Posted on 04/13/2021 6:58:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Back in January, at a meeting held at the Royal Society in London, a team of scientists and investors announced the largest prize ever offered to solve a scientific mystery. Organized by engineer and business consultant Perry Marshall, the whopping prize of $10 million (ten times the Nobel Prize payout) will be given to any person or team who can “arrange for a digital communication system to emerge or self-evolve without…explicitly designing the system.” The point of the contest is to learn where the genetic code came from and how it became the basis for all life.
The winning experiment, according to their website, “must generate an encoder that sends digital code to a decoder,” and transmit at least five bits of information, or roughly half as much as a comparable segment of DNA. In other words, to claim the prize, you must bring into existence the functional equivalent of the first living cell, without intelligently designing the system.
Judges include Oxford and Royal Society biologist Denis Noble, Harvard Geneticist George Church, and philosopher of science Michael Ruse. According to Noble, a scientist whose work led to the first pacemaker. The prize is so big because evolution “leaves two things completely unexplained: How did life get going in the first place, and what is the origin of the genetic code.”
With refreshing honesty, he continued, “I cannot see personally how DNA could have been there at the beginning. After all, it requires the cell to enable it and to reproduce, and it requires the cell also to correct errors in that reproduction and replication process.”
Perry Marshall explained why he organized the prize by recalling a debate about the origin of life he once had with his brother. Sons of a pastor, Marshall offered a standard argument from design, but his brother retorted that natural processes were sufficient to explain all of life’s complexity.
Marshall wasn’t convinced. As he was writing what would later become his bestselling book on computer networks, he realized that “mathematically [DNA and ethernet] are identical. It’s encoding and decoding. It is a communication system…Genetics is digital communication.”
Intelligent design theorists have been making this point for decades. From a variety of angles, authors such as Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Steven Meyer have argued that information, like what is stored and communicated in DNA, has only one known source – an intelligent agent. To produce a system like DNA through unguided processes would not only be to do something that’s never been done; it would be to do something never before observed in the history of science.
But, it gets even worse for those hoping to snag that $10 million. As Dr. Noble reminded press and colleagues, DNA requires a cell to function…and cells, as far as we know, require DNA. To get one, you need the other. In other words, to win the money, competitors must not only put together the equivalent of functioning genetic code “without cheating,” they have to create the molecular machines that use, replicate, and edit that code.
How difficult is it to produce a living cell from scratch? A while back, my colleague Shane Morris asked synthetic-organic chemist James Tour this very question on the BreakPoint Podcast. Dr. Tour replied that anyone who claims we’re close to building a cell, even in the most ideal of circumstances, “has no idea what they’re talking about.” In fact, he said, “ask them for details, and you see them start to sweat.”
The bottom line? The origin of life and of the information that makes it possible remain the most significant challenge to a naturalistic worldview. The only plausible explanation for how these incredible systems came into being is intelligent design, precisely what those competing for this prize are forbidden from using.
Don’t get me wrong. $10 million is a lot of money, but, it’s still not enough to make the impossible possible.
Turtles.
All the way down. Turtles.
His 10 million is pretty safe.
“...the contest is to learn where the genetic code came from and how it became the basis for all life. “
GOD. Where do I collect?
“Paging Dr. Frankenstein. You are wanted on the phone.”
To the scientist who told God that he could create life out of dirt, God responded, “Show me, but you have to use your own dirt.”
Where's my 10 million?😎
What about the Mom and dad’s genetic code?
Spoil sport!🤫
Why? We already know that evolution (as if it is an active entity) can do everything. Just give nothing becoming something enough time (whatever that is) and randomness(is the universe really random?). Q.E.D.
Where’s my 10 million? I want it in unmarked 20’s.
You can’t have digital communication that is self-organized by dumb, inert matter, because communication requires transmission of actual information, not just random noise.
This is delicious!
Isa 40:21 Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?
Isa 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
Isa 40:23 That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.
Isa 40:24 Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth: and he shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble.
Isa 40:25 To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One.
Isa 40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.
Isa 40:27 Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the LORD, and my judgment is passed over from my God?
Isa 40:28 Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.
The idea of "naturalism", whether philosophical or methodological, undergirds all of "natural science", but it's neither an observed fact, nor a confirmed theory, nor even a falsifiable hypothesis.
Rather, it's simply an assumption, in essence a "let's pretend" foundation on which the entire vast scientific edifice is constructed.
Naturalism, in effect, says: "let's pretend there are only natural explanations for natural processes, and let's see where that takes us."
So naturalism by definition underlies all of science and any explanations which are not naturalistic lie outside the realm of natural science.
Such explanations may be perfectly valid philosophy, or theology, or just "space aliens did it".
But by definition, they are not natural-science.
Now science has never, ever, pretended to "know everything" about everything, indeed, one great art to science is in asking just those questions for which a natural explanation can be found.
That's why nobody has yet proposed a detailed theory on the natural origin of life, or of DNA.
Science doesn't know the answers and scientists are, as yet, unwilling to say: "maybe space aliens did it".
Of course there are now many ideas floating around as to how life may have originated, but nobody has yet demonstrated a complete sequence of natural events, nor, so far as we know, is anybody likely to anytime soon.
But if & when they do, a mere $10 million will not be anywhere near adequate reward, by orders of magnitude.
The question seems more philosophical than straight-science.
Agree !
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