I guess my problem with understanding your posts is that your analogies were originally brought up in reponse to Wings' question regarding how ID addresses nylonase. You have used the analogy of how two messages (or programs, or enzymes) can be encoded, but offer no explanation of how the decoding can happen. In your "message from aliens" example, you mention a frame-shift, and then when I question it, you say it doesn't matter. For an encoded message, some decoder would have had to work to discover the frame shift. This implies the decoding process is intelligently driven.
On the other hand, with this new programming example, you say you have a "data error", well, how does that happen? Is it just some random error that luckily transforms your spreadsheet to a word processor? That to me sounds like the standard evolutionary description of a mutation. The fact that it is useful to me, implies that my finding it useful represents the natural selection process. If the data error rendered the program useless, it would quickly be uninstalled. Unless you are suggesting that the data error itself is intelligently driven to force the new program to be useful.
To go back to the original question, with nylonase, if there are two options, why and how would one get shifted to another? To me, the simple explanation would be that you are describing a random mutation and it was lucky, or beneficial, or whatever you want to call it, that this particular shift is "good" for nylonase. However, the part I can't figure out is whether you are suggesting that this mutation does follow the standard explanation of evolution (random mutation ends up being beneficial and is propagated due to natural selection), or if you are suggesting that the shift from one enzyme to another is somehow directed by an outside intelligence, as would be required in the case of the alien transmission, or a data error that can only result in a shift from spreadsheet to word processor.
Transcription errors occur frequently enough inside cells. Whether I use certain words for it, such as mutation, or error, or accident, all seem to me fair words. Selecting one word preferable over the other, I don't understand to be something that would convey anything more precise between us in communicating the concept I'm attempting.
I think some people view this transcription starting point being at point A vs at point B to be the crux of the mechanism for creating this newly, much needed, enzyme for this bacteria that finds itself needing to digest Nylon in order to survive.
But I see that issue of transcription starting point as something different. It seems to me that the formula for Nylonase was already coded and the transcription merely needs to start in the right place to dial it up.
To think otherwise appears to me to be naive. Let me convey my meaning of why it is naive with a metaphor:
I will use a palindrome as an example in my metaphor. I would use a frame shift but I'm not nearly clever enough to invent a good frame-shift here. So please give me license here for the substitution. Let's say a child sees the sentence "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." The child notices if you start at the end of the sentence and read backward, it says the same thing (albeit you must ignore punctuation, white space, and upper/lower case). The child says to his parents, "Look Mother, Father, I've invented this wonderful thing. Look! This sentence reads the same thing forward and backward."
Analysis: the child thinks, because he discovered on his own that the palindrome reads backward the same as forward, that he invented or created the backward sentence. He thinks the forward sentence already existed, but by mutating the way he looks at it, he gets the backward sentence.
Conclusion: the child does not recognize that "amanaplanacanalpanama" was invented on purpose. Certainly the child was clever to have noticed the palindromic characteristic -- but that's all that he did. The creator of the palindrome invented it and did so long before the child discovered it.
Analogy: the codons were already in the genome to express into nylonase. The bacteria didn't invent the coding for nylonase when nylon appeared on the scene. Again, the code was ALREADY THERE. It is naive to think it evolved in 1930 when it had been there for who knows how long.
To frame shift your decoder is trivial. But to invent something that has multiple meanings depending on how you decode it, is
phenomenal! To place the phenomenal event at the decoding end is naive. The phenomenal event was that the data appeared in the first place.
So when Wings asks what is the ID take on nylonase, I bring up this viewpoint that nylonase is damn hard to explain from an evolutionary perspective. I have shown how it appears to invoke consideration of the plausibility of teleology.
But my statement was just an observation that the string of codons transcribing enzyme A and the string of codons transcribing enzyme B are the same codons except for where they underlap. They are, in that sense, "overlaid" or "superimposed".
