Posted on 05/06/2005 7:36:09 PM PDT by DouglasKC
A lack of randomness in quantum mechanics leads to experimental consequences; experiment always indicates that randomness is there.
The DeBroglie equation gives the wave component of a particles energy. This goes down in proportion to the particle's mass. Thus, electrons are very cloudlike, at least until they smack into something. Protons, 1835 times more massive, tend to act more like little ball-bearings.
The most famous "Geiger counter" experiment never happened: it's Schroedinger's famous dead-and-alive cat. This thought-experiment was used to illustrate in macro terms the "collapse of the wave function."
Many other experiments show the same thing. A sufficiently wave-like particle is essentially everywhere along its wave-front with a certain weighted probability, until it smacks into something. Then it is or was a point-particle at a given place.
Many real experiments have shown this behavior to be mind-bogglingly spooky for those who like things to be one thing or another, preferably neat little balls clacking about.
When I was in grad school in the seventies of the last century, I chanced upon an article in Science magazine about evidence for water channels on Mars. The article compared the situation to the evidence for the Spokane Flood put forth by Harlen Bretz in the 1920s. Geologists were indeed "antidiluvian" and Bretz pretty much sacrificed his career to his advocacy of this interpretation. Of course, he was subsequently vindicated.
When I debated Henry Morris as a "local challenger" back in the eighties, I contrasted the satellite photos of the Spokane badlands with those of the Grand Canyon. In the first case, you can see the "braided stream" effect formed by water rushing over a broad area. In the second case you can see the dendritic ( tree-like ) pattern caused by local drainage, clear and visually compelling evidence against the catastrophic formation of the Grand Canyon which many creationists advocate.
In his book In the Beginning Was Information, Dr. Werner Gitt, an expert in information systems, deduces certain conclusions from the information found in DNA. Here is a summary:
Since the DNA code has all the essential characteristics of information, there must have been a sender of this information.
Since the density and complexity of the DNA information is millions of times greater than man's present technology, the sender must be supremely intelligent.
Since the sender must have encoded (stored) the information into the DNA molecule and constructed the molecular biomachines to encode, decode and run the cells, the sender must be purposeful and supremely powerful.
Since information is a nonmaterial entity and cannot originate from matter, the sender must have a nonmaterial component (spirit).
Since information cannot originate from matter and is also created by man, man's nature must have a nonmaterial component (spirit).
Since biological information can only originate from an intelligent sender and all theories of chemical and biological evolution are based on the premise that information comes solely from matter and energy (with no sender), then the theories of chemical and biological evolution are false.
Macro level randomness may appear as a result of Brownian motion; a discussion of Einstein's work on this (his PhD dissertation) is on the xxarchive preprint server (history of physics.) The existence of atoms (or molecules) produces randomness. Some people didn't accept atoms until after Einstein.
QM randomness reall is different as you point out. It's fundamental. It can be amplfied though; one could use radioactive decay to generate Lotto numbers.)
Bump
Maybe you should try reading them. The ones dealing with evolution are starting to have to come up with so many secondary hypotheses to explain the data that it is making epicycles look like good theory.
The question before the house was, "what do scientists believe?" NOT "what do some creationist non-scientists think about what scientists believe?".
That's not even close to accurate. Many potential discrete steps on the road to cellular life are being explored. Like Urey's experiment, it is rather marginal biological science, occupying the nether world of scientific legitimacy--rather like SETI. However, it is just not remotely true that a sensible set of small stairsteps leading to life well beyond the Urey-Miller experiment have not been discerned.
What is really amusing is that in the Miller-Urey experiment, they were excited, because the results of their experiment produced chemicals that matched a meteor that came to earth. And then it hit them that the meteor was millions of years old (maybe billions), and it still had not progressed beyond their experiment's results (which is basically that they got a few amino acids of mixed chirality).
You're complaining because a meteor has not shown signs of evolutionary behavior?
It's a problem, this DNA, only because we are trained to look at it backwards. DNA is not the controlling agency of the cell.
By looking at the mutational distance of the DNA of their existing closest cousins.
This statement is completely out of touch with the current state of affairs. We have repeatedly worked the mutational evolutionary clock backwards and forwards with astonishing agreement with the main branches of the tree of life.
The only quarrels that exist are way out on the loose leaves of the tree, and they are pretty entertaining, and creationists try to get a lot of mileage out of them, but they are pretty inconsequential. For the main story, along the main branches, where divergence is tallies in hundreds of millions of years, the DNA story has recapitulated the fossil story to a mind-bogglingly accurate degree. This is the fundamental story of biology for the 20th century, and it is dramatically, astonishingly convincing to virtually every working biologist on the planet, for glaringly obvious reasons. Not, aspersions to the contrary notwithstanding, because they are extremely stupid and gullible, or because they are quaking in fear for their jobs, or because they are engaged in a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy western civilization.
Apparently you don't talk to the same creationists as report in here. I sort of doubt that very many creationists are willing to concede this much ground. Hard to do so without pretty much giving up the game, I should think.
RNA world is still a hypothesis, and self-replication is a doubtful requirement.
In addition, as we know more about cell biology, we are finding FEWER links between the kingdoms.
Not even remotely close. Every stinkin' one of us critters share fundamental chemical and morphologic identities. We all use the transcriptase-ribosomes-tRNA chain to build and repair, we all procreate thru the machinery of miosis and mitosis. All of us have protoplasm inside phospholipid bags that bear a remarkable similarity of composition. Differentiating up the tree a bit, and specializing what I mean by "we", we all have blood flow systems, we all have chemical signaling systems that use the same chemicals to accomplish the same ends, we virtually all have topologically equivalent overall morphological structure, both grossly, and in fine detail, as appropriate to the degree of DNA-mutational clock separation.
Add to that the fact that some species have alternate DNA codings, and the common origin of all life is getting further away as we know more.
This statement draws a blank from me on two scores. 1) Of course all species have "alternate" DNA coding. 2) A single, unicellular origin of DNA life has not been in the cards since about the year 2000, due largely to Carl Woese's work, which changed the official tree of life, at it's root, displacing Kingdoms as the root of the tree. Distinct, DNA-encapsulating unicellularity was not an instantaneous event, by our current lights, so there is no need to develop a scientific explaination for it.
ping
This is a logical and valid deduction from the premise: the whole exists as a collection of interdependent components. The only way the above syllogism could be demonstrated to be unsound is if one of the premises were untrue. If the argument is false, then there's a contradiction in the major premise in that the system wasn't interdependent. In such case, any system that could function without one of its components is not inherently dependent upon the missing component and therefor a simpler system could exist and by definition the system in question wasn't an essential system (as one of the components was superfilous). That's not the issue, and that's not the syllogism I presented. What the irreducible complexity argument makes is that a complex system can not originate from a simpler system on its own by the addition of previously unrelated components such that the newer system will be dependent on the previously unrelated componentes according to the definition of a system.
A good example is the circulatory system. Each and every component of a circulatory system is required and the omission of any component would cause the system to fail (or not to exist in the first place). What about in an embryo? Clearly there's a point where there's no circulatory system. However, the embryo is utterly dependent upon the host (or environment) for the functionality that a circulatory system would provide. According to pure chance, time and natural events, what are the probabilities of such environment occuring, and for sufficient time to allow such organism to develop.
An even deeper question is: would an intermediary organism in such environment, having a semi-formed non-functioning circulatory system, be sufficiently viable on its own whereby it can propagate sufficient number of times whereby time, chance and natural processes will allow sufficient beneficial mutations to occur whereby a fully functional circulatory system will be the net result (upon which ultimately resultant organisms would be utterly dependant)?
If not, then an organism having a functioning circulatory system would be an example of an irreducibly complex system. To compound the matter, additional critical systems are stacked up: nephritic system, lymphatic system, hepatic system, nervous system, etc. each of which in intermediate form would contribute nothing to viability of the host organism (over that of organisms without it) and yet would amount to an enormous amount of essentially dead baggage.
Another good example of an irreducibly complex system is that of reefs. A symbiotic relationship exists where Zooxanthellae, a unicellular yellow-brown - dinoflagellate - algae, live symbiotically in the gastrodermis of corals. Without the nutrients supplied by the zooxanthellea the corals couldn't grow quickly enough to produce reefs, and the coral provides access to light for the zooxanthellae and protection from predators. The two can and do remain as seperate viable entities (both symbiotically and physically), however in all of time both have been in existance they've not symbiotically recombined into a single organism (whereby one cell - asexually - or two (sexually) propagates the entire system). As it is the coral propagate sexually and the algea assexually (and both remain distinct despite the mutual benefit of their symbiosis).
What will an alien signal be like? The truth is we don't know. Rather than examine a signal for signs of a message, certain assumptions about any received signal are made.
SETI assumptions:
1) persistance of a "signal"
2) Natural signals have a rather broad frequency spectrum, but the artificial ones usually dont
3) the signal would be received at or around a frequency of 1420 MHz - spectral frequency of hydrogen - and therefore a universal reference point for different intelligent species.
4) the signal's power curve will resemble the bell-shaped graph known as a "gaussian over a span of about 12 seconds
That's it. No application of communication theory, or information theory or what not. How are such candidate signals being scientifically assessed with respect to artificial origin and apart from random noise? One thing that is done is application of the Fourier Transform.
In terms of signal processing, the transform takes a time series representation of a signal function and maps it into a frequency spectrum, where w is angular frequency. That is, it takes a function in the time domain into the frequency domain; it is a decomposition of a function into harmonics of different frequencies.
Another technique used is to assess periodic signal components as signature variables describing a problem or event of interest. These components are often buried in a background of extraneous information. Being able to extract a periodic component hidden in noise is one of the most frequent tasks in signal processing. The means whereby a signal buried in noise can be discerned is through use of a detection indicator known as a Coherence Function. The Coherence Function indicates what fraction of the noisy signal’s power can be attributed to the reference signal and a linear process at every frequency point.
What needs to be established is that functional DNA has a greater periodic component or "coherence" than could be attributed to the "random" reference of entropy such as found in an inert snowflake. If indeed it can be demonstrated that higher entropy exists within the structure of DNA than that of a snowflake, and that such entropy can still be attributed to random chance, sufficient time and natural processes, then every artificial thing under the sun is inherently natural. The Hoover Damn is natural in that it naturally had a tendency to form (man only being one of the natural processes involved in its formation).
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