Is there really information being conveyed within a cell?

Conversation
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I am not sure in what sense you mean “semiotic,” but if you mean something like “consisting of arbitrary symbols,” then of course the genetic “codes” are not semiotic. They operate through chemistry.

We do know that intelligent agents can create codes. But we also know that all known intelligent agents are highly derived biological creatures, and so cannot have pre-existed the genetic codes, which were in place long before the rise of the metazoa. So the fact that humans can create some kinds of codes is not particularly relevant, now, is it?

There are in fact no good reasons – you certainly have never given one, in years of posting here – to believe that natural causes cannot create codes. Even intelligent causes are wholly natural; we literally do not know of a single instance of a code arising through any process other than natural.

You do realize that before you say anything as mind-roastingly foolish as “naturalism of the gaps,” you should warn others to get their forehead-slapping helmets strapped on first, right?

I have very little regard for your “syllogisms.” You are, it seems, entirely incapable of constructing one which is not merely a word game, devoid of useful content. But the best answer to your question is that we literally know of nothing at all, anywhere, at any time, which has arisen from non-natural causes. But by all means, demonstrate that (1) a non-natural cause exists, and (2) that it is the source of genetic codes. I suspect that your answer will be exactly as compelling as the case you tried to make in defending Douglas Axe’s claim that evolutionary biologists believe evolution has stopped happening.

Tell you what: how about learning some biology? How about actually viewing and learning about source materials, rather than thinking that somehow you’re going to get one over on empiricism through mindless word-shuffling?

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So how did a designer (intelligent agent) create the genetic code?

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The semiotic adjective is a rhetorical begging of the question. Define semiotic as requiring intelligence, then replace genetic code with semiotic code.

Language games and syllogisms resolve nothing. Are there plausible biochemical pathways - what else matters? Nature does what it does and is not accountable to our verbiage. We can precisely describe, but not prescribe.

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Yes, that is a point I have raised many times with people who try the line of “reasoning” @Giltil is trying to foist on us here. It can even be put into a (sort of) syllogism!

  1. All intelligent beings are organisms who require DNA.

  2. Organisms who require DNA cannot exist in the absence of DNA.

Conclusion: DNA could not have been created by an intelligent being.

@Giltil, I await your example of a code whose creation by an intelligent being that is not an organism requiring DNA has been observed. TIA.

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The genetic code isn’t semiotic.

So there’s no problem

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Nothing rhetorical here but a pure description of reality.
Here is a general definition of semiosis given in the treatise Semiotik/Semiotics edited by R. Posner, K. Robering and T. Sebeok:
« We stipulate that the following is a necessary and sufficient condition for something to be ya semiosis: A interprets B as representing C. In this relational characterization of semiosis, A is the Interpretant, B is some object, property, relation, event, or state of affairs, and C is the meaning that A assigns to B »
Based on this definition, the genetic code is a semiotic code, where A is the set of tRNAs, B is the set of codons and C the set of amino acids.

False. See above.

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You’re wrong here, for the genetic code does consist of an arbitrary relation between amino acids and nucleobases.

Given your error (see above), maybe it’s you who should learn some biology.

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Whether you want to call the genetic code a code or not is completely irrelevant to the argument you are attempting to make. Because your argument rests on false premises. We do have evidence that the blind forces of nature can produce codes (in fact, that’s what happens when intelligent designers like humans design codes, you’re not violationg the laws of physics, sorry). For a direct example, ask your preferred chat AI to generate a code for you. It will intelligently design one. But your chat bot is completely and entirely functioning through the “blind forces of nature.” There is also evidence that the genetic code evolved.

And lastly your entire argument rests on a complete misunderstanding of what intelligent design is capable of, which apparently you think is a form of magical ability to just know complex solutions without prior thought or comprehension, out of nowhere. As you continue to fail to take up my challenge of magically just knowing the long random password I have in mind, I think you’ve actually realized that what I am saying is true, and that the ID argument doesn’t actually work. It can’t also solve the situation you are positing ID is required to solve when evolution can’t.

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There is nothing supernatural there, so if this is granted, it is clear that semiotic codes are within the reach of natural processes in fact and principle.

Further, your supplied definition does not involve intelligence, as the relationships are expressly stated as sufficient.

We stipulate that the following is a necessary and sufficient condition for something to be ya semiosis: A interprets B as representing C. In this relational characterization of semiosis, A is the Interpretant, B is some object, property, relation, event, or state of affairs, and C is the meaning that A assigns to B

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No, that relation is purely a matter of chemistry. You’re confusing different senses of the word “arbitrary” here. The relation is determined by nothing but chemistry, in the context of the whole biochemical system in which these codons exist. That the system behavior could be different, if the rest of the biochemistry were different, is not particularly relevant; there are chemical pathways, not interpretative cognitive processes; there are codons that play a role in chemical processes, not symbols. There is no “meaning,” no abstraction, just a complex set of chemical interactions which cause a particular sequence to result in a particular protein.

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That verges on “Not even wrong.”

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It should be noted that none of these authors are practicing biologists, and are affiliated with the department of linguistics at Palacky University. While we are learning some biology, the authors of this paper would benefit by joining in.

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Let me try to put this together (and correct the bad translation from German into English).

“The set of tRNAs” is an interpreter (“Interpretant” is not an English word), and assigns meaning to codons – these meanings being amino acids?

This would appear to stretch the English language, and the commonly-accepted definitions of “interpreter”, “meaning” and “assign”, well past breaking point.

As such, “semiotic” loses any rigorous definition.

Because of this, the claim:

… becomes ill-defined, and thus “not even wrong”.

A similar problem arises with the premise:

The basis of this claim would seem to be a very narrow range of (explicitly human-created) codes. It is completely unclear that this logic would also apply to such an extremely divergent “code” as “genetic code” – and whether this might not also force allowing “coder” to also stretch sufficiently as to allow a completely mechanistic process such as evolution as the “coder”.

This would appear to be a rhetorical, rather than analytic exercise – selectively loosening and tightening definitions to manufacture the superficial appearance that genetic code requires and intelligent designer. In other words, “wordplay”, as other have suggested.

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I don’t really see why this is a problem at all. I have no issue considering the set of tRNA molecules an “interpreter”, the amino acids the “meaning”, and the set of codons the “code”. It makes total sense to me and I can easily deal with this way of using these terms. Nothing has broken when I do this. I can continue to speak of meaning, interpreters, interpretations, understanding, comprehension, and so on, in various different ways. Many words have multiple meanings, some directly interchangeable and completely synonymous (some codons are, literally, synonymous to varying degrees), some not.

Objecting to a use of language which seems to me entirely legitimate and sensible, appears to me a waste of time. The real issue isn’t whether we can think of the genetic code and translation system in these terms. The real issue is the factually incorrect premise that we have some sort of evidence that indicates codes with meanings can’t be produced by “blind natural forces”, and to get codes requires that intelligent designers engage in the willful casting of magical spells of creation to create complex systems. That’s the real issue here. That his argument basically rests on two completely ridiculous demonstrable falsehoods as premises.

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tRNAs don’t interpret codons, they bind to them chemically (or not). So the genetic code isn’t semiotic.

There’s still no problem.

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Returning to this, it seems to lead to a conclusion that you may not actually accept. In that analogy, A (the “interpretant”) is an intelligent being who interprets B as representing C.

This would mean that tRNA’s are intelligent beings.

Is that your position? It seems it would have to be if you are applying that analogy consistently.

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Then allow me to explain what I see as the “problem” to you.

Let us take the word “car” as an example.

When somebody “interprets” the “meaning” that has been “assigned” to the car, they would form a mental picture of a passenger vehicle with four wheels, a motor, and a means of steering.

We would not expect them to automatically go out and construct a car – that is not what we would expect to typically happen from our understanding of the meaning of these words.

That reaction would seem more congruent with the phrase “follow an instruction to make a car”.

Hence, my comment that the usage stretched the definitions well past breaking point.

Now of course language does change, and words are reused to fit new contexts (particularly in response to rapid technological change) – but this creates breaks or discontinuities in meaning, which in turn means that logic that might apply to its original/older/different meaning may well not apply to the new one.

While they are all “code”, Morse Code, Computer Code and Genetic Code are very different concepts, and entail very different ideas about “coders” and “decoding”.

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I kinda see your point but I think that any objection to calling tRNA an “interpreter” is a fool’s errand, at least until you somehow reverse these related linguistic atrocities:

  • The process that tRNA mediates is called translation.
  • The production of mRNA from DNA is called transcription.
  • The activity of ADARs is called RNA editing.
  • Histone methylation creates epigenetic marks; this is called writing and the enzymes that perform it are called writers.
  • The marks are recognized by various proteins and complexes; this is called reading and the proteins and complexes are called readers.

I’m personally solidly in favor of these metaphors, but even if they made me queasy, I’d avoid trying to claim that tRNA should not be called an interpreter. Few metaphors are more apt.

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Yes, but he went beyond just tRNA=interpreter to constructs-amino-acid=assigns-meaning (as I pointed out in my example above). That was the point at which I objected.

You yourself explicitly state that this usage is a metaphor, a figure of speech, rather than a literal meaning of “interpreter”.

And even if, through widespread use, this becomes a new, additional, literal meaning of the word, it will still be a discontinuous/disjointed one – and assumptions that can be made about one usage may well not apply to another.

Speaking of modern, metaphorical, usages of “interpreter” – there is also its usage in computing --where its definition centres around exclusion of a compiler, rather than any particular aptness of the metaphor: “without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program”, and amalgamates three different scenarios:

  1. Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly;

  2. Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that;

  3. Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode[1] made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter’s virtual machine.

This, all on its own, is somewhat of a disjointed definition. It would be hard to imagine that there is much that human-linguists-as-interpreters, tRNA-as-interpreters and computer-programs-as-interpreters all have in common, that making generalisations about them all would be analytically useful.

I’m not suggesting that we abandon such metaphors/new-usages – just that (i) it can sew confusion, and (ii) that each new usage needs to be analysed separately from older usages of the word.

These new usages will quite frequently be based on very superficial similarities to existing usages, meaning that the similarities cannot bear any analytic weight.

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The problem, in a sense, is knowing how to deal with both the uses and the misuses of metaphor. It seems to me that there is nothing objectively the matter with these metaphorical uses of terms, when they are used by intellectually capable people who understand the difference between literal and metaphorical speech.

But this thread illustrates – and has, if I’m not mistaken, done so three times so far with different correspondents – that there are a lot of people who either are not capable of understanding the difference between the literal and the metaphorical, or find it in their argumentative interests to pretend not to understand.

The temptation for creationists is always to take the “fillossiffee” shortcut: why bother understanding evidence if you feel you can produce a cogent logical argument that demonstrates the wrongness of the things that make you sad, like having non-human ancestors? Surely, if pure reason puts the full stop to evolution, it’s no longer necessary to understand evidence or its implications at all, and that’s a lot of homework to skip. Very tempting.

But, as we know, there are a variety of difficulties to that. Reason unaided by facts isn’t actually very useful, and “logic” in the ordinary sense applies more sloppily to the ragged and irregular realities of actual things and events than it does to abstract entities. History, for example, doesn’t neatly boil down to a lot of simple “if A, then B; A, therefore, B.”

But this is why we have such a constant problem with the obsession with questions like whether something is a “code” and whether, therefore, it must have a “coder.” The notion is that once you’ve taken the ragged and complex thing in the real world and reduced it to a thing categorized, for discussion, by a four-letter word, it now has been rendered into a little unit – a nugget to be pushed around like A or B in a logical proposition. Never mind that this is almost always done in the most grotesque and ham-handed fashion – the appeal of it, to someone unarmed with the facts but very, very sure that it is not acceptable to have excessively hirsute ancestors, is very strong.

My own profession is often guilty of this, and for a funny reason having to do with our discipline, which is a kind of applied philosophy, made infallible by force and finality if not by actual correctness. In the law we have abstractions that are, to us, extremely real. It is sometimes a question of very great importance, for example, whether discussions between two parties and exchange of undertakings between them did, or did not, constitute a “contract.” For the most part, our system is “binary” on questions like this. If you have a contract, a whole range of consequences are more or less automatically applicable; if you do not, they are not. And so the word-shuffling becomes a kind of bloodsport on which fortunes and promises rest, and someone has got to pronounce the final answer: yes, it’s a contract, ergo, the one who failed to perform is in breach, ergo, the common law remedies for that breach are now available to the injured party. And so, in our own weird little domain, stuff like this “works.” If it mattered, for the sake of the law, whether DNA was a “code” or not a “code,” a whole slew of logical legal consequences would follow upon the answer, just as the creationists tend to think they do.

Ah, but reasoning “in the wild” is not the same thing as reasoning in law. Out here we are free to use language flexibly, and no assignment of something to one category or another is anything much more than a linguistic convenience, a shortcut to help us discuss things without atomizing them.

I think that in the same way that it may be fine to talk about your sexual behavior to a marriage counselor, but questionable to have the exact same conversation with your six-year-old child, it is sometimes the case that the use of terms therefore winds up, for practical reasons, needing to be more guarded when one is dealing with people who are liable, by incomprehension or by deceit, to try to render the literal metaphorical and the metaphorical literal. So, while I break these rules quite a lot, I find that I do try to limit the use of metaphors when talking to creationists, as it leads into these word-play back alleys. Unlike real-life back alleys, nobody gets stabbed, but Jeez, a lot of time gets wasted arguing about which linguistic construct to apply to something, rather than productively discussing the thing itself in all its complexity. In fact, the discussion might be avoided altogether, since it is usually the case that the creationist is ONLY interested in whether wordplay can be used, and has no actual interest in learning about the underlying subject matter.

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