Sure you can. They’re basically like bar codes.
Still irrelevant to the enormous non-sequitur underlying the entire pro-ID argument. That something is a code doesn’t tell you it was created by an intelligent designer. It just doesn’t. We already know the genetic code evolved.
There is no chronological nor causal “order” in which one comes before the other when it comes to the priority of chemistry and sequence, in protein sythesis. They are both necessary attributes of the system. One isn’t any more primary than the other.
I don’t. We are talking about information being produced within a cell. All chemical processes within the cell produces information in units of bits.
Please then, explain how you can code messages with say, tree rings?
This is a gross epistemological error. It’s pretense of knowledge at its highest.
The syllogism I’ve advanced in support of ID is not a non sequitur for the conclusion logically follows from the premises.
Well… in a way… tree rings are giving us ‘messages’ what their ages are, the climate they grew in, and sometimes they also have recorded environmental disturbances like wild fires.
No, none of that suggests that digital “information” is a thing in and of itself. Rather, it suggests that digital information is an explanatory construct of sorts, useful to humans for the purpose of characterizing the behavior of complex things and for communicating. It’s not good to mistake explanations for facts. It is, in fact, literally just chemistry which you’re characterizing here.
Cute use of the word “denialism” here. Do you think it fools anyone?
So, what aspect of it is not chemistry? Have you discovered some part of those processes which does not obey chemical principles? If so, you haven’t mentioned it.
Concerning your bafflement: the fact that you aren’t able to actually express WHY you think that these phenomena require an intelligence frankly suggests that you haven’t bothered to think about it much. Inability to plainly and coherently express an idea often is caused by that sort of underlying failure of thought. Since biologists as a rule do NOT accept what you appear to think is intuitively obvious, it’s fair to say that you will convince nobody who does not share your own particular prejudices and misconceptions in the matter. If you want to persuade the biological community that the genetic code can only be the product of an intelligent mind, you’ll have to actually be able to express WHY you think that, not just your incredulity at others disagreeing with you.
@Tim’s criticism of your so-called syllogism is on point, in every way. A syllogism, to actually work, must be unambiguous and its premises must be true. You have smuggled the non sequitur into your premises:
It’s clear from other discussion that you believe that the word “coder” here means an intelligent agent. If so, the non sequitur is embedded in your premises, so that even if the syllogism were correctly constructed internally, it is fatally flawed because its premises are false.
And this gets back to what seems to be the core problem with you. You think that an absence of evidence for your astonishing claims can somehow be made up for by a surplus of “argument.” It really doesn’t work that way, on questions of fact. This isn’t some sort of obscure philosophical exercise. There is no form of words, no strange characterization of the facts, no rephrasing of your non sequiturs, which turns your lack of evidence into a compelling case. You need to stop focusing on “argument” entirely and ask yourself how one might actually demonstrate – with EVIDENCE, not argument – such things as the existence of your designer and its behavior in constructing the things you allege it constructed.
Control the growth of the tree by how much light, warmth, air, and fertilizer you give it. Let ring-thickness above some threshold be 1, below it be 0. You can now communicate in binary by controlling the seasonal thickness of ring growth, and thereby compile a message in binary. Takes a while to build a message, but that’d be one way to do it.
Of course the tree’s rings all by themselves tell us of it’s climactic history. The rings thickness are therefore essentially messages about the conditions that affect the growth rate in past seasons. You could consider them “codons” for growth seasons.
Not at all. I have already explained how we know this. Did you even read it? You never replied, and don’t appear to have clicked on any of the links in my post. Is that how you continue never learning anything from our discussion? You never read our posts?
If in your view, “by having good evidence that supports it” isn’t a way to know something ,then I think you’re the one with epistemological issues. Or perhaps linguistic, as you seem to be having a different idea in mind of what constitutes knowledge.
Your syllogism doesn’t have ID in either of it’s premises, nor the conclusion. It simply says that code requires a coder, with zero elaboration on what that actually is.
But sure, the argument is logically valid, it’s just that if by coder you actually mean intelligent designer, then it’s first premise just begs the question instead. You should be working to support it’s first premise then, instead of just merely asserting it. I think you should begin by explaining why all the things I mention in the post linked above doesn’t imply the code evolved.
Glass houses.
You are making a gross error in reasoning when you conclude, from the fact that some codes are known to have intelligent origins, that all codes have intelligent origins. You’ve even gone so far as to call this wholly unwarranted claim a law of nature.
There is, in fact, substantial evidence that the genetic code evolved, already set out for you in this thread by others. How much evidence is there that it arose from an intelligent agent? None that you or anyone in the history of ID Creationism has ever cited.
This is the premise of an upcoming Dan Brown novel; the miniseries is in production.
This is the sort of encoded information I intended. It is not a practical way to communicate. 
Likewise, encoding message in DNA can be done (Craig Ventner did it first IIRC), and I see articles about using it for data storage, so it might even be more practical than tree rings. 
By growing a tree in an artificial environment where you can set the temperature, humidity and amount of light each year, resulting in a tree with rings that vary in width as is needed to convey the message. It would obviously take a very long time, but it would also obviously work.
It’s so obvious, in fact, that you have no excuse for not having thought of it yourself.
Ok, you’ve been able to show how an intelligent agent could harness tree rings to generate small messages through a code, which, ironically, nicely illustrates my contention that a code requires an intelligent coder!
Of course there is. Tree rings vary in width depending on the environmental conditions in a particular year. They can and have been used to generate digital data in exactly the same way you are generating digital data from DNA, and that digital data has been used to compare samples from different trees.
Of course you could. It’s obvious how you could encode a message in tree rings. It would just take a very long time to do so.
You can keep repeating this until you’re blue in the face, but it will never become true. The genetic code is not of the same type as Morse code because Morse code is entirely based on symbols, while the genetic code is only converted to symbols by us when examining it. Further, Morse code messages are decoded back from Morse to the original text, while DNA ‘messages’ are never decoded from proteins back to the original DNA.
These differences mean that any conclusions you draw about the genetic code based on Morse code may not hold. This has been pointed out to you already, and you ignored it.
So are you. Morse code does not produce specific effects. It is not an example of what you term “1b information”. So it is not the same type of code as binary digits in a computer program.
It certainly does - because apologists like you cannot reach your ‘conclusions’ without equivocating.
How’s that for a non-sequitur! It straight up doesn’t follow that because I DID create a code out of tree rings, that an intelligent designer is required to create a code.
You ignored the 2nd half of my post, in which I explaine how tree rings already constitute a code.
@Gilbert, seriously. Why is your logic so poor, and your blinders so thick?
Indeed. To elaborate further, @Giltil: Suppose one used @Rumraket’s method to encode the message: “This tree had it greatest year of growth in 1996.”
In another tree, one can determine from examining its rings that it also had it’s greatest year of grown in 1996. To be clear: This just from looking at the natural variation in the width of the rings. No intelligent agent was involved in this.
By your reasoning, we would have to say that the first tree’s rings contain information, but the 2nd tree’s do not.
If that were the case, though, why are we able to gain the same knowledge from both sets of rings?
No, tree rings don’t constitute a code, not at all. A code is made of arbitrary symbols and you have no such things with tree rings.
My logic may not be as poor as you think for even Francis Crick, with his panspermia hypothesis, envisaged that an intelligent agent was behind the genetic code!
DNA is both replicated and transcribed by teams of proteins. It doesn’t do anything by itself.
It does store digital information (which is what I said), but only by way of the sequence of the individual nucleotides.
Whatever “empirical predictions” you think my so-called hypothesis makes are of your own creation.
If you think catalysis somehow refutes my point, you are welcome to explain why.
I’m not about to guess your point and write some sort of an essay on catalysis for you.
When I say that the information was created, I’m talking about the information required for life at the original time of creation. And, I’m pretty sure you’re using the word information in the Shannon sense, so that any change of sequence is new “information”.
For example, if I change the string “my username is theaz101” to “my username is theaq101”, you would consider that a different (new) string, but the functionality (which Shannon doesn’t care about), is degraded.
I actually think that the cell is able to modify DNA as needed. Lenski’s cit+ mutation is a perfect example. I think that that mutation is a case of an intentional, adaptive modification.
Your answers don’t take into account one of the facts that I pointed out about peptidyl transferase (PT) which is that the post-transcriptional processing (by proteins) includes modification of some of the bases. That’s why I’m asking about modern PT vs “raw” (maybe I should have said “unprocessed” PT.
Where is the evidence that unmodified PT would work the same way as modified PT?
Did the RNA World hypothesis predict that rRNA is post-transcriptionally processed by proteins?
Anyways, predictions are fine, but ultimately inconclusive.
For example, suppose Genesis 1 is exactly how the universe and life began. Some scientists, working to show that life actually had a naturalistic origin instead of a supernatural one, make some predictions like the existence of ribozymes. Does that mean that Genesis 1 is wrong, or does it mean that ribozymes are just part of created life?
Here’s an example from this thread.
Completely false. I think that science has done an amazing amount of work showing how the cell works. But I agree with Kepler’s quote that “Science is the process of thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Even if today’s scientist denies God the credit.
What I completely reject is scientism, which is the philosophy that truth can only come from science. If science can’t explore the supernatural, then the supernatural doesn’t exist.
Since it is the sequence of amino acids/nucleotides that determines the function of a protein or functional rna, God (the Designer in my case), determined the sequences of the various parts of the translation machinery so that it (the entire translation system) would match the correct amino acid to each codon of the mRNA strand being translated.
