No, if the signifiers and signified are defined by direction of causality (fire causes smoke, signified causes signifier), then by the order of cause the amino acid residues in a protein sequence are the signifier and the codon the signified.
They certainly aren’t symbols because they’re not defined by culture, tradition, or convention.
So if tree rings can’t be considered a code because they’re indexes, then neither can the genetic code, because it would be defined by a direction of causal relation between signifier and signified, not by culture, tradition, or convention.
There is nothing you can do against this basic fact.
I don’t see how you would think so. I’m making a clear distinction between the purpose of the genetic information as used by the cell, and man’s ability to find out about the information through research.
The key word that I was responding to was “intended”.
I don’t think there is anything special about the base of a coding system. You are the one who first brought up the issue of base.
My claim is that all functional digital information, which requires elements (dots/dashes, bits, nucleobases) of a coding system to be put into functional sequences, requires intelligence to do so.
By this logic, the words on this post are just “hard-wired” by the laws of electronics or physics.
This is why Crick’s Sequence hypothesis is so fundamentally important. The coding is only “hard-wired” because the DNA bases were put into the right sequence in the first place. And there is no law of chemistry that requires any specific sequence of bases, just as there is no law of physics or gravity that requires a series of Scrabble tiles be put in any specific sequence.
My interpretation is that a sign of intelligence that precedes humanity is a sign of the Divine.
And your claim is made on no basis whatsoever. All you can do is appeal to instances where intelligent designers have created functional sequences, which does not support your extrapolation that all instances of functional sequences required creation by intelligent designers.
To make matters worse, it is known by direct observation to be false, as we have seen functional sequences evolve without intelligent design.
So why do you continue to make this demonstrably falsified claim? Why do you engage in denial? It’s truly strange.
You make the claim that this Information is special because it is digital.
Dots-and-dashes are base two (ie: digital), but the base used to express Information is arbitrary, imposed by humans. You are ignoring the previous examples of naturally occurring Information which clearly does not require an intelligence. EXCEPT perhaps, if you already believe in such an intelligent behind everything. Your requirement here is your own presupposition, which leads you to conclude that which you already assume.
That’s OK. By the same logic you should interpret ALL information as Divine - and maybe you do. That is not my objection.
Perhaps you misunderstood my meaning? The laws of chemistry act on atoms and molecules regardless of any intelligent interpretation. Given the proper ingredients and energy a chemical reaction WILL happen, no intelligence required. It is irrelevant to impose the human concepts of Information to chemical reactions for the purpose of inferring the supernatural.
They are recognizable because and only because you and I have a prior mutual agreement as to what the physical hard-wired patterns indicate. They have zero intrinsic significance.
Not only does the physical layer not constrain the meaning, but by way of the same agreement between parties, the transmission can be realized by independent physical means. Morse code can be sent by wire, flashlight, or banging on pipes. The words are independent of physics.
And the messaging with any on these can be encrypted, where the transmitted patterns then stand for other meanings.
Symbols, call them whatever you wish, are abstractions to communicate from one person to another based on mutual understanding. Outside of this, in respect to communication they do not exist. DNA and proteins are not persons, so there are no symbols involved.
As @Rumraket points out, of course, this is contrary to what we know to be true, so that’s a bit of a problem.
But, also: it’s best to understand that this core non sequitur of ID Creationism has been around for decades now and has absolutely no traction at all. It’s led to nothing. Books have been written about it, and their impact upon biological thinking has been zero.
So why bother? Why bother attempting to just restate a failed and completely debunked notion? What is the point? Is this some kind of demonstration of faith, along the lines of self-flagellation? “I will abase myself intellectually, and claim to believe nonsense, because doing so affirms the depth of my commitment to YHWH, ineffable scribbler of codes”?
It would be another matter entirely if you had some novel observation to make about this – some insight that has escaped the attention both of the advocates of ID Creationism and its detractors, and that truly changes the whole nature of the question. I can’t blame you for not having it – it’s a near certainty at this point that no such insight is available anywhere – but why is it worthwhile to restate what has been so completely and thoroughly rejected by every biologist outside of a tiny clique of cranks?
Well, let’s see. You start by pointing to observations that according to you indicate the reality in the distant past of an RNA world. Then you point to the Ronin Ohno hypothesis, not realizing that it refutes the RNA world hypothesis. What all this mean is that the naturalistic scenarios that have been put forward to explain the genetic code and the translation system are highly speculative, based on observations that might appear to be suggestive but certainly not indicative of anything. The first truth is that under naturalism, the origin of the genetic code is an enduring mystery. The second truth is that asserting, like @Puck_Mendelssohn do, that we know that no intelligence was involved in the genetic code is a gross epistemological error.
Did I assert that? I’m quite sure I didn’t. What I have pointed out, and what you have done NOTHING to rebut, is that you have not the faintest shred or hint of evidence that intelligence was involved. All you have are bad analogies and non sequiturs.
The assertion that there’s no evidence that something happened is not equivalent to the assertion that it definitely didn’t.
Testing predictions of mechanistic hypotheses is the essence of the scientific method. Why do you reject science for semantic games when the answers (and questions) it provides make you uncomfortable?
It can’t be exact, as Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 contradict each other.
No, the existence of ribozymes is a stone-cold fact. The predictions come from the hypotheses–they aren’t just guesses.
How about understanding and addressing the actual hypotheses instead of straw men? If you have faith, why not jump in and look at God’s creation in detail instead of through hearsay?
It does work by testing the predictions of mechanistic hypotheses, a practice you rejected above as “inconclusive.”
Have creationists done “an amazing amount of work showing how the cell works,” or do they only work to deceive the public about how science works and what we have learned?
Yet another false dichotomy. In my Christian opinion, your creationism greatly diminishes God because it turns Him into a tinkerer obsessed with reusing things. The most obvious reason that creationism is false is that there are so many painfully obvious ways in which an intelligent designer would throw out many mechanisms and design better ones instead of modifying them. Evolution is severely restricted. There are good examples of that in translation, if you have the courage to look more deeply.
Yet another straw man! Again, if you think that testing predictions is fine, but ultimately inconclusive, then you literally reject the scientific method.
So let’s test a prediction of that hypothesis regarding “the ENTIRE translation system.” Wouldn’t the aminoacyl tRNA synthetases have been designed to be specific for each of the 20 amino acids used for initial protein synthesis?
You conveniently omitted the known flow in the other direction. Why?
It seems that your confidence in your claims is very low. I’ll ask again: Why to you appear to be afraid to go deeper and learn anything beyond creationist rhetoric?
But that’s not true. There are plenty of human (and mouse) null mutations that when homozygous are compatible with life. Those genes, when not mutated, produce functional proteins.
We learned about the genetic code through research, so there’s no difference between the two.
Only metaphorically, because there are zero abstractions involved and no one is communicating anything to anyone else.
Why be so shy and avoid mechanisms? What’s your hypothesis for the mechanism by which Divine intelligence did that? For example, did an intelligence design a single aminoacyltransferase for each amino acid?
I am showing evidence that the genetic code and the translation system evolved. This isn’t something a reasonable person can just pretend like doesn’t exist.
You’re not explaining why this evidence exists if, according to you, the genetic code and translation system didn’t evolve but was instead somehow created.
The main author of the paper that details some of the experimental tests of that hypothesis, Charles W Carter, has made that claim, but first of all it’s irrelevant to what I am doing by pointing to the Rodin-Ohno hypothesis for the origin of the aaRS enzymes (showing evidence that translation evolved), and second is he’s just blatantly wrong when he claims that, as that just flat out doesn’t logically follow. And I’d be happy to teach you why, but before I can even be bothered you’re the one who has a lot of explaining to do about the evidence.
Sure, the individual scenarios are highly speculative. Which is irrelevant to the point: There is evidence that the genetic code and translation system evolved, even if do not know or understand the full context in which this evolution occurred. So you’re not dealing with the evidence, you’re trying to find poor excuses for not doing so.
It is bothindicative and suggestive(quite sure these are synonymous) of the fact that the genetic code and translation system evolved, and you have no explanation for any of the facts I detailed in that post. Notice how you haven’t actually explained why any of this evidence exists, or why the data is the way it is, if the translation system or the genetic code was designed and created.
No amount of appeals to things we still don’t know is going to make the things we do know go away. Deal with the evidence. Explain the data. Show me why it isn’t evidence for the translation system evolving. That means accounting for that same data in a better way, that is more expected/more probable on the hypothesis that the translation system was created, than if it evolved.
Bla bla bla, this isn’t dealing with any of the evidence. Another crappy excuse to avoid dealing with evidence that you have zero reason to expect on the untestable fever dream that magical wishing manifested the genetic code in physical reality.
From a related FB discussion, and relevant to this one, Dennis Venema pointed me to this (response to a response) of his review of Steven Meyer Signature in the Cell.
@Giltil said “arbitrary rules”. Once the rules of the code are set up (dot dot dot = ‘S’), they are set. They are set arbitrarily, not used arbitrarily.
I think that the fact that rRNA and tRNA are post-transcriptionally modified by proteins is better explained by the hypothesis that “all parts of the system were created at the same time”. In other words, it was “DNA world” from the beginning.
I agree with ID that you can use science to come to the conclusion that an Intelligent Designer is the best inference to explain something, like the origin of life.
Where I disagree with ID is the idea that you can take a string of information, whether it is a string of bits or a string of nucleotide bases, and calculate if is functional or not.
The Genetic code, computer code and morse code are all “1b” codes. Alternative grouping of elements (dots/dashes, etc) that produce an effect. There is no such code (involving different groupings) in tree rings. The tree ring is just an artifact of the tree’s growth for a particular year.
The key word is could. If you developed a code that doesn’t currently exist.
This isn’t relevant. In use, codes are always held or transmitted in some sort of physical form. The Genetic code is actually the mappings of the codons bases to specific amino acids, not the chart that we make to show the mappings.
The specific effect of Morse code is to transmit a message by representing each letter or number in the message by a grouping of dots/dashes just as a grouping of bits (a byte or bytes) represents a letter/number/logical statement.