The supernatural

[IanS]

The point that's worth making to him (in the unlikely event he can grasp it) is that's all he's doing because it's all he can do. And it's entirely worthless, because retrofitting proves nothing.

His argument would be millions of times more convincing if he could point to a single example of a scientific discovery being predicted by the Qu'ran before it was made. Either an example from the past of someone using the Qu'ran to predict a specific discovery that was later confirmed, or someone today using it to predict a specific discovery that is then confirmed. But he can't do that because there are no scientific discoveries predicted in the Qu'ran, his desperate and deluded attempts to read them into it notwithstanding.

OK, just re that highlight - Heydarian is claiming that in 600AD the Quran did already describe or predict all modern scientific discoveries. And his evidence for that is to say he has new and completely accurate transaltions which show those descriptions in hundreds of different verses.

So that (your highlight) is exactly what he is claiming to show!

A more valid way to way to trap him or expose him on that is, as I just repeated again above, to show that both Heydarain and all his fellow Islamic ijaz preachers, only started to make their claims of finding such science in the Quran, AFTER science had alreday explained it to the world!

The difference is the date at which the claims were first made, not the date when any verses first appeared the Quran. And that is a huge difference - the verses appeared in the Quran from about 630AD, but the claims only started to appear afaik in the 1970's !

I asked him about that at least a dozen times as far back as maybe 6 months ago in this thread. But his response was alwasy to ignore uncomfortable questions like that.

But that is not the same thing as asking him to produce a new scientific hypothesis of his own. Or asking him to find a verse in the Quran that makes a claim of some new as yet undiscovered science. So far, he has not claimed to have done anything like that afaik. All that he has claimed is that God is in any case proved the "fact" that he has found hundreds of verses where a Quran from circa 650AD already described all of modern science. But that is entirely different from the question of when he or other recent Muslims started to make such claims.

 

[Pixel42]

OK, just re that highlight - Heydarian is claiming that in 600AD the Quran did already describe or predict all modern scientific discoveries. And his evidence for that is to say he has new and completely accurate transaltions which show those descriptions in hundreds of different verses.

So that (your highlight) is exactly what he is claiming to show!

No, because in the sentence after the one you highlighted I go on to specify exactly what is required to show it, and the "evidence" he offers does not come close to meeting those requirements. There are two possible ways to do so, and heydarian has never attempted either.

 

[IanS]

The point that's worth making to him (in the unlikely event he can grasp it) is that's all he's doing because it's all he can do. And it's entirely worthless, because retrofitting proves nothing.

His argument would be millions of times more convincing if he could point to a single example of a scientific discovery being predicted by the Qu'ran before it was made. Either (1) an example from the past of someone using the Qu'ran to predict a specific discovery that was later confirmed, or (2) someone today using it to predict a specific discovery that is then confirmed. But he can't do that because there are no scientific discoveries predicted in the Qu'ran, his desperate and deluded attempts to read them into it notwithstanding.

No, because in the sentence after the one you highlighted I go on to specify exactly what is required to show it, and the "evidence" he offers does not come close to meeting those requirements. There are two possible ways to do so, and heydarian has never attempted either.

Well, re 1 ... I don't recall Heydarian ever claiming that he had done that, or that he could do that, or agreeing that it was necessary at all? Did he make that claim somewhere?

He has so far adopted the position that he does not need to do anything like that. Because he says that the Quran had already produced all of these scientific explanations by 650AD. That's his argument. He is not (AFAIK and IIRC) making any claims about producing "an example from the past of someone using the Qur'an to predict a specific discovery that was later confirmed" ...

... he does not need to do that. You may say that his claims would be a million times more convincing if he did do that. But he is saying that he provides all the proof ever needed because his correct translation of the 7th century Quran reveals descriptions of all modern science ... so he does not need to do what you say at all.

The second sentence, i.e. No.2 is actually exactly a repeat of the first sentence, i.e. the exact same thing, i.e. "someone today using it to predict a specific discovery that is then confirmed" ... So again, in his mind he has no need to do that.

What I asked him to do was slightly different (and others here and elsewhere have posed the same question, for the same reason) – Q ; did any Muslims inc. himself ever claim to find those sentences of science in the Quran BEFORE science told everyone about it? That does not trap him either, for the exact same reasons as above. But if he simply answers the question, i.e. honestly accepting that the answer is “No”, ie the scientific discovery was made first, and only decades or centuries later did he or Islam then claim to discover that it was also mentioned in the Quran … then if he agrees with that, that agreement is very damaging to his case … i.e. it would show that he had never found any of it in the Quran until long after science had already told him about it! ...

... it's just like any of us claiming that we personaly are the discoverers of a new particle called the Higgs Boson which we just discovered last week ... well, too late mate, & not a valid claim, because Peter Higgs already predicetd it from QM-Maths in the 1960's and it was already confimed at the LHC 10 years ago. So, too late for you to have any credibilty in personally claiming discovery of it now!

 

[Pixel42]

Well, re 1 ... I don't recall Heydarian ever claiming that he had done that, or that he could do that, or agreeing that it was necessary at all? Did he make that claim somewhere?

No. That's the point. It's the only claim which, if he could produce evidence for it, would actually mean something, and he doesn't even understand why that is.

 

[IanS]

No. That's the point. It's the only claim which, if he could produce evidence for it, would actually mean something, and he doesn't even understand why that is.

Well actually that's not correct. He is claiming to have produced, not merely evidence of his beliefs, but actual certain proof by saying that all sorts of verses in the Quran describe modern science. That's his proof of God.

So if that claim of his was true, or at least convincing to you, then you would be forced to agree with him.

But of course you don't agree with his translation of those Quranic verses and what he says those translations mean. You are rejecting that. But that IS his evidence, in fact he claims it as absolute unarguable proof.

And each time you reject that from him, he just repeats his claim, and you just go round in circles hundreds of times getting absolutely nowhere.

Trying that exact same line of argument with him by saying that he needs to produce an example from the past of "someone using the Qu'ran to predict a specific discovery that was later confirmed “, is a complete waste of time because he can just say that he has no need to do that at all because he has already given you 100 proofs that he is right with his verses from the Quran!

So you get nowhere at all by that line of argument.

That's why I keep persuing that very different line of argument with him, to say that he must produce real peer-reviewed science papers where the authors claim to have found evidence of modern science revealed in 650AD copies of the Quran. I'll spell out again why I am pressing him on that -

- when Heydarian says there are various descriptions in the Quran of things like evolution, quantum theory, relativity, the Big Bang, black holes, neutron stars etc., those are all things that the world learned about from published peer-reviewed science research papers. IOW, the science that he claims to have found in the Quran comes to us, and comes to Heydarian, entirely from those research papers …

… so I'm asking him to produce the papers which claim to have discovered evidence in the Quran for those discoveries. But of course he cannot produce any papers which make that claim of saying that the Quran contained all of this way back in 650AD … because out of millions of such papers, none of them claim any evidence for that whatsoever.

As far as I can see - that is a complete refutation of his claims of finding those scientific discoveries in the Quran.

And that's why that is, I think (?), a vastly better argument against Heydarian than trying to say that he must produce “an example from the past of someone using the Qu'ran to predict a specific discovery that was later confirmed” … because (to repeat) he does not need to do what you say there at all … instead he simply tells you that he has already given you a complete unarguable proof where he says hundreds of verses in the Quran do indeed describe all of modern science.

Does that make sense to you? Do you see what I am driving at here?

 

[steenkh]

I think Heydarian does not understand the concept of “retrofitting”. This could be because Google translate probably also can’t give a satisfactory translation to his native language, and he wouldn’t know a prediction from a postdiction - another untranslatable word.

Besides the language difficulties, I think that the problem is also at the conceptual level: Heydarian needs to understand why fitting quotes from old books to new concepts does not impress us. He needs to understand that this could be done with any book, not just the Quran.

But his religion will probably tell him that in case the Quran has not predicted something, the rule that the Quran has always predicted everything will kick into action, saving the situation.

 

[IanS]

I think Heydarian does not understand the concept of “retrofitting”. This could be because Google translate probably also can’t give a satisfactory translation to his native language, and he wouldn’t know a prediction from a postdiction - another untranslatable word.

Besides the language difficulties, I think that the problem is also at the conceptual level: Heydarian needs to understand why fitting quotes from old books to new concepts does not impress us. He needs to understand that this could be done with any book, not just the Quran.

But his religion will probably tell him that in case the Quran has not predicted something, the rule that the Quran has always predicted everything will kick into action, saving the situation.

OK, I'm just chatting about all of this with you and MoJo and Pixel, I am not being confrontational at all …

… so just as an entirely friendly and hopefully constructive conversation – when we say Heydarian is “retro fitting” things, in this case I don't think he is actually doing anything wrong with that.

What I mean is - what Heydarian is doing, is following, ie repeating, what certain Islamic writers started to claim in the 1970's, and that is to claim that various verses of the Quran actually describe what we have since learned from modern-day science ...

... I don't know if you'd really call that "retro fitting" in any critical sense, because all that he's doing is saying that if you look very carefully at the Quran then you will find that it describes things that science only discovered 1200+ years later in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

If what he said was true, ie if there really were verses in the Quran describing things like evolution and the big bang etc., then it would be entirely valid for people like Heydarin to point that out.

That's also really the answer to Pixel saying that Heydarian needs to produce someone who described things in the Quran and which only LATER were found to be correct ... well, that's exactly what he has been claiming here. That is - he is claiming that Mohamed described all of this to other Muslims around 630AD, and then we only verified it as all true with science from about the time of Darwin onwards.

But of course the problem is that what Heydarian, and incidentally millions of modern-day Muslims, claim as descriptions of science in those verses of the Quran, is completely untrue ... those verses contain nothing at all about modern science. OK, so we all know that ... but I'm just stressing that, that IS the Crux of the problem here ... ie he is making, and millions like him are making, an entirely false claim about what is actually said in those verses of the Quran.

I'll try not to labour this further by repeating why I think the most valid refutation of what he says is to point out that he is actually using the published research that first alerted the world to things like Evolution and the Big Bang etc (hundreds of things in his claims), that's where he is getting the science from … without that published peer-reviewed research, he would never have known anything about any of that science ... however, the killer factor here is that none of those published research papers accept or agree that the Quran ever described any of that science at all ... IOW - the published science, which he himself is entirely relying on, totally rejects what he is claiming. And that really is an outright demolition of his case/claims/beliefs.

There may be other ways to refute what heydarian and his fellow fundamentalists claim. But that's the only really effective one that I see at present.

Of course that does not mean Heydarian will ever give up or ever agree with us. On the contrary he has repeatedly told us that he will never give up, no matter what is said and no matter how wrong he is shown to be - he simply will never accept anything against his religious beliefs. But I think it's still worth us exposing why his claims are invalid and demonstrably untrue … and that's what all of the published science shows.


Footnote - in the case of early discoveries such as evolution, Darwin published the work in a book, and not in a peer-reviewed paper/journal. However, that's only because at that date the need to present work in peer-reviewed journals was not yet fully established ... though iirc there were such journals that had been in existence since the early 1800's (eg iirc, Phil Trans). But the point against Heydarian is still exactly the same. Namely, that he only knows about evolution entirely because some scientists such as Darwin published it. So when Heydarain claims to find evolution described in the Quran, he is relying entirely on using publications such as that of Darwin ... but neither Darwin nor any other scientist has ever claimed in those books and papers to have found evidence that God told Mohamed about evolution such that it was described from 630AD in any Quran! ... IOW - the very papers/sources which heydarian is entirely reliant upon, all completely reject his claims.

 

[Mojo]

OK, I'm just chatting about all of this with you and MoJo and Pixel, I am not being confrontational at all …

… so just as an entirely friendly and hopefully constructive conversation – when we say Heydarian is “retro fitting” things, in this case I don't think he is actually doing anything wrong with that.

What he’s doing is exactly the same thing people do when they claim to have found prophesies in Nostradamus’ ramblings. The quatrains never actually predict anything, but once something has happened it is sometimes possible to find something in the large volume of writings that looks a bit like it.

Saeed claims that the Quran contains clear descriptions of scientific discoveries. If this is the case, then people should have been able to use the Quran to identify the discoveries before they were made, and Saeed should be able to provide us with information about future discoveries.

Descriptions of past scientific discoveries, if they actually exist, could be used to form the hypothesis that the Quran contains previously unknown scientific information, but to test that hypothesis he needs to try to identify future discoveries.

If someone threw a six with a die, and then claimed that they could throw a six every time, would you accept the six they had already thrown as proof of this?

 

[Myriad]

What he’s doing is exactly the same thing people do when they claim to have found prophesies in Nostradamus’ ramblings. The quatrains never actually predict anything, but once something has happened it is sometimes possible to find something in the large volume of writings that looks a bit like it.

Saeed claims that the Quran contains clear descriptions of scientific discoveries. If this is the case, then people should have been able to use the Quran to identify the discoveries before they were made, and Saeed should be able to provide us with information about future discoveries.

Descriptions of past scientific discoveries, if they actually exist, could be used to form the hypothesis that the Quran contains previously unknown scientific information, but to test that hypothesis he needs to try to identify future discoveries.

We can also check the accuracy of the descriptions of the scientific discoveries claimed so far to have been predicted in the Quran. Since it's been discovered that DNA stores large amounts of information, Saeed equates it with a passage describing angels recording everyone's thoughts and actions. Such records would indeed be a large amount of information. But as far as we know, DNA does not store anyone's thoughts and actions. There's no evidence that it does so (for instance, we do not see DNA sequences change or expand during a person's lifetime, as we would expect if they were storing that kind of information), and there's no known plausible process by which it could do so.

We could, I suppose, take saeed's claim that the Quran says DNA records our thoughts and actions as a prediction of a future scientific discovery that it actually does so. (What a boon to law enforcement: "Forget the witnesses, let's just sequence the suspect's DNA and see if there are any murders in there.") However, besides being implausible, such a future discovery would contradict much of our present scientific knowledge of cell biochemistry, that was supposedly also predicted in the Quran. So either way, the hypothesis that the Quran predicts modern scientific knowledge must lead to the conclusion that it often predicts wrongly.

 

[Mojo]

We can also check the accuracy of the descriptions of the scientific discoveries claimed so far to have been predicted in the Quran. Since it's been discovered that DNA stores large amounts of information, Saeed equates it with a passage describing angels recording everyone's thoughts and actions. Such records would indeed be a large amount of information. But as far as we know, DNA does not store anyone's thoughts and actions. There's no evidence that it does so (for instance, we do not see DNA sequences change or expand during a person's lifetime, as we would expect if they were storing that kind of information), and there's no known plausible process by which it could do so.

We could, I suppose, take saeed's claim that the Quran says DNA records our thoughts and actions as a prediction of a future scientific discovery that it actually does so. (What a boon to law enforcement: "Forget the witnesses, let's just sequence the suspect's DNA and see if there are any murders in there.") However, besides being implausible, such a future discovery would contradict much of our present scientific knowledge of cell biochemistry, that was supposedly also predicted in the Quran. So either way, the hypothesis that the Quran predicts modern scientific knowledge must lead to the conclusion that it often predicts wrongly.

It’s revealing that the Saeed’s “translation” of the Quran shares Saeed’s misunderstandings of science.

 

[IanS]

What he’s doing is exactly the same thing people do when they claim to have found prophesies in Nostradamus’ ramblings. The quatrains never actually predict anything, but once something has happened it is sometimes possible to find something in the large volume of writings that looks a bit like it.

Saeed claims that the Quran contains clear descriptions of scientific discoveries. If this is the case, then people should have been able to use the Quran to identify the discoveries before they were made, and Saeed should be able to provide us with information about future discoveries.
Descriptions of past scientific discoveries, if they actually exist, could be used to form the hypothesis that the Quran contains previously unknown scientific information, but to test that hypothesis he needs to try to identify future discoveries.

If someone threw a six with a die, and then claimed that they could throw a six every time, would you accept the six they had already thrown as proof of this?

Re the highlight (and to repeat) - Heydarian has done exactly what you are asking asking for! - ie, he says that by about 630AD the Quran already described all of modern science ... that had all been communicated to Mohamed, and he communicated it to others who wrote it all down, and ever since then it has been communicated to all Muslims when they hear the preaching of the Quran.

He says, or implies (I don't recall him ever being seriously pinned down on this point), that people at the time would not understand any scientific terms or scientific language, and so that's why (according to heydarian) the verses had to be written in the common every-day vauge poetic wording of the time ... actually I did ask him about that very close to the beginning of this thread, and of course his response (which is the standard response from most Muslims and Christians) was to say that God could not describe quantum theory or evolution as we understand it now in 2022, because people in 600AD did not understand what an atom is or what genes are etc. etc ... so that was his excuse for why the verses of the Quran do not sound to us anything remotely like science. But the point is (just to be ultra clear) -

- Heydarian thereby claims that all of science was indeed communicated to everyone from about 630AD. And the only reason that people, ie Muslims, did not really use any of it to make scientific discoveries themselves many hundreds of years ago, is that they did did not understand what the verses meant .... but he says, they do now understand it because he himself and other Islamic fanatics have now explained it all with modern correct translations (his own translations!).

So ... in his mind, and in his submission/claims here, he has already done what you & Pixel have asked of him.

 

[malbui]

- Heydarian thereby claims that all of science was indeed communicated to everyone from about 630AD. And the only reason that people, ie Muslims, did not really use any of it to make scientific discoveries themselves many hundreds of years ago, is that they did did not understand what the verses meant .... but he says, they do now understand it because he himself and other Islamic fanatics have now explained it all with modern correct translations (his own translations!).

So ... in his mind, and in his submission/claims here, he has already done what you & Pixel have asked of him.

Maybe we're going around in circles here but the point of what Mojo and I and some others have been saying is that now that Heydarian has provided correct translations of the Quran, all he needs to do is point to something in there that is so clear and so ground-breaking that it can be verified by modern experimental science. Hence references in this thread to dark matter or dark energy or my particular interest in superconductivity or anything else that physics or chemistry is inching towards. If it's been dictated into the Quran and is understandable to man as Heydarian claims, then let's cut out tens of billions of dollars and decades of research and go right to it.

 

[Mojo]

Re the highlight (and to repeat) - Heydarian has done exactly what you are asking asking for!

Please link to the post in which he has made a testable prediction about currently unknown science.

 

[IanS]

We can also check the accuracy of the descriptions of the scientific discoveries claimed so far to have been predicted in the Quran. Since it's been discovered that DNA stores large amounts of information, Saeed equates it with a passage describing angels recording everyone's thoughts and actions. Such records would indeed be a large amount of information. But as far as we know, DNA does not store anyone's thoughts and actions. There's no evidence that it does so (for instance, we do not see DNA sequences change or expand during a person's lifetime, as we would expect if they were storing that kind of information), and there's no known plausible process by which it could do so.

We could, I suppose, take saeed's claim that the Quran says DNA records our thoughts and actions as a prediction of a future scientific discovery that it actually does so. (What a boon to law enforcement: "Forget the witnesses, let's just sequence the suspect's DNA and see if there are any murders in there.") However, besides being implausible, such a future discovery would contradict much of our present scientific knowledge of cell biochemistry, that was supposedly also predicted in the Quran. So either way, the hypothesis that the Quran predicts modern scientific knowledge must lead to the conclusion that it often predicts wrongly.

There's a problem here with using words like "information", "code" or "store" etc. Namely that all sorts of religious groups (particularly Christianity, but also now Islam with people like Heydarian), have jumped on descriptive terms like “information” and “code” to claim that even biologists themselves are now admitting and accepting intelligent designer intent within DNA.

But of course that's wrong not merely because no such intent or intelligence is being claimed by any biologists, but also because those descriptive words are not literally true or accurate.

Biologists have used words like “information” and “code” as a short-hand analogy to give people (the public and other biologists alike) an idea of the way in which DNA (or other molecules) engage in chemical reactions.

But when they say “information” they are only talking about the various chemical reactions that the molecule undergoes, ie how it's changed by chemical interaction with other molecules. There is no “information” there actually in the DNA … it's only we as human investigators who feel “informed” by the features that we find in the chemistry of DNA.

“Information” (and “code”) is something that requires an intelligence, ie it's a considered interpretation of things. ... We "consider" the properties to be "informative" to us ... and we consider, treat or use a sequence of changes as a "code for us to understand and recognise", ie for us to think of it & use it in that way.

For example – you could equally say that Stars “store Information & have a Code” … ie they have all sorts of continuously updating & changing properties, that we use as “information” to calculate how & why our universe/galaxy/solar-system/planet all formed … there is a sequence of specific events there which you could equally call a “code”, but there is actually no real “code” there at all. And there is not in DNA or any other molecule either …

… the stars (and indeed DNA) were all there, all formed, billions of years before any humans came along to talk about “information & code” … the properties and features in reactions of the stars and of DNA were all present and happening long before any biologist came along to say it was a “code” that “stored information” … all that was there was normal fully understood chemical reactions … that's all that DNA or any molecules can ever do … the reactions produce different new molecules (and the original molecules are destroyed, broken apart, in that process), &/or they change their physical form to adopt a new spatial geometry etc.,... but they are not storing information or codes! … they are simply changing their chemical and physical properties as a result of the energy exchange from chemical interactions … that's not information or code, UNTIL we as human come along and say that those features and properties that we now observe, are useful to us as “our information”, and that we can think of it like a form of what we have invented in our language as “codes”.

As I say it would not matter, except that millions of Christians and Muslims have used that to claim that DNA therefore contains the work of an intelligent designer (God), because even biologists tell them (wrongly!) that it contains “information” & “a code”.

So why do biologists continue with such words, or even insist that the terms are indeed an correct description of DNA? Well, it's because they have no interest in what religious fanatics say! They are getting on with their research and are not remotely interested in religious claims about the nature of the language being used in biology.

 

[IanS]

Please link to the post in which he has made a testable prediction about currently unknown science.

He is not personally predicting any currently unknown science. And I have never said he has. So why on earth are you asking me to do that lol!

Look - what he has done is to claim currently known/discovered science was already revealed in the Quran from 630AD!!! That's what you have to deal with! And I must have just explained at least 5 times in those posts above.

He has no need whatsoever to do what you say and produce his own claim of some science that is currently unknown to anyone ... to repeat - he claims that exact revelation already happened in 630AD when the science was revealed to Mohamed but where it has only confirmed by science now 1400 years later!

Do you really not understand that??

He has already done exactly what you are demanding! And that's his entire case in every one of his 1000 posts here? Did you really not realise that??

 

[Mojo]

Please link to the post in which he has made a testable prediction about currently unknown science.

He is not personally predicting any currently unknown science. And I have never said he has.. So why on earth are you asking me to do that lol!

Yes, you did:

Saeed claims that the Quran contains clear descriptions of scientific discoveries. If this is the case, then people should have been able to use the Quran to identify the discoveries before they were made, and Saeed should be able to provide us with information about future discoveries.

Re the highlight (and to repeat) - Heydarian has done exactly what you are asking asking for!

I was asking for testable predictions regarding future scientific discoveries. You claimed that Saeed “has done exactly what [I was] asking asking for”. That’s why I asked you to link to a post that supports your claim.

 

[Pixel42]

What he has been doing is twisting, mistranslating and misinterpreting the words of the Qu'ran to make them seem to fit later scientific discoveries after those discoveries have been made. This is an utterly meaningless thing to do. It proves absolutely nothing. That he still does not understand this does not make it any less meaningless. We cannot and will not accept it as a valid thing to do. Because it isn't. We reject it completely.

The only way to show that the Qu'ran predicts later scientific discoveries is to show that it can be used to predict a specific scientific discovery before it is made. He can either point to an example of a Qu'ran scholar who already successfully did this - and I'm talking about a documented example of one pointing to a specific verse and stating "This is predicting that the universe is expanding", or something equally precise, before that was discovered - or he can attempt to do it himself for some future, equally specific, discovery. He certainly has not already done either of those things.

 

[Myriad]

There's a problem here with using words like "information", "code" or "store" etc. Namely that all sorts of religious groups (particularly Christianity, but also now Islam with people like Heydarian), have jumped on descriptive terms like “information” and “code” to claim that even biologists themselves are now admitting and accepting intelligent designer intent within DNA.

But of course that's wrong not merely because no such intent or intelligence is being claimed by any biologists, but also because those descriptive words are not literally true or accurate.

Biologists have used words like “information” and “code” as a short-hand analogy to give people (the public and other biologists alike) an idea of the way in which DNA (or other molecules) engage in chemical reactions.

But when they say “information” they are only talking about the various chemical reactions that the molecule undergoes, ie how it's changed by chemical interaction with other molecules. There is no “information” there actually in the DNA … it's only we as human investigators who feel “informed” by the features that we find in the chemistry of DNA.

“Information” (and “code”) is something that requires an intelligence, ie it's a considered interpretation of things. ... We "consider" the properties to be "informative" to us ... and we consider, treat or use a sequence of changes as a "code for us to understand and recognise", ie for us to think of it & use it in that way.

For example – you could equally say that Stars “store Information & have a Code” … ie they have all sorts of continuously updating & changing properties, that we use as “information” to calculate how & why our universe/galaxy/solar-system/planet all formed … there is a sequence of specific events there which you could equally call a “code”, but there is actually no real “code” there at all. And there is not in DNA or any other molecule either …

… the stars (and indeed DNA) were all there, all formed, billions of years before any humans came along to talk about “information & code” … the properties and features in reactions of the stars and of DNA were all present and happening long before any biologist came along to say it was a “code” that “stored information” … all that was there was normal fully understood chemical reactions … that's all that DNA or any molecules can ever do … the reactions produce different new molecules (and the original molecules are destroyed, broken apart, in that process), &/or they change their physical form to adopt a new spatial geometry etc.,... but they are not storing information or codes! … they are simply changing their chemical and physical properties as a result of the energy exchange from chemical interactions … that's not information or code, UNTIL we as human come along and say that those features and properties that we now observe, are useful to us as “our information”, and that we can think of it like a form of what we have invented in our language as “codes”.

As I say it would not matter, except that millions of Christians and Muslims have used that to claim that DNA therefore contains the work of an intelligent designer (God), because even biologists tell them (wrongly!) that it contains “information” & “a code”.

So why do biologists continue with such words, or even insist that the terms are indeed an correct description of DNA? Well, it's because they have no interest in what religious fanatics say! They are getting on with their research and are not remotely interested in religious claims about the nature of the language being used in biology.

Information theory provides a precise definition of information and how to measure it. Actually there are several different such measures, but the default one, if someone just mentions information without further specification, is Shannon information. Shannon information applies quite well to sequences of items selected from a limited set of choices, such as text, computer data, and genomes. It puts comparisons like how many encyclopedia volumes worth of information a given genome encompasses on very firm theoretical ground.

Referring to DNA as a "code" is a reference to the "genetic code" which is simply a mapping between the 64 possible three-base sequences of DNA and the 20 different amino acids that make up the proteins the genes "code for." As you say, not really a code but a high-level description of a biochemical process. (Of course, one could say something similar about "computer code" which is a high-level description of an electronic process. The word "code" can still apply regardless.)

But the phenomenon of evolution also implies a different encoding: the genome encodes information about the environment the organism is adapted for, in an abstracted way, as it generates traits conducive to survival in that environment. Natural selection is the feedback from the environment back to the genome that tends to keep this information in synch with the actual environment, by editing out versions that don't develop successfully surviving and reproducing organisms or species within that environment. That's an alternative and concise way of describing Dawkins' "selfish gene" or "gene-centered" interpretation of evolution.

It's true that that Shannon's measure doesn't take into account usefulness or "meaningfulness" of such information. (That's one reason there are other alternative definitions.) A waterfall generates vast amounts of Shannon information, based on the number of bits of data it would take to describe every splash and whorl, but we don't care about that information and no mechanism records it. That's a different situation from DNA, where the information it contains matters a great deal to the organism and its ability to contain it makes the evolution of such organisms possible in the first place.

 

[heydarian saeed]

Islam and the Qu'ran were translated and understood centuries ago. There is nothing new to be learned from them. Any time wasted on them is time that could be better spent translating and understanding much more worthwhile books. Books that contain actual knowledge.

Hello, dear Pixel
I don't just use my time to translate the text of Quran and Islam. Rather, it is part of my studies about the Quran and Islam. I spend most of my time on other things. Free study - sports - entertainment - work - family conversation and...
I am happy to have you with me.

 

[heydarian saeed]

You must learn your lessons well. Do not be such a lazy student. Your words are all rejected, out of date, and everyone agrees. It is proved against you. And it is known. And everyone knows. What a shame you are. Never mind. Take rest. You need to rest. Do not keep fleeing like a tiny insect in the dirt at our feet.

Thank you. Have a nice day.

Hello, dear philosopher
I am currently benefiting from your sharp statements. And your silly literature. But I try to only see and not learn. My approach is to see rudeness in rude people but don't learn. I should not repeat this procedure. Culture and etiquette in Islam and Quran are all correct and healthy manners.
Dear philosopher, you, who are a learned and cultured person, are more expected to speak more beautifully! I'm sorry.
But I love you all more than yourselves.

Thank you. Have a nice day.