compact form of the information it contains. A DNA codon could actually encode for 64 amino acids, but actually only encodes for 20. This is a good thing, because the excess codes are used to provide redundancy which reduces the probability of errors causing problems (by changing to a code for the wrong amino acid), and even allows some types of errors to be corrected.
The reply from Julio Johansen ( Flaws in the evolution theory (Message 10)) is pretty much on the mark. He also mentions Shannon, and I think he's way to kind to Dembski. Dembski's information theory is made up. Gitt, who he doesn't mention, has done the same thing. --Percy
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
Rob
Suspended Member (Idle past 5869 days) Posts: 2297 Joined: 06-01-2006
|
Useful quotes
I personally prefer Phillip Johnson's definition of information. I wish to offer it, and then give some other quotes to add context. I offer all of these FYI. Phillip Johnson - author ”Darwin on trial’ / Professor of law (emeritus) University of California at Berkeley- ...on the question: ”What is information?’
“Information at the simplest level is just meaningful text. You can say it’s like the plays of Shakespear or the Bible if you want to pick something noble. It’s like the Los Angeles telephone directory if you want to pick something much more mundane. Perhaps an instruction book, let’s say a cookbook with all of the recipes would be a better example; or a computer program; the operating system of a PC. Now, in order to have a computer operating system, you have to have lots and lots of that text and instructions. So it’s extremely complex. That’s feature number one, it’s a lot of letters (or digits) in a specific order. And the order is specified, that’s point number two; which is to say that only one complex arrangement will do to operate the computer. If you got another one, you’ve got something that won’t work at all. So it’s specified complexity. And a third feature is called aperiodic, or non-repeating. And that means it’s not the result of physical or chemical laws, because those laws always produce simple repetitive patterns. For example, you can imagine a book tha’s written this way: you put a macro on your computer processor that says reapeat the letters ABC until the printer runs out of paper. And you’d get a book like that, and it wouldn’t be a very interesting book. And it would never get more interesting because the same laws that give you that pattern, ensure that you’ll never get a different pattern, or a more meaningful one. So the information in the computers operating system, like the information that has to be present to operate all of the cells machinery, is complex, specified, non-repeating (meaningful) text. And without exception, in all of our experience, you never get anything like that unless you have an author. To get computer software, you have to have a software engineer. To have an encyclopedia you actually need a lot of different authors and editors. To get the plays of Shakespear, you need Shakespear.” Scott A. Minnich Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology at the University of Idaho. He was an assistant professor at Tulane University, and did postdoctoral research with Austin Newton at Princeton University and Arthur Aronson at Purdue University. Minnich’s research interests are temperature regulation of Y. enterocolita gene expression and coordinate reciprocal expression of flagellar and virulence genes. He is widely published in technical journals, including the ”Journal of Bacteriology’, ”Molecular Microbiology’, ”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, and the ”Journal of Microbiological Methods’. Minnich on the question: ”What is the most remarkable aspect of the bacterial flagellum?’
“The most amazing aspect of the bacterial flagellum to me is . (actually I can’t limit it to one aspect). You have the motor itself, very sophisticated; Howard Berg at Harvard (I’ve heard him speak several times) has labeled it ”the most efficient machine in the universe’; the fact that it runs (normally in E. Coli) at 17,000 rmp. Two gears, forward and reverse, water cooled, proton motive force, it’s hardwired to a signal transduction system and has short term memory . That’s fascinating! But then when you step back and look at the genetics in terms of the program, the blueprint to build this system, you find another layer of complexity. In the genes it’s not enough to have the fifty genes required; we find that they are also fired (or expressed) in a given sequence. And that there are checks and balances, so if there is a problem in assembly; that information feeds back at the genetic level and shuts down expression. There are gate keepers. There is communication molecularly at a distance (and a significant distance). So you build a scaffold on the end of this thing that is protruding from the cell, and it’s feeding back and saying, ”ok, we have enough of that sub-unit, now send the next sub-unit.’ We don’t understand how this works yet. But it’s fascinating! It’s something that I could spend the rest of my life studying it’s so intriguing in terms of how this system works.” William Dembski, Mathematician, Baylor University- has earned Ph.D. degrees in mathematics (University of Chicago) and Philosophy (University of Illinois, Chicago) and a M. Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has also received two NSF fellowships and has conducted postdoctoral work at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and Princeton. Dembski has published articles in journals of mathematics, philosophy, and theology. He has also written and edited several books including; ”The Design Inference’, ”Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology’, ”Signs of Intelligence’, and ”No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence’. Dembski on the question: ”What is the probability that a cell could have formed by chance alone’?
“My intuitions are that it’s incredibly small. The complexities are just immense! I mean, you know, I was describing earlier a bacterial flagellum ok . Now if that thing is highly improbable, then the system within which it sits is even more improbable because you’ve got even more stuff to account for. So, you know, I mean, uh, it’s, it’s just improbabilities that just get worse and worse as you go up. Just an individual protein . a functioning protein, I mean it has 100, 200, or 300 amino acids. And something like that, your talking improbabilities of something on the order of 10 to the minus 100 to get these things. And that’s just an individual protein. That’s just a building block. That’s like a brick in a house that you’re trying to build up. So just getting those bricks is highly improbable. And then you have to build the whole thing up. Just how complex is it? I think early indications are, that this is way beyond anything that we’re going to be able to reasonably attribute to chance.” Jonathan Wells has received Ph.D. degrees in Molecular and Cell Biology (University of California at Berkeley) and religious studies (Yale University) He has worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and has taught biology at the University of California at Hayward. Wells has published articles in Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, BioSystems, The Scientist and The American biology Teacher. He has also authored two books, ”Charles Hodge’s Critique of Darwinism’, and ”Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach About Evolution Is Wrong’. Wells on the question: ”What potential benefits does Intelligent Design Theory hold for science’?
“Before Darwinsim took over in the late nineteenth century, virtually every Western Biologist believed in intelligent design. The founders of all the modern biological disciplines; Mendel, who founded genetics, Leneaus, who founded Taxonomy where we name organisms; the early Embyologists, the early Paleontologists . All of these people believed in design, and they founded modern biology. Darwinism came along and said, ”no . design is an illusion’, but yet it kept all these disciplines . of course that’s what we now work in. And I see the current revolution as a return to our roots; our scientific roots, which were design roots. And so I see science once again returning to a design paradigm. Now, the Darwinists claim that this will restrict scientific inquiry. I see it just the opposite . What I see now, is that the Darwinists cannot allow any hint of design in living things. They have to exclude every possible aspect of design. And this narrows the range of explanations tremendously. And it forces them to cram the data into these boxes that end up distorting the truth. In a design paradigm however, the whole range of explanations is wide open! It doesn’t mean everything is designed . So some things can still be a product of random variations and natural selection as Darwin said they were. But it greatly expands the range of explanations that we have, and liberates science to follow the evidence wherever it leads. So I see a tremendous invigoration . a reinvigoration of scientific research opening up areas that are now closed.” All quotes from the Q&A section of the DVD documentary, 'Unlocking the Mystery of Life'
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
Rob
Suspended Member (Idle past 5869 days) Posts: 2297 Joined: 06-01-2006
|
Information theory...
My apologies DarkEnergon... I left out the best quote of all... Dr. Stephen C. Meyer earned his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of science from Cambridge University for a dissertation on the history of origin-of-life biology and the methodology of the historical sciences. Previously, Meyer worked as a geophysicist with the Atlantic Richfield Company, after earning his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Geology. He has recently co-written or edited two books ”Darwinsim, Design and Public Education’ (2003 Michigan State University Press) and ”Science and Evidence for design in the Universe’. Meyer on the question - ”Why can’t biological information originate through a materialistic process’?
“One of the things I do in my classes, to get this idea across to students, is I hold up two computer disks. One is loaded with software, and the other one is blank. And I ask them, ”what is the difference in mass between these two computer disks, as a result of the difference in the information content that they posses’? And of course the answer is, ”Zero! None! There is no difference as a result of the information. And that’s because information is a mass-less quantity. Now, if information is not a material entity, then how can any materialistic explanation account for its origin? How can any material cause explain it’s origin? And this is the real and fundamental problem that the presence of information in biology has posed. It creates a fundamental challenge to the materialistic, evolutionary scenarios because information is a different kind of entity that matter and energy cannot produce. In the nineteenth century we thought that there were two fundamental entities in science; matter, and energy. At the beginning of the twenty first century, we now recognize that there’s a third fundamental entity; and its ”information’. It’s not reducible to matter. It’s not reducible to energy. But it’s still a very important thing that is real; we buy it, we sell it, we send it down wires. Now, what do we make of the fact, that information is present at the very root of all biological function? In biology, we have matter, we have energy, but we also have this third, very important entity; information. I think the biology of the information age, poses a fundamental challenge to any materialistic approach to the origin of life.”
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
RAZD
Member (Idle past 1425 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: 03-14-2004
|
|
|
Message 12 of 102 (385016)
02-13-2007 9:30 PM
|
Reply to: Message 11 by Rob
02-13-2007 9:13 PM
|
|
Re: Information theory...
See Irreducible Complexity, Information Loss and Barry Hall's experiments Information intentionally deleted is regained by evolution. Thus evolution can result in an increase in information. Case closed. Enjoy.
Join the effort to unravel AIDS/HIV, unfold Proteomes, fight Cancer,
compare Fiocruz Genome and fight Muscular Dystrophy with Team EvC! (click)
we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 11 by Rob, posted 02-13-2007 9:13 PM | | Rob has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 13 by Rob, posted 02-13-2007 9:51 PM | | RAZD has replied |
|
Rob
Suspended Member (Idle past 5869 days) Posts: 2297 Joined: 06-01-2006
|
|
|
Message 13 of 102 (385019)
02-13-2007 9:51 PM
|
Reply to: Message 12 by RAZD
02-13-2007 9:30 PM
|
|
Re: Case not so closed...
Razd; Information intentionally deleted is regained by evolution. Thus evolution can result in an increase in information. Case closed. That's like Subbie's argument that you start with DNA and then add mutation. So what... how do you get a DNA molecule to begin with? Abiogenesis inevitably boils down to chemical evolution within the natural laws; the very 'Biochemical Predestination' concept that Dean Kenyon describes in detail. Dean Kenyon - coauthor of textbook on theory of biochemical evolution ”biochemical predestination’ 1969 / professor of biology (emeritus) San Fransisco State university- Kenyon on ”describing the complexity of a living cell’.
“Back in the days of Charles Darwin, relatively little was known about the complexity (the enormous complexity) of the microscopic world -the microscopic aspects of living organisms. There was a view in the latter part of the nineteenth century that a living cell was essentially a featureless bag of enzymes; all, kind of in a true solution. Not much in the way of detailed three dimensional complexity. But of course in the twentieth century, we’ve made enormous strides in understanding that that’s not the case at all. There is a very great degree of intricacy of architecture down in the cell units. So today, everybody understands about bits and bites, and so perhaps a useful illustration of the complexity of, say the DNA molecule, might be helpful. You can calculate the number of bits contained in tightly packed DNA material that would fill one cubic millimeter of space as equaling 1.9 times 10 to the 18th power, bits ( or, 1,900,000,000,000,000,000). Now that number, is by many orders of magnitude, vastly greater than the storage capacity of the best supercomputing machines. Their storage capacity is far less, than the storage capacity in the DNA Molecule. Now moreover, the DNA itself as it functions in a living cell has about one hundred different proteins involved with just its own functioning. And then you have these tens of thousands of other proteins in the living cell also involved. So we have now a picture of immense sub-microscopic complexity. And so no longer is it a reasonable proposition to think that simple chemical events could have any chance at all, to generate the kind of complexity we see in the very simplest living organisms. So, we have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells, with the new knowledge that’s accumulated in this century.” You can still believe in evolution Razd... you can use you imagination to concoct all variety of Theories. All it takes is a little faith and a motive. Just ask Aldous Huxley... Aldous Huxley: "I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political." --Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means What do you think??? Case closed? Nah... Edited by Rob, : No reason given.
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 12 by RAZD, posted 02-13-2007 9:30 PM | | RAZD has replied |
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 15 by subbie, posted 02-13-2007 10:18 PM | | Rob has not replied | | | Message 42 by RAZD, posted 02-14-2007 7:25 AM | | Rob has not replied |
|
Chiroptera
Inactive Member
|
|
|
Message 14 of 102 (385025)
02-13-2007 10:16 PM
|
Reply to: Message 1 by DarkEnergon
02-12-2007 11:41 PM
|
|
DNA - the most famous non-language
Heh. I like this one:
Linguistics shows that DNA is literally a language containing four letters.... Actually, at most DNA is a medium in which "messages" in some "language" is stored. But, presuming he means the process of transcription utilizes a language, I'll believe it when someone translates Hamlet into this "language".
This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 1 by DarkEnergon, posted 02-12-2007 11:41 PM | | DarkEnergon has not replied |
|
subbie
Member (Idle past 1275 days) Posts: 3509 Joined: 02-26-2006
|
|
|
Message 15 of 102 (385027)
02-13-2007 10:18 PM
|
Reply to: Message 13 by Rob
02-13-2007 9:51 PM
|
|
Re: Case not so closed...
That's like Subbie's argument that you start with DNA and then add mutation. So what... how do you get a DNA molecule to begin with? This response completely missed the point. The changes in DNA that we can observe result in an increase in "information" without an author, without a designer. The fact that we start with DNA is irrelevant. DNA mutations can result in an increase in "information" absent any outside influence. Your argument is akin to saying evolution can't be accepted as scientific until we can prove how abiogensis happened.
Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat
| This message is a reply to: | | | Message 13 by Rob, posted 02-13-2007 9:51 PM | | Rob has not replied |
|
™ Version 4.2