What IS evidence of design? (CLOSING STATEMENTS ONLY)

So why is that particular amino acid charged onto that particular tRNA? I think that's what he's getting at. And that IS arbitrary, at least to some degree.

No. If you read the last post you responded to he's saying that the codon-amino acid link is arbitrary. Which is it. The process is physical, yes, but you can't explain the coding itself in such simple terms.

I agree that genetic processes work by chemistry, and the functioning of genes is intimately bound to their chemical properties; if you recoded genes into some other media they flat wouldn't work because a great many of the products bind DNA or rely on properties of the RNA intermediate to correctly splice, etc. But the actual amino acid codings? They're arbitrary.Okay, so C binds to G and A to T, right? Why? Because of a physical interaction between the two. You couldn't have a DNA system in which C binds to T instead.But the sequence AUA doesn't have a direct physical relationship to Isoleucine. In order to associate the two you need a tRNA with the right anti-codon; but that tRNA association could be different. It could be Methionine. That's not a theoretical assertion, btw, we know it to be true because that's one of the differences in nuclear/mitochondrial gene coding.So the coding itself is not a physical certainty; it's a convention.

It's not like ink on paper. You could - at a push - perhaps argue it's like electrons in a processor. Ink on paper produces no direct effects anywhere; photons bounce off it and we, eventually, decode those into meaning. DNA interacts chemically and physically with proteins and RNA. Thinking of genetics as information, especially information without a strict formal definition, is rarely useful. No, it's not different. The DNA interacts with other molecules. That interaction produces changes in the surrounding environment. It's physical all the way down. The encoding in DNA is semantically flexible, as we analyse it, but in the cell the exact same chemical processes that drive protein-protein, protein-lipid or protein-ion interactions are involved in protein-DNA interactions.No special explanation is required for DNA interactions that is not required for protein-protein interactions.

No that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the process by which proteins are produced from DNA sequences is entirely a physical/chemical process. There is nothing special about it. It's mostly explained by "wobble" in the third base. You realise there are less tRNA types than amino acids, right? I'm very dubious of the notion that DNA has "meaning" outside of our interpretation of it. DNA certainly encodes proteins and when interacting with the correct cellular setup will produce proteins but does that mean it has "meaning"? I'm not so sure. And, if it does, that meaning is certainly not something extra on top of the physical interactions that needs explaining.

Funny that in all the time I've spent studying and reading books on genetics; the only time I've come across anyone saying anything of the sort is when talking to Creationists.I assure you, while Information Theory - which is categorically not the same thing as the layman's idea of what information is - is relevant to some areas of genetics, it is not viewed by scientists as the best was to understand genetics. Or, if it is, they're doing a damn good job of hiding it.

After 360 posts, and a fair amount of diversion, we're left pretty much where we started: without knowing the designer and their methods we are unable to distinguish design.ID proponents seek to use design to evidence God but their method fails because without showing God they are unable to provide credible evidence for design.