The facts that I listed was more than just “rRNA is transcribed from DNA”. It was that rRNA is not only transcribed from DNA by proteins, but also modified by proteins.
And your solution is … viruses? Viruses can’t replicate without the translation machinery of cells, can they? Once again, totally within DNA World and not evidence for RNA World.
What is the post number where this happened?
I think you’re wrong about that. We’ve found the bases on meteorites, not nucleotides.
Found in samples taken from actual deep-sea vents, or simulated deep-sea vents in a lab? And were they produced abiotically or produced by a living organism?
Do you have a reference of where they “just set up abiotic conditions and see what emerges”?
The first tree contains coded information whereas the information found in the second one is not coded information for it’s not based on arbitrary rules.
That’s just mere assertion. You have no evidence in support of this.
There is more to this. We could cut down some poor old tree, take careful measurements of the rings in the main trunk, and create a code in which the rings encode the message, “This tree had it greatest year of growth in 1996.”
If we then proclaim we had discovered a hidden message in the tree rings from our created code, this would obviously be farcical. The same thing happens when we try to attach any meaning to genetic code other than it’s role in chemistry.
I missed this one earlier …
I understand perfectly, and it is not my purpose to dissuade you otherwise. My position is that the claims made by ID are not scientific, and often depend on misrepresentation of science. From what I can tell, you do not completely disagree? 
LOL. If you’re really falling back on that rule, then the genetic code is not a code, because it’s made of molecules, not symbols, and the assignments clearly aren’t arbitrary (among other things, the mappings from codon to amino acids helps significantly to reduce the effect of deleterious mutations).
What’s weird is that I would have agreed with you that the genetic code is a code, but now you’re latching on to one of the main arguments against that simply because you want to avoid admitting that tree rings could be considered a code too, then.
You’re just making it all up as you go. You have no rules or principles. Do you even know what you really believe?
Who gives a flying fudge what Francis Crick “envisaged” with his panspermia hypothesis? That doesn’t save your extremely poor reasoning skills.
By the way Francis Crick proposed that the genetic code evolved, and is credited with coming up with the frozen accident hypothesis.
That is a misrepresentation of what I wrote. Look at it in context and you will see that.
The genetic “code” is also not arbitrary. It cannot be changed without changing the chemical and physical reactions that are involved. This has already been explained to you, more than once.
You don’t understand what evidence is. Evidence is data that is better explained (or is more expected, or more probable) on one hypothesis compared to another. You have no explanations for any of the facts explained in this previous post of mine.
There’s no such things with DNA either. So DNA doesn’t constitute a code by your own criteria, and all your claims that it is a code have just vanished in a puff of inadvertency.
Game over.
I checked before posting. We’ve also found sugars and phosphates in meteorites. While we may not have found full nucleotides, we’ve found their components.
Samples; abiotically as far as we can tell (high temperature).
Miller-Urey and successive follow-up experiments.
Regarding codons as symbols:
According to Merriam-Webster, a symbol is something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance .
Since codons stand for someting else (for amino acids) by reason of relationship, they function as symbols.
Regarding the arbitrariness of the genetic code: I invite you to have a look at the paper below
Well, if you think that tree rings form a code, then you don’t understand what a code is.
Below is a link toward Merriam-Webster entry for « code ». Can you find there a definition that fits with tree rings?
That doesn’t really answer my question. My question was, “how did a designer (intelligent agent) create the genetic code?”
Answering that you believe God simply “determined the sequences of the various parts of the translation machinery” tell me nothing as to how they would have accomplished that.
My question is how did they determine that? What is the process by which a designer would go about creating a genetic code?
And one could say the exact same thing about the thickness of tree rings. The thicknesses are symbols of conditions external to the tree when it was younger.
I don’t actually care about to what degree you think the genetic code meets abitrariness, which I’m happy to read that your reference acknowledges comes in degrees.
In that respect the genetic code isn’t actually completely arbitrary in the way a man-made code (such as morse code) can be, as numerous physical and chemical attributes of both codons and amino acids, have been discovered that helps explain, in an evolutionary context, why specific amino acids are encoded by certain codons). But even despite this empirically demonstrated non-arbitrariness in amino acid to codon assignments, I’d still be happy to call the genetic code a code.
The issue at work is your, well, arbitrary adherence to certain rules which you’re just changing or denying if you find them inconvenient.
Yeah a system of signals or symbols for communication. The thickness of the tree ring represents the conditions external to the tree when it was younger. It therefore communicates information to us as we can basically translate this thickness (and even other chemical factors of the rings besides just their physical dimensions) to knowledge of past climates. Temperature, light conditions, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, nutrients in the soil, etc. etc.
It basically perfectly matches that definition.
Tree rings are a code, in that it consists of a system of signals that communicates information, and this information can be translated. And it forms completely naturally through tree growth.
Hence codes can form naturally and easily.
Why, why, why the constant obsession with words? It doesn’t actually matter whether one uses “code” in a narrow sense or in a broad sense. What matters is whether there is anything about the genetic code which shows that it can only have come from an intelligent source. You have yet to suggest any reason to think so.
Again: this is NOT a question that can be resolved philosophically. Even if your ghastly attempts at syllogisms were well-formed, this is not the realm of pure reason. It’s the realm of evidence. How we define words cannot affect that in any sense. What is the EVIDENCE that the genetic code was designed? You seem to think that your own belief that it must have been designed is all that anyone should require for evidence, and you’d rather argue ad nauseam over whether this or that is a “code” than deal with the question you’re supposedly interested in answering.
Wrong, again!
According to Merriam-Webster, a symbol is something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance .
Since codons stand for someting else (for amino acids) by reason of relationship, they function as symbols.
Not so
Indeed. As a semi-expired computational linguist, I’ve got to reiterate that words and their definitions don’t somehow control the universe. Instead, words are simply imperfect attempts by imperfect humans to use semi-agreed-upon strings-of-sounds to communicate. Because of these imperfections and ambiguities and all around complicated issues with trying to use a shared language, lots of words have a great many meanings, usually dependent upon context but sometimes dependent upon things like personal preference, whimsy, poetic beauty, and a host of other reasons. (I’m resisting the temptation to go into lots of interesting examples and tangents.) Thus, they are a means of transmitting ideas. In and of themselves, the words have no powers of proof or overwhelming evidence.)
Secondly, probably the least useful place to go to somehow settle a science-related controversy is to quote a general purpose dictionary. @Giltil chose the Merriam-Webster entry for the word code. But I could just as easily choose what most lexicographers and linguists would consider the most respected dictionary of the English language: The Oxford English Dictionary.
There are many editions but the one I have most readily at hand says under the word code:
“a system of words, letters, numbers, or symbols that represent a message or record information secretly or in a shorter form,”
Of course, DNA doesn’t fit that primary definition of code. Yet, it doesn’t really matter, just as @Puck_Mendelssohn said—because the important question is whether there is EVIDENCE that the genetic code was designed.
Bottom line: General purpose lexicography is an unnecessary and unsuccessful goose chase when it comes to settling scientific questions that must start with examining evidence. [Of course, if one is literally and not figuratively chasing geese, success is reached when one actually has the goose firmly in hand. But that’s an another story entirely. And the words announcing the conclusion of the chase only let others know that one CLAIMS, at least, to have taken position of the goose. The words alone don’t provide overwhelming evidence of that avian capture event.]
POSTSCRIPT:
OK, I just can’t help but announce my plan to overturn commonly accepted taxonomy using my knowledge of lexicography and etymology:
(1) A Guinea pig must be a pig from Guinea because it is right there in the name—despite the claims of zoologists that it is a rodent and doesn’t come from Guinea.
(2) A Koala bear must be a bear cuz it is in the name, even though zoologists say it is a marsupial.
(3) A mountain goat must be a true goat even though zoologists say it is in the antelope family.
(4) Flying squirrels must be able to fly because it is in the name.
(5) Sea lion. You get the idea. Roar.
(6) Starfish, jellyfish, and crayfish. Yeah, they gotta be fish. It’s in the names. So by definition they must have the characteristics of true fish.
(7) I’m on a roll so here goes: About a month ago John Ratcliffe was sworn in as Central Intelligence Agency Director. So he surely must be intelligent. It’s right there in the name.
I’m far from done—but I am finished. (Yeah, you just try to resolve that lexicographic contradiction by looking it up in your Funk & Wagnalls.)
Note, too, that starfish must be stars as well, and jellyfish must be jelly. What type of jelly, however, is not specified, so we don’t know if they’re more akin to strawberry jelly or petroleum jelly – both useful substances, to be sure, but not readily substitutable for one another.
Spider monkeys are, of course, both spiders and monkeys, while capuchin monkeys are presumably either monkeys and monks, or monkeys and coffee.
Meanwhile, I’d like some goldfish and silverfish to smelt down into ingots.
Further confusion can be found when trying to untangle a dire wolf spider crab grass snake eagle owl butterfly barb horse chestnut oak blue antelope squirrel monkey puzzle.