I’m far behind in catching up with this thread but I think this gem bears repeating:
Most of us realized this long ago but I don’t think it can be emphasized too often.
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The implication is that DNA being able to be described in symbolic/digital form does not mean that DNA or the information within it is symbolic/digital.
You’re right, I haven’t. I prefer to present evidence rather than arguments from authority.
I did present my reasons for considering the information in DNA to be non-digital.
You haven’t addressed them.
It would depend on how the design (or rather the manufacture) was performed. How about you produce some evidence of a design process having taken place between (i) when there were no complex features and (ii) when there were Cambrian body plans, and then we can discuss it?
Alternatively, you could continue substantiating that there is “no evidence of any other process other than evolution having taken place” by not producing any.
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It explicitly validates my statement that DNA encodes digital information.
True. But the article informs us not to take a narrow definition. Read under the subheading Historical digital systems.
Read this too.
In my initial comment, I made it clear that any digital strings meeting the other two criteria are examples of FDI. English texts fall into the category of digital strings. I dont understand why you are complaining when it’s ‘language’ characteristics not even factored into my analogy.
The information itself is not physical – it is abstract. But we do use physical representations to transmit that information.
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Wow. That was a profoundly unethical truncation.
I did:
That’s more than one reason. Even the sentence you unethically truncated was a reason. None are global. Your claim was explicitly global. Do you not understand this concept?
Do you not understand the differences between evidence, speculation, and opinion?
See above.
See the question? You didn’t answer it. So are you truly interested in learning about evidence that demolishes your unsupported assumption, or will you merely pretend to be and perform more unethical edits?
Thank you @Midhun for pervassively quoting me out of context. I will take the liberty of restoring this context in my replies to you.
As can be seen, it rather “validates” my own original statement. Lacking a clear definition, the use of the adjective “digital” can easily be taken as a metaphor or simply sloppy wording.
The claim in that section that DNA is digital data is uncited, and therefore worthless.
You have also completely failed to address my point that DNA has far more in common with other biochemicals than with a written text.
This essay starts out with the bald claim that:
… all languages known are digital …
This is a blatantly false statement, as spoken language contains a large amount of analogue content: inflection, emphasis, etc. It may be true of written language – but written language was a late development in homo sapiens.
I am complaining because the less characteristics DNA has in common with English texts, the less compelling the analogy becomes. They may both be “functional”, but in completely different, and disanalogous, ways. A mop and a hammer are both tools, and both functional – but try washing a floor with a hammer.
You will find few people here who accept the language-DNA analogy as a good one – and fewer still who accept any analogy as a valid argument.
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I see. Why didn’t you check if I was interested before addressing my other statements? 
Jus kidding
I wonder what “built-in mechanisms” are. Other than just having genes which influence phenotypes, which can have different fitnesses. Or is it something more mysterious like having all the sequences for redwood trees already present and waiting in its green alga ancestor?
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Which, incidentally, would conflict with the concept of intelligent design, since that’d be just the sort of cartoonish inefficiency every human engineer would be laughed out of the room for, rather than hired.
I’m thinking of something more Lamarckian, a force pushing for advancement or mutations as a direct response to need. But I’m also willing to bet that @Midhun won’t say.
Reading my earlier post will give you an idea of what I meant by “built-in mechanisms.”
What’s this ping about? How can I help?
You can’t just declare the probability to be 1. That’s nothing but an assertion.
If you can just declare that a designer can produce English sentences with a probability of 1, I can just declare that some sort of physical and chemical process can produce functional organic polymer sequences with a probability of 1.
No we don’t have to ensure that at all. There is nothing that demands that for a functional sequence to be considered “FDI” then only a tiny fraction of all sequences are capable of the function. Completely nonsensical demand. Why should anyone agree to that? I don’t agree to it. I can consider a function encoded in a sequence to be FDI regardless of whether sequences able to perform the function are very likely, or very unlikely. It’s completely irrelevant.
If you’re just going to insist that is how you define FDI, then my response is I reject your understanding of the concept as being meaningless and I don’t see why anyone should care about your personal and idiosyncratic definition.
That’s a meaningless response because the question being addressed here is if a nonfunctional sequence can be evolved to gain a function and then improve it.
All experiments are controlled. That’s how you make sure you understand what is causing the results.
If researchers allowed mutations elsewhere in the phage genome that would just make it much more time consuming to look for mutations at other loci and control for their effects. By constraining the mutations to only occur at the locus of interest, it just makes it easier to determine whether any measured gain in infectivity actually comes from mutations to the relevant sequence, instead of mutations elsewhere in the phage genome. Putative mutations elsewhere in the phage genome would not be addressing the question the researchers are trying to answer: Can an arbitrary sequence evolve to acquire a biological function?
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Then your “challenge” has become completely meaningless.
You have provided us with a challenge to describe a natural process that can reliable find and produce functional sequences that are supposed to be rare in sequence space, but then ALSO provided us with the further criterion that the natural process is not allowed to bias the results towards parts of sequence space that are more likely to be functional.
But if there IS a natural process that biases the sequences it produces towards those more likely to be functional (and hence is potentially capable of producing evolvable organisms), then you have elected to define that process as not meeting your challenge.
What?? That makes no sense. Isn’t that how one WOULD meet that challenge? If such sequences are very rare and therefore very unlikely to be guessed at random, the only way to find them is if the process that generates the sequences has some sort of intrinsic bias towards the functional part. But you have now just declared that if the process has that bias, it is not allowed in the challenge.
Tails you win, heads we lose. Well played sir.
Even if it is true that no such natural process is known at the present time, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. That’s just straight up “God of the gaps” reasoning.
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Okay, but since it has in fact been demonstrated that the evolutionary process can produce functional sequences from nonfunctional ones, and since “the modern cell type” is essentially encoded by a collection of functional sequences, it seems to me the challenge is already known to have been satisfied.
If the challenge instead becomes about the first functional sequences and how abiotic chemistry first gave rise to that, then all I can say is they’re working on it, and the fact that they haven’t solved it yet doesn’t mean intelligent design is right by default. Among other reasons because any intelligent designer, as best we can tell, is itself a biological organism that would have to have evolved first. There can’t have been an infinite regression of intelligent designers, so the first one must have arisen from non-life through some sort of process governed by physics and chemistry. QED.
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Not really. It was all exceedingly vague. And none of those “built-in” mechanisms seems to have what you’re looking for, which appears to be some kind of intentional adaptive mutation.
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Thank you for confirming your lack of interest in evidence.
What John said.
And Midhun thus implies that ordinary mutation and selection can’t do the job, for reasons not explained.
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@Midhun, if you don’t know who Joe is, Google him.
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“Even if”? Are you aware of any natural mechanism that can bias/direct the arrangement of individual nucleotides (i.e., polymerization) towards a function x?