I’ve tried for hundreds of posts to explain carefully and with many sources – that the issue is information, not chemistry. The focus of all these physicists and mathematicians and information theorists has been on the prescriptive information content of the DNA – the instructions. This is what separates life from non-life, so they want a plausible theory for how those instructions might have arisen from non-life.
I had hoped this line of inquiry would be important to the biologists and chemists on this forum, even though Pattee warned that such professionals would not be interested.
But to some of us, it is essential to determine how the original bootstrap of instructions arose, because if evolution is viewed as cellular automata (autonomous biological self-organizing complexity) - then it potentially resolves a host of enigmas which fuel the crevo debates: the lack of new phyla after the Cambrian explosion, the seemingly parallel evolution of such things as eyeness across phyla, the rise of functional complexity, the finite timeline of the geological record.
Thank you so much for the vigorous debate, RWP!
Any new technique has to prove itself. It proves itself by bringing new insight to a field, and making new predictions that could not be derived from existing methods. Information theory has, quite simply, not done this in biology or chemistry. When it proves itself useful, it will attract interest.
Couple that with the clear agenda of people like Yockey and Dembski, and the lack of respect for this branch of mathematics is heightened.