Upright Biped,
Before fleeing the discussion in July, you spent months here at TSZ discussing your “Semiotic Theory of ID”. During that time we all struggled with your vague prose, and you were repeatedly asked to clarify your argument and explain its connection to ID. I even summarized your argument no less than three times (!) and asked you to either confirm that my summary was accurate or to amend it accordingly. You failed to do so, and you also repeatedly refused to answer relevant, straightforward questions from other commenters here.
Here is my most recent attempt at a summary of your argument, from July 22nd:
X1. All irreducibly complex systems are designed.
X2. All semiotic systems are irreducibly complex.
X3. Therefore, all semiotic systems are designed.Y1. A system involving representation(s) and protocol(s) is a semiotic system.
Y2. Protein synthesis involves a representation and a protocol.
Y3. Therefore, protein synthesis is a semiotic system.Z1. All semiotic systems are designed (by X3).
Z2. Protein synthesis is a semiotic system (by Y3).
Z3. Therefore, the protein synthesis system is designed.If you think this is an accurate summary, then tell us. If you don’t, then please make corrections while maintaining the explicit and concise format of the summary.
I reiterate the challenge, with special emphasis on the bolded part above. Note that since you claim that your argument is an argument for ID, it must lead to conclusion Z3 or something similar:
Z3. Therefore, the protein synthesis system is designed.
If it does not, then it fails as an argument for ID.
Also worth repeating are some observations I made earlier regarding your evasions:
Upright doesn’t realize how obvious his predicament is to the rest of us.
Suppose he had a strong argument (or at least thought that he did). Then he would have every reason to make his position clear and to answer questions forthrightly, secure in the knowledge that his argument would stand up to scrutiny and criticism. On the other hand, he would have no reason to evade or obfuscate, as doing so would only create the impression that his position was weak.
Now suppose that his argument is weak, and that Upright knows this. Clarifying his position in this case would be disastrous, as it would lay bare the flaws in his argument and render it vulnerable to decisive refutation. Evasion looks weak, but at least it allows him to pretend that his argument is strong and that the only problem is that people have failed to understand it properly.
So far Upright’s behavior matches the second scenario perfectly. We thus have every reason to believe that Upright’s argument is weak and that he knows it.
You can choose to evade and obfuscate, Upright, but be advised that we know exactly why you do it.
I invite you to prove me wrong. Either confirm that my summary above is correct, or amend it while maintaining its explicit and concise format so that it accurately represents your argument.
Clarify or evade. It’s your choice.
I’ll offer the summary I wrote that was posted on the new moderated thread for the Semiotic argument, I think it is a bit closer to the mark:
I:
A1: Chance and necessity cannot generate a semiotic system, whereas the necessary and sufficient conditions of a semiotic system consist of arrangements of matter that produce specific functional effects by means of inert intermediary patterns.
A2: The necessary and sufficient conditions of a protein synthesis system consists of arrangements of matter that produce specific functional effects by means of inert intermediary patterns.
A3: A protein synthesis system is a semiotic system
ConclusionA: Therefore Chance and Necessity cannot generate a protein synthesis system.
—
II:
B1. Chance, necessity and intelligent causation can generate a semiotic system, whereas the necessary and sufficient conditions of a semiotic system consist of arrangements of matter that produce specific functional effects by means of inert intermediary patterns.
B2. Chance and Necessity cannot generate a semiotic system, whereas the necessary and sufficient conditions of a semiotic system consist of arrangements of matter that produce specific functional effects by means of inert intermediary patterns.
ConclusionB: Therefore the origin of a semiotic system is best explained by chance, necessity and intelligent causation.
The challenge of premise 1 (A1) was made over a year ago:
http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=659&cpage=14#comment-14814
Results not in.
Liz seemed to understand this argument. She also has said in one of the posts, that “we need to evolve a code then.” Alan has put a lot of effort into attempting to map a plausible pathway.
junkdnaforlife,
Your argument works only if semiotic systems (as defined) invariably require intelligent causes.
That’s a big if.
In effect, all you’ve done is this, where S is the set of all semiotic systems, P is the protein synthesis system, and I represents intelligent causation:
1. Define S to include P.
2. Assert that all instances of S require I.
3. Conclude that P requires I.
If you can’t demonstrate #2 (and neither you nor Upright has done so), then you can’t conclude #3. What does the argument accomplish in that case?
Well … I have simply argued on what has been known since the 60’s – that this is a ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem, but since the product is protein, it is unlikely that the product is a necessary precondition for its own synthesis (given that this is not autocatalysis). Drop the insistence that protein catalysis is essential for life, and a logical answer to the conundrum is laid bare. There is no logical necessity to think that any molecule universal to modern life is therefore essential to Life.
Where is the ‘inert’ intermediary in the protein synthesis system? I never saw inertness mentioned in UBP’s work.
Take another system – cell signalling, say. A product of one cell is taken up or bound by another to produce an effect. That effect is not a result of any chemical ‘essence’ in the intermediate molecule. Is this, too, a semiotic system? (In UBP’s terms, in fact, I’d say yes, and more so than protein synthesis, because it is about signalling, whereas PS is simply chemical synthesis by activated carriers).
So can we declare cell signalling to be beyond the capacity of ‘chance and necessity’ (a rather meaningless phrase that seems to have caught on)? If so, why? Can you not even imagine a scenario whereby this ‘protocol’ could arise by natural evolution?
I suggest that the basic problem does not lie with #2, but with #1. I think we CAN demonstrate that S requires I, if S is permitted to retain it’s intended and original meaning. It’s only when the definition is stretched beyond recognition that #2 becomes problematic.
Getting closer to home, we might rephrase this as:
1. All designs require a designer
2. Life is defined as such a “design”
3. Therefore, life requires a designer.
The problem here is that the foregone conclusion is built into the definitions, not that there’s an error of logic or a failure to demonstrate. UPB has DEFINED himself as correct.
I like to see it as a fundamental attempt to predict the results of research without doing the research.
1. Eggs always come from chickens.
2. Chickens always come from eggs
3. A system that this property of mutual interdependence cannot reasonably be accidental, so one or the other must have been created.
I think any and all of these interpretations can be mapped to each other. They all depend on the assertion of that which needs to be proved. When he gets to that point in the argument he resorts to bluster and name calling.
The same argument has been used in regard to sex. Namely that maleness and femaleness are co-dependent. and could not have evolved.
Same for the bacterial signalling systems.
Flint,
It’s hard enough to get Upright to argue clearly, much less use words in the conventional way. I’m content to let him (and JDFL in this case) use terms in a nonstandard way as long as they are explicitly defined.
Besides, if Upright doesn’t define ‘semiotic’ broadly enough to include protein synthesis, then he can’t grandly label his argument the “Semiotic Theory of ID”, and it becomes obvious that it’s just a rehash of the argument from irreducible complexity. Yawn.
UB responds to TSZ, in part:
We all know who fled the conversation.
Enough said.
Upright makes excuses for why he won’t clarify his argument:
Upright,
Every time I summarized your argument, I a) asked you whether my summary was accurate, and b) invited you to amend my summary if it was not. You refused each time, even when others (who also found your prose impenetrable) repeatedly asked you to do so. Why is that? If your argument is as strong as you claim, why do you work so hard to prevent your audience from understanding it?
When I have a good idea, I actually want other people to understand it. When they ask questions, I answer them. If I see that they misunderstand me, I clarify things. Why wouldn’t I? Why would I try to hide my good idea?
You, on the other hand, seem ashamed of your argument and afraid of what might happen if you stated it clearly and explicitly. Instead of clarifying, you obfuscate. Instead of answering questions straightforwardly, you evade them. You complain that others are misrepresenting your position, but when they ask you for correction, you refuse to give it. Then you declare victory, saying that no one has defeated your argument!
For you, the entire exercise seems to be more about saving face than it is about communicating your ideas. In fact, you appear to be deliberately avoiding communication precisely in order to save face. Why should anyone take your argument seriously if you are so ashamed of it? Why are you afraid to communicate it in a way that your audience will actually understand?
And again:
Onlooker, my argument is at the top of this page.
You can indicate what words you are having a hard time with, and I’ll be happy to explain.
I don’t think anyone is convinced, least of all himself.
UBP
Chortle! Lost? We can look forward to the Semiotic Theory of ID becoming standard issue in both biochemical and philosophical works in the future, then?
There is a world of difference between being unable to identify flaws and being able to persuade the argumenter to recognise them. At worst, a failure of rhetoric. But – to break ‘penguin rules’ somewhat – UBP’s comprehension skills are suspect. Ironic, given his frequent dishing out of criticism on the same. Still … has anyone ever managed to persuade someone their comprehension skills are suspect by saying so? 😀
I’m not sure it is even possible to persuade a committed supporter of either side that their logic is flawed. If they recognised it as flawed, they would probably not hold their position in the first place. But for my money, arguments by analogy and by construction of asserted Universals (and the various supporting manoeuvres demanding empirical demonstration of the counter-claim) are pretty weak.
And so it goes.
I look forward to seeing UPB’s thesis published in a peer reviewed journal like ENV or Bio-Complexity. It may be too much to hope for, but since it completely destroys evolution, it might eclipse Dembski’s Search for a Search, or the recent tome on Adam and Eve.
‘onlooker’ at UD:
Upright:
LOL.
The thread at UD is starting to look very familiar. CLAVDIVS and onlooker are pressing Upright for clarifications, and Upright is fighting hard to keep his argument vague and unclear.
How long before Upright flees UD, just as he fled TSZ, and declares victory somewhere else?
Or will Barry step in and apply the ban hammer to the problem?
It’s really a shame that mphillips quit posting just about the time UBP promised to answer questions. And the new thread didn’t carry over the original questions.
UBP@UD trash-talks TSZ, in full:
The material evidence was wot done us in? Physical linkage via intermediates with varying binding specificities makes DNA anticodon C represent amino acid A, and not just cause its linkage? And the modern relationships are the past relationships, right back to the OoL unless someone can prove you wrong, someone had to mean that it should all have the ‘meaning’ it does, and yah-boo to all objectors and their ‘black swan’ logic? Well done!
An onlooker might have difficulty distinguishing a victory dance from a tap dance.
I would be interested to see these phantom reviewers’ actual comments and qualifications. If they endorsed both technical and logical conclusions … well, presumably, they were non-ideologues, which must help. And not thick, like everyone here 😉
For a mere £1250 or so he could publish at http://www.biology-direct.com/ They will publish anything provided you can get 3 reviewers from their panel to endorse it as worthwhile. They do not even have to agree with it, just be prepared to review it. Then you get to see the reviewers’ comments appended , plus author responses – something missing from conventional publication. I’d be tempted to have a whip-round; I would love to see peer review on this.
eta: Having a poke round, I came across the relevant but also delightful title: “The RNA world hypothesis: the worst theory of the early evolution of life (except for all the others)”.
Here’s something Upright BiPed could explain which could help all of us, IDists and Evos.
1) Evolution could be modeled as a semiotic system.
2) Evolution IS a semiotic system engineered by the “Intelligent Designer”.
I have no problem with 1 but I don’t see UBP even suggesting that 2 is what he’s getting at.
For an ID proponent, you would expect a case for 2 but he’s shied away from it.
At the very least, he would need to make a case for how those “semiotic” codes were arrived at.
A) How do you know in 10,000,000 BC, what “semiotic” codes would be required in 2012 AD?
B) How do you upgrade a biological life-form with the new codes? Would it be in the egg, the womb or the “run-time” implementation of the life-form, i.e., a parent?
I’ve decided this was my plan all along, after the fact!
In reviewer comments to the ‘RNA world’ article I mentioned, Eugene Koonin makes the following point:
ie: the aaRSs which are the principal protein components in the modern system are apparently (on phylogenetic analysis) much younger than most proteins of their type. Therefore, a high-fidelity system of making protein (with up to 20 acids in the library) was already in operation when aaRS took its place in the translation system. This undermines UBPs assertive dismissal that ‘a single-acid system would not have the information-carrying capacity to specify a “system”‘.
eta: another reviewer’s main critique is that the author is ‘too polite’ (in a field that has many vociferous opinions in both directions):
😀
The “arrangement” could be a consequence of its environment via evolution or the actions of an “Intelligent Designer” working arbitrarily.
Which is it?
That’s the case everyone wants to see made.
“Tap dance” suddenly reminded me of Razzle Dazzle from the show Chicago, with Richard Gere playing the lawyer who can’t say anything straight out, because of course that would give his case away …just like UB, who doesn’t dare say anything straight about keiths’ summary, for fear it would give the ID case away:
except I don’t picture UB as anywhere near as cute as RG in real life 😉
Razzle Dazzle movie clip, on youtube
Yeah, that phrase really jumped out at me, too.
How do you get a “lock and key”, such as nylon and the nylonase enzyme, without evolution? For sake of argument, I’m willing to grant any reasonable definition of information, but how did the information re digesting nylon get into the cell, without evolution?
Don’t tell me the designer twiddled its (immaterial, supernatural) little fingers in the atoms comprising one nucleotide of some lucky single cell one day.
Now, we might say it’s possible that the designer originally designed (first) living things with the (heritable) ability to evolve locks-and-keys as a general strategy to take advantage of, or to withstand, future unpredicted environmental resources and challenges. But if so, then how can a IDist blindly assert: So far, and no further. How can the IDist say: okay, evolve brand-new information to digest nylon, but not evolve the entire information-structure of DNA replication, because … because what? Because it’s just too complicated, or complex, or specified, or something! It’s just against the designer’s rules, that’s what!
I don’t find that assertion in the least bit convincing. We know, with as much certainty as we know anything in the world, that the information in nylonase “as a consequence of its arrangement” – quoting UB – came purely by natural, unguided, undesigned-at-least-at-that-immediate-moment evolution. And as an extension of knowing at least that much, it seems completely logical that the information for older and more important lock-and-keys in cells also came purely unguided and undesigned. And why couldn’t they … because the designer didn’t want it that way? Who says?
UB’s statement about arrangements and matter helps him not one whit. He has no case for ID.
Hotshoe,
That’s exactly the sort of thing that most of the IDers believe (with the exception of the ‘frontloaders’). Here’s VJ Torley at UD on the subject of Adam and Eve:
It only requires one miracle. How reasonable! Who could possibly argue with that?
You ask:
This is easier to understand if you put yourself in their shoes. Suppose you’re an IDer. You want to conclude that a Designer is responsible for the complexity of life. You know about mutations and natural selection, you know that they’ve been observed in nature, and you know that you can’t argue against them without utterly destroying your scientific credibility. But if you concede that they happen, then what’s to stop the evilutionists from arguing that they can happen over and over, leading to complex adaptations — and rendering God superfluous to the process?
The only way to prevent Satan’s minions (the Darwinists) from making this argument is to claim that some kind of mysterious barrier prevents repeated microevolution from turning into macroevolution. You have no evidence for such a barrier, but hey — you can’t afford to be scrupulous here. Without a barrier, there is no need for a Designer to leap over it. The stakes are high, so you insist — again, without evidence — that the fitness landscape consists of isolated islands of functionality surrounded by vast, deep and turbulent waters. So vast that only a designer can straddle them.
This kind of inverted thinking — starting with the desired conclusion, and inventing evidence and theories to match — permeates the ID movement. It’s often funny, but too often it’s just sad. VJ Torley, for example, seems to be intelligent and well-educated, but he is so wedded to dogma, and so unwilling to doubt it, that he will consider the wild scenario mentioned above, concocted in jest and for which there is no evidence, and take it seriously because it “doesn’t seem too extraordinary” and “requires only one miracle.”
Heh.
Upright, feeling the heat of onlooker’s questions, tries to flee the conversation, but onlooker shames him into continuing.
Good stuff.
Locks and keys, chickens and eggs …
The ‘binding site’ problem, the ‘male-female’ problem, and the ‘signal-response’ problem all boil down to the same issue of complementarity, though two of them have a temporal sequence and the middle one is a matter of simultaneous divergence.
If you have an arrangement of atoms, things will bind to it, with varying degrees of specificity. You can’t help that: they’re magnetic! Given the flexibility of polymeric macromolecules, changes in sequence here and there will cause better or worse binding. It really depends on what the phenotypic result is as to what, if anything, is ‘better’. But if stronger binding is ‘fitter’ than weaker, then both binder and bindee may tune the relationship towards an optimum. Someone comes along and says the one ‘represents’ the other – that’s a hole-puddle representation, not a semiotic one. The ‘info’ is the charge field (and the Pauli Exclusion Principle).
Gender is the odd one out (a digression prompted by Petrushka).
Male/female is fundamentally about the size of the package that gametes come in, and is a relative term. Without that asymmetry, there is no gender. The genetic complement of the gametes remains entirely symmetric (give or take a sex chromosome or two). But even with full gamete symmetry, there can still be sex. The kind of things we associate with sex – larger eggs and smaller sperm, internal fertilisation by one of the other, egg-laying or internal embryo development, post-partum nutrition – are all derived states, and all can only take place in multicellular bodies – even down to that basic size difference: single cells gain nothing by dividing asymmetrically. Sex itself can (IMO) only evolve in single-celled organisms, gender asymmetry only in multicellular ones, while multicellular bodies are themselves kept in harmony by the gamete bottleneck. So: sex, then multicellularity, then gender.
I agree, Allan, with one minor quibble:”single cells gain nothing by dividing asymmetrically” may or may not be true.
I refer you to the sex life of S.cerevisiae. The interesting thing about the switching pattern (mothers switch, daughters do not) and the budding pattern (axial for haploids, polar for diploids) is that it appears optimized to convert a single spore into a pair of homozygous diploids. In other words, selfing is preferred over outcrossing.
This suggests to me that meiosis (to promote the expression of recessive traits, including lethality) came first, then sex, then slime molds…
Using your comment! Nicely done.
Maybe this yelling-over-the-fence communication style has some advantages after all.
UBP cannot conceive that a complementary system could evolve, so he spends all his time and effort establishing that the genetic code is such a system. Once that is accepted his job is done. It’s difficult to tell if he even understands the problem, but his repeated evasions suggest he does.
Mmmm … as far as I can discover, yeast are still isogamous? I think mating types and gender are two different phenomena. But yes, budding is indeed an asymmetric division, so my statement was a bit cavalier. I was thinking more of a diploid unicell hedging its bets by producing one microgamete and one mega.
Well, I think you have to start with a haploid, which is constitutionally already equipped to express traits ‘recessively’. Syngamy and division must (IMO) arise together in rapid succession (ie one cell cycle). The fusion rationale could be nutritional or some kind of ‘hybrid’ effect. Since the cell cycle is already tuned to separation of diploids (in mitosis), there is a ready-made means of restoring the haploid state – a proto-meiosis.
I doubt that early diploids could replicate mitotically – too many chromosomes – so obligate return to haploidy for reproduction would be the norm.
So: sex (syngamy/reduction) then diploid mitosis or recombination in the reduction phase (either coming first is plausible) then loss of haploid mitosis (in some species) and greater persistence of the diploid [….] then us.
Keiths
Biped’s “good idea” was to construct a conceptual Trojan Horse purportedly built strictly of “material observations” (one of his endlessly repeated, lumbering turns of phrase) intended not to clarify, but rather to ensnare “materialists” into admitting that such-and-such exhibits “a semiotic state.”
To do this, he has to avoid at all costs giving a straight answer vis just what he believes “a semiotic state” entails (intelligent origination), beyond characterizing elements of his definitions as “entailments” of that which he has defined.
This is the same attempted sleight of hand that characterizes ID generally, as it claims not to be about “the Designer.”
Upright declares victory yet again:
Upright, who ran whimpering from the discussion here at TSZ, assumes that others are also cowards if they don’t respond within his arbitary time limits. How totally surprising is that?
UBP
Huh? That clarification has rather lost me. Does he mean writing the symbol ‘CTA’ on a piece of paper? Presumably not if he runs it through a ribosome. Which won’t work because T is a DNA base … OK, I’m being a little pedantic. Still, the physical trinucleotide CTA isn’t a symbol. It’s a molecule. Run it through a DNA polymerase and it will form the template for GAT … it ‘means’ G … A … T, separately, to that enzyme. Alternatively, a specific endonuclease could cleave the backbone between the C and the T. Or something could bind it. Or …
OK, run it through RNA polymerase and you will form the template for G … A … U. Run that through a ribosome and (if in frame) supply it with a tRNA with a CUA on its bottom end and it will dock. Whatever amino acid is on the other end of it will get added to a growing peptide chain.
So … if you do that tomorrow, you will affect molecules that are not in your pocket today. How is that any different from having a sugar lump in your pocket that you give to a horse tomorrow? Any old horse is pretty much guaranteed to have enzymes that will ‘recognise’ sugar and act upon it. I guess the answer might be that that is a chemical transformation – breaking bonds and stuff – and that to UBP and Joe seems to be the only thing you can call chemistry. If the trinucleotide does not become the acid, it is no longer chemistry but ‘informatics’. Even though it involves binding energies, and proton/electron forces, and is chemistry!
The amino acid that happens to be on the end of the tRNA that docks with your codon could in principle be absolutely anything. The ‘meaning’ (the effect) of CTA depends upon the system you shove it into. In practice, if you put it in any modern living cell, there is a very good chance that it will be a consistent acid, because modern cells do not have options – globally changing the acid would be catastrophic, now that we have an embedded protein system. But that present consistency does not force us to conclude that any CTA represents the amino acid that happens to be stuck on the end of a tRNA in the system through which you eventually run it (if that, indeed, is what is being meant by a ‘semiotic’ relationship).
I can’t resist this from Joe, either:
Apparently one only has to assert that evolution can’t do it and your argument is complete. No muss, no fuss, no icky research.
If ID claims “evolution CANNOT therefore ID”, why can’t the evolution argument be, “ID CANNOT therefore NOT ID”?
For example, the intelligent designer, like we humans who also design, cannot see the future.
How does he know what “specific functionality” is required 1000 years from now?
Also, if as Joe says ID is not anti-evolution, how does the designer stop evolution from changing a working design into something that will not meet his design requirements 1000 years from now?
This should be enough to discount ID as viable, without requiring the non-ID side from having to come up with any mechanism at all since non-ID would be the only option left on the table.
The impossibility of design has been my favorite argument for more than a year now. Unless the Designer is omniscient. In which case one could ask why adaptation is so spotty and why extinctions occur.
why, for example, did the Lensky adaptation take thousands of generations and appear to involve an exhaustive search?
If Joe was right, ID would not stop short of vetting the designer.
If for whatever reason you arrive at ID, you must then test whether ID is a valid possibility.
That is how science works.
If you believe A is a valid possibility, test A.
If you believe ID is a valid possibility, test ID.
If I believe life was “intelligently designed”, I have to test to see if life is “intelligently designable”.
Why would I stop short of that?
What is required of life ten thousand years from now?
How could I find that out?
If I can’t see the future, how can I design for it?
petrushka,
The impossibility of design is a great point.
How does Upright BiPed deal with future semiotic codes, i.e., “design in an unknown future”?
What I was shooting for is that ID and evolution are not peer “theories” and you have granted that is the case by not treating them as peers.
If schools should teach the “controversy”, clearly it is NOT a choice between ID and “Darwinism”.
Since Joe doesn’t treat them as peer “theories”, why should schools?
How did ID pass the test of knowing what was required for future functionality?
Show me the test that design passed demonstrating foresight.
If as Joe says ID is not anti-evolution, how does the designer stop evolution from changing a working design into something that will not meet his design requirements 1000 years from now?
But *what* limitations?
If the designer doesn’t know *how* the environment is going to change, what component does he limit?
If the “built-in responses to environmental cues” means the designer has allowed his design to adapt on its own, then life could have “started in a bog” and then evolved on its own just like “Darwin” said.
Why bring up the designer if life evolved on its own right after the OOL?
What is the point of ID in evolutionary science if it is not required for the study of the actual “evolution of life”?
I’ve missed the part in UB’s arguments where he supports his claim that Darwinian evolution cannot take place without what he describes as a semiotic system in place. I’ve missed the chemistry that says that a self-replicating molecule cannot replicate with variations which would be subject to Darwinian selection (he excludes such molecules from his definition of containing recorded information, on the basis that they represent themselves rather than something else).
Does anyone know if he has attempted to demonstrate that such evolving molecules can’t exist, and couldn’t have existed on the early earth? Does he think that they break any laws of chemistry?
I’d also like to know whether or not nylon can contain “recorded information.” Its presence has imparted information into a population group in a process which surely requires a UB protocol to appear independently in order to produce the seperate phenomenon of that population group metabolising nylon, an action which is not nylon. Semiotic or not?
dr who,
Is that what he’s claiming? If that’s Upright’s basis for excluding self-replicating molecules, then he’s screwed up yet again.
Case 1: Suppose I encode a message into a molecule M0 and pass it to someone else who “reads” out the message from the molecule. Surely Upright would agree that “recorded information” has been transferred in the process, and that the information was contained in the molecule M0.
Case 2: Now suppose I encode another message into a self-replicating molecule S0. I place S0 into a solution where it creates millions of copies of itself (S1, S2, … Sn). I then select one of the molecules at random (call it Sz) and send it to my partner, who reads out the message. Has “recorded information” been transferred in the process? Obviously, the answer is yes, and the information was contained in Sz.
Yet if Upright claims that self-replicating molecules are truly incapable of “transferring recorded information” when they replicate, then his answer would have to be “it depends”. If the recipient happened to pick and decode the original molecule S0, then Upright would have to say that yes, recorded information was transferred. Why? Because this scenario is identical to Case 1: a message was encoded in a single molecule and read out from the same molecule. But if the message were read out from some other molecule Sz, with z not equal to 0, then he would have to answer that no, recorded information was not transferred, since self-replicating molecules don’t transfer “recorded information” when they replicate. The information was “locked” in S0 and could not be transferred by the process of replication.
This is clearly absurd. The recipient obtains the same message regardless of which molecule is chosen. The information was present in all of the copies, which means that it was transferred by the process of self-replication.
This might help enlighten us. Upright Biped on autocatalytic systems
This is similar to the objection I raised vis the replication of DNA, which he states results only in templating, not “the transfer of recorded information” (no protocols, independence, or arbitrary relationship.)
Granting this distinction, it follows that DNA does not contain recorded information, and that therefore transcription of DNA into proteins therefore cannot be the transfer of recorded information (there is none in DNA to transfer).
I think this problem reflects another instance of UB’s maladroit use of language (not to be confused with his blustering malapriapisms).
By “transfer” of recorded information I think he intends something like the “realization” or “actualization” of recorded information, probably a better descriptor for what he asserts happens when the protocol reads the information into an effect within a system. This is distinct from replication of the physical medium bearing the information in question, a process that does not realize/actualize that information, but does preserve it for later realization/actualization.
Rather than respond to this objection, he asserts that one is using terms equivocally. But it is his selection of the term “transfer” that causes the problem, as it admits several meanings. Assuming that, in semiotic theory, a word means what it ordinarily means generally results in trouble (c.f. “entailment.”)
(I don’t know what he does with “self-actualization.”)
We’re agreed on 1, that evolution CAN do it.
On the other hand, no one has ever observed the “intelligent designer” actually at work “designing” changes in life.
So, no designer but evolution works.
Either KF is not “focused” on the problem, or he is desperate to prove an analogy is reality.
Comms protocols work between intelligent nodes.
Does KF believe there is intelligence in a single cell?
If intelligence is instantiated in matter, does intelligence still require an out-of-body “mind” or is UB’s “semiotic” explanation all that is required for “mind”?
You may not have any positive evidence for ID, but surely KF has.
Ask him to show it to you.
He should be able to demonstrate how you would design a life form.
Ask for something simple, say solar powered with asexual replication.
No need for any “complex” evolution, just very slow moving evolution, something that may not be obvious in less than 400 years.
If he can’t do it, get Dembski to show him where he went wrong.
I AM a programmer and I HAVE seen programmers at work.
Usually I say, “Why in Dembski’s name did you do that?”, when they do something I have observed as being not very “good”.
Show me *anyone* who has observed the designer designing life.