Creationist argument about DNA and information

[Lukraak_Sisser]

I am willing to speculate as to why Daniel seems to avoid actually answering my question.

If he admits that single nucleotides are 'dumb molecules' like he claims repeatedly, explaining why making a string of them at random can give rise to biological function coupled to genetic information is impossible, as he claims that cannot be done and decades of experimental evidence says it can be done.

If he claims that counter to his other posts single nucleotides DO contain hidden information he has to explain how it is that only he can see this and no one else can.

 

[Daniel]

Why choose this two random enzymes?

No particular reason; how bout Albumin and Trypsinogen. There's hundreds of thousands to choose from.

Well, like all proteins, the DNA gene doesn't just have "instructions" for the assembly of the proteins, like an assembly manual...

Sir, have you even taken an 80 level Intro to Biology Course?

"Most genes contain the information needed to make functional molecules called proteins."
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/howgeneswork/makingprotein

"Over the next sixty minutes I explained how life ultimately consists of DNA-driven biological machines. All living cells run on DNA SOFTWARE, which directs hundreds to thousands of PROTEIN ROBOTS.
Craig Venter PhD Geneticist (NIH, Celera Genomics)
http://www.sciencefriday.com/blogs/10/24/2013/dna-the-software-of-life.html

...but there is a direct physico-chemical link between the DNA sequence and the assembled and folded protein.

1. This is Direct Contradiction to your statement above.

2. Show the DIRECT Physico-Chemical link please...

CCU, CCC, CCA, CCG = ....................... Proline.
CUU, CUC, CUA, CUG, UUA, UUG =.................... Leucine
UAA, UAG, UGA =................................... STOP!

Go ahead...?

And btw, say goodbye to that "Direct" Link...

"During the process of transcription, the information stored in a gene’s DNA is transferred to a similar molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid) in the cell nucleus."
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/howgeneswork/makingprotein


3. "Folded Proteins"?? Where'd you get them? Chaperonins are..."Functional Proteins".
What folded the First Protein if it takes "Functional Proteins" to create "Functional Proteins"?? (See Transcription for another 250 or so)

Is this like the Space Shuttle giving birth to the Space Shuttle Assembly Plant??

The process doesn't require an agreed arbitrary language - it occurs through entirely natural (although very complex) reactions.

Sure. Like the Information in this sentence was compiled by the Natural Laws governing the conspiratorial actions of Display Pixels and Keyboards.


regards

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

Daniel:

Please define the following terms

Mitosis
Meiosis
Allele
Allele frequency


Your continued failure to answer this suggests a profound lack of understanding of basic science.

 

[MikeG]

........"Most genes contain the information needed to make functional molecules called proteins.".......

...but there is a direct physico-chemical link between the DNA sequence and the assembled and folded protein.

These two statements are synonyms. The information is the physico-chemical link. That you can't or won't see that is just you being perverse, displaying Aspberger's-like lack of understanding of expressions, or a lack of comprehension or understanding.

There are your options, Daniel. Into which of those 4 categories would you place your ignorance?

 

[tsig]

Jihad has to be understood from the perspective of the holy warrior.

The short cut to the virgins is being in the battle. You don't have to win. The more humiliating the defeat, the more Christ-like we become: carry the cross to your own crucifixion while the crowd mocks and jeers.

We are looking at a vision of Christ.

He is cleansing the temple by whipping out the evildoers.

Can we haz Crucifixion now?

 

[tsig]

If you can't understand "The Message" COMMUNICATION ...it's merely NOISE, there is NO Information.
Ergo...what needs to happen PRIOR to sending 'data'; so as to Create Information....?


Also, could you please respond; I'm hearing crickets...


Norbert Wiener Professor Mathematics MIT...

“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.”
Wiener, N., Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Hermann et Cie, The Technology Press, Paris, 1948.

Question: if Information is nether Matter or Energy and you're a Materialist/Realist... who by the quintessential tenet of your World View, believe that Matter and Energy is all that there is...THEN ahhh, you have a what they call in the Industry: A PARADOX!! i.e.,

How can you believe INFORMATION even EXISTS ?? Pray Tell....?


regards

Here is how your posts read to me:

BZZZT, BLAAT, DECRA, CHUG, CHUG, CHUG.

 

[zooterkin]

For anyone who actually wants to know a little about the current understanding of how DNA works (it's almost certainly a lot more complicated than you think), I can recommend Kat Arney's book, Herding Hemingway's Cats..

 

[Daniel]

These two statements are synonyms.

"Most genes contain the information needed to make functional molecules called proteins."

...but there is a direct physico-chemical link between the DNA sequence and the assembled and folded protein.

Then you say..."displaying Aspberger's-like lack of understanding of expressions, or a lack of comprehension or understanding."

That's pretty hilarious

The information is the physico-chemical link.

Really?? How on Earth sir can INFORMATION be the Physico-Chemical link when Information is neither Matter or Energy:

Norbert Wiener Professor Mathematics MIT...

“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.”
Wiener, N., Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Hermann et Cie, The Technology Press, Paris, 1948.

Pray Tell...?

So are you saying Physico-Chemical is neither Matter or Energy? Are they 'Synonyms' This is Aspberger's^10000...
Are you familiar with The Law of Non-Contradiction, by chance?


oy vey

 

[Shalamar]

Then you say..."displaying Aspberger's-like lack of understanding of expressions, or a lack of comprehension or understanding."

That's pretty hilarious





Really?? How on Earth sir can INFORMATION be the Physico-Chemical link when Information is neither Matter or Energy:

Norbert Wiener Professor Mathematics MIT...

“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.”
Wiener, N., Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Hermann et Cie, The Technology Press, Paris, 1948.

Pray Tell...?

So are you saying Physico-Chemical is neither Matter or Energy? Are they 'Synonyms' This is Aspberger's^10000...
Are you familiar with The Law of Non-Contradiction, by chance?


oy vey

Argument by incredulity.

For the love of FSM, do you even read what people are posting?

PLEASE, take a science course. Read a science textbook, anything but your continual anti-science copied from creationist sites! You are looking increasingly foolish, and people here are trying to teach you something!

 

[ComfySlippers]

Daniel is funny. Can we keep him?
I could feed him on Tuesday's and Friday's.
Please can we keep him? Please?

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

He is cleansing the temple by whipping out the evildoers.

I think you've identified a better Christ vision he is working from.

 

[MikeG]

Then you say..."displaying Aspberger's-like lack of understanding of expressions, or a lack of comprehension or understanding."

That's pretty hilarious





Really?? How on Earth sir can INFORMATION be the Physico-Chemical link when Information is neither Matter or Energy:

Norbert Wiener Professor Mathematics MIT...

“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.”
Wiener, N., Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Hermann et Cie, The Technology Press, Paris, 1948.

Pray Tell...?

So are you saying Physico-Chemical is neither Matter or Energy? Are they 'Synonyms' This is Aspberger's^10000...
Are you familiar with The Law of Non-Contradiction, by chance?


oy vey

I thought you might actually try to refute my post. As you haven't, I'll take it that you agree with it, even though you haven't categorised the source of your ignorance on the subject as the post requests. Nonetheless, small steps forward. Daniel agrees that physico-chemical action is what acts as information within DNA. Yay, after weeks, Daniel learns something!

 

[Son of Inigo]

Then you say..."displaying Aspberger's-like lack of understanding of expressions, or a lack of comprehension or understanding."

That's pretty hilarious

Really?? How on Earth sir can INFORMATION be the Physico-Chemical link when Information is neither Matter or Energy:

Norbert Wiener Professor Mathematics MIT...

“Information is information, neither matter nor energy.”
Wiener, N., Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Hermann et Cie, The Technology Press, Paris, 1948.

Pray Tell...?

So are you saying Physico-Chemical is neither Matter or Energy? Are they 'Synonyms' This is Aspberger's^10000...
Are you familiar with The Law of Non-Contradiction, by chance?


oy vey

I don't know about you Daniel, but I am having a blast! It is so fun whacking your mined quotes.

Norbert Wiener Professor Mathematics MIT.

From: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/wiener/

Norbert Wiener created the modern field of control and communication systems, utilizing concepts like negative feedback. His seminal 1948 book Cybernetics both defined and named the new field.

In the book, Wiener helped define the new quantitative concept of information coming out of the work of John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon on computers and communications.

Bolding mine.

Not seeing how Wiener's definition of information has anything to do with biology. However, I do agree with that statement as it pertains to computer and communication systems (telephone, ect).

Here is a bit more from the same link. Again, this is in context, something I know you just hate.

Wiener compared the information processing in the computers of his day to the human mind and found them both wasteful of energy. And he argued that information is neither matter nor energy.

"As a final remark, let me point out that a large computing machine, whether in the form of mechanical or electric apparatus or in the form of the brain itself, uses up a considerable amount of power, all of which is wasted and dissipated in heat. The blood leaving the brain is a fraction of a degree warmer than that entering it. No other computing machine approaches the economy of energy of the brain. In a large apparatus like the Eniac or Edvac, the filaments of the tubes consume a quantity of energy which may well be measured in kilowatts, and unless adequate ventilating and cooling apparatus is provided, the system will suffer from what is the mechanical equivalent of pyrexia, until the constants of the machine are radically changed by the heat, and its performance breaks down. Nevertheless, the energy spent per individual operation is almost vanishingly small, and does not even begin to form an adequate measure of the performance of the apparatus. The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day"​

(Cybernetics, 2nd edition, p.132)

Daniel, would you care to point out to me where he is talking about anything other than information contained in computers or communication systems?

Also, there is this, again from the above link. It talks about

Information philosophy agrees that "information is neither matter nor energy," but it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication.

We are immersed in a life in which the world as a whole obeys the second law of thermodynamics: confusion increases and order decreases. Yet, as we have seen, the second law of thermodynamics, while it may be a valid statement about the whole of a closed system, is definitely not valid concerning a non-isolated part of it. Processes that decrease the entropy locally we call "ergodic" There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress. What can we say about the general direction of the battle between progress and increasing entropy in the world immediately about us?​

(The Human Use of Human Beings, p.44)

Also, you might want to read this article from Scientific America.

Fact or Fiction?: Energy Can Neither Be Created Nor Destroyed: Is energy always conserved, even in the case of the expanding universe by Clara Moskowitz on August 5, 2014

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/energy-can-neither-be-created-nor-destroyed/

It addresses your Law of Thermodynamics arguments

And then there is this, which pretty much tells you what information means.

What about ‘information'? by Massimo Pigliucci

There are many technical definitions of information. Perhaps the most commonly cited is that of Claude Shannon (1916–2001), which is related to the physical concept of entropy. At the most basic level, however, in order to talk meaningfully about information there has to be either an organism or a man-made device involved. For instance, when we say that plants act on information about the position of the sun to orient their leaves, or that DNA carries information from one generation to another, or that a satellite in orbit gathers information about the weather, we mean that there is a causal input of some sort that interacts with a receiver of a given type.

Another way to put this is that information is any type of pattern of matter and/or energy that causes or contributes to causing the formation or transformation of other patterns. Again, think of the examples above: the light falling on the plant (energy) alters the orientation of the leaves (matter); the DNA carried by germ cells (matter) contributes to the formation of a new organism in the next generation (matter); and the photographs taken by a satellite (either energy or matter), depending on the medium used to record them, influence whether you will pick up an umbrella (matter) on your way out the door.

Pigliucci, M. (2011). What about “information”? EMBO Reports, 12(2), 92. http://doi.org/10.1038/embor.2010.213

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049437/

I look forward to your rebuttal of the information (choice of word intentional) I have presented to you.

 

[MikeG]

Good work, Son of Inigo. It's quite a giggle seeing Daniel's quote mining coming back to haunt him.

I pretty sure if it were me trying to persuade a whole group of rationalists to change their entire world view to accept the irrational, that I would at least go to the trouble of reading the stuff I was posting in support of my case to............you know.............make sure it actually does support my case. That would seem obvious, rather than just metaphorically blasting myself in my foot, repeatedly, with quotes which actually say the opposite of what I claim they say. Maybe that's just me.

 

[marplots]

The problem with this "isn't matter or energy" bit is that any instantiation of information we know about does use matter and energy. It's like saying "smells bad" isn't matter or energy to make it seem mysterious.

All we need to do is ask for an example of something with information, scramble that thing a bit and ask if the new arrangement still has the same information. If it doesn't, and I only manipulated matter and energy in my scramble, then information is very much a property of matter and energy. Conceptualize all you want, but it only exists when it is embodied in some material form. you could make the same kind of smooshy, mysterious claim about mathematics with the same lack of effect.

Classic map and territory mix-up. Works the same too: DNA is just mathematics, and mathematics, which is neither matter nor energy, requires a Mathematician. Hence God.

 

[Son of Inigo]

The problem with this "isn't matter or energy" bit is that any instantiation of information we know about does use matter and energy. It's like saying "smells bad" isn't matter or energy to make it seem mysterious.

All we need to do is ask for an example of something with information, scramble that thing a bit and ask if the new arrangement still has the same information. If it doesn't, and I only manipulated matter and energy in my scramble, then information is very much a property of matter and energy. Conceptualize all you want, but it only exists when it is embodied in some material form. you could make the same kind of smooshy, mysterious claim about mathematics with the same lack of effect.

Classic map and territory mix-up. Works the same too: DNA is just mathematics, and mathematics, which is neither matter nor energy, requires a Mathematician. Hence God.

marplots

I think I see where you are going with this. Perhaps reading the link I supplied above may help?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049437/

To my layman mind, it clears up the whole information is not matter and energy argument that has been presented in this thread very nicely.

If you have already read it, I would be interested in knowing if you agree or disagree with it.

Respectfully,

 

[marplots]

marplots

I think I see where you are going with this. Perhaps reading the link I supplied above may help?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049437/

To my layman mind, it clears up the whole information is not matter and energy argument that has been presented in this thread very nicely.

If you have already read it, I would be interested in knowing if you agree or disagree with it.

Respectfully,

Pretty much agree. I think the parallel with mathematics is a good one too, in that both can be useful ways to describe the world around us but have no independent existence.

I'd say it's more of an artifact of language than anything else. Useful in the way language is useful, but misleading in the same manner as well. I think all descriptors have this property - I can usefully say that "Malcolm is a tall man," but if I can't point to "tall" on its own, does that remove "tall" from the matter and energy universe?

I wonder if Daniel could point to DNA that has no information whatsoever. I think it would be as hard as me finding some human who doesn't have a size. I propose that envisioning the category - the very mechanism that creates the group - also creates these conceptual properties and if the category contains physical things, it necessarily contains conceptual properties as a way of talking about them.

If that's so, it isn't so much discovering some property but exposing the construction of the category. For DNA, we select out one group of chemicals in a cell and inject the "information" label as part of that process, sometimes forgetting what we have done.

In my medical training we were taught physiology by studying systems - circulation, metabolism, individual organs and so on. It then became difficult to see the body as an interacting whole system. The tendency was always to fall back on how it was originally taught and artificially categorized. Still useful, but possibly misleading. You never want to forget what's in play.

Daniel's misuse of information in DNA is an example of this type of error. I could make the same claim about fingerprints, how by allowing me to solve crimes, they contain information that must have been put there for me to be able to solve crimes. They may seem random, but son-of-a-gun, there they are on the tips of every normal finger. Saying fingerprints "contain" information is a useful concept, but it's very much an artifact of context and not independent.

By the way, I'm a big fan of Massimo Pigliucci, so thanks for that link.

 

[MikeG]

........I wonder if Daniel could point to DNA that has no information whatsoever.........

I asked him already. Guess what? He skipped right on by and pretended he hadn't seen it.

 

[Daniel]

The problem with this "isn't matter or energy" bit is that any instantiation of information we know about does use matter and energy.

We use it "The Medium"....it's NOT "IT"(Information). That's "The Medium" used to Convey Information, it's NOT the Information itself.

Information is ASSIGNED to a Medium by Intelligent Agents, ONLY.

I can use, to communicate: "Look out there's a Tiger behind you": chalk, ink, graphite, sand, toothpicks, strawberry jelly...

Is the Strawberry Jelly(ect) telling you there's a Tiger Behind You?? Or just an Intelligent Agent using different Mediums??

Paul Revere...what's the "CODE" ? One Light or Two Lights (The Medium), right? What's the Software/Information? It was the "Preemptive" Agreed Upon Meaning between Paul and The Patriots.
Who Created the Software/Message (The "1 if by Land and 2 if by Sea")... the Lights or Paul Revere and The Patriots ??

According to your World-View...it was "The Medium"....the Lights!!!

All we need to do is ask for an example of something with information, scramble that thing a bit and ask if the new arrangement still has the same information.

So I write on a Chalk Board "Look Out, there's a Tiger Behind you!!" you read it; then I erase the board with my hand. Are you still aware of the Message/Information you just read/understood?? What if someone walks in right after I erased it...can they liberate the message by reconstructing the chalk dust from my hand ??

If it doesn't, and I only manipulated matter and energy in my scramble, then information is very much a property of matter and energy.

It's not, you clearly have the wrONG emPHAsis on the wrONG syLLAble.


regards

 

[marplots]

I asked him already. Guess what? He skipped right on by and pretended he hadn't seen it.

It's tough on this forum when the avalanche of responses come it. You almost have to pick out those things you find interesting and have a good response to. It just gets overwhelming.