Posted on 01/27/2009 6:59:07 AM PST by betty boop
Edited on 01/27/2009 7:16:52 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
I think that, for a multicellular organism, this is generally the case, and is especially noticeable at the level of the most complex biological organism that we know of, the human. Senescence seems unavoidable; and seems to entail a degradation of the organism's ability to "successfully communicate" in the meaning of Shannon's theory. When "the center will not hold" — that is, when the meta-information or biological information at increasing rates fails to be successfully communicated to the organism — eventually things "fall apart."
No amoeba that is currently living has ever been dead. Biological immortality is not magic. Amoebas are not Superman and immune to physical trauma.
No amoeba that is currently alive has succumbed to entropy or information degradation. There is no law of biological or genetic entropy that causes all living things to degrade.
It's avoided by human cancer cells and by human germ line cells. The cellular machinery and organelles of human beings have been working as least as long as there have been humans.
"With a life all its own...." Believe it or not, there are "cosmologies of wholeness" emerging that postulate the entire universe is a living being. One Logos — an algorithm from inception? — constitutes a "common" or universal information set, a/k/a "meta-information" or biological information. David Bohm referred to this as "the implicate order" of the universe....
This IS fun!
The sender and receiver must speak the same language. The sender must have foreknowledge of the code, how it will decoded by the receiver. Hence, the foreknowledge.
Again, the Wimmer experiment like Szostak's planned experiment (according to his bio) - began with the message. The code was presupposed along with autonomy and information (Shannon, successful communication.)
The question remains whether chemical evolution can lead to a genome based replicator. So far it's all been pre-game show and the associated trash talk. I'm looking forward to the game, which will take place in the laboratory.
My problem with ID and related criticisms of evolution is that they have downplayed or dismissed the need to test hypotheses.
I do say that everything in space/time - whether a live amoeba or a dead amoeba - is subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
The live amoeba pays the thermodynamic tab when it successfully communicates (Shannon) - by dissipating heat into the local environment as the receiver (molecular machinery internal to itself) moves from a before state to an after state.
Again, communications is autonomous. The single celled organism is autonomous, self-contained.
In autonomous higher organisms, communications are multi-cellular.
But I'm sure many will be watching and will be pleased if he is successful.
I'm heading out now. See you later.
You didn't really just say that.... did you?
It would be remarkable if something were found to be unaffected by thermodynamics.
But there is a common notion amongst evolution critics that living things degrade as a result of entropy, and that this is an inescapable law of nature.
I'm merely offering a counterexample.
Indeed... "he that has an ear let him hear what the Spirit is saying"..(multiple entrys).. even more passages the same is implied or metaphorically intoned..
Listening with both ears or seeing with both eyes or detecting the odor of logic with both nostrils.. can increase your ability to absorb information/data/data sets..
Especially the hidden message(s) of metaphorical data..
"Literal" truth seekers(opposed to metaphorical) can be inhibited..
There is a place for both wave-forms of data..
Not in the least. My "sure knowledge" falls in domains that are not (and should not be, IMHO) addressed by scientific inquiry and explanation -- such as my confidence that my Creator exists, and in my relationship with Him.
If there is a near-overlap, it is at the point where science (so far) "poops out": at the point of explaining what happened to start this whole universe, and in accepting that truths like PV=nRT appear to have been established to make things progress as planned by the One who claims to have started it all.
Because I understand, accept and apply relativity, I have zero problem accepting the accumulating evidence for a universe age that is probably in the vicinity of that which you perceive: ca 13 billion years +.
Although I have the acadmic requirements for BS in biology, I am no particular fan of Darwin. I simply accept his work -- and that built upon it by his successors -- as our best (but still flawed) explanation to date of how life here on Earth reached its present state. I am not on a mission to "prove" anything. The fact that I see that progression as following the Creator's plan does not color my investigations -- because I view myself as being - like all good scientists -- on a continual journey of discovery.
In cosmology, I have the same questions as many of our colleagues: what is that "dark matter/energy" stuff? And how did we miss such a large portion of our universe for so long? And...what else have our observations missed?
~~~~~~~~~~~
BTW, it was your two statements to A-G re "verification" that I viewed as expressing a dichotomy: verifiability of science results versus non-verifiability of spiritual truths. My point was that -- if you use the same methodology that the reporting observer used, both are equally verifiable.
I do not mix my science with my religion. The closest I come to doing so is the continual sense of enjoyment and awe I feel as I make ever-newer discoveries of the beauty and majesty of what I believe to be His handiwork. No matter whether I am at the controls of the SEM or am adjusting the alt-azimuth of the telescope, that thrill of discovery makes scientific investigation just plain fun! In addition, the thrill of praise I feel for each revelation of His masterful work simply adds to my enjoyment of life... Science without religion would be, to me, far less enjoyable!
Such a deal: double joy -- while improving our understanding of our universe!
Animism goes along this line of thought..
My brother the buffalo, sister the grass.. "the great Spirit".., even Cargo Cultism, like that..
Could be the animists are detecting the Spirit "on some level".. "Primitive minds" can have a hard time with long winded rational.. and tend to simplify to the point(maybe) of being simplistic.. Not every one can be as "smart" as materialist scientists.. {cough}...
Could be all seeking of God can have an element of the truth in it.. Even MINE!..
I'm not aware of any methodology for resolving conflicts in personal spiritual experience.
Science is not perfect, but over time it tends to converge on descriptions of phenomena. Religion seems to splinter and diverge. We have, for example, three major versions of the Abrahamic revelation, two major versions of Christianity, and half a dozen newer revelations with a million or more adherents.
I'm familiar with a dozen or so controversies in science, some of which extended over several decades, but they were resolved through research, and science moved on. I don't know of any similar history or pattern of resolving conflicting religious revelations.
So then, if you experienced a "miracle" it would scare you?..
You know, "scare you" so you would not be open to having one?..
I have experienced many of what I deem as miracles..
Many conflicts have been resolved in my life..
But then I am open to accepting and honoring miracles as what they are..
Meaning I am not afraid to experience one or many of them..
There is a methodology if you would be open to it..
In my experience some are NOT open to them..
Yet they still expereince them even while denying them, I think..
Only way I can explain this is they are scared of them..
You know...... scaredy cats..
I supposed if everyone agreed with everyone else, there would be no disagreements.
But I'm just observing the fact that people disagree on religious revelations, and there appears to no history or tradition of reconciling divergent revelations.
I’m perplexed by these statements, js1138. I don’t know whether to read them as if they were simply discrete facts, or whether you intended me to discover some meaning from the way the two statements correlate. If the latter, then the sense I get is you’re saying that ultimately, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between organisms that avoid senescence and those that do not. And yet for you to say that the “cellular machinery and organelles of human beings have been working as least as long as there have been humans” rather ironically (considering the source) suggests that evolution has had no role to play in the increasing complexity of cellular machinery and organelles, that whatever influenced the development of these systems, it was in place at once, in the “beginning.” Which is to make the case for William’s IC/AP argument, and its centerpiece, meta-information. You cannot have wanted to do that.
Perhaps the explanation for organisms that avoid senescence is really very simple: They are so relatively “simple” themselves that there’s little to “senesce.” At any rate, such organisms can probably be classified according to the algorithmic complexity requirements at Level (iii) of the AC/IP model. Why you think we can get exhaustive information about the astronomically more complex living systems described at Level (iv) (and above) from the Level (iii) information is beyond me. I figure it must be some kind of Darwinian prejudice.
Darwin’s theory is an incremental build-up from the “bottom,” i.e., from Levels (i) and (ii). The presupposition is that evolution bottoms out in chemistry, as “shaped” by “blind” random mutation and natural selection. And the theory’s fundamental assumption would appear to be that “the biological ‘whole’ is merely the sum of its parts” at any given point in the evolutionary development. This being the case, deal with the simplest “part” you can imagine — say, the single-celled organism — and extrapolate from that to a description of all the other "parts."
But to me, this procedure will not work. For the disparities in necessary information, of algorithmic complexity, between the simplest and the most complex organisms — many, many orders of magnitude difference between them — militates against this expectation.
Certainly, one cannot speak about biological functions in [the] case of chemical evolution. I note that this point requires ramifications in the context of the problem of continuity of life with the apparently inanimate world, as many scientists [have] suggested; e.g. Editorial, 2007, “The meaning of “life,” Nature 447, pp. 1031–1032.To get to the point Dr. Grandpierre was making here, let’s do a “thought experiment” in which we “reduce” both a high-entropy entity — a rock — and a low-entropy entity — a rabbit — to their physical and chemical constituents. We will do this by mercilessly pounding on these two entities with a heavy cudgel, repeatedly as necessary. Eventually (this would take longer for the rabbit than the rock), both are “reduced,” not only to atoms, but more significantly, to their fundamental constituent sub-atomic “particles.” We are now (figuratively speaking) in the quantum world — in Fig. 4, this is represented as underlaying Level (i). The point is, all existents in nature ultimately “boil down” to the quantum level, which is wholly undeterministic. It is pure, i.e., “unformed,” potentiality. SO: What “determines” whether the “quantum possibilities” are to express as rock or rabbit?
— A. Grandpierre, “Fundamental Complexity Measures of Life,” Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution, World Scientific, 2008;, p. 600.
The point seems to be: It is not the “matter” itself that makes them one type of thing or another; it is the information that specifies them.
In closing, just a little extra something to think about:
… [West-Eberhard, in] “Gaps and Inconsistencies in Modern Evolutionary Thought” … (2003, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, Oxford University Press) [presents] a whole list of basic problems of evolutionary theory…. It becomes more and more clear that Darwinian theory is so logically flabby it can “explain” anything by subtly changing the terms of the debate. Evolutionary theory can show only that systems of functions may evolve in a changing environment, but does not explain how an individual cell selects from the astronomically large domain of biological possibilities. Evolutionary theory concerns only the historical life forms appearing on the earth. It considers only a part of biological phenomena, instead of working out the general theory of biological processes and deriving the more special phenomena from the more general laws as it is possible in physics. In contrast, the theoretical biology of Ervin Bauer established the most universal law of biology in an exact manner which is quite compatible with the exactness of physics. These arguments indicate that selection is not the cause but the result of biological organization. Therefore, ultimately, the [bird’s] flying instinct, together with the phenomenon of evolution, is based on the Bauer principle. — ibid., p. 602. Emphasis added.
What a deeply insightful post, dear hosepipe!
Indeed. That is its most primitive formulation. And it seems to me there is some degree of truth in it. Not the most exhaustive, perhaps. But certainly not outright false. Same for the way all of us "explain" the spiritual aspect of human reality, provided, of course, that we haven't ruled it out as a matter of principle. Then I think, all that's left is: nihilism.
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