Posted on 10/28/2010 10:49:08 AM PDT by betty boop
If that truly is the position of contemporary science, it's rather uncomfortably reminiscent of the folks in the late 19th century, who felt that science had reached its perfection, and that the rest was just a compilation of results.... (I can't recall which big-name scientist made the claim.)
Absolutely astonishing article, Diamond! Thank you ever so much for the link!
It looks to me like the mathematics and evolution of DNA can be neither random nor accidental.... This must be unsettling for orthodox Darwinists.
What effect would duplications such as genome duplications or chromosome duplications have on the cited ratios?
Thanks, Diamond and Betty. I’m showing this link to my husband. He loves to study the perfect geometry of God’s creation.
Right. And then along came the great physicists Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, et al., who blew that assumption to smithereens....
Not to mention the work of the great mathematician, Kurt Gödel....
It's been said that biology is the youngest science. (Astronomy being the oldest.) If that's true, it may yet have a good deal of growing up to do....
Thanks so much for writing, r9etb!
I didn't say the HGP has been suspended, OldNavyVet. Of course the research continues.
What I was referencing with my remark about "crash and burn" was simply that the expectations for the Project were so high, that many researchers were disappointed with the results achieved at the time they were publicly announced.
IOW, they had confidence that their methods would be highly fruitful, but it seems their results did not meet expectations. Of course they're going to keep trying to explicate the genome! What I wonder is whether any researcher is explicitly aware of the possibility that the genome may ultimately be a mathematical, not a material object....
That's my speculation anyway.... FWIW
Thank you for writing, OldNavyVet!
Betty ... The word "change" applies to everything in the universe, at every moment in time. And that which is happening in each next moment is a randomly predictable change from that in the prior moment -- with high confidence results given good understanding of the process.
Of course I agree with you that change applies to everything in the phenomenal or material universe. Things are constantly changing all the time. But what on earth is a "randomly predictable change?" Your argument appears to be strictly, relentlessly deterministic.
Whatever. What Marshall wants to know is —
Is the formulaThis is Darwin's formula for biological evolution. But does it hold water?Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Design
Mathematically true, or false? ...
DNA is a blueprint for life. It’s a code and a language. It has an alphabet (A = Adenine, G = Guanine, T = Thymine, C = Cytosine) and that alphabet spells out the instructions for everything. So the question is:To analyze this question, Marshall invokes Claude Shannon's information theory. And he finds that "random mutation" is "noise" with respect to DNA. Noise in a communication system degrades the message being communicated. That is, it doesn't add new, useful information, it just degrades the information being communicated. In short, mutations are deleterious, not the source of a "new and improved" biological individual/species.Can Random Mutation add information to DNA?
[Alamo-Girl, you are going to love this article!]
Marshall asks, "has any advocate of Darwinian evolution ever proven that random mutation can increase information?" The answer evidently is: No.
It’s interesting to note that the fanatical atheist Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous living proponent of Evolutionary theory, has never answered this question either — in fact he has studiously avoided it. There’s an article [http://trueorigins.org/dawkinfo.asp] where this question was posed to Dawkins, and even though six years have gone by, he never answers it. The answer he does give is a smoke-and-mirrors example at best.Somehow, I don't find that surprising at all. But what it all boils down to is this:
But there’s one kind of design that does not occur naturally, so far as anyone knows:Just a little food for thought!What does NOT occur naturally is CODES. [DNA is a CODE.]
Symbolic codes of any kind — things that contain language, a message, or information, any arrangement of symbols that represent something other than itself — do not happen naturally. Blueprints, languages, ciphers, encoding / decoding mechanisms all come from a mind.
Just as there are no exceptions to the law of gravity, or the laws of entropy, there are no exceptions to this.
There is vast difference, in fact an infinite chasm, between a pattern and a code. Patterns occur naturally [e.g., "Snowflakes, Tornados and Hurricanes, Weather, Stalagmites and Stalactites, Rivers, Sand Dunes, And much more"], codes do not. All codes contain patterns, but not all patterns contain codes. Codes can only come from a mind. There are no known exceptions to this.
Thanks so much for writing, OldNavyVet!
Oh, you're so welcome, dear sister in Christ! But thanks go to Diamond for finding this amazing piece, and providing the link....
You and your hubby might also enjoy this: "Darwin: Brilliantly Half-Right; Tragically Half-Wrong".
What “random system”?
I forgot to mention tbat random mutation happenings should be factored into probabilistic genetic studies — mutations happen frequently.
From Steve Jones (pg 170) we have:”DNA’s inability to copy itself without mistakes - mutation - means that evolution is inevitable. Natural selection does nothing more than capitalize on that fact.”
I didn't say anything about a "random system." All I said was we don't know what is random in any system if we don't know what the system is.
"Random system" is an oxymoron — a contradiction in terms.
Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Design
Mathematically true, or false? ...
Mathematictally close ..
My evaluation, considering Darwin's total avoidance of the word "evolution" in "Origin of the Species" (Jones, page 298), would be
Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution
Well maybe they should. But the statement "mutations happen frequently" does not address the problem of whether they add any new information to DNA such that "natural selection" can capitalize on them in positive, "creative" ways; e.g., improvement in survival fitness. Usually mutations are deleterious to the organism.
So if you're going to factor random mutations into probabilistic genetic studies, can this tell you anything about evolution per se, or only give you readings on likely morbidity/mortality outcomes respecting various types of genetic inheritance?
What does Steve Jones expect to find?
Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution
But — evolution of WHAT?
Evolution theory is the counter argument to design theory. That is, it purports to explain how the evident richness and diversity of living beings came to be. It says these are in effect "designed" [apparent design only] by random mutation and natural selection. IOW, the "designer" is random mutation + natural selection + time.
To say that random mutation + natural selection + time is what produces the vast diversity of living beings may well be an "evolution"; but it fails to explain convincingly HOW this happens, or WHY. This failure is especially glaring in light of recent important achievements in genetics, system theory, and information theory.
It makes for a lovely "intuitive" story; but is Darwin's theory really science?
I'll answer that question myself: Yes. But — 19th century science.
Oh so very true, dearest sister in Christ!
Control the speech, control the argument....
But in science, this strikes me as "cheating!"
Thank you so very much for your outstanding observations — and for your kind words of support!
Betty, EVERY mutation adds new information to DNA that is then subject to the Natural Selection process: If "bad," for any of multiple ways, holders of "bad" DNA will die off. If "good," the DNA sequence will probably pass on to subsequent generations.
This section of Jone's book is good reading on pages 111 to 115.
The first time a humans unique DNA structure was formed was when their parents DNA was randomly shuffled together.
Radio-atomic decay is calculated as a chance that an atom will randomly spit out some radiation.
Our immune system antibodies can bind to any foreign 3-D structure because they randomly shuffled the DNA that codes for their variable regions to “explore” almost all possible combinations (self binding ones are eliminated).
Obviously what we see as “random” is everywhere we care to look in the universe and part and parcel of the reality that God created.
Prov 16:33 “The dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord”
I think it's correct to say that "any extremely unusual or extraordinary thing or occurence" is a random phenomenon.
Could be the source of dark energy/matter is emitted from black holes.. designated matter falls in to it and UN-designated matter comes out.. closing the "loop"..
Could also be some structure "in" the dark energy/matter "fields" that we cannot presently "see" (like a black hole) that does the reverse.. Meaning making/creating(transforming) dark energy/matter from UN-designated energy/matter into designated..
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