Yes George. That's why just about every field of study has axioms.
(And when did Kurt Gödel come out in Reader's Digest?)
"The missing ingredient needed for the origin of living matter is the genome, not Intelligent Design."
His hypothesis is that examining the genetic code (the result state) can't give you information about the origin.
A analogue would be: given carbon dioxide, water, and sodium salts; was the precursor vinegar & baking soda? or did the seltzer water go flat?
I think he's on pretty firm ground here.
He also says that the origin of the genome is unknowable in principle.
That's where he steps out onto the ice. Biochemistry is looking at it from the other end (the initial state) and will be the tool to detail the origin. Who knows, maybe both seltzer and vinegar theories will do the trick.
And yet all of evolution proceeds from this unknown origin. Darwinian evolution commences after this origin; life is simply taken for granted.
Yes Betty, that's one of the axioms.
And so there's nothing in Darwinist evolution that deals with what life is; it only deals with how life behaves.
Very good! I think you're getting the hang of it!
So it seems to me Yockey does not entirely close the door on the possibility of an intelligent design of the genome -- since its origin is shrouded from our view.
Remarkably, he doesn't entirely close the door on the possibility of The Flying Spaghetti Monster either. But like Laplace, science has "no need of that hypothesis”.
It also seems to me that information itself implies intelligence of some sort, at both the inception and receiving ends of the Shannon model.
Only because of your axiom that there was an intelligible message to begin with. And unlike Shannon's theory and the game of "telephone", there's no requirement for the message to get transmitted with any particular fidelity.
For instance, I don't have to answer to my dead great grand-dad as to why I have detached ear lobes and he didn't.
It is a basic principle of information theory (mathematics), so I'd say "pretty firm" is an understatement. That this concept is apparently opaque to most people never ceases to amaze me.
Ah, he seems to have fallen into a pitfall one might expect of a mathematician. He is thinking of the genetic code as an abstract string of bits, whereas first and foremost it is a class of chemical structures. The mathematics cannot reveal the origin of the code, but the chemistry can. Nothing in the mathematical mapping of a triplet of two-bit characters onto a collection of twenty-odd amino acids contains the essential experimental result that the amino acids also bind chemically to their cognate triplets.
Very amusing, and a salutary lesson to mathematicians everywhere, that when one throws out the physical details, one should be careful that there isn't a second baby remaining in the bathwater!