Williams is not misrepresenting Polanyi in the slightest. He is taking Polanyi’s argument and extending it to cover new information. For intance, during Polanyi’s time, DNA was thought to be “linear, one dimensional, one-way, sequencial code”—and mostly junk. Now we know that DNA is an “overlapping-multi-layered and multidimensional sequence that can be read forward and backward, and that the “junk” is actually “far more functional than the protein code” itself. This means that the so-called “fossilized” history that was read into “junk DNA” is now itself junk. Polanyi had no knowledge of this, and would undoubtedly concur that this makes the hurdle for naturalistic explanations for evolution even that much more impossible. But even back then, according to the paper you just cited, Polanyi recognized life’s irreducible structure. From the conclusion of the paper you just cited:
Summary
“Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are boundary conditions harnessing the laws of inanimate nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary conditions extending, in the case of man, to consciousness and responsibility.”
It doesn’t get much clearer than that—GGG
[[Williams is not misrepresenting Polanyi in the slightest. He is taking Polanyi’s argument and extending it to cover new information.]]
Thank you- that’s states it better than I could- Wallace also said “Something “I” will refer to as a ‘polanyi impossibility” which conveys that the polanyi assertion is now somethign that Wallace has extended.
As I said above, I didn't say Williams was misrepresenting Polanyi, just that that's why I went looking for what Polanyi originally wrote. I apologize if that was confusing.
And I don't see that our increasing knowledge of how DNA works invalidates Polanyi's statement that "the effect of a higher principle over a system under dual control can have any value down to zero may allow us also to conceive of the continuous emergence of irreducible principles within the origin of life."
I'm not arguing that life doesn't have an irreducible structure in Polanyi's terms. But he apparently didn't seem to think that the higher-level control mechanisms had to exist prior to the development of the lower-level ones, or that they couldn't arise in conjunction with them. Williams asserts that they can't, but he doesn't demonstrate it.