1. Functional Information
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
DNA contains multi-layered information that reads both forward and backwards - DNA stores data more efficiently than anything we've created - DNA contains meta-information (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data). It is a closed system dependent on all operations to be functioning. You have information in a symbolic representation and a reading frame code. Put simply, a message assumes a protocol (agreement, set of rules) between the sender and the receiver, to help correctly encode and interpret the contents of the message. A simple example would be codons, they only represent amino acids if you have the system in place to interpret the functional relationship of the medium (aaRS). This cannot just happen by accident and the design inferences are obvious and inescapable.
It is just that it is increasingly clear that the long-reigning neo-Darwinian paradigm is collapsing – and despite many efforts to deny what is obvious – clearly “the emperor has no clothes.” The extremely sophisticated hardware and software systems that enable life simply cannot be built by any trial and error system. In particular – it is very clear that software can never be developed one binary bit at a time. Apart from a fully functional pre-existing hardware/software system, a single bit has absolutely no meaning. I feel that if we are to preserve our scientific integrity, we must acknowledge that we have a major explanatory problem, and we need to go back to the drawing board in terms of understanding the origin of biological information.
- John Sanford
DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.
- Bill Gates
Instead, the living cell is best thought of as a supercomputer – an information processing and replicating system of astonishing complexity. DNA is not a special life-giving molecule, but a genetic databank that transmits its information using a mathematical code. Most of the workings of the cell are best described, not in terms of material stuff – hardware – but as information, or software. Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won’t work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level.
– Paul Davies
Molecular biologists have introduced a new “high-tech” teleology, taking expressions, often self-consciously, from communication theory, electrical engineering, and computer science. The vocabulary of modern molecular and cell biology includes apparently accurate descriptive terms that nevertheless seem laden with a “meta-physics of intention”: “genetic code,” “genetic information,” “transcription,” “translation,” “editing enzymes,” “signal-transduction circuitry,” “feedback loop,” and “information-processing system.” As Richard Dawkins notes, “Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer-engineering journal.”
- Stephen Meyer
Un-designed design bookmark
DNA and the whole system it works in is extremely complex. There is complexity within complexity. I know almost nothing about it. It’s fascinating, and natural selection does not fully explain how DNA got that way.
Video is well done, I liked the edgy end.