"...science has not identified any naturalistic source for information within the universe, biological or otherwise."js:
Programmed cell death is a rather modern invention in living things, a requirement of having specialized cells.
The teleological words in bold taken in their ordinary sense are inconsistent with naturalistic assumptions, but they are consistent with the fact that in every case where the origin of a code is known, it is without exception the product of intelligence. It doesn't really make any sense to speak of it otherwise, as there is no known example of a code originating from an unintelligent source. Not one. None. Zero.
All the naturalist has to do to show that a genetic code could arise naturalistically would be to provide an example of a code, defined as a communication channel with an input alphabet A and an output alphabet B, (outside of DNA or any of its derivatives, which would of course be begging the question) arising from a unintelligent source.
So why do naturalists continue to assume something which has none of the evidence to support it, and all of the available scientific and mathematical evidence against it; namely, that genetic code, which is a encoding / decoding mechanism isomorphic with Shannon's model, arose solely by the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?
If you stay tuned you may live to see such a demonstration. If your sources are more than a year old, you need to keep up. this is a thriving field of research.
There really are two distinguishable problems here. One is the origin of the code, which is a very hard problem.
The other is much simpler: how is code modified. There really isn’t any question that modification and selection work. We have numerous examples of new functionality arising by mutation and selection.
Where does the “information” come from? the environment, via the process of selection. Bill Dembski has just authored a paper on the subject, admitting what biologists have argued all along. Selection is a source of information.