Is there really information being conveyed within a cell?

Conversation
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I’ll second the “Why?”

Indeed. You merely hypothesize that it is abstract, and you have falsely presented that hypothesis as a fact.

You could learn so much more if you took a scientific approach to testing that hypothesis instead of a rhetorical approach.

We see that all the time here. ID creationists roar in here stating their hypotheses as facts, then in turn stating the false empirical predictions of their hypotheses as facts. It’s too late to get reality in there once that happens.

You claimed:

It is abstract because there is no chemical requirement that a certain codon code for a specific amino acid, just as there is no electrical requirement that a certain set of ones and zeros code for a specific letter or other character in ASCII (or any other code set).
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Leaving aside your moving the goalposts to “requirement,” your hypothesis predicts that when curious people look, they will find zero chemical interactions between amino acids and their cognate tRNAs that might serve as a foundation for building this metaphorical code.

Everything! Maybe you could try answering them in the context of your claim that the genetic code is abstract.

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Why is that important? Why is it there, if it is important for your assessment that “amino-acyl tRNA synthetases are produced like all other proteins…”

What do the leading lights of IDcreationism say about peptidyl transferase being made of RNA?

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The way that life is today speaks volumes about how it began. Here’s a great book that is merely a start for further study:

Hilariously, IDcreationists ignore the very existence of metabolism-first hypotheses. I suspect they do so because they’re so analog and complex. That has little value in trying to convince people like you that it’s a simple problem.

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So it’s simply God-of-the-gaps.

Not really. At least not how I understand God-of-the-gaps, which is to attribute a natural phenomena to a creator if science can’t (yet) explain it.

However, the origin of life is not a natural phenomena that we can observe happening at the present. If anything, the OOL is a case of “Naturalism-of-the-gaps”, where you say “There must be a naturalistic explanation for OOL. We just haven’t found it yet”.

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If you don’t think your belief is supported by scientific evidence, what do you think does support it?

That isn’t what I said. I think there is plenty of evidence to support my beliefs.

Just a few that deal with biology:

  • Presence of functional information (sequential)
  • The functional information is coded (Genetic code)
  • The machines of life (proteins and functional RNA) are produced according to the coded information.

That is categorically false, and strongly suggests that your beliefs are not just held in the absence of scientific evidence, but out of ignorance of scientific evidence that exists and is readily accessible.

Examples?

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I thought that’s what you were saying.

“Natural processes don’t account for X, therefore there is a designer” is a non sequitur and God of the gaps. What you need is “natural processes can’t account for X” and you’re on your way to a valid design argument, or at least an argument for the supernatural. But ID hasn’t been able to convincingly argue for this modified premise.

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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.
Including but not limited to the material bases of all other aspects of life, such as the need to ingest physical food and chemically turn it into the constituents of the physical body, and to obtain energy to drive the physical processes of life such as growth and reproduction, the physical basis of all the senses, etc. etc.
This historical evidence from the chemical and physical sciences all strongly point in the same direction. Life’s ultimate origins is most likely to be another natural phenomenon.

And then there’s the fact that origin of life research has given a few interesting clues pointing to life’s origins having a physical and chemical basis.

Nothing about this is gap-reasoning. It’s entirely reasonable abductive and inductive reasoning.

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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.

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Of course, it you do not look for it, you will not find it; and if you assume there is no natural explanation, there is no point in looking.

There may be a genuine gap in knowledge, but assuming naturalism has heuristic value propelling research, whereas assuming divine intervention means you are done, and in fact the unwelcome discovery of natural explanations would just spoil the apologetic utility.

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You keep making this claim. How many papers from the primary literature have you read on the subject?

And there’s no requirement needed, just tendencies.

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I’m really not following you. The machinery copies (translates) the code. Change the code and the same machinery will still copy it. To risk an analogy, if I change the words written on a piece of paper, that doesn’t mean I need to run out and buy a new Xerox machine to make copies.

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.

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Here’s a question. Are you claiming to be talking scientifically or is it more religious apologetics? Because the criteria to be applied are rather different.

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Hum, let’s see.
It’s more a case of the history of technology having already been so overwhelmingly successful at finding natural, physical explanations for so many aspects of the technological world, that it would be perverse to deny this history. Including but not limited to the material bases of internal combustion cars, such as the need to ingest gasoline, burn it and convert the resulting heat into mechanical work, which, applied to the wheels, make the car move.
This historical evidence from the chemical and physical sciences all strongly point in the same direction. Technological ultimate origins is most likely to be another natural phenomenon.

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Yes, I now see what you said is that, while members of the ID movement claim to be able to support their belief in a “designer” with scientific evidence, that is not something with which you are concerned.

However, your subsequent comments have shown that is not the case and, in fact, you are quite concerned with that issue. So perhaps you should drop any pretense to the contrary.

Sure. While this is, by now, quite an old article, it still provides a good summary of much of the well-established evidence for the fact that all life forms now on earth are related to one another by common ancestry, and that this has been the result of nothing more than unguided evolutionary processes:

29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent

That aside, I think your entire tact of trying to adduce “design” from processes that don’t directly involve chemistry is misguided. 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.

The creation of this information, however, did not depend on the chemical structure of my feet nor of the sand. Not chemical reaction was involved. Correct?

However, by the reasoning you are using elsewhere, you would have to conclude that the information contained in the footprints had been produced by some guided process involving intelligence. That is an obviously erroneous conclusion. All that is required is the physical force of a foot causing an indentation in the sand.

I do, actually, think it is possible to “steel man” your argument, and make a less obviously fallacious one regarding genomic “information”, though still not a particularly persuasive one. But I’ll leave that for now.

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What are the evidences that natural phenomena can produce the 3 features put forward by @theaz101 ?

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I find your analogy here quite literally incomprehensible. “The history of technology” isn’t “finding natural physical explanations” for anything.

I do agree with your last sentence. The origin of technology is a natural phenomenon. Animal and human inventions and their capacity to intelligently design tools and technology is all natural processes.

You can’t just magically and supernaturally know how to do anything as I’ve explained to you before many times. The idea that design can solve the problem of a flat fitness landscape and you just somehow magically know where the solution is, is a demonstrable fantasy.

To be able to do intelligent design takes learning from interaction, and that can only happen if there are rules to be learned about how functional things work, which can only happen if there are degrees of function. If there are no degrees of function, you have no choice but to do blind, brute force guessing until, eventually, you find the right solution. There is no such thing as design by revelation.

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You already know the answers. It’s evolution. We have evidence that all three evolved, elucidated on this forum innumerable times.

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What is functional information?

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Doesn’t the junk DNA story tell the opposite?

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There is no bottom. There is no floor.

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