I thought I would give a comment by a poster with the handle “ericB” a little more publicity as it was buried deep in an old thread where it was unlikely to be seen by passing “materialists / evolutionists”.
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Calling all evolutionists / materialists! Your help is needed! Alan Fox has not been able to answer a particular challenge, but perhaps you know an answer.
The issue is simple and the bar is purposely set low. The question is whether there exists one or more coherent scenarios for the creation of a translation system by unguided chemicals.
The translation system in cells indicates intelligent design. I would submit that, regardless of how many billions of years one waited, it is not reasonable to expect that unguided chemicals would ever construct a system for translating symbolic information into functional proteins based on stored recipes and a coding convention.
[I realize people have thoughts about what happened earlier (e.g. that might not need proteins, for example) and what happened later (e.g. when a functioning cell provides the full benefits of true Darwinian evolution). For the purposes here, attention is focused specifically on the transition from a universe without symbolic translation to construct proteins to the origin of such a system. Whatever happened earlier or later, sooner or later this bridge would have to be crossed on any path proposed to lead to the cells we see now.]
One of the key considerations leading to this conclusion is that a translation system depends upon multiple components, all of which are needed in order to function.
+ Decoding
At the end, one needs the machinery to implement and apply the code to decode encoded symbolic information into its functional form. (In the cell, this is now the ribosome and supporting machinery and processes, but the first instance need not be identical to the current version.) Without this component, there is no expression of the functional form of what the symbolic information represents. The system as a whole would be useless as a translation system without this. Natural selection could not select for the advantages of beneficial expressed proteins, if the system cannot yet produce any. A DVD without any player might make a spiffy shiny disk, but it would be useless as a carrier of information.
+ Translatable Information Bearing Medium
There must be a medium that is both suitable for holding encoded information and that is compatible with the mechanism for decoding. Every decoding device imposes limitations and requirements. It would be useless to a DVD player if your video was on a USB thumb drive the DVD player could not accept instead of a suitable disk. In the cells we see, this is covered by DNA and ultimately mRNA.
+ Meaningful Information Encoded According to the Same Coding Convention
One obviously needs to have encoded information to decode. Without that, a decoding mechanism is useless for its translation system purpose. If you had blank DVDs or DVDs with randomly encoded gibberish or even DVDs with great high definition movies in the wrong format, the DVD player would not be able to produce meaningful results, and so would have no evolutionary benefit tied to its hypothetical but non-functioning translation abilities. In the cell, this information holds the recipes for functional proteins following the same encoding convention implemented by the ribosome and associated machinery.
+ Encoding Mechanisms
This is perhaps the least obvious component, since the cell does not contain any ability to create a new store of encoded protein recipes from scratch. Indeed, this absence is part of the motivating reasons for the central dogma of molecular biology. Nevertheless, even if this capability has disappeared from view, there would have to be an origin and a source for the meaningful information encoded according to the same coding convention as is used by the decoding component.
(For the moment, I will just note in passing that the idea of starting out with random gibberish and running the system until meaningful recipes are stumbled upon by accident is not a viable proposal.)
So there has to be some source capable of encoding, and this source must use the same coding convention as the decoding component. To have a working, beneficial DVD player, there must also be a way to make a usable DVD.
+ Meaningful Functional Source Material to Represent
It would do absolutely no good to have the entire system in place, if there did not also exist in some form or other a beneficial “something” to represent with all this symbolic capability. If you want to see a movie as output, there needs to be a movie that can be encoded as input. If you want functional proteins as output, there needs to be access to information about proper amino acid sequences for functional proteins that can serve as input. Otherwise, GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. If there is no knowledge of what constitutes a sequence for a functional protein, then the result produced at the end of the line would not be a functional protein.
+ Some Other Way To Make What You Want The System To Produce
If we supposed that the first movie to be encoded onto a DVD came from being played on a DVD player, we would clearly be lost in circular thinking, which does not work as an explanation for origins. Likewise, if the only way to produce functional proteins is to get them by translating encoded protein recipes, that reveals an obvious problem for explaining the origin of that encoded information about functional proteins. How can blind Nature make a system for producing proteins, if there has never yet been any functional proteins in the universe? On the other hand, how does blind Nature discover and use functional proteins without having such a system to make them?
The core problem is that no single part of this system is useful as a translation system component if you don’t have the other parts of the system. There is nowhere for a blind process to start by accident that would be selectable toward building a translation system.
The final killer blow is that chemicals don’t care about this “problem” at all. Chemicals can fully fulfill all the laws of chemistry and physics using lifeless arrangements of matter and energy. Chemicals are not dissatisfied and have no unmet goals. A rock is “content” to be a rock. Likewise for lifeless tars.
The biology of cells needs chemistry, encoded information, and translation, but chemicals do not need encoded information or biology. They aren’t trying to become alive and literally could not care less about building an encoded information translation system.
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I’m hoping ericB will find time to respond to any comments his challenge might elicit.
I would suggest that you perhaps need to review some books on good programming practice.
And thank you Mung for showing why ID explains nothing by explaining everything.
No, perhaps DNA (rofl) was not designed by humans. And perhaps it was designed by a designer that wanted it to be the way it is and that’s why it is the way it is!
Very insightful Mung!
So when you extrapolate from human designs to design in general and see something that does not make sense in that context (i.e. overlapping codes) then, shrug, it’s still ID it’s just the designer is not human so go figure.
Funny how the things that are like humans do indicates design and the things humans don’t do indicates design. Overlapping codes? Designed? Codes? Designed?
So, yeah, sure Mung, perhaps the designers were not human. And you call this what? As I’m sure it’s not science!
You appear to be missing the simple fact that you are not just talking about a single ‘Chemy’ but (potentially) billions of them, all exploring the same (or similar) spaces over many millions of years.
One drunkards walk will never traverse the mountain in a reasonable timescale, but billions?
The concept “genuinely unlike anything we’ve seen before” is so thoughtlessly stupid it sounds like a joke or parody, like invisible pink unicorns.
We assign “artifact” to things that we think were made by humans (or animals) . When movie makers envision alien artifacts they depict things imagined and made by humans (themselves) .
The Triplet-Reading System — Part Two
Allan Miller’s proposal to meet the challenge of this thread repeatedly commits the error of reasoning that I have described allegorically as the Error of Camp-Comparison Reasoning (i.e. the comparison of hypothetical stages of development according to the advantages they would have — if reached — without justifying an assumed ability to overcome the intervening obstacles). In a post half a week ago, I illustrated this problem by reviewing some earlier exchanges concerning the specific example of The Triplet-Reading System.
[Side point: It seems the site sometimes has a problem creating the correct links when quoting from posts on earlier pages. The quotation links in that post (which is on cpage=5) have their source posts as also being on cpage=5. However, they are actually on cpage=3. (The comment numbers are correct.) The corrected source post links are A.M., mine, A.M., A.M.]
So how might one support the appearance of a Triplet-Reading System? I haven’t seen a response from Allan Miller since that post, but he did suggest earlier that …
I’ve already discussed how reading triplets is irrelevant to how RNA folds. What about the more general idea that the triplet-reading system developed originally for “a completely different reason” than for the purpose it now has? That suggestion easily runs into one or both of at least two problems.
A. The alternate use is so similar that it does not significantly decrease the difficulties or the implausibility. It merely shifts the difficulties off screen and out of sight.
B. The alternate use is sufficiently different that it creates new difficulties when it comes to an imagined migration from the old purpose to the new purpose.
For example, Allan Miller did suggest “that even a mere length-control counting system would operate to a triplet frame”. Yet, if it controls length (or serves any other purpose) by successively matching triplets of nucleotides in an RNA sequence, the system still needs the functionality of
1. being able to advance the sequence,
2. pausing while exposing one triplet to matching,
3. having a full set of 64 structures with potentially matching complementary triplets (e.g. tRNA or the equivalent) so that a match can be found for whatever triplet of nucleotides occurs,
4. being able to recognize when a match has been found,
5. taking whatever advantageous action is associated with having found that match (e.g. add an amino acid to a polypeptide chain, or whatever), and
6. then — when it is not too early to do so — recognizing that it is time to advance the sequence to the next triplet and repeat the process …
7. … until reaching some recognized STOP condition.
Even if we relabel the purpose served by the system, such a triplet-reading system is still effectively just as complex and just as implausible to develop without intention as it is if serving its current purpose in translation. Merely changing the identified purpose does not reduce the problems of attributing its development to blind, unguided natural process in the face of severe obstacles.
What if we try to reduce the difficulty by imagining a purpose that could be fulfilled without all the features of a triplet-reading system?
For example, a system that didn’t involve matching successive triplets in an RNA sequence might not need much of that complexity. For instance, you wouldn’t need the 64 structures with complementary triplet combinations. But then that would also eliminate the relevance of Allan Miller’s observations about why triplets work when “binding a folded structure [e.g. a tRNA] to a linear one [e.g. the mRNA]” (here and here).
Since that other system would be something other than a triplet-reading system, the problem still arises of how to justify the creation of an actual triplet-reading system. A system that doesn’t need to read a sequence as a series of triplets may be easier, but it would not be oriented toward reading triplets. How does a blind, unguided process stumble upon going from the one to the other?
In any detailed example, it will become apparent that this just creates new problems when it comes to justifying the move to an actual triplet-reading system. The problem has been relocated, but not removed. It might be taken out of view, but the issues remain real and without a solution.
And it’s a many-dimensional mountain. Every time you open up a dimension, you increase the number of pathways, in an exponential manner.
This puts me in mind of saddling up a horse – ‘Analogy’ – and galloping off with the rest of the runners and riders in the 3.30. After a while, the horse just evaporates from under the jockey’s legs, and he ends up running, but still making a gangnam-style ‘ridey’ motion in the hope no-one has noticed. It’s just like stuff we know, except when it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen!
Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
video
Physicist Peter M. Hoffmann describes his own research in this way: “My research I consider nano mechanics, so I like the mechanical idea of it …”
Extracting “order” has never been the problem with explaining the origin of the molecular machines and the systems of molecular machines, such as the translation system. At 45:22 in the video, a question is asked that is the most relevant for the challenge at hand in this thread.
So we don’t know how it happened: therefore designerdidit?
If we can’t design it, how can we use our designing ability as an analogy?
Perhaps what you mean by design is magic. That’s Behe’s answer. Poof. Thunderclap.
Or perhaps as we understand how to make a simple replicator it will be obvious that we are using molecular evolution, and chemistry is doing the designing.
I wonder when in the history of science that magic was a useful and produductive conjecture.
Hi Eric
Did you want to put up an OP? I’ve changed your role to contributor which means you can compose an OP via the dashboard. Just ask an admin to publish it when you are ready.
The ID position (or at least a common ID position) is that the first cell must have been designed and appeared de novo, the reason unknown. Curious then that another two and a half billion years passed before the designer(s) made humans. There must be some reason why the designer(s) didn’t create complete, mature ecosystems all at once. Perhaps the designer(s) died not long after making the first cell. After all, every form of intelligence that we are aware of is mortal, with individual life spans usually less than century. If there were further interventions, I suspect different designer(s) were responsible, with different motivations and goals.
So ericB is resorting to the god-of-the-gaps argument.
Science hasn’t figured out the recipe(s) for how replicating molecules came to be yet; therefore goddidit.
This is not an argument; it is a stubborn refusal to look at the science. There are plenty of ideas on the table that are being researched; and none of those ideas requires injecting a deity. Every one of these ideas is built on well-understood principles of chemistry and physics.
Notice what Hoffman said in that video:
This is the consensus of nearly everyone in research. They are well aware of the difficulties of the research; but there is nothing in the laws of physics and chemistry that precludes a sequence of processes that would lead to replicating systems on which natural selection can then act. Not one ID/creationist knows this fact.
ID/creationists flat out deny the laws of physics and chemistry. A perfect example is ericB’s little “Chemy” character. Little Chemy is based on THE Fundamental Misconception of all of ID/creationism that life violates the second law of thermodynamics. Every ID/creationist believes this; ericB believes this. Granville Sewell thinks he has trumped the entire physics and chemistry communities with his “unique insight” into the second law.
But the notion is dead wrong; and it has been dead wrong from the time Henry Morris introduced it as a foundational argument for “scientific” creationism. It has been wrong from the time when Duane Gish bullied biology teachers in front of their students with it.
Any argument based on a misconception/misrepresentation of science is a straw-man argument at best. However, in the case of ID/creationism, this misrepresentation has been pointed out to ID/creationists repeatedly for something like 50 years; nevertheless proponents of ID/creationism keep repeating the argument as though they were never corrected. So instead of being a straw-man argument, it has become a deliberate deception on the part of ID/creationists.
EricB has swallowed the misconception/misrepresentation hook, line, and sinker; and he presents it here.
Did anyone notice how long it took ericB state this “argument” explicitly even though he was prompted that we all recognized it from the beginning? This is the old Gish Gallop.
He has presented no challenge whatsoever; he has presented only the old, hackneyed creationist misconceptions and misrepresentations. God-of-the-gaps is not an argument; it is the Black Knight’s bluster.
Read the book, eric B. Learn some chemistry and physics.
It was more likely and incompetent deity that blew itself up in the Big Bang and hasn’t been seen since. 😉
See 6 – cart before horse
The neighbouring unoccupied triplet is already exposed.
Wrong. There is no need to have 64 different triplets. A simple polynucleotide is what I had in mind – say, a monotonous stretch of GGGGGGGGGG.
If a system had only one anticodon-bearing tRNA – CCC – it would ‘recognise’ GGG until it encountered something non-GGG. Which, in my potential scenario, would be STOP. 63 STOPs and one codon.
This is length control (an entirely hypothetical model, I add). So the precursor system produces peptides of varying length, but the use of an RNA control sequence allows faster peptide synthesis (because docking is a rate-increasing action) and controlled termination. Indeed, the other function – increasing the rate of synthesis – is at least as likely a cause. I am simply offering scenarios for a simple, primitively coded system. You may note that I can suggest more than one. Both of those could be wrong. There may be others. You keep obsessing about qualities that the modern system has – in particular, 64 assignments (rather, 61 and 3 stops). Why can you not recognise that this could be a derived state from a much earlier one (eg 1 assignment and 63 stops)?
Given that this is chemically controlled … how does it happen? What steps cause advancement of the ribosome along the mRNA? Perhaps the fact that preceding triplet is already bound by peptidyl-tRNA? The next tRNA can only attach to an unoccupied codon.
See above. In a one-assignment code everything else is STOP.
Yeah … it’s complicated. But not as irreducibly as you are determined to think. And – incidentally – how does a designer get round those complications? Do you know how to design such a molecular machine, and do you know it can only be done by design? I’m guessing no to both.
I’m glad that Allan Miller is contributing, because I’m really curious about something.
At a minimum, the same ways that we have always known designers to do so. Talk with people who design complex systems. I notice that you repeatedly seem to have some kind of skepticism about the ability of designers to design, but I’m really not sure why you should find this in any way strange. But you seemed to have something particular in mind when you said this…
I’d genuinely and sincerely like to understand better what kind of catastrophe you are alluding to. For example, what would it take for Craig Ventor et al to trigger such a catastrophe?
Good question. I’m glad you asked. Consider this argument.
Without P2, the argument would fall apart. Yet that is exactly the kind of premise that thorton has correctly called into question elsewhere on the page. It is certainly doubtful. We don’t have a warrant for assuming that everything Artificial will necessarily look like the things humans have designed. Therefore, for anyone who doesn’t accept P2, that argument does fall apart.
In terms of subsets of the Universal set of Material stuff, the faulty argument would be equivalent to claiming that everything in the set Artificial is also in the set Looks like our designs. If that were so, then it would be legitimate to infer that something not in Looks like our designs must be in the set Natural. However, once again, the idea that everything Artificial can be expected to look like our designs is unwarranted and quite suspect, exactly as thorton pointed out.
The situation is not symmetrical.
Of course, as I’ve always maintained, the inference to this conclusion is only warranted in the cases where P3 holds. That is why I say it is a necessary condition (as well as being sufficient) for inferring Artificial for material stuff based on their properties.
As I’ve always said, the inference to Artificial depends on whether P3 holds. That is both the necessary and sufficient condition.
In some cases P3 doesn’t hold. There are cases where “I got no friggin’ idea”. You are correct in expecting that such cases do belong in a different category — as I explained in my detailed responses to thorton. (See here and here.) For example, (with emphasis added)…
So, if you consider those two responses to thorton carefully, you will see that the discriminatory cases are all in the quadrants or categories where either both patterns are matched or neither pattern is matched. If neither is matched and if that becomes a non-empty category, then by definition that is a situation where we are necessarily talking about a case that is not reasonably attributed to natural processes as well as being unlike anything humans have designed. If it were otherwise, it would be in a different category that I also discuss in the posts and where we might not infer Artificial.
You should take my earlier comments on set theory as skepticism about talk of “the Universal set of Material Stuff.”
Why the dichotomy of natural or artificial? It seems to me that there should be a third possibility, namely: unknown but perhaps warranting further investigation.
Mike Elzinga:
You first heard about this book from me? It’s ok to admit it, really.
OMagain:
Better yet, put them into practice! Don’t re-invent the wheel. Is that a good practice? Here’s one of my favorites: YAGNI.
Since you seem to know so much, who is your favorite author on “programming practice”?
OMagain:
Just full of your usual nonsense, I see. How does one extrapolate from human designs to design in general? That’s abstraction, not extrapolation.
Mike Elzinga:
Mike’s bluff got called. Therefore, god of the gaps. Skeptical much?
“Faced with such mysteries, many people want to throw up their hands like Darwin and declare that it is not possible to explain life after all.” – p 246
But Life’s Ratchet, unlike Darwin, who could merely throw up his hands, explains life. Right Mike?
“The fruitful interaction of chance and necessity also explains how these chaos-harvesting machines were “designed” by evolution.” – p. 7
Amy Draves: We have an online question which is, “Where did the machines come from?”
Peter M. Hoffmann: Okay. That’s a great question. So… [pause] um… [pause] This is always the big question, of course, where scientists don’t have a good answer, is once we have the machines how do we get the variety of them? That’s evolution.”
No, that was not the question.
Peter M. Hoffmann: But where the first machines start from, that goes back to the origin of life and basically I would say we have no idea at this point.”
Ignorance of he gaps much, Mike?
Mike Elzinga:
You don’t know that “fact” either. So lump yourself right in there with those dreaded creationists. Facts are either self-evident or demonstrable. Your alleged “fact” is neither.
And you are either ignorant or a liar. My opinion is you’re just ignorant. Or maybe you’re just tossing feces to see what sticks.
No, I did not learn about the book from you; I knew about it long before you started pretending you knew something about it.
And I also know you haven’t read it, let alone comprehended anything in the book. I have been trying to get others to read it.
The book is accessible to high school physics and chemistry students. You should read it instead of spending all your time trying to annoy people with your hit-and-run juvenile taunts and insults as you continue to abuse Elizabeth’s hospitality.
But you are trying to change the subject. ID/creationists assert that life violates the second law of thermodynamics; just ask Granville Sewell. It does not; that has been checked out and has been known for almost a century.
But ID/creationists want to reinsert “vitalism” which violates the first law of thermodynamics.
If you had actually read Peter Hoffmann’s book, you would have learned that Hermann von Helmholtz demonstrated, way back near the end of the 19th century, that life does not violate conservation of energy (the first law).
Knowing some science makes life more interesting and enjoyable. You really should try it.
Good question, ask KF as he does it daily.
So do you believe that the coding claimed in DNA represents good programming practice? Why?
You should try answering a few of the questions asked of you some time, then perhaps others will be more amenable to answering yours.
Answer mine and I’ll answer yours. Does the “multitude of multi level overlapping codes” claimed to exist in DNA by ID proponents correspond to “good programming practice” as we understand it or not?
And it’s not even about a specific author, it is much simpler. If you employed someone and they wrote code “like we find in DNA” would you give them a bonus or fire them?
Demonstrate that life’s origin or the origin of any biological artifact was via ID.
Wow. Who did your hypothetical designer talk to who had aleady designed that sort of system?
Just wow.
Yes, there is. The laws of physics and chemistry states that chemical reaction tend to the equilibrium the state of less energy. A replicator that allows a darwinian evolution is not in equilibrion, so you need a continuos flow of reactants to keep the replicator working, and to reach that you need a chemical machine. The only knowed chemical machines is life, then without life you cannot get life. OOL is impossible, at least with the phyics laws we know here on earth.
OOL is the need of materialistic metaphysic.
So how’s that principle been working out in the history of s ience w Blas? Got any examples in scienc where progress was made by assuming non-material causes or angels pushing things around?
You are totally confused, Blas.
Get Hoffmann’s book and read it; I mean really read it for comprehension.
Mike, I do not need read that book, it is you that need to understand basic chemistry.
Then there is no hope for you.
Hope? What is hope?
“Unknown but perhaps warranting further investigation” would be a case where I am saying we are not warranted to infer Artificial. It doesn’t mean it we know for sure that it can be produced by natural processes or that it couldn’t be Artificial, but it would indicate there is not a sufficient basis at present for making the inference to Artificial as the best explanation.
In other words, until we see otherwise, natural process explanations are not ruled out. They would remain a live possibility as the default state.
I’m not sure what you mean about skepticism about a universal set of material stuff. For any materialist, that would just mean the universe and the things it contains.
The idea that “ID/creationists assert that life violates the second law of thermodynamics” is completely false. There is no issue about “life” violating any thermodynamic laws, including not by Granville Sewell. This indicates you don’t understand his position (or that of other ID proponents). The issue is not the operation of “life” but the origin of life, i.e. the transition, and there has never been any question about the ability of energy flow to accomplish this — if there were/are suitable engines that can harness the energy flow (just as Hoffmann discusses concerning molecular machines).
This issue has never been the operation of the machines (once they exist). It has always been about where such machines could come from given only natural processes.
I have five very straight-forward questions for you:
(1) Does Granville Sewell understand the second law of thermodynamics?
(2) Does Granville Sewell understand what entropy is?
(3) Do YOU understand the second law of thermodynamics?
(4) Do YOU understand what entropy is?
(5) Why do the origins of life violate the second law of thermodynamics?
I am not looking for more copy/paste without comprehension.
Bullshit, ericB. Lots of Creationists assert that Life violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, on the grounds that ‘intelligent agency’ is required to ‘overcome’ the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and therefore Creationism is true. Duane Gish said so in his live dog-and-pony shows, Whitcomb and Morris said so in their YEC book The Genesis Flood, and the list goes on and on and fucking on.
You’re right—but that hasn’t stopped mass quantities of Creationists from asserting that there is such an issue.
Alternately, ericB, it indicates that you know nothing of Creationist argumentation. Or perhaps it indicates that you do know about Creationist argumentation and are willing to lie about it?
Mike E
I’d be happy to loan my copy to you EricB.
Mike Elzinga:
Some do, some don’t. Those who do I am not sure I’d classify as ID’ists, but that’s really neither here nor there. Those who do probably don’t truly understand the argument.
On the other hand, you have no excuse for not understanding the argument and you have no excuse for lumping all ID’ists and all creationists together based on a single issue that they don’t even agree on.
You can, I am sure, provide a quote to establish your claim that Granville Sewell asserts that life violates the second law of thermodynamics.
I’ll even help you. A recently published volume to which he contributed a paper is freely available online:
Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems
Or maybe I already knew that before ever reading Hoffman’s book.
p.s. you forgot to mention feces.
That’s what I thought. You come into the realm of programming practice, asserting that I I need to “read up” on it, and can’t even name an author.
I, on the other hand, can name many. I can do more than name them, I can demonstrate that I have read them.
So, I called your bluff, and you folded.
Skeptical much?
Mike Elzinga:
Because obviously, Blas, your position is refuted in that book. Where, exactly, Mike doesn’t say. Maybe he is referring to a passage like the following:
“Thus the power input from the random pounding of water molecules is a hundred million times larger than the power output of our machine! – p. 145”
cubist:
You forgot the IDists!
Mike Elzinga:
Maybe cubist and Mike E should get together and come up with a coherent position that could then be adopted by the entire “skeptical” community here at “The Skeptical Zone.”
ericB,
Sorry, I contributed to dragging the thread off topic yet again.
For penance I’ll try to see what, if anything, Hoffman has to say in his book that is relevant to the OP.
Naah. ID-pushers are Creationists, therefore the term “Creationists” covers them.
I have been on top of this for well over 40 years. You can’t bluff about what ID/creationists know and don’t know about the laws of thermodynamics. I have thoroughly dissected Sewell’s “papers” many times over, right here on this site and on Panda’s Thumb. Sewell can’t even do what a high school student can do and keep units straight. But I suspect you don’t know what that means.
If you really have a copy of Hoffmann’s book, keep it and read it for understanding instead of just quote-mining it. You think I don’t know what the contexts of your quote mines are?
I have a copy and I have read it; but you haven’t figured that out either.
I will ask you the same questions that I asked ericB.
(1) Does Granville Sewell understand the second law of thermodynamics?
(2) Does Granville Sewell understand what entropy is?
(3) Do YOU understand the second law of thermodynamics?
(4) Do YOU understand what entropy is?
(5) Why do the origins of life violate the second law of thermodynamics?
I am not looking for more copy/paste without comprehension.
I second that request. I would like to see some actual clear quotations where he claims that “life” violates the second law of thermodynamics.
Clear quotations please.
I will yield this much. Since I have not studied these people that you allude to, I cannot claim to know what they have claimed. However, I have never heard of any ID proponent or Creationist making any such claim. I remain hugely skeptical that there are any that do.
What I expect is that many have claimed that evolution or that the undirected origin of life violates the 2nd law. And I would find it sadly unsurprising if their critics misrepresented such statements as if they were claiming that “life” violates the 2nd law.
But if any have indeed claimed that “life” violates the 2nd law, that is something I would like to see and know about. That is the claim that I find far fetched and unbelievable. So clear quotations, please, from those that supposedly make the claim (not second hand sources).
BTW, this has been covered in depth as far back as The Mystery of Life’s Origins, by Charles Thaxton et al, which reviewed the scientific literature and had multiple chapters dealing specifically and at length with the thermodynamic issues regarding the origin of life. I’d recommend that anyone wanting to look into the topic in depth should include studying The Mystery of Life’s Origins.
The bottom line conclusion is that the flow of energy from the sun and the openness of the system on Earth are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the origin of life. One also needs suitable engines to harness that energy and convert it to useful, appropriate work, such as to perform the configurational operations that are needed. Energy flow into an open system on its own is not sufficient.
Likewise Granville Sewell maintains as a main point that the mere openness of a system is not sufficient.
Even Hoffmann’s work shows the role of the molecular machines in converting what would be otherwise nondirectional chaos (e.g. the push of water molecules in random directions) into ordered movement and work.
The significant and noticeable point about Hoffmann’s answer is that even though he does understand how the machines work without violating any laws, that knowledge does not give him the answer about how it comes to be that there are such machines at all. He is honest enough to admit plainly that he has no answer as to “Where did the machines come from?”. How do you get the machines without having machines to make them? That is reason the field is stalled and without a clear answer. His research obviously does not provide that answer, since he freely admits he has no answer and does not know.
In this case, I’m at least as guilty myself, if not more so. However, if there really is anyone who says such a thing, I want to know about it. I’d really like to see those quotations, if they exist. So to the extent of getting documented clarification through clear quotations, I will explicitly invite that much of a diversion as a special case.
Besides, as a hand waving excuse for the diversion, it has some relevance in relation to the second obstacle of this challenge (or allegorically).
I hope you’ve also been following my other posts related to when we are warranted to infer design, such as to cubist (with links to earlier ones to thorton).
I hope that makes clear that one would not be warranted to infer design for the silicon based life unless we had reasons to consider it not plausibly attributed to what undirected natural processes can produce. If we simply don’t know whether natural processes could do this or not, then we still don’t have the basis for inferring that design is the best explanation.
That is why I wrote to you in my previous answer that it is not a question begging assertion or any blind assertion at all. It is based on an understanding of what can (or cannot) be reasonably attributed to the reach of unguided natural processes.
I hope that answers your question. If not, it would help me more if you paraphrased your question and elaborated, rather than requoting it. Thanks.
Did I miss something?
First, I want to apologize for describing the precursor system at the state of having the full set of 64 anticodons. That was incorrect with regard to your intent. I do apologize for that error on my part.
I should have been more accurate and more clear about the distinction between what you proposed and what I suspect would be needed (which I agree is not the same thing and the two should not have been confused, so again, I’m sorry about that).
That said, I do have a problem seeing how your actual proposal becomes plausible. Do you really suppose and propose that the organism knows from the start to supply only long monotonous stretches of the single nucleotide that corresponds to the only codon pattern that would work?? If that doesn’t seem like a teleological assumption, I’m not sure what would.
Or do you suppose that a blind accidental system would necessarily start out working with random sequences of nucleotides? (If it is not at first using random sequences, how does it know better?)
If it starts out with random nucleotide sequences (how could it know to do otherwise?), then only one out of 64 triplets will actually do anything other than stop immediately. That means that 98.4375% of the time, the system would produce nothing at all.
It also means that for another 1.538% of the time, the “output” is a peptide “chain” of length one, which is no longer than the input of the amino acid that one already had attached to the tRNA (or equivalent).
As a very rare event, the hypothetical system might even form a chain of length two. But overwhelmingly, the great result of such an elaborate but accidental system is to either produce nothing at all or else nothing more than what it had to start with — an amino acid in and the same amino acid out.
Is this what you propose to start with?? I’m guessing not, but its getting hard to guess what you would propose instead.
Even if such a system existed and was not eliminated by natural selection as being a waste and inefficient, how do you then propose that such a system learns to create and preferentially supply only the long monotonous nucleotide sequences that happen to correspond to the only monotonous anticodon that is available?
Notice that even though it is simple to describe a monotonous sequence, that doesn’t automatically mean that it is simple for a blind process to develop an ability to selectively create and preferentially use such sequences to “control” the length of anything like a truly polypeptide.