Abiogenisis by the Numbers

Hi Bob,You've may have seen the notice in one of the other threads, but RisenLord is actually JasonChin and three other identities. The RisenLord account is now suspended, too.Jason, it is clear that your purpose here isn't discussion but disruption. Is this the example you want to set for other Christians?I'd be glad to reinstate your JasonChin account if you assure me via email to Admin that you'll follow moderator requests and the Forum Guidelines, and begin discussing topics earnestly and in good faith.--Percy

Just guessing, but dshortt may have in mind the question of where the information in DNA came from if it arose by a natural processes. If he believes that information can only be created by an intelligence, then he may be making the point that a natural origin for DNA is not possible.I have a different take on the information aspect of the discussion. It seems perfectly valid to me to view DNA encodings as Shannon information. The letters/ink analogy has relevance, but I don't think it should be used to sidestep consideration of the DNA code as Shannon information.It works better for me to draw a distinction between information and meaning. As Shannon says right on page one of his landmark paper, "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."Once you've established that Shannon information is independent of meaning, then it is easy to consider DNA as containing information. In fact, such an obvious code of course contains information. How could it not? The human interpretive structure you mentioned before is the meaning that is irrelevant to Shannon information. All voice phone calls are now translated into binary streams. The information carrying capacity of the telephone network is measured by bits, and it does not change if the discussion turns from gossip to nuclear physics. The bits that carry the information know nothing about meaning.And neither does DNA know anything about meaning. It's just an encoding that results in a biological representation that interacts with an environment in a process that governs whether the DNA (some of it, with sexual reproduction) survives into the next generation.But could the information in DNA arise naturally? Now, there lies a discussion!--Percy

Hi Dshortt,I've just got to congratulate you. I don't agree with you, but you've done a wonderful job of staying on topic and sticking with rational arguments while not taking disagreement personally. I hope you stick around a while.--Percy

I just wanted to point out the difference between an assumption and an "I don't know."This contains a couple assumptions: One assumption is that early life wasn't too different than modern life. The other assumption is that conducting studies of the survivability of modern life under extreme conditions is relevant to early life or it's origins.This is expression of "I don't know": Pink was merely providing the opposite end of the spectrum from your assumption that conditions on the early earth were hostile to the formation of life. He did this to make the point that we don't really know whether these conditions were hostile or not.Nailing down probabilities on this topic is fraught with things we cannot know because uncovered too little evidence thus far to enable us to ferret out the details of conditions on the early earth.--Percy

This part of the assumption about DNA and RNA isn't as safe as you think. One widely accepted hypothesis is that DNA and RNA themselves had simpler predecessors. You have to somehow cast doubt on these and other alternative hypotheses to justify your assumption. I think this information is critical for formulating probabilities. If you have good recent sources for the most widely accepted hypotheses of the environment of the early earth then I think you should go ahead and present this information.One hypothesis about the origin of life involves black smokers. They're buried deep at the bottom of the sea, are hotter than the boiling temperature of water, and are full of sulpher and poisonous heavy metals. This is pretty hostile, I'm sure you'll agree, yet black smokers contain life today, and they're one possibility for the origin of early life.It's always a good idea to recognize the difference between what you know based on evidence versus what you think you know that's actually only an assumption.--Percy

Recent discussions have drawn many attempts to explain the same thing, but never was it said so well.--Percy

Yes, you are missing something, which is that it isn't the study saying this, but the Reasons to Believe article about the study (Chromosome Study Stuns Evolutionists). PaulK referenced this article to point out a few of its serious errors. And so... ...you're just quoting more erroneous statements from the same Reasons to Believe article about the study. I assume that you also uncritically accepted the next sentence that said, "The researchers, apparently committed to Darwinism, back-pedaled...etc...", and so you're at the same time buying into the conspiracy nonsense that the evidence is against evolution, but thousands and thousands of scientists for decades and decades are covering it up and continuing to accept evolution anyway.Here's the abstract for the actual paper Absence of polymorphism at the ZFY locus on the human Y chromosome by R. L. Dorit, H. Akashi and W. Gilbert that I found at Absence of polymorphism at the ZFY locus on the human Y chromosome - PubMed: Note that the paper covers a "729 base-pair intron", while the Y chromosome contains over 50 million base pairs. Even if the study had any contradictory results (which it doesn't), a single study's results on such a tiny portion of the Y chromosome wouldn't be considered stunning. The Reasons to Believe article is wrong to say scientists are stunned, since the results weren't stunning but were fairly consistent with other studies. Note also that Ross mentions only one of the four possibilities that the study lists for the cause of the invariance. And note also that Ross critisizes them for using a statistical approach when no other approach is possible when the sample size is 38. All these types of studies use statistical approaches.You would be poorly served to put much reliance on Reasons to Believe to accurately represent the results of any genetic study. Magazines and newspapers like the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the Boston Globe, and so on, all have science sections that love to follow this Adam/Eve research, and I suggest you wait until they report on stunned scientists before believing it.--Percy