Looking for sources on the information argument continued

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@DaveB

@Rumraket

@DaveB

There is no chemical law or law of physics which explains the sequence of DNA bases.

This is not really true of course. There is some series of physical and chemical causes of why some given DNA sequence is the way it is. It’s ancestor used to have some sequence, and then there is some physical cause of a mutation in that sequence, giving us the descendant sequence, same would be true for the ancestor, which itself has physical causes of why it is the way it is, all the way back to the origin of the first genetic sequence.

You might not be able to name a physical “law” as being responsible, but it is false to say it isn’t due to physics and chemistry(there is no physical “law” that explains why yesterday’s weather was the way it was, but physics and chemistry does explain it, through the interactions between the Earth’s atmosphere with the sun and so on).

There is definitely a complex history of physics and chemistry that explains both any extant, and any ancestral DNA sequence. The DNA sequence having a contingent and complex physical history does not mean they have no physical and chemical explanation. That’s a non-sequitur.

What I said is true and not that difficult to understand. There is no law of chemistry or physics that explains the DNA sequence, by which I mean the order of the bases. The chemical nature of atoms and molecules does not require or impose any particular order of the bases.

It’s true there is no “law” that says what the order of bases has to be, but your latter claim doesn’t follow from the former, and it’s wrong. There is no “law” that says what tomorrow’s weather will be, but tomorrow’s weather is still due to physics and chemistry. The nature of atoms and molecules (of all the atoms that make up the solar system, the Sun, the Earth, and the atmosphere) is what determines tomorrow’s weather through their mutual interactions through all the fundamental forces of nature. And the nature of atoms and molecules that make up a string of DNA and it’s chemical and physcial surroundings explains why we have a particular string of DNA: and yes we call that explanation heredity.

@Rumraket

Your response boils down to “heredity” or “evolution”, which does not refute my claim at all.

It certainly refutes your claim that "The chemical nature of atoms and molecules does not require or impose any particular order of the bases, because the chemical nature of atoms and molecules of the ancestral DNA molecule and those of it’s surrounding environment strongly determines the descendant sequence

@Rumraket

And, of course, you completely skip over the issue of abiogenesis, which is where the ID argument begins. You can’t have heredity without the means of replication, which requires information.

There’s going to be a physical explanation for why any particular piece of genetic material comes out the way it does even if not derived through complementary basepairing from some ancestral template, just like there’s a physical and chemical explanation for Earth’s weather pattern going back before even the origin of the planet.

@DaveB

@Rumraket

@DaveB

Chemistry explains how proteins and rna products operate, but does not explain the DNA sequences from which they were derived.

That would be like saying there is no physical explanation for the particular arrangement of matter we call the Mt. Everest. We might give a generalized explanation by invoking things like gravity, plate tectonics, and electromagnetism, as all being parts of the explanation for the particular arrangement, but these forces must then be understood in the context of the initial conditions of the solar system and the formation of the planet and so on, and of course we can go back further still to the initial conditions of the universe.
You might say there’s nothing in the force of gravity alone that demands the existence of the Mt. Everest, but if we think about it we can still see that gravity is still very much a part of the explanation for the Mt. Everest. The pressures exerted by the gravitational pull of the planet are part of the explanation for it’s particular size, shape and structure. Then there are all the electrostatic interactions between all the atoms that make it up, and how pressures in the Earth’s crust and mantle have changed over time etc. etc. Thus there really is, in principle, a total physical and chemical explanation for the Mt. Everest, it’s just practically outside our ability to provide. It’s not that physics and chemistry can’t and doesn’t explain it, it’s that we just lack sufficiently detailed knowledge of the system that gave rise to it to give this explanation.

All the same things are true for any given DNA sequence. There really is a physical and chemical explanation for why some particular sequence exists. It’s just much too complicated and too sensitive to local conditions at the atomic level at any given moment in time for us to be able to give a complete world-history for all the subatomic particles that are part of that explanation.

I’m getting the idea that you don’t understand the ID information argument very well.

I think I understand it perfectly well, thanks. It’s all just based on the idea that some particular arrangement is just one out of all possible arrangements(be it order of bases in a sequence of DNA, letters in a sentence, atoms in some structure) and if there are lots of possible arrangements it would be very unlikely to pick the specified one by chance in one or a few attempts.

That’s basically all ID arguments about information ever.

@DaveB

There is no sequential information in Mt. Everest. You are trying to equate complexity with specified complexity.

Sequence information is not the only kind of specified complexity. The arrangments of the atoms that make up the mountain can take an innumerable number of other forms only one of which is the Mt Everest.

@DaveB

Simple complexity: sdflkeoijb lkasd elifdkg iedlji ghckeq iemdboprn dkqzehd

That’s specified complexity, by definition. You just specified it. That’s literally what specified complexity is, complexity you specify. You having now specified that sequence, it would be extremely unlikely to blindly and randomly pick it from the total set of all possible letter sequences of equal length.

Of course those kinds of after-the-fact probabilities are meaningless. They don’t tell us how anything came to be. Finding a DNA sequence and then specifying it, and then pretending because it’s low odds for a blind and random sampling of all sequences of equal length to find it, doesn’t tell us anything about how it came to be. The Mt Everest didn’t emerge through a blind random sampling of the total structure space of an equal number of the same types of atoms, there’s no reason to think that’s how the first genetic polymer had to originate either.

@DaveB

Specified complex information is functional, sequential information. Whether that is telling you my username, or specifying the order of nucleotides or amino acids in a functional rna product or protein.

The act of specifiying it is what makes it specified complexity, as opposed to just complexity. Nobody was specifying some sequence of DNA or amino acids before we sequenced them as best we can tell.

@DaveB

The ID information argument includes Dembski’s “Explanatory Filter”.

(1) Does a law explain it? (2) Does chance explain it? (3) Does design explain it?

Law and chance can explain Mt. Everest, but not specified complex information.

That’s a false trichotomy, since clearly there is another way in which physics and chemistry can explain how and why some particular complex arrangement came to be, even if that does not reduce to some particular law of physics, but rather has to do with the interactions between a large number of atoms and molecules through their mutual forces of attraction and repulsion, strongly contingent on prior(and initial) conditions of the system.