…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
It’s a case of you repeatedly applying a highly loaded and specific label to me, apparently because the religion I no longer hold to is one that is close to one you do.
I used to believe in life-after-death, and thus found the gospel accounts at least plausible. Once I no longer found life-after-death plausible, the gospel accounts seemed to me more likely to have a more prosaic explanation.
Call it “apostasy” if you wish, but please stop flinging it at me as though it is something I should be ashamed of. I am not ashamed of changing my belief – I try to discern what is true as best I can, and if I find what I used to consider plausible no longer so, I cannot in honesty say I still believe it.
So I don’t. Which makes “atheist” a reasonable description of me. “Catholic apostate” sounds ludicrous, and in the context of your pejoratives, offensive.
I might be uninspiring to you, Gregory, but I’d rather be shallow and uninspiring than be anything like you: abusive, insulting, self-righteous, and not merely ignorant but proud of how ignorant and ineducable one is. Walto thinks you might mature and mellow with time; I do not think you have any capacity to mature, because you have no capacity for self-awareness, humility, or growth. I rather expect that you will become more and more enraged and embittered in a hell of your own making, and correspondingly more sad and pathetic to those around you.
Elizabeth,
What makes it ‘highly loaded’? It’s properly descriptive. You’re reading offense where none is intended.
Well, Dennett sure seems to have negatively impacted your worldview! ‘Plausible?’ Probable? No miracles? No spirit? Horizontal numbness?
Peoples’ beliefs change throughout their lives, even within a consistent theology/worldview. Conversion or de-conversion makes its mark. You and KN apparently both ‘lost faith’ (though it is not clear if KN ever really ‘believed’).
I’m not shaming you, Lizzie. It is simply clear that your apostasy played a major role in founding this blog…for ‘skeptics’ and ‘atheists’ like you.
Kantian Naturalist,
It’s sad that you don’t believe in elevation. Flat, horizontal, depressing, reductionist, Marxist, foolishness seems to consume you. What you write here is uninspiring. But really, KN, you too can change and don’t need to continue sinking. Maybe Joel Kovel’s ‘revelation’ and conversion could reach you. It’s not like more Sell-ars-out will double your h. Or that comfortably intentional disenchantment will lead to faith.
So why did you write:
if you intended no offense? If that’s how you write when you intend no offense, I’m surprised you still have an unbroken face.
Actually, no it didn’t. I wasn’t even aware, I have to confess, that “skeptic” was regarded as a code for “atheist”. I meant “skeptical” as in “demands evidence before accepting as fact”. I’ve been a skeptic all my life. My first venture into internet skepticism was as a Bush-beat-Kerry skeptic, but rapidly became an “exit polls evince fraud” skeptic.
I like to know the answers to things, and I like those answers to be based on good evidence. It’s why I love science.
It has nothing to do with atheism, except that in the end, I followed where I thought (and think) the evidence leads when concluding that there is no reason to think that life-after-death exists, at least in the sense of a thinking feeling being that is independent of a body.
Gregory,
You might feel less insecure in the face of ‘apostasy’ if you were better able to defend your faith against criticism.
Want to give it a try?
“This site is tedious”, note two regular visitors.
Yes, Allan, tedious because of people like you, who will say anything to avoid granting a single point to the people in that other box.
The genome produces repair enzymes? Really? Grow up.
Not sure what your point is here. Do you think that enzymes aren’t encoded in DNA?
My statement that I hoped you were well was sincere, but apparently that’s not the case.
Don’t you think before you go demanding defending beliefs from others you ought to step up to the plate and defend your own?
They’re like Statler and Waldorff:
“Why do we always come here?”
“I guess we’ll never know!”
I’m still considering an OP on the subject. Are you planning on sticking around for a while?
I try to keep looking in. I’m a bit busy right now, but some of the business involves waiting for computer kettles to boil, so I click 🙂
Mung,
God Mung, still smarting about that? Yes, the genome produces repair enzymes. Really. It’s a bit like saying “the program produces the output”, when clearly the program’s just an inert set of 1’s and 0’s to some tedious pedant.
You know I don’t think the genetic code is ‘really’ a code too, don’t you?
Is that why you write stupid things Allan, because you think it makes people smart?
Education and explanation don’t seem to make mung smarter.
Mung,
No.
Wow! The genetic code is as much a real code as Morse code. Even Larry Moran made that same comparison.
You have to be very desperate to say the genetic code isn’t really a code- ignorance helps, too.
Frankie,
Why should I give a fundamental fuck what Larry Moran thinks? I agree with him on some things, not on others. Arguments from authority are a waste of time with me. Without that and unsupported assertion, you’d have nothing. Mayr said this, Crick said that, Moran said the other, Provine Knox gibber gibber gibber. I am capable of forming my own opinions. If you don’t like them, I have others.
I have my reasons. But why do you care what I think about anything?
LoL! The genetic code fits the definition of a real code, Allan. And it matters what you think as it shows whether or not you are posting in good faith or not. By saying the genetic code isn’t a real code you cannot be taken seriously when it comes to discussions on biology.
You can form your opinions. If you can’t support them then they are gibberish. And you cannot support your opinion of the genetic code not being a code.
There’s some really nice examination of what is wrong with the “the genetic code” metaphor in Lenny Moss’ What Genes Can’t Do and Oyama’s The Ontogeny of Information.
Whether “the genetic code” is literally true or just a metaphor, and if the latter, whether it is a helpful metaphor or not, are still very controversial issues in theoretical biology and philosophy of biology.
By my lights, the real problem with “the genetic code” is that normal codes, such as Morse code or Navajo code, are ways of compressing linguistic information. But a sequence of nucleotides is not a sentence in any language. “Guanine-cytosine-adenine” is not a claim; it is neither true nor false, nor is there any corresponding speech act. There aren’t tiny little people inside the cellular nucleus passing notes to each other.
In other words, the very idea of “the genetic code” is a version of the homunculus fallacy.
The genetic code is not a metaphor. It fits the definition of a real code. mRNA codons REPRESENT amino acids. They do not become them. The dots and dashes of Morse code REPRESENT letters. They do not become them.
If the genetic code isn’t a real code then there isn’t any such thing as a real code. Evolutionists, changing definitions to suit their needs. Life is good- not.
There is a reason why evos have to deny that the genetic code is a real code- they don’t have a mechanism capable of explaining codes! That is why they are so desperate to deny its existence.
Sad, really.
Frankie,
The argument is a subtle one, and I suspect it to be beyond you. If you don’t take me seriously – guess what? – I couldn’t give a shit. The feeling is, after all, mutual.
Allan, nothing you can say is beyond me. You are on a lower level than I am.
I can support my claims. You cannot. I am OK with that.
This looks fascinating: “Rethinking the Meaning of Biological Information“:
Abstract: Throughout the history of molecular biology, the primary meaning of biological information has been taken from the image of a word-based linguistic code. I want to argue that the metaphor of such a code does not begin to capture either the variety or the richness of the processes by which nucleotide sequences inform biological processes. Current research demonstrates that nucleotide sequences inform not only development but also heredity and evolution, and they do so in all sorts of ways. Even though they do not exhaust the varieties of biological information employed in these processes, I claim that the power of DNA sequences to inform these processes is richer and perhaps far greater than the conventional understanding of genetic information permits, indeed richer than what any of our images of simple linguistic codes or of senders and receivers permits. Rather than a tape in a Turing machine or a message or signal sent through the generations, DNA is first and foremost a physicochemical structure with a range of potential uses by the physicochemical arsenal of biological cells that is so large as to expose the poverty of our most familiar metaphors. Recognition of this fact leads us to conclude that DNA is both more and less than we thought—more because it carries both symbolic and non-symbolic information and less because accepting that fact undermines its radical distinction from other biological molecules.
Kantian Naturalist,
Not to Crick who said is was just the sequence specificity required to produce functional proteins.
Yes, DNA does more than we thought. No, undirected evolution cannot explain DNA nor what it does.
Also DNA is inert. It does nothing without all of the other required parts of the cell.
Frankie,
Proving my earlier point. You just can’t help yourself, appealing to some Higher Authority. It’s so cute!
Frankie,
If you say so.
Kantian Naturalist,
There are about 4 fundamental kinds of code that have become lumped under the one definitional heading, with some cross-talk depending on the – ah – ‘purpose’:
a) Encryption systems
b) Transmission systems
c) Conversion systems
d) The genetic code.
They all share some features in common, of course, and I am more than happy to informally, and even formally, use the word ‘code’ for all of them. It’s in the definition, after all. But there is a significant danger of equivocation if one sets too much store by this. This, of course, drives the Creationist insistence that the genetic code is a code in one or more of the other senses – perpetuating that equivocation helps their case. Since the other 3 are clearly ‘intelligently’ derived (more specifically: human-derived …), then so must the 4th. Anyone who denies this is ‘desperate’.
The Morse code, to me, is simply a conversion/transmission system, much like Braille (which, for some reason, we choose not to call a code, though it is very similar). Since there is a letter-for-letter mapping, it’s not much different from rendering the letters in variant fonts. One could easily become fluent in reading the visual representation of an English sentence in Morse (yet another conversion: the conversion from the audible tones to visual dots and dashes).
And one can treat the genetic code in this way too. Given the location of the start codon and exon boundaries, the aaRS’s and their specificities, and the convention that the string presented for translation is oriented in the appropriate direction for synthesis, one can take a written representation of a genetic sequence and write down the peptide sequence that results. But it’s a physical system, and it is actually producing something which is not in itself a ‘message’ of any kind but a physical piece of phenotype with a role, just like a beaver dam or a bird’s beak. A properly analogous system to protein translation would need to have some physical link, not merely symbolic. If one took a set of roughly-hewn holes and filled them with water, then stuck popsicle sticks in and froze them, writing the letters “X”, “S”, “Y” and “E” on neighbouring sticks, one could then remove and jumble them about. One could reconstitute this (meaningless) message by finding the best fit. But to what extent does a given hole shape or counterpart ‘represent’ the thing stuck on the other end of the stick? It is not merely symbolic, even at the codon level, though it can be represented in biochemistry textbooks symbolically. Hence the confusion, not to say desperation, of those who insist that their definition is the only one a rational person ‘should’ prefer. Shrug! 🙂
LoL! So KN wasn’t doing exactly that? I was just showing that part of his post was incorrect. To do so I had to site Crick.
It’s as if you are totally clueless, Allan.
Allan Miller,
LoL! The equivocation is all yours! There isn’t any physiochemical connection between the mRNA codons and the amino acids they REPRESENT.
Again, mRNA codons REPRESENT amino acids, they do not become them. It is an arbitrary arrangement, meaning it is not reducible to any physiochemical process. This is the exact definition of a code. It is exactly akin to computer compilers- source code in-> object code out. mRNA codons in and a polypeptide out.
Allan Miller is desperate and it shows.
And the message is “make this polypeptide”
FWIW, I agree with Allan that the genetic code is not a code. It lacks the abstractness that we expect with codes. The use of DNA and RNA in biology is more similar to the use of mechanical templates than to the use of encodings.
Templates are like cams. They cause things to happen, but are not semantic.
If DNA is a code — in the sense of having syntax and grammar — then some ID wizard needs to elucidate the syntax and grammar, and demonstrate that one can “read” novel meanings expressed in the code language.
That would be an actual ID research project.
To whom is this message directed?
Perhaps it is unfortunate that DNA was –early on — called a code.
It tends to support the map/territory fallacy.
Allan Miller,
I wonder if E-Prime, mentioned on occasion here by Lizzie, would help in eliminating that equivocation. It might prevent leaving the question of who or what the coded message is directed to open and vague.
Intracellular communications. One part of the cell sending a message to another
The genetic code is the code. DNA is only part of it. And they called it a code because it fits the definition of a code.
Again, if evos don’t like other people saying that codes require intelligence to generate then all they have to do is step up and demonstrate a code can arise via undirected processes.
There is a 3.1 million dollar award if you can. And any alleged equivocation is all yours if you cannot.
Braille is a code and knowledgeable people understand that. It was based on the military code called night writing.
There is a good summary of the issues in SEP particularly starting paragraph before section 3.
I agree with Allan Miller that we have to be careful what we mean by code. I don’t think encryption or compression are the ways it is being considered here.
Rather, it is an issue of information. And then representation.
Grice distinguished natural from non-natural information. Natural information is only causal correlation, such as tree rings providing information on tree age. Non-natural was not precisely defined, but Grice considered language non-natural.
I believe the key is the philosophical concept of representation which, by definition, must allow for mis-representation. And if there is mis-representation, there must be a norm for judging it so.
For DNA, one could say it represents a protein sequence. Misrepresentation happens when there is a transcription error. But both correct and wrong transcription are causal processes. So what is the justification for calling one correct and one a mis-representation?
If we are simply using the idea of DNA representation as a helpful analogy to explain the process to other people, then we can rely on people to supply the norms. But if we want to say DNA actually does semantically represent with the possibility of error not requiring an agent to provide the norm, then we have to naturalize the norm which distinguishes error from correctness. A standard way to do this is teleosemantics, which relies on the evolutionary history to say that the transcription process selected by evolution is the correct one.
However, as far as I know, this semantic interpretation is not needed by biology, except in some fringe areas, like biosemiotics. It is enough to consider the code simply as a way of explaining the process to help people understand it. DNA transcription is then only an example of Grice’s natural information.
Frankie,
KN was posting someone’s viewpoint. Your random quote from Crick is not incompatible with that viewpoint. Crick talked of sequential information, specifically, for the purpose of formulating his central dogma. He was not forcing anyone to the conclusion that that is how information is to be defined in biology, in any and all circumstances.
Yes, of course it is. Pat-pat-pat.
I did not quote Crick. I was just pointing out he contradicted the article.
Go back to your delusional world where the genetic code isn’t really a code.
Frankie,
LoL! The equivocation is all yours! There isn’t any physiochemical connection between the mRNA codons and the amino acids they REPRESENT.
Like I say, the argument is maybe a bit beyond you. Putting REPRESENT in capitals does not add to its force. There is a connection between anticodon and amino acid, and it is a physical one, not a symbolic one.
Well, computer code is another variant again. Equivocation all the way down.
Don’t be silly. It’s hardly a problem to me either way. If one agrees that the genetic code is a ‘real’ code, it does not compel the conclusion that all codes MUST have designers. It simply says that here is a potential exception to the rule.
All codes of known provenance are designed by people. Therefore the genetic code was designed by people? No, of course not, intelligence! Intelligent people, then. No, no, no, you desperate equivocating evo, we don’t need to know the nature of the designer!
Frankie,
Hahaha!
Frankie,
I didn’t say it wasn’t a code. Nor Morse. They are fundamentally linguistic devices.
“Make this polypeptide” indeed. Removes glasses, wipes eyes.
There isn’t any physiochemical connection between the mRNA codons and the amino acids.
All known codes have intelligent designers. No one knows how to model nature producing a code. Science 101 tells us that all codes require an intelligent designer. And if we observe a code and know that people couldn’t have produced it we infer it was some other intelligent agency. We don’t say that mother nature magically did it just cuz we weren’t watchin’.
And yes, “make this protein”- intracellular communications. The ribosome is a genetic compiler- translates and aborts if it detects an error.