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Member (Idle past 1345 days) Posts: 104 From: Ottawa, ON, Canada Joined: |
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Author | Topic: NvC-1: What is the premise of Naturalism in Biology? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: The symbols are the bases, and it is their chemical properties that determine their interactions. Your last sentence denies that - it even denies that we have argued that. If you insist they the bases are inert symbols, that their chemical properties are irrelevant then it is for you to provide evidence.
quote: I suggest that you read my prior posts, but I’ll repeat my point. All we can say is that a simplistic application of natural law without adequate knowledge Of the circumstances is insufficient to explain it. As our knowledge and understanding grows progress may be made. As the authors would agree.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2
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quote: If you want to introduce other laws - and show that they are not natural laws or supervenient on natural law - it’s up to you to provide the evidence. The point you are responding to is a fact. The circuits of a cellphone function according to natural law. If you want to argue otherwise it’s for you to provide evidence.
quote: But it does mean that any other laws in the processes of life will be supervenient on natural law.
quote: A false dichotomy as you have implicitly admitted in your previous point. The translation process works according to natural law to follow the genetic code.
quote: It’s funny how you said that you wanted to focus on genetic information but you keep talking about the mind instead. I don’t propose to argue about that here since it is contentious and neither side can prove it’s case. However, I will point out that law in the legal sense is quite different from natural law and confusing the two is folly and nothing more, Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: Your question was a response to an assertion made by someone else. It’s hardly relevant to my points. Since you fail to produce any evidence that the bases of DNA are merely inert symbols, or that translation is not accomplished by processes following natural law, I presume that you have none,
quote: So you say, but your evidence is lacking.
quote: If we are talking about genetic information, that does not concern us. Only when we get to language - and then, again, we are talking about the mind. I will anticipate your point below by pointing out that Google Translate has a more difficult task than DNA translation because it must preserve meaning - and cope with idiom and other aspects of natural language that make it difficult (and it does so imperfectly, in my experience). A human translator can do better than Google Translate, but DNA translation is too mechanical for humans to have an advantage there,
quote: We cannot currently explain it in terms of natural law, but that does not mean that it is impossible in principle. We should not expect to understand an immensely complex history with many unknown contingencies - at least not without a huge amount of work. Nevertheless in the cases where we can study and do have good knowledge we do not see any sign that your claims are true of genetic information. Genetic information is changed and added by natural processes obeying natural law.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: On the contrary, the evidence is wholly lacking.
quote: I note again that you are not talking about genetic information at all.Nevertheless the fact that historical contingencies play a major role is not sufficient to prove a violation of natural law. quote: I have already addressed this point. While it cannot be explained by a simplistic application of natural laws, made without adequate understanding of history and circumstances, that does not mean that it is beyond natural law. I don’t need to address the following paragraph other than to note that it confirms that you are referring to exactly the simplistic application of natural law that I reject as obviously inadequate.
quote: Mutations occur by natural law, and it is mutations that change and add to the info-content.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: Of course you don’t.
quote: No, we don’t. In fact these topics actively obscure the issues. The operation of the mind is contentious and not adequately understood.
[quote]quote: Of course you don’t.
quote: No, we don’t. In fact these topics actively obscure the issues. The operation of the mind is contentious and not adequately understood.
quote: Why aren’t you mentioning them? Apart from the absurd idea that legislation is the same as natural law you haven’t exactly been forthcoming. And wouldn’t all those rules in biology ultimately rely on natural law anyway?
quote: Well they can’t answer them in the simplistic way you want to do it. But as I did explain we shouldn’t expect them to, nor should we expect to know the actual answers yet. But you don’t address that point.
quote: It would seem to be an essential point if you actually wanted to discuss genetic information. But then you are largely avoiding that topic.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: This seems a pretty pointless question, not least because answer 1 is an obvious strawman - although I must point out that the circuits only work because they obey physical laws But also because answer 2 doesn’t get us anywhere, unless it’s sole purpose is to ignore the fact that it is the physical circuits obeying natural law that do the real work. The logical circuits are simply higher level descriptions of the physical circuits used for convenience.
quote: And this is just a repeat of the same errors.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Essentially all you have is assertions without any actual evidence.
So, let us look at genetic information, which is the one we know most about (for the others you always end up talking about the mind - and if you did not you’d have to concede the point) The genetic information is entirely supervenient on the physical structure of the DNA. All changes to the information are made by changes to the DNA, and we have no evidence (even indirect evidence) of any violation of natural law in those changes. The translation process proceeds by chemistry, following natural law. So, is there any reason to believe that any bioinformatic laws - at least with respect to DNA are simply higher level representations of processes founded in natural law, and that aspects not immediately dictated by natural law are the product of historical contingencies? Remember also that natural laws do not have to produce deterministic behaviour. Spontaneous radioactive decay is predictable only statistically.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: If the mind is supervenient on the operations of the physical brain then any calculations it performs are ultimately being performed by physics. As I have said before this is a contentious issue which cannot be shown to be true or false at present.
quote: Why do you waste time with these. For the first the actual prices of translation is chemical as I have said, and the origins are not available to us, or should we expect them to be. The second concerns the mind and I have repeatedly given my reasons for avoiding that topic. The real question is why you repeatedly keep talking about areas where we are ignorant - and where you cannot prove your point because of that ignorance.
quote: Since all of them are based in - very complex - chemistry your assertion is obviously incorrect. It seems that your bioinformatics laws are merely higher level descriptions of physical processes.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: I would expect a scientist to understand the difference between logic and his personal opinion. It seems that you do not.
quote: When science discovers how the mind operates we can revisit this question. Until then any answer would be speculative. And I note that once again you evade the whole issue of genetic information to try to talk about the mind. It’s amazing how often you repeat this tactic, despite the fact that it cannot work.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: On the contrary, I know that physical processes can and do explain them. However for convenience more abstract explanations are used in this context, since the details are complex. For comparison consider logic circuits - they are typically described in terms of inputs and outputs, not the arrangement of transistors. Or the use of gas pressure rather than listing the motions of individual molecules,
quote: The higher level descriptions are those in the textbook you cited. Repeating those won’t win me a Nobel.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: You seem to be saying that physics can do it, just as physics translates the genetic code. But of course the question was not about the translation, it was the explanation for the differences, which really will involve the mind.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2
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quote: On the contrary, that is the only way to fully understand how it works. And yes, it can be broken down in that way. However there are contexts where the details of how it works is of little relevance and a high-level view of what happens is far more useful.
quote: I have reasons for not paying money for your book. And really a similarity at the level of high level descriptions hardly seems relevant. It still boils down to chemistry.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
Eighty messages in which you have produced no real evidence of bioinformatic processes violating natural law. So what do you expect? That we should just accept your opinion? That certainly isn’t how it works in science.
But yes, let’s discuss how mutations change and add information, since that would be an actually relevant discussion.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
In the context of reproductive biology, the information in a DNA molecule is entirely determined by the sequence of bases. Thus, changes to the information - including additions - must be changes to that sequence.
Mutations do change that sequence, adding to it, removing from it, changing bases and even swapping one part of the sequence to another. Creationists have tried to argue that mutations cannot add information, but those arguments generally founder on the lack of a suitable measure of information. Typically no measure is given, but even when one is showing that it is relevant and actually applying it properly are serious difficulties. I believe, however, that there are two arguments which make a case that mutation can add information. The first relies on the simple fact that point mutations - the replacement of one base with another - are reversible - any change made by one such mutation can be done by another. Unless we assume that all sequences of a given length have the same amount of information then point mutations can change the information content - and if any mutation causes a loss the reverse mutation must cause a gain of information. The second relies on multiple mutations. The addition of a new, distinct gene to a genome - differing from the other genes, at least slightly - is surely a gain of information. Certainly it is if the protein that the gene codes for is produced and is useful to the organism. Mutation can and does do this, although it takes multiple steps. First an existing gene is duplicated, then - in some cases - subsequent mutations change one of the copies, making it distinct. With the aid of selection that version can become adapted to a particular use - which may or may not have been served by the original gene. For instance a gene involved in blood clotting could evolve to produce a venom. This is called duplication and diversification While these arguments as I have presented them fall short of proof they still represent a very good reason to think that mutations can add information. Unless they can be overcome it is not at all reasonable to insist that mutations cannot add information.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17822 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: An assertion that does more to undermine Richard Wang’s arguments than mine.
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