That’s very well put. The way I speak of this sometimes is to speak of different “explanatory domains.” The atom-by-atom explanation may have value for some purpose or other but, despite being strictly accurate, it doesn’t translate very well, in practical terms, to answering questions like “how high will the ball bounce?” But the ball-and-floor explanation will answer those questions better, and others more poorly.
The example I always use is the War of the Spanish Succession. In principle, there is no reason a full explanation of the War of the Spanish Succession could not be given purely in terms of physics. But this will be a bad answer to someone who asks, “why did the French crowd themselves so disastrously within the town limits of Blindheim?” or “what motivated Marlborough to treat Tallard as he did?” But it remains the case that, so far as we can tell, the radical reductionist physics explanation, if one had the right data, would be a complete explanation in its own terms.
One needn’t think about “information,” though Marlborough no doubt used some in evaluating his battle plans. “Information” is not an additional ingredient that hovered over the battlefields, but is merely a way of characterizing some of what went on, all of which was purely obedient to the principles of physics. It may be an explanation, but it is not a thing.
To my understanding, the philosophical questions that apply here are those pertaining to “hard emergence” vs. “soft emergence.” The example of the ball and floor is an example of soft emergence. When the particles and forces dealt with by fundamental physics are looked at from the higher level perspective of the ball and the floor, different objects and mathematical equations emerge that allow us to better understand and predict what is happening there. But the existence of these objects and equations can be fully accounted for by fundamental physics. That is to say, they can be reduced to fundamental physics.
If there was no way such a reduction could take place, i.e. if it were demonstrated that the existence and interactions of the ball and the floor could not be accounted for by fundamental physics, then that would be an example of strong emergence. AFAIK, there are no examples where we know this to be the case. Historically, it was once considered that chemical and biological phenomena might be strongly emergent (e.g. vitalism). But that is no longer tenable.
One area in which this remains a live issue is that of consciousness, largely because we have yet to elucidate a physical model that can satisfactorily account for it.
However, one area in which this is decidedly not a matter of controversy is the process by which proteins arise from DNA. Every step from DNA sequence to protein is fully understood and there is no non-physical magic involved at any point. And we can also fully account for how those sequences containing the “information” necessary to produce functional proteins arose in the first place: thru heredity, mutations, drift and natural selection. Again, there is no gap in which to insert a role for spooky non-physical actions of an intelligent agent.
Where science is limited in most cases is with ultimate origins. Where we now understand pretty well how atoms work we are not well positioned to understand their origin beyond that they are the product of the Big Bang.
In Biology as you articulated we do understand certain things like how cells produce energy and ultimately divide and how the transcription translation mechanism is part of that process. What we don’t understand is the ultimate origin of those mechanisms as they are a piece of a cellular system. In the same way electrons and protons are part of a larger system called atoms.
As far as information goes this is an abstract way to describe linear arrangements of nucleotides and amino acids in cells DNA and proteins. While we understand how their unique arrangements can produce functional proteins we don’t understand the ultimate origin of the arrangement of nucleotides in DNA which determines the arrangement of amino acids in proteins.
Not really. That would be like claiming it’s “naturalism of the gaps” if scientists “assume” there’s a natural explanation for how some pollutant causes cancer.
It’s more a case of the history of science having already been so overwhelmingly successful at finding natural, physical explanations for so many other aspects of the natural world (not just life), such as evolution, that it would be perverse to deny this history.
The difference is that cancer is a phenomenon that is occurring today, so it’s perfectly valid to look for a natural explanation for why it occurs.
We do not see the same thing with the origin of life. Whether it happened naturalistically or supernaturally, it happened in the past.
So asserting that there must have been a naturalistic origin of life (in the past) is naturalism of the gaps.
All of which fits just fine as a natural phenomena; none of which is disputed, but none of which demands supernatural intervention. So that does not present very compelling evidence for special creation.
I’m not saying that supernatural intervention is needed for those things to operate in the present. I’ve said that life operates by natural processes.
I am saying that natural processes don’t account for the sequence of the bases necessary to code for the proteins and ribozymes needed for life to begin. And there is no known way for the sequences of DNA to be expressed into proteins and ribozymes without the presence of proteins and ribozymes in the first place.
But maybe you mean some different scheme of encoding the same amino acids? (Like ASCII versus EBCDIC?) If so, then OK - the translation mechanics might be different too. If the genetic code had evolved differently, then the genetic code would be different.
That is tautologically true, but what’s the point? If the genetic code were any different from what it is, we would still have all the same questions about Information in the cell.
Yes, this is what I mean, but I’m also trying to refute the idea that the code comes from the machinery by pointing out that the machinery comes from the Genetic code being translated in the first place.
As a simple example: Suppose I walk on the beach and leave my footprints in the wet sand. This process will now have produced information. e.g. it would be possible to know that a human being had walked on that beach just from looking at the footprints. It might even be possible to identify me as the specific human being who had done so.
As with most words, there are more than one meaning of the word information. In my first post, I said that I was using the “1 b” definition when referring to the base sequence of DNA. Your example fits the 1 a(1) definition. Your footsteps don’t carry any functional (producing specific effects) information.
It would be different if your footsteps were spaced and arraigned to produce a message in Morse code that said “My user name is Faizal_Ali”. Then it would be 1b information.
1
a(1) : knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction
b : the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects
there is a precise definition of information given by Shannon in his foundational paper in 1948. It applies to everything in the universe including the processes happening in living cells. Information, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics are forever linked by Shannon’s foundational work.
Shannon’s work is truly foundational to modern communications systems, but it doesn’t concern itself with the whether or not the string of bits being communicated has any meaning or not.
All strings of “bits” are Shannon information but only some strings carry functional information.
You seem to possess knowledge not held by any scientist currently working in origin of life research. You should contact them and tell them why you think they’re wasting their time.
No known way, but could there be an unknown way?
In any case, maybe life did not begin with DNA being expressed into proteins and ribozymes. Is that possible?
What difference does it make when it occurs? Is there some rule that says supernatural things only happened in the past, and only natural things only happen in the present? No, there is not.
What do you mean by whether a the string of bits being communicated has any meaning?
What meaning would a string of bits have? and to whom?
How does a string of bits carry functional information? What is functional information? Please enlighten me.
Nonetheless, I think it is reasonable to say that, if we ever do answer that question, it will be thru science. There is no other epistemic method that shown itself even remotely useful for answering questions of this sort. If you disagree, please provide an example.
Not really because, as you have admitted, we have countless examples of phenomena that can be accounted for thru naturalism. So there is no need to look for gaps where naturalistic explanations might be hiding. We already know they exist.
“God of the gaps”, OTOH, often refers to the situation in which an unanswered question is used as evidence for the existence of a god, on the assumption that only the existence of a god could serve as the answer. It is very sloppy thinking.
I believe we are still waiting for you to provide a rigorous model that is used to characterize and measure “functional information.” ID apologetics do not qualify, sorry.
I’m missing the why. You state a number of facts, none of which imply a creator at all.
Please complete your argument, so far you seem to have only stated a few premises none of which entail (or make likely) the conclusion you claim to derive from them.
I’m comparing the facts that I stated with a basic premise of creationism vs naturalistic OOL.
Creation’s premise is “all parts were formed at the same time”.
Naturalistic OOL’s premise is a “bottom-up” process. Precursors of nucleotides > nucleotides > polymers of nucleotides > non-enzymatic replication of polymers and so on. RNA World was hypothesized since RNA can act as both storage and as an enzyme.
Peptidyl transferase is supposedly strong evidence for RNA World, but when you take a look at how it is produced today (the facts that I listed), it is firmly within DNA World. Since I think that Peptidyl transferase fails as evidence for RNA World, I think that it, as well as all other integrated processes like DNA replication and gene expression, imply “all parts were formed at the same time”.
That’s not why the RNA world hypothesis was proposed. It was actually first proposed, in 1962 by Alexander Rich, on the basis that RNA serves as an intermediate transcript between DNA and before it’s translation into amino acid sequence.
He merely speculated it might also be able to act as a catalyst. This wasn’t discovered to be true until 1982. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that it was discovered that the ribosome is a ribozyme.
The RNA world hypothesis is supported by numerous different observations, not just that RNA can act as a catalyst and also store information. The fact that RNA either performs or can perform all the critical functions in translation, in addition to serving as an information storage system like it does in RNA viruses (and transiently following transcription from RNA), are just some of these observations.
That nucleotide and nucleobase-derived compounds are frequently used as cofactors in central metabolic reactions (are used as critical “helper” molecules that participate in catalysis by protein enzymes) is thought to be another remnant of the RNA world, and then there’s the fact that RNA monomers are actually chemical precursors of DNA monomers. Basically when cells biosynthesize DNA from the bottom up, they first make RNA and then further modify it into DNA, implying that the pathways for DNA synthesis are later elaborations on the pathways that made RNA first.
The fact that ribosomes are transcribed from DNA doesn’t mean it isn’t evidence for the RNA world hypothesis.
You seem to confuse evidence with proof. That the ribosome is a ribozyme doesn’t prove the RNA world hypothesis, but it’s central roles in translation (not just that peptidyl transferase is a ribozyme) are best explained as byproducts of an earlier stage in life’s evolution where RNA served much more central roles in replication and catalysis.
I don’t think that hypothesis explains all the same facts as well as the RNA world hypothesis does.
I disagree with this assessment. There is a third possibility. Neither explain OOL, or there is NO explanation for OOL.
You might think like this: Naturalism and non-naturalism (or supernaturalism) is a true dichotomy. Either life originated through a natural process or a non-natural process. Let’s ignore the option “a mixture of both processes” for the sake of simplicity.
That would be a true dichotomy. However, that’s not the same as explaining something. Even if someone logically disproved the supernatural to me, I would be like…
“That’s neat and all, but I still don’t know how life came about. Do you have a theory of the process? What predictions does it make? How can we test this? etc, etc”
I know the argument (it’s a bit of chicken-or-the-egg), and it has never gotten much traction, least of all among biochemists. The origin of life requires a replicator, which is minimally capable of copying itself, therefore passing along it’s function. Nevermind the machinery and code - It is its own egg.
I can’t remember is this paper has been brought up in this thread. If not, you should find it interesting.
And of course this gets us no closer to knowing the form of the original biological replicator, but it does suggest the idea of naturalistic OoL isn’t that far fetched. It’s also does not rule out divine assembly of some of the bits, if that’s how you like to think about it.
Here is a reasoning leading to the conclusion of design for the genetic code.
Premise 1: a code requires a coder
Premise 2: the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material into proteins represents a genuine code known as the genetic code
Conclusion: the genetic code has been brought about by a coder
I know you would dispute one of the 2 premises or even both. But what is a-yup here ?
