Posted on 09/01/2003 5:46:19 PM PDT by Tribune7
Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught that Darwin's theory of evolution is the explanation for the origin of life -- regardless of what they might have learned in Sunday school. Yet according to law professor and author Phillip E. Johnson, this modern-day mantra of science classes is little more than a dogma of materialism. In his books "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," "Darwin on Trial," "Reason in the Balance" and others, Johnson defends the truth with the intellectual clout that earned him a prestigious seat at the University of California, Berkeley, yet with a humility that can only come from knowing the Creator one-on-one. Here, he talks candidly with "Decision" on the topic he is most passionate about -- dismantling Darwinism.
Q: The Ohio Board of Education recently ruled that public schools in that state can now discuss controversies surrounding the theory of evolution. Why do you think so many leading educators fought to keep such debate out of the classroom?
A: It's a good question. You would think the Darwinists would be glad to teach the controversy as a matter of educational policy. According to public opinion polls, most of the nation has serious doubts about the truth of the evolutionary theory. Why don't the educators want to address those doubts seriously? They are afraid to acknowledge that there are any doubts that matter. Real scientists, they say, believe without any doubt in the theory of evolution. But in Ohio we had petitions signed by dozens of well-credentialed scientists saying that this area of study should be opened up to freedom of thought. Science should not be committed to a dogma -- much less a dogma that is in serious trouble with the evidence -- but should freely acknowledge areas of doubt and should address them honestly.
Q: Through your books and lectures, you've become known as someone who has worked hard to bring together different factions of the creationist movement.
A: My policy is to concentrate on the first issue: What scientific evidence points toward or away from the need for a Creator? Does the evidence of science really show that Darwin's force of natural selection is so powerful that nature can do its own creating and that there is no need for God? That's the philosophical doctrine the Darwinists propose, but my colleagues and I have shown that it is not true. The evidence, as opposed to the scientific imperialism, points to the fact that natural selection has no creative power and that the Creator is very much needed. So if we concentrate on that issue first, then we can get to other issues that are somewhat divisive within the Christian world. I have done that by saying, "Let's be careful that we start with the correct Scripture."
(Excerpt) Read more at billygraham.org ...
It seems we're coming down to the "tough questions" Alamo-Girl! I have great faith that humankind will answer them in due course. So-called "integrative science" might be a helpful tool in this regard....
What an era to be living in!!!! Yikes!!! and BIG hugs!
This is false. The idea that all life descended from a single instance of abiogenesis not considered to be an axiom. It is a conclusion based on observations. Future observations may or may not support this idea.
It could be that we share a ancestor. Or it could be that the coder is reusing code.
Hi PH! Thanks for the link to the Wilke/Adami paper. I'm wondering to what extent it is realistic to expect a purpose-built "digital organism" to faithfully model processes in nature. That model can only capture what its designer knows; but so much is not known. The other thing that I wondered about is why look at RNA instead of DNA. I'm not sure this designed experiment really can tell us much. FWIW.
I'm not sure. Whatever is being learned by this particular bit of research may be only a very tiny piece of the puzzle. But what we often have in science is a situation where some people think the whole thing is an incomprehensible mystery, and others are actually tackling it, bit by bit. Every researcher (and there are thousands of them), every PhD dissertation, every little bit of work they do adds to the sum of our information. At some point it reaches a critical mass and another part of the big picture becomes clear.
So I don't know if this research will pay off or not. They may be exploring a dead end. But that's useful information too. Ultimately, research pays off. But often it takes time.
Probably. If you look at the most conserved protein sequences, they show strong evidence of common descent. For example, homologs of the prokaryotic initiation factor 2 (IF2) have been recently found in archaea, yeasts and humans.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=16334
There's significant evidence RNA preceded DNA. DNA nucleotides are synthesised from RNA nucleotides in the cell, using a very odd and likely primitive enzyme called ribonucleotide reductase. The protein synthesis apparatus - not just ribosomes, but the tRNAs - is entirely built from RNA; DNA has essentially no involvement. RNA, unlike DNA, can function as a catalyst. And we know that organisms can synthesize DNA from RNA as a template. The one thing DNA has over RNA is much higher chemical stability. It therefore likely evolved as an information storage medium long after there were functional autonomous cells. Its advantages over RNA in retaining genomic integrity probably meant RNA-only organisms were wiped out by natural selection.
Very interesting, Professor! It seems the "wipe-out" of RNA-only organisms must have occurred very early in the life of the planet. On what is this conjecture based?
Thanks for the link -- I'll check it out.
Yes it is, PH.
Here are two articles which I find particularly interesting with regard to the language of DNA (emphasis mine):
The genetic code is a mapping of 64 possible triplet codons from a 4-letter alphabet (A, C, G, U) into 20 amino acids and one STOP signal for protein synthesis. The pattern of degeneracies in codon assignments to amino acids suggests that there is an underlying variable length code, which meets all the optimal coding criteria dictated by Shannon’s Information theory.
The genetic code can be viewed as an instantaneous, prefix code with unique decipherability and compactness. Optimal codon assignments and average code lengths for 20 species from 10 groups in the phylogenetic tree have been determined from the available data on codon usage, using the Huffman algorithm. The average binary code length of the genetic code exceeds the optimal average length of the Huffman code only by 2 to 5%, showing that the genetic code is close to optimal. But functionally, the genetic code is a fixed length code of 6 binary bits (3 bases). This provides the needed redundancy (≅25%) for tolerance of errors in the DNA sequences due to mutations.
This hybrid character of the genetic code, combining the advantages of variable and fixed length codes, supports a speculation that in the past the genetic code could have been a variable length code which has evolved to its modern version. The DNA sequence bears striking similarities to linguistic discourses from an Information Theoretic view. Both are complex adaptive systems with intrinsic elements of order and randomness. The complexity parameter, which we had defined earlier for linguistic discourses, is close to maximal in both DNA and natural languages. In this article, the first of two parts, we have focused on the variable length genetic code. In Part II, we deal with DNA sequence treated as a complex adaptive system and some possible correlation of certain parameters with evolution.
Extenza - Information Theory and Algorithmic Complexity: Applications to Language Discourses
Linguistic discourses and DNA sequences in molecular biology are treated as complex adaptive systems with interacting coexisting elements of order and randomness. Following a prescription for ‘effective complexity’ of a system by Gell-Mann, we defined earlier a complexity function C for a linguistic discourse. C depends on two ‘order’ parameters x and α, which in turn depend on two kinds of entropies, Shannon entropy and Algorithmic (Kolmogorov) entropy. Algorithmic complexity is used to define an Optimum Meaning Preserving Code (OMPC) which preserves the ‘meaning’ of a particular word sequence, unlike the Shannon entropy. C tends to be 0 for systems of low as well as high order and is maximum (C = 1) for a mixture of order and disorder.
The starting point for our analysis is the distribution of word frequencies, Zipf’s law, which is a power law (W(k) = B k -2), where W(k) is the frequency of words occurring k times and B a constant). In earlier papers, we deduced a modified version of Zipf’s law (MPL) which was in better agreement with data from natural languages. The model used physical principles of maximum entropy and degeneracy from classical and quantum statistical mechanics. The model was extended to speech, a small invariant set of phonemes to obtain a law similar to the MPL, called the Cumulative Modified Power Law (CMPL), which adequately fits the phoneme rank frequencies. It was shown that the near maximal value of complexity (≈1) is a consequence of Zipf’s law.
In this paper, we extend the above concepts to DNA sequences treated as strings of symbols from a four-letter alphabet (bases A, G, C, U). The genetic code is examined at three hierarchical levels of codons (64, 26, 21). Codon rank frequencies of 20 different species are shown to follow the CMPL. Entropy, order and complexity parameters for DNA are numerically similar to those obtained for language. Complexity ≈1 for all 20 species spanning a wide range of evolutionary age. Some parameters show significant correlation with evolutionary age of the species.
IMHO, like with the need in the “RNA world” of abiogenesis to alternate between autonomy and not to give rise to self-organizing complexity – this research is suggesting the alternating between variable and fixed length DNA coding. To me, alternating between "states" strongly suggests an external "hand" in the process, i.e. emergent behavior and/or intelligent design.
And, of course, my theory of origins puts the emphasis on language so I find the similarity of complexity compelling as well.
Naturally, their conclusions take material cause as an axiom, but IMHO those very conclusions suggest much more and may help with those “tough questions.” Therefore, I make it a point to check now and again on S. Naranan and V.K. Balasubrahmanyan to see what they are doing.
Galileo studied gravity by rolling balls down an inclined plane. He didn't have accurate clocks and instruments to study objects in free fall, much less objects falling in a vacuum. Only time will tell which experiments will bear fruit. There is a possibility that digital emulations of living systems are a dead end, but that is a risky bet in my opinion. The history of science suggests that simulations start off with weak results, but get better with knowledge and experience.
On the fact that there aren't aren't any RNA organisms around. Well, that's not exactly true; there are RNA viruses that don't do DNA synthesis (not retroviruses, which have an RNA genome but make DNA). But whether RNA viruses are relics of an earlier RNA world, or degenerate parasites derived from later DNA-based life, I don't know.
One feature of the putative 'RNA world' that existed before we evolved DNA is that known RNA viruses mutate much more readily than DNA based organisms, because they lack the DNA repair mechanisms we possess. So it's likely early life was producing and testing different genomic possibilities at a far higher rate (possibly a million times higher) than, say, a contemporary bacterium does.
All living organisms, from archaeobacteria to humans, appear to have a homologous ribonucleotide reductase enzyme (which makes DNA precursors from RNA precursors). That says that the ancestors of all living groups shared a common descent from a primitive population of DNA-based organisms, and that therefore, for example, Cambrian organisms are likely to have been entirely DNA based, since almost all of them can be linked, at least as sidebranches, to contemprary organisms' descent.
Don't use comet in your bathtub. It scratches.
I don't know how risky this bet is, js1138. A machine -- e.g., a digital emulation -- is a unity of order, not of substance, and the order that exists in a machine is external to its parts. It is "designed in" from "outside."
As the biologist Paul Weiss points out, "In contrast to a machine, the cell interior is heaving and churning all the time; the position of the granules or other details in the picture, therefore, denote just momentary way stations, and the different shapes of sacs or tubules signify only the degree of their filling at the moment. The only thing that remains predictable amidst the erratic stirring of the molecular population of the cytoplasm and its substructures is the overall pattern of dynamics which keeps the component activities in definable bounds and orderly restraints. These bounds again are not to be viewed as mechanical fixed structures, but as 'boundary conditions' set by the dynamics of the system as a whole."
How does one emulate such dynamics? How can one make an "assemblage of parts" model a "whole" with self-emergent properties constrained only by internal boundary conditions, not by fixed switches and relays (necessary to run the program on a machine)?
Interesting how you can't help but anthropomorphize and talk as if life were intelligently designed.
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