coded information in DNA

WordBeLogos,At least when you were passing off other other people's words as your own the mistakes were not as bad, but I'll comment on your errors later. For now I'll just comment on this: No, it is not okay. It wasn't okay before, and it's still not okay. This is from the Forum Guidelines that I quoted to you just a short while ago:

6. Avoid lengthy cut-n-pastes. Introduce the point in your own words and provide a link to your source as a reference. If your source is not on-line you may contact the Site Administrator to have it made available on-line.

What is your problem with following a few simple rules? Members are asked to put things in their own words because otherwise we find that some people, like yourself, take advantage and cite arguments they don't understand, as you've just demonstrated by failing to express Perry Marshall's ideas in your own words. You can't even copy his mistakes right.I'm returning to my TV program, more later.--Percy

Here's the problem - you don't even understand Mr. Marshall's ideas, so in reality you have no idea how well he articulates them. That's why when you try to express them in your own words you only compound his errors. Since you don't understand what Mr. Marshall is saying, you don't understand our rebuttals either, which makes replying to you kind of pointless.Being able to accurately explain something in your own words is the only way to be sure you understand it. And you should never promote ideas you don't understand, which is what you're doing here.You've got to stop looking for a way where you can win a debate about something you don't understand. It isn't possible. Why don't you at least read Shannon's Paper so you can discover the magnitude of your errors when you first invoked Shannon, then insisted on definitions that contradict Shannon. In Shannon's time most communication was over analog channels, and he would never have excluded AM radio. He would never have described the terms "information" and "code" as interchangeable.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Spelling.Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

You don't really mean to say that they didn't "originate from the laws of nature." Everything that happens obeys the laws of nature. What you really mean to say is that they didn't happen naturally, by which you actually mean that people did it.But this is not a discussion of nature on the one hand and man on the other. In this discussion man is part of nature. It does not matter if the pebbles were arranged by people, by animals, or by random events, their arrangement still represents information.I earlier gave you example of Alphabits cereal. If you arrange three letters to spell "yes", that is information. But if you jostle the box and three letters fall out to spell "yes", that is also information. In fact, any arrangement of letters is information. That some arrangements happen to correspond to words to which we attach meaning (which as Shannon tells us is independent of information) is irrelevant to the information itself. Speaking digitally, information is just bits, it doesn't matter what meaning people might attach to the arrangement of bits.We do know that information arises naturally all the time. Nothing happens anywhere that doesn't create new information. Your fundamental argument is actually that the origin of DNA could not have been a natural event, in that it would have required intelligence to create it and the processes that surround it. You have so far produced no evidence to support your position.The only kind of properties and processes we've ever observed in the universe are all natural, and so we explain DNA in terms of those properties and processes. You postulate that there are properties and processes of which we're yet unaware, and perhaps that is so, but again, you need evidence.Neptune was discovered in part because the orbit of Uranus deviated from its calculated path, so it was presumed that there must be another planetary body out there perturbing its orbit. You need the equivalent of something that deviates from known physical laws in ways we can't currently explain in order to claim that there must be something more going on than we're currently aware. Just stating over and over and over again that DNA could not have arisen naturally won't get you anywhere.There's another bigger problem that rarely gets addressed in ID discussions, and that's where the designer came from. If DNA requires a designer, and if the designer was an advanced alien, then the alien's DNA would have required a designer. And that alien's DNA would also have required a designer. And so on back to the beginning of time, and at some point you just have to call a halt and say God did it.So why not just admit that ID requires God and is religion.--Percy

I feel like I'm talking to someone with short term memory loss. You not only don't recall past messages, you don't even recall past sentences of the same message.I just responded to your claim that after rearrangement the pebbles "now contain information (a message) which did not originate in the laws of nataure," explaining why you don't really mean to say that they didn't "originate from the laws of nature."You reply by restating that the coded information "did not have its origin in the laws of nature," the very statement I just rebutted.Are you a parrot? Now restrained from copying someone else's words are you reduced to copying your own?Please stop saying that coded information did not originate in the laws of nature, because it gives the impression that you're claiming that it didn't obey the laws of nature. This misunderstanding has already arisen several times in this thread. No one ever says anything like, "Lightning originates from the laws of nature," or that "Planetary orbits originate from the laws of nature." What they say is that, "Lightning is a natural phenomenon," or "Planetary orbits obey the laws of nature." The argument you're trying to convey is that the pebble arrangement didn't happen naturally, so just say that.But you can't make that claim in this thread, because in the context of this discussion there is no distinction between the natural and the unnatural. In fact, in this context there's no such thing as unnatural. This discussion about codes and DNA is actually just a proxy for the question of the ultimate origin of life itself (and of people) and whether it arose naturally, and people are part of nature. Everything in the universe is part of nature. Your claimed designer is part of nature. If there's some part of your argument that lies outside of nature then you're making supernatural claims. You're having more recall problems, I see. Without actually going back and counting, I bet you've been provided examples about 20 times. I gave you the Alphabits example for the second time in the very message you replied to. This Alzheimer's approach to discussion has to stop.Let's take something very simple. You leave a small bowl of pebbles on your front porch and agree with a friend that if he comes by while you're gone that he'll remove one of the pebbles from the bowl and set it next to it. While you're gone a very minor earthquake occurs, and one of the pebbles falls out of the bowl and comes to rest beside it. You return home and see the pebble. How do you determine if the information was produced by your friend or by nature?The answer is that you can't. That's because there is no inherent difference between information that people produce and information produced by nature. People are part of nature, and all of nature is producing new information all the time. But the claim of ID, the very reason for the attempt to replace traditional creationism with ID, is that it is scientific, that it makes no appeal to the supernatural. Once you concede that ID is religion you've lost the battle to replace evolution with ID in the classroom. It's ID adherents like yourself who openly concede its religious nature that are ID's biggest enemy, and it must frustrate the Discovery Institute no end. They've worked so hard building the case that ID is every bit as much science as evolution, but rank and file evangelicals don't understand this and just like at Dover make open appeals to God and Jesus.--Percy

Instead of ignoring the discussion already in progress and attempting to restart the discussion from scratch, please just continue the current discussion. Everything you've just said are things you've said before, and we've already replied to it before, there's no point in us rebutting it again just so you can ignore it again.Please go back to the replies you're ignoring now and reply to the ones you think most appropriate.--Percy

No, it's real information. If you had come into the room later and observed the word "yes" spelled out on the table you would have no way of knowing that the letters had fallen there randomly. You would look at the letters and claim, wrongly, that they must have been intelligently placed there because they represented specified complexity.This Alphabits example is analogous to your claim that you can examine DNA and judge merely by inspection whether it could only have come about through intelligent guidance. We already know that life can accumulate information through mutations, and you're also incapable of telling whether a mutation occurred naturally or through your claimed intelligent agent. Furthermore, we've never discovered anything specific that your claimed intelligent agent has ever done, not to mention ever found any hint of the existence of the intelligent agent himself. In other words, you're postulating a mechanism for which you have no evidence. You're again making the mistake of reading human qualities into the sending and receiving of information. Go back and read Shannon. Intention is not part of the communication of information. Intention is a quality involving meaning, and meaning is completely irrelevant to the engineering problem of communicating information. While this is a complaint without meaning, I must still point out that you're drawing a distinction that does not exist. DNA's structure is a direct result of the things it has come in contact with, just like everything else in the universe. Everything in the universe contains encoded information. You keep saying this, but so far this has been the extent of your rebuttal to all the examples. Let me repeat one of the examples you never addressed, this one from Message 95:Now we know you're insisting that the information from the sun is not *encoded information*, but it is. For example, the elements in the sun's outer atmosphere are encoded in the sun's absorption spectrum. Every black line in the spectrum represents an energy change in the electron shells of the isotope of a specific element. Here's an example of such a spectrum: And here's a table of some of the more significant absorption lines: Now explain to us how this correspondence between black lines at a frequency (symbols, since you're so insistent about them) and elements is not a code.--Percy

I'm sure no one can figure out why you think valid rebuttal consists of declaring, "Only an intelligent agent can create a code," then repeating this over and over and over again. Until you stop imitating a broken record and engage in sincere discussion, this thread can't really make progress.--Percy

You seem not to comprehend your own claim. You claimed that assembling functioning proteins was a very significant problem because the required sequences of amino acids were very specific and therefore very unlikely. When it was pointed out that hundreds of different sequences could create proteins that accomplish the same function, thereby falsifying your claim of high specificity and unlikelihood, you gladly concede as if that's what you had claimed in the first place.I'm happy that you concede the point, but you seem not to realize that the concession is fatal to your position. Of course you've claimed it! I can easily believe you don't understand that you've claimed it if, as I suspect, you're still copy-n-pasting, only this time from one of Dembski's books instead of from online material, but you have most certainly claimed that high specificity removes natural processes as a possible origin. This position is fundamental to Dembski's claims of having proven that DNA could not have had a natural origin. Your Message 183 contains words that Dembski himself could have written: Gee, what do you know, you did claim it! How about that!Word, seriously, there's no substitute for familiarizing yourself with the material before engaging in debate about it. I don't know whose words you're using now, but clearly you don't know what they mean.--Percy

I don't think you know what you're arguing. The message you just replied to wasn't about codes, it was about specified complexity and how you apparently don't even recognize your own position when someone repeats it back to you.Word, the ends do not justify the means. No God worth his salt would want you to lie in defending him, and the all-powerful Christian God needs no defenders anyway. What you're actually doing is defending your sense that you're right. Just do a couple simple things and you'll feel much better about yourself. Only write about things you understand using words that are your own, and don't ignore responses, especially to the extent of reiterating (over and over) your prior points as if they've never been rebutted.--Percy

I guess it figures that if you can't even keep your own position straight that you can't keep ours straight either. Despite your statement that many here claim DNA does not contain information, Parasomnium is one of the few in this thread to suggest this. Most of us would disagree with him. Everything in the universe contains information, and new information is being created naturally all the time. You've been provided so many examples of natural codes I've lost count. We're all waiting for you to provide an answer that goes beyond, "That's not a code."--Percy

Hi Word,You're just repeating the same mistakes. There's really no point in replying.--Percy

"Brrrraaaaack! WordBeLogos wants a cracker!"

It hasn't proved possible to engage WordBeLogos in discussion, so I'll simply provide some correct information about information.Shannon launched the field of information theory with his landmark paper (A Mathematical Theory of Communication) back in 1948. Shannon was working for Bell Labs on the problem of communicating information in the presence of noise, and so he first had to define information. He defined information as a set of messages, and he defined the problem of communication as one of "reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point." In other words, the problem of communication is how to transmit a message from point A to point B.Shannon proposed a logorithmic approach to measuring information where the amount of information in binary bits is the log₂ of the number of messages in the message set. So if you have a message set of size 6 then the amount of information contained in any single message from the message set is:

log₂6 = 2.58 bits

A simple example helps makes this clear. Here's a set of six messages that I might want to send to a friend:

• I am sleeping.
• I am awake.
• I am working.
• I am playing.
• I am away.
• I am traveling.

How would you transmit one of these messages over a digital channel? You'd encode it, like this:

• 000: I am sleeping.
• 001: I am awake.
• 010: I am working.
• 011: I am playing.
• 100: I am away.
• 101: I am traveling.

Notice that although sending one of these 6 messages should require only 2.58 bits that we've actually used 3 bits for each message. We might be able to reduce the number of bits by using 2 bits for some messages and 3 bits for others, for example:

• 00: I am sleeping.
• 01: I am awake.
• 100: I am working.
• 101: I am playing.
• 110: I am away.
• 111: I am traveling.

This uses 2.67 bits (on average). Getting to 2.58 bits might not be possible with a binary encoding. But the specific encoding of the messages isn't what's important. Here's the important part: messages do not have meaning.Let me repeat that: In information theory, messages do not have meaning. Meaning is irrelevant to the communications problem. Reading meaning into messages is probably WordBeLogos's biggest error. In Shannon's own words, "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."This means that information theory doesn't care that one message means "I am sleeping" and another message means "I am awake." All that is important to information theory is that one message is "000" and another message is "001", and the problem of communications is how to transmit a message from point A to point B.This too is key, so let me repeat this too: The information we're tranmitting is not "I am sleeping" or "I am awake". The information we're transmitting is "000" or "001" and so forth. We could even send the information by converting the characters in "I am awake" to their ASCII code equivalents and sending those, which in hexidecimal for brevity would be, though of course this is much less efficient than "001":

4A20616D206177616B65

But notice that the efficiency of the binary representation does not affect the amount of information contained in a message from our message set. If we use 3 binary bits to represent our 2.58 bits of information, then we're only wasting .42 bits. If we use the ASCII code to represent "I am awake" as 80 binary bits, then we're wasting 77.42 bits. Independent of the specific encoding, the amount of information we're transmitting is always just 2.58 bits, because there are only 6 messages in our message set.There is a high degree of consistency and rigour in all this that is completely absent in WordBeLogos's level of understanding, and it is essential for discussing these issues. Discussion is pointless until Word begins accepting the feedback and discussing the issues in terms that make sense.--Percy

WordBeLogos reminds me of an old Popeye cartoon. There's just no way to argue against someone who refuses to debate, simply repeating the same claim over and over again without explanation or elaboration. Enjoy: --Percy

WordBeLogos still gives no indication of engaging rebuttals, so I'll just briefly point out his irrationality concerning information and meaning.About information and meaning Shannon says on page 1 of his paper A Mathematical Theory of Communications: In response, Word simply quotes Perry Marshall claiming that meaning does exist in Shannon information: For WordBeLogos, Shannon stating that meaning is irrelevant to the problem of communicating information can be trumped by Internet denizen Perry Marshall claiming Shannon is wrong to have said this.For Shannon, DNA's 'GGG' is information. 'GGG' can be interpreted as meaning Glycine, but this meaning is irrelevant to the information itself. 'GGG' can be interpreted as having literally any meaning one wants, and the machinery in cells actually attach more than one meaning to 'GGG'. During protein production 'GGG' means Glycine, but during fission (cell division) 'GGG' means "match up with 'CCC'".Until Word begins taking seriously Shannon's unambiguous statement that meaning is irrelevant to the information problem, this discussion will not be able to make progress.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.