The "Digital Code" of DNA

Sorry, rob. Can't go there. Too busy picking my nose.

Rob (inactive) writes:then scroll down to the animated sequence with the man writing on the chalkboard

Also, Kenyon wasn't a leading evolutionary biologist in the 1980s. His last publication was 1976, and most of his work was done in the 1960s on prebiotic chemistry.

He has a full chapter on prebiotic polymer/protein assembly without genetic information, so I find it quite hard to believe that he would have completely converted with so simple a question.

...prebiotic polymer/protein assembly without genetic information

Rob writes:We can test over and over... to show that proteins are assembled using genetic information. So it is emperically factual.

“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.”

Rob writes:Perhaps it would be illustrative for me to provide another quote of Kenyon's to you on the subject more directly.

Ringo wrote:The issue is whether or not genetic information is a "digital code" that is somehow above and beyond the structure of the DNA molecule.

Hoot Mon writes:No one ever said that genetic code is "somehow above and beyond the structure of the DNA molecule."

Then why do you keep arguing?

Hoot Mon writes:Because you refuse to see that nucleic acids are capable of encoding, storing, translating, and transmitting digital genetic information.

Hoot Mon writes:Do you know of any other natural molecules besides nucleic acids that contain digital codes?