After re-reading the source, you are correct.
The AVIDA examples don’t show any cases of zero function either.
On consideration, the situations where zero function is likely are short sequences - shorter than needed to accomplish the function at all - which is not interesting. The relative number of non-functional short sequences becomes vanishingly small as sequence length increases, so it doesn’t matter.
I don’t think so. If ID proponents are making falsifiable claims, and I believe they are much of the time, they cannot be dismissed as non-scientific purely on the basis that their claims are not falsifiable.
Well, with all due respect, that’s a bit of a bait and switch there, itself. We can’t know anything about an unknowable designer, But I don’t believe ID’ers generally hold that the “designer” is unknowable. Some of them even insist they have met him in person!
All said, I think there is general agreement that ‘information’ can be said to exist or be transformed in ‘life’. But … choosing a metric that is both appropriate and determinable in practice is where things fall down.
I’m not aware of any metric that forbids or indicates that biological evolution is impossible or even unlikely. In a number of metrics, it seems the opposite is likely. What is the source of biological information? Well, the environment and selection definitely provide a filter for its acquisition.
I think if one wants to make the case that the origin of life is or isn’t possible naturalistically, those are fair but contingent claims. I’d assign it a low weight in an argument because any definitive resolution either way appears far off at this point.
Aside: Thermodynamics and ‘information theory’ display many similar features but if you burn a deck of cards that is sorted by suit & rank and compare the heat output to a randomly shuffled deck made of the same materials, you’re not going to measure a difference. I suspect the term ‘entropy’ refers to somewhat different things in thermodynamics and information theory.
We can’t falsify creation of something by an unsupervised designer. However, I think we could confirm creation by an entity if there was sufficient positive evidence that one acted at the time and location where it happened. There are many ways in which a creator could specifically record or leave evidence of any particular interaction (stone tablets buried at the appropriate time, etc.), similar to how we investigate whether a particular bone or stone artifact may have been shaped by past humans.
One such attempt has been to argue that the chronological events of creation specified in Genesis were unexpected based on random chance and with information likely unavailable to humans of that era. Other people are still looking for a giant ark or conclusive evidence of a global flood. That hasn’t gone so well but at least some recognize the need to put forth positive theories of ‘design’ to make any inroads scientifically. Something the ID community was originally supposed to do by now…
Not bait-and-switch, just setting the story straight; ID proponents are making falsifiable claims about evolution, not about ID.
It is possible to define aspects of designer or the designer which allow falsifiable hypotheses. Material definitions make it possible for a designer (if they exist) to be knowable in a material sense. The Dependency Graph (Ewert 2016) is an example of defining what design might look like, which is why I cited it so often. It’s also the only example in all the ID literature of a hypothesis about Design.
Possible, but with very few exceptions testable hypotheses for ID just doesn’t happen.
And where tested, colewd will never accept that they failed…
Failing a test for ID is very different than failing all tests for ID. Newton based on his model of gravity saw Gods action as important for explaining the orbit of the planets as his model required corrections. This gravity plus design model was falsified by Einsteins model which did not require corrections to the action of gravity.
Most of ID presentations, as Dan mentioned, are not based on hypothesis testing but supporting a method of design detection. Winstons has been one of the exceptions. Behe’s work has been supporting design detection and as Dan mentioned his hypothesis testing has been testing evolutionary mechanisms such as gene duplication and divergence.
QED. All ID proposals are equally precious…
Just to add this, that line…
“There must be a naturalistic explanation for OOL. We just haven’t found it yet”.
This statement is just a basic assumption that EVERY scientist makes and has made before they have successfully explained something. Not just regarding OOL.
It does NOT have the structure of a “Naturalism-of-the-Gaps”, or specifically the appeal to ignorance fallacy, which is when one is arguing for a conclusion based on the absence of evidence against said conclusion. For example: “X must be true since there is no evidence against X” or “X must explain Z since Y does not explain Z”. So the following:
There must be a naturalist explanation for OOL since there is no evidence against it.
There must be a naturalist explanation for OOL since supernaturalism cannot explain OOL.
Would be examples of “natturalism-of-the-gaps”, but I have not seen anyone (especially not any researcher in the field) make such an argument.
This does not become more true, or less arbitrary, with repetition.
Do you think Crick’s Sequence Hypothesis is arbitrary or untrue? Why?
Given that DNA is and behaves like a chemical molecule, and the expression of protein is driven entirely by biochemical processes which are not incidental, what is the end game to this primary and secondary distinction you are so bent on? What is the conjured ghost in the machine?
How does DNA behave? It is transcribed by a team of proteins. DNA doesn’t do anything by itself.
I’m not appealing to a ghost in the machine (supernatural intervention). I’m just saying that information if being conveyed through the expression of protein (the topic of the thread). I also believe that the information stored in DNA (sequence of the bases) was originally created.
Sure, if you consider the adaptive radiation of, say, all tetrapod species from lobe-finned fish to be small changes to existing organisms.
Obviously, if I thought that were true, that would not be an example of small changes.
Let x be the nature of peptidyl transferase. How does it imply a Designer? More accurately, how do IDcreationists, in particular you, infer a Designer from that?
Here are a few reasons why I infer a creator.
(In steps 2 - 4, RNA might be involved as well, but that doesn’t change the point, because that RNA is transcribed from DNA by proteins)
Some questions for you:
Is there any evidence that “raw” (not transcribed from DNA and processed by protein) PT ever existed?
Is there any evidence that “raw” PT is capable of functioning like modern PT does?
Is there any evidence that modern PT is capable of translating mRNA into a protein by itself?.
My problem with him is that he also maintains that science isn’t making a scientific claim.
How did I give you that idea?
Which is just what happens. So exactly what are you misunderstanding?
“Produce” wasn’t the best word to use. I’m saying that the amino acid isn’t the product of a chemical reaction where the nucleotides of the codon are the (or among the) reactants.
You don’t think that the amino acid is the product of such a reaction, do you?
Of course Information is being conveyed, and of course Information is created. 
HOW it is created and conveyed in extant life is pretty well understood. How life originated is still an open question, but there don’t appear to be any insurmountable barriers to scientific discovery on the question.
I can’t speak for all here, but I think most don’t object to the idea of a divine Creator so much as they object to bad arguments for a divine Creator. Conveying Information isn’t magic, it’s a material process. Likewise for the generation of new Information. Some ID claims try to make Information into a magical event, which is one of those bad arguments. Don’t get me wrong - the variety of life and living things is spectacular. We can accept that life is spectacular without accepting the bad arguments.
So are you:
How so? The examples of code that I’ve given are consistent of the definition of information that I’m using (given in my first post).
Mercer’s example doesn’t fit at all.
Morse and ASCII are both means of encoding text for transmission, receipt and decoding into text again. There is no equivalent of decoding in genetics: the sequences of proteins in amino-acids are not converted back to RNA or DNA sequences. So the generic code is not a code in the same sense as Morse, ASCII etc.
There are other differences too, but this one is enough to refute your argument.
That isn’t a requirement for a code at all. You’re talking about how the code is used.
Besides, there is nothing new about examples of binary code being stored on read-only media like a DVD. Of course, they make re-writable DVDs, but that’s beside the point.
One thing that all 3 codes have in common is that you make a chart of the mappings. “This maps to that”.
No-one is talking about digital information. DNA isn’t digital.
I’m not talking about the DNA molecule itself, I’m talking about the sequence of bases.
DNA is a storage medium, like computer tape. No one would (should) ever say that computer tape is digital information. It stores digital information.
We’ve covered some of this before. If we create a chart of mappings, any mappings, that is now a code. (Maybe not a useful code, but still a code.) What John is saying is that DNA/RNA has only one mapping, and that is determined by the laws of chemistry. It is the only mapping that matters.
A critical difference is that amino acids, the medium of the genetic code, are also the building blocks of the proteins they encode (more than just CATG obviously). This is completely unlike any human code.*
* We might create a code with some similar properties, like writing instructions to fold a paper airplane on a piece of paper. This still lacks the unique mapping imposed by chemistry.
Agree that the first one represents an argument from ignorance (AfI).
However, the second one cannot be viewed as an AfI if naturalism and supernaturalism are the only possibilities. If only two hypotheses exist for explaining something, then if you can safely reject one, it follows that the other one is true.
In the way I then illustrated, which you’ve just quoted:
I am. The genetic code is used differently to Morse, ASCII and your other examples. So any statements you make and conclusions you draw about Morse, ASCII etc may not apply to the genetic code.
Thus your argument is refuted.
You’ve got that backwards. Proteins aren’t ‘read’, they’re ‘written’. You’d need examples of write-only media.
One thing that lions, cheetahs, jackals, hyenas and stepladders have in common is that they all have four legs. But you can’t use that fact to conclude that stepladders hunt antelopes on the African savannah.
This analogy doesn’t really work when you’re referring to DNA information as a sequence of bases.
The nucleotide bases are part of the physical structure of the DNA molecule. Without those bases, you don’t have a DNA molecule.
Or to put it another way: You can have blank computer tape. You can’t have a “blank” DNA molecule.