From this context, I will take the turgid “experiments showing how the genetic code was designed by human minds that infuse information into the DNA to get a self-replicating molecule” to simply mean, when put into plain language, ‘experiments that artificially recreate naturally occurring biological phenomena (viruses, cells, etc)’. It is hard to see this, rather modest, conclusion bearing the weight of, or even being remotely related to, your thesis.
As to "experiments attempting to show this same information evolved naturally ended up yielding negative results every time”, I would direct your attention to this this sentence from the introduction of the paper you cited:
This approach has never worked, and it is not expected to work, at least not if one is limited to the lifetime of a human, let alone the duration of a funding period or a Ph.D. thesis.
(My emphasis.)
When attempting to replicate results that occured over millions (billions?) of years, with the entire Earth as its petri dish, under a wide range of conditions (which would have included lightning strikes, volcanic erruptions, and who knows what else), in such a short time period, in a single lab, it is hardly surprising that “[s]imply mixing chemicals and watching for a living system to appear from the broth seems unreasonable”. Giving the system a little ‘kick’ to model the impact of such a wide range of low-probability events (whose probabilities rise to certainty over millions of years and the entire Earth) seems entirely reasonable.
What is entirely unreasonable is your pretense that this in some way renders Abiogenesis impossible.
The problem is that this is precisely the citation that my previous statement addressed:
That genomes bear some similarity to natural language is neither surprising, nor remotely supportive of a designer – as a key attribute of a natural language is that it is one that evolved naturally (as opposed to an artificially created, ‘designed’ language like Esperanto).
Given that nothing in your current efforts even remotely addresses “human language”, and your attempted defense of your employment of this citation in the previous thread amounted to parroting a context-free, and largely irrelevant, Creationist quote-mine (cribbed from the DI) of an opinion Yockey gave forty years ago, I have no qualms repeating that your claim is “balderdash”.
I would also suggest that this incident has further demonstrated that you appear to be incapable of learning from criticism.
What I meant was that these experiments show how human information is literally the same or highly similar to DNA information. This is because observations show how both of them are almost identical. More importantly, when human information is stored in the DNA, it produces the same or highly similar self-replicating molecule we observe in nature.
Therefore, they are NOT metaphorically similar or identical, but literal.that way.
However, I want to make it very clear that I am NOT suggesting that these experiments alone show that the first life on earth was mainly caused by an intelligent designer. I am just arguing that those experiments show a literal commonality between the two information structures. That’s it!
This leads me to address your next response…
You are equivocating between chance events and material mechanisms. If there are material mechanisms that purely caused the inception of the first life, we should be able to find those mechanisms in nature and then test it in the lab. For instance, we have found many mechanisms already showing how the mineral surfaces of the earth would have contributed centrally to the linked pre-biotic problems of containment and organization [just ask for reference]. Also, this did not take million of years let alone months to reveal in experiments.
Now, I am sure you were probably referring to chance events that occurred only once in a lifetime or rarely happen. But, this would still not bolster your point at all because chance events don’t require long periods of time to produce the effect in question. Instead, they just require many tries like what we see from rolling the dice. Nevertheless, we can still test this within a reasonable timeframe.
Therefore, we can conclude from current evidence that the first life on earth was created by not only an intelligent designer but by a common designer because of the remarkably similarities between both languages. More importantly, since there could not be any life before abiogenesis and there is nothing in the physico-chemical world [apart from life] that resembles reactions being determined by the genetic code, we can conclude this common designer is also transcended. Finally, the only mind we know of that is both divine and human is Jesus Christ.
As I told @Dan_Eastwood, whether a feature in nature is irreducibly complex (top-down) or reducible simple (bottom-up) has no bearing on whether an intelligent designer was part of the process or not let alone a divine one.
Instead, the question is whether chemical or biological evolution was an unguided natural process or a guided process by a divine designer. I was not trying to disprove evolution or abiogenesis nor have I ever tried on here with some exceptions. I made this very clear beforehand.
As I already addressed above, the experiments I showed you do demonstrate that both languages are literally the same or highly similar since they essentially produce the same effect.
I did not even bring up Yockey’s article here but yet you still accuse me of not learning from past criticisms. Well, that is just classic!!
No @Meerkat_SK5, your purely rhetorical employment of the vacuous phrase “human information” notwhithstanding, you have shown nothing of the sort.
These experiments merely show human ability to recreate naturally occurring biological phenomena, that are themselves DNA (and RNA-based). These DNA/RNA recreations do not play Pacman, run a database search, report the latest World news, or do any of the other things that “human information” typically does.
This ability to recreate is in no way probative. Human ability to build arches does not make them similar (in any way beyond the most superficial) to natural arches.
They have not shown anything of the sort. And nothing you have presented here comes close to demonstrating this.
You are conflating information with medium. That both music and computer games can be stored on CD does not make them “the same or highly similar”.
The “human information [that] is stored in the DNA” would not be interpretable by the biological systems that translate naturallyu occuring DNA, and naturally occuring DNA would result in garbage if it were fed into the DNA-as-storage-medium reader. This demonstrates that they are incompatible rather than “the same or highly similar”.
This claim, which you have made before (and which I think was rejected before), it utter balderdash. Nonsense on stilts.
Given that everything that you have said to support this conclusion has been erroneous, your huffing AND puffing is simply (metaphorical) hot air.
They are in fact completely irrelevant to that question.
And your argument has failed. Completely.
Given that the “lightning strikes, volcanic erruptions, and who knows what else” I was discussing are “material mechanisms”, it is hard to see what I am equivocating.
Only with a near-infinite amount of lab space (every material mechanism, and every set of precursor conditions, that might have occurred over the entire Earth over millions of years) and infinite imagination (to tabulate them all).
That we know of, and can accurately replicate, a few specific circumstances does not mean that we can replaicate everything that might have occured.
Millions of years affects the shear volume of potential circumstances to be replicated, not necessarilly the time required to replicate each one of them.
The tiny amount of largely irrelevant evidence supports no such grandiloquent and verbose conclusion. Bolding it just emphasises its vacuity.
I’m sure there is very little here that you haven’t asserted before. But repetition does nothing to improve its value.
But given that I was neither discussing the reducibility or irreducibility of early life, nor the involvement of a putative intelligent designer (divine or otherwise), it would seem that this comment is irrelevant.
No @Meerkat_SK5. You have simply asserted that these experiments demonstrate this.
Given that in both this, and the preceding thread where you brought up Lijia Yu et al, you simply baldly cited the paper, rather than providing any discussion of how you think it supports your position, I have no reason to believe that you have even read this paper, let alone understood it.
This paper does not claim that they are “literally the same” or even "highly similar*, only that they are analogous, which is a far weaker statement.
When you spam your quotemines so liberally, over so many different threads, it is hard to keep track of who has already criticised what. No criticism was leveled at it on this thread, where you employed the bald quotation of it as an attempt to rebut my rebuttal (which you quoted above) of your attempt to employ (the bald citation of) Lijia Yu et al to bolster your argument. Given that you have decided to resurrect this issue, I’ve tried to be thorough in addressing all outstanding issues, both here and on the original thread.
The similarities Yu et al are discussing (“Like all cellular life forms, all natural languages are believed to have descended from a single ancestor and have evolved through mechanisms comparable to biological evolution”) do not exist under your model.
You are basing your argument on something you believe to be false.
Thank you for demonstrating once again that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Yep. I would not have thought that the quality of @Meerkat_SK5’s argument could deteriorate, but it’s getting even worse. Perhaps with a bit more “improvement” it will just cause computer screens to burst into flames.
The study I gave you suggeted that “all known natural languages possess a nearly constant relative entropy, which is a measure of entropy loss (information gain) between a text written in the given language following the strict rules of grammar and a random sequence of words… It has been observed that for all natural languages, the information gain is about 3.6 bits, which is compatible with the existence of a universal grammar, despite some distinct, language-specific variations.”
They found this universal grammer within protein domains with only some differences… “Together, these findings suggest the existence of a “quasi-universal” grammar of protein domain architecture.”
However, they never said this comparison was metaphorical.
No, I am not doing that this time since the study above was referring to the genetic code without suggesting it was a metaphorical mathematical comparison.
But, even if I was, why would almost identical mediums that harbor information not show how a common designer was at play rather than just an intelligent designer that would be an alien?
Well, the circumstances that took place within that event was rare and happened for a short time period or am I mistaken?
This is just a materialism of the gaps argument. We have to base our scientific conclusions on current evidence rather than speculate into the future.
You are just special pleading now. Again, the origin of life mechanisms we found did not take that long. You are being inherently unscientific now.
Well first off, they did say that “Genomes show remarkable similarities to natural languages.”
Second, they never said the same universal grammer that they found in protein domains was meant to be considered a metaphor.
OK, I have to ask what you think is going on there. You understand that “barcoding” is a metaphor here, right? They’re just sequencing an agreed upon bit of DNA that happens to be variable (well, usually) between closely related species and so can often be used as a convenient identification tool. Now what did you mean?
As @John_Harshman points out, they are merely using “bar-coding” as a metaphor. They are not introducing a literal bar-code into the plant’s DNA. They are not in fact introducing anything at all. They are merely sampling certain well-behaved areas of DNA that allow them to easily distinguish between populations of interest.
In fact this seems akin to a simplified and streamlined version of DNA testing at a crime scene: it is simply using DNA to identify the organism under consideration.
This in no way supports your position.
This passage does not in any way support the claim that “DNA information and human information are identical (or at least highly similar)”. It in fact does not discuss DNA at all.
This passage in turn does not discuss human language at all. So it likewise does not support your position.
No, but they explicitly state that it is merely analagous.
My comment was in response to your claim about “human information … stored in the DNA” (by way of an artificial information to DNA writer/reader). The DNA-barcoding paper involves no storage of human information (merely cataloging of pre-existing DNA), so is irrelevant to this issue.
For the blindingly obvious reason that humans have simply co-opted a pre-existing natural form of information storage. The fact that humans could also carve this information into stone likewise does not mean that a block of stone and a CD are "the same or highly similar”.
It very much depends on the circumstance in question. Volcanic activity can last for centuries.
No it is not, if for no other reason than that “materialism of the gaps” is nothing more than a vacuous meaningless Creationist canard.
In this case, it is merely an expression of humility in acknowledging that we cannot conceive, let alone tabulate, all possible specific circumstances, so experiments will need to be designed to approximate wider ranges of circumstances.
But I am not an expert on Abiogenesis research. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, is any of the large number of Creationists who ignorantly and tendentiously pontificate on the subject. If you want to learn more about this research, and it’s inherent limitations, you will need to read material written by the researchers themselves.
You clearly have little idea what a Special Pleading fallacy is.
Again utterly and appallingly irrelevant to the argument I am making.
The Earth has an area of 510 million square km. Therefore, over the course of 100 million years (for sake of argument), any event that had the probability of happening in a square km in a year, of at least 1 in 51 trillion, would be expected to happen at least 10 times.
Now try to tabulate all the circumstances that might meet that incredibly low probability threshold. That low a probability is mind-numbing, as would be the shear volume of unlikely and obscure circumstances that it would allow for.
That was my point.
Addendum:
By way of comparison a square kilometer will, on average, be hit by lightning around 2.75 times per year – meaning that this is a really really common occurrence by comparison. (Hat tip to @Roy for inspiring me to look this up.)
The probability of the impact of a meteor 5km in diameter would be of the right order of magnitude (they hit the Earth on average once every 20 million years). Can you think of everything that is as unlikely as this? I can’t.
Well first off ‘remarkably similar’ does not mean ‘highly similar’. It merely means surprisingly similar. If the expectation was for almost no similarity, then almost any similarity would be “remarkable”.
But more importantly that sentence was disingenuously quotemined:
Genomes show remarkable similarities to natural languages. Like all cellular life forms, all natural languages are believed to have descended from a single ancestor.
In other words the authors are saying that they are ‘similar’ because they both show signs of COMMON DESCENT!
I am confused about your repeated harping on about “metaphor”. You would appear to be ignorant of the fact that metaphor is not the only literary device whereby an author will state something that is not literally true.
In this case, the author has explicitly stated that the relationship between natural languages and DNA is one of analogy, arguably a form of simile.
SUMMATION
To be “identical” two things would need to be indistinguishable.
Likewise to be "highly similar"they would need to be difficult to distinguish at first glance.
DNA and human language on the other hand are easily distinguishable, at the most superficial inspection, even by a complete layman. It seems unlikely that anybody would mistake one for the other.
When the level of similarity is sufficiently small that it requires detailed and esoteric statistical analysis to discern it (as was the case with Lijia Yu et al) , it is clear evidence that the similarity falls far short of “high”.
That @Meerkat_SK5 thinks they are “identical (or at least highly similar)” would appear to indicate that they have no understanding of degrees of similarity.
That @Meerkat_SK5repeatedly continues to cite Lijia Yu et al long after its irrelevance has been pointed out to them would seem to indicate that they are wholly incapable of learning from criticism.
I’ve searched that paper, and there are no references to “Pacman”, “database search” or “World news”. Contrary to your claim, that study does not suggest that DNA recreations do such things. That study isn’t even about DNA/RNA recreations, but about identifying species from their DNA signatures. .
You clearly didn’t understand that study. You may not even have read it.
They found evidence of a grammar within protein domains, but they did not say it was the same grammar that underlies language. They even highlighted some of the differences between the two underlying grammars:
Thus, both the protein and the human (and formal) languages seem to be based on quasi-universal grammars, but the complexity (orderliness) of the latter is substantially greater than that of the former.
So you clearly didn’t understand that study either. Nor did you read all of it.
The media are not almost identical. Even if they contain the same data, DNA strands look absolutely nothing like compact disks.
You clearly don’t understand the difference between a recording medium and the data recorded on it
Let’s see what @Tim actually said [insert “sic” where appropriate]:
When attempting to replicate results that occured over millions (billions?) of years, with the entire Earth as its petri dish, under a wide range of conditions (which would have included lightning strikes, volcanic erruptions, and who knows what else)
Lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions aren’t particularly rare, and millions of years is not a short time period.
But they did not say that “both languages are literally the same”.
Again, you clearly did not understand (or did not fully read) that paper.
Again, they didn’t say it was the same universal grammar.
You know you haven’t read many of the papers you have cited, but you cite them anyway.
You know you don’t understand much of the work you have referenced, but you pretend you do.
You know that many of the quotes you use are out of context, but you still use them.
You know that much of what you write is garbage, but you post it as factual anyway.
That is one of the objections, yes. That was not the only fatal flaw. The solution you offer amounts to painting racing stripes on a car and expecting it to go faster - it makes no difference.
I think you might want to read this article more carefully. It could help you, but it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. If you want to see what a testable ID hypothesis looks like, see Ewert (2016) or Theobald (2010).
I am arguing for a common designer representing God and man but my argument does not require them to be the same. So this part of your objection is irrelevant. The fact is there is a strong analogy between both languages and that’s what matters.
For instance, “an analogy, in it’s broadest definition is in fact an umbrella term for a cognitive process where we transfer meaning or information from a particular subject to another subject. It is a similarity between the features of two things where a comparison can be made.”
“A classic example of an analogy is the describe the human mind like a computer. They are not identical, but considering the mind to be like a computer can create greater understanding of the human mind.”
This is why they are not using the term “same” because there are important differences.
Now, you are conflating the terms “analogous” and “metaphorical”.
“A metaphor is a type of analogy, but where analogy is identifying two things as similar, a metaphor claims a comparison where there may not be one. It is then up to the listener to create meaning out of this comparison.”
‘For example “ that sound goes through me like nails down a blackboard”. The sound may be very different to the nails on the blackboard, but create a similar sensation or emotion.’
Therefore, since the mathematical structure of human languages and biochemical languages is almost identical, we have a basis to infer that there is a commonality between us and the cause for the first life. When you include the experiments showing how life must be created by an intelligent designer, we can go a step further and infer a common designer.
No, a rock is not the best example. Instead, here is an article where they likened the transcriptional regulatory network to a computer OS and again they never suggested this was merely a metaphor:
“A computer OS is described by a regulatory control network termed the call graph, which is analogous to the transcriptional regulatory network in a cell .”
“…we present a comparison between the transcriptional regulatory network of a well-studied bacterium (Escherichia coli) and the call graph of a canonical OS (Linux) in terms of topology and evolution. We show that both networks have a fundamentally hierarchical layout, but there is a key difference:”
So my question continues to go unanswered…
That’s fine but it’s not an excuse to ignore the evidence supporting a consciously guided natural process in the form of a divine common designer or quantum mind.
Do you have any studies showing that unguided abiogenesis is mathematically possible?
Right!. But ,as I suggested above, when you include the experiments showing how life must be created by an intelligent designer, we can go a step further from this and infer that they both show signs of COMMON DESIGN.
Right. Then, let me address the other major objection that I fully acknowledged beforehand. You said…
“If it’s not falsifiable in the present, why should we expect that to be any different in the past?”
Before I address this, let me make it very clear again that this objection only applies to an aspect of the hypothesis that suggests God continues to guide life after the creation of humans. In other words, the only issue is that we cannot falsify this particular prediction using the same methods. We also cannot falsify whether a particular design in nature is a bad design I might add.
However, this does NOT mean the hypothesis yields no falsifiable predictions NOR does it suggests the hypothesis itself is unfalsifiable.
Now, let me address the objection. I have mentioned in the past that there are other ways we can verify this aspect of my hypothesis. Are you suggesting that this still does not matter? If so, is it because there are still other major flaws left that would need to be addressed first or is there some other reason involved?
I don’t think these are great examples because they are more like models within a theory rather than theories themselves. In addition, one of these examples can be incorporated within my theory to make it more testable.
Here is a better example of a testable ID hypothesis that is a better example of why my ID hypothesis is actually testable instead:
No @Meerkat_SK5, I was merely relating how the authors describe the relationship.
I also covered the fact that an analogy is a form of simile in my previous comment.
Wrong – you have established nothing of the sort! That two things are merely analogous in no way makes them “almost identical” in mathematical structure.
This pretense that ‘not explicitly called a metaphor’ = literal is getting really really silly!
The authors of this paper explicitly state that the relationship between the two is merely “analogous” – a word that you quote and bold.
They do not state that the two are “identical”, “almost identical”, or “highly similar”.
There is no such evidence, just a very large pile of bad argumentation, and in the case of your “quantum mind” nonsense, unscientific mysticism.
This question both misunderstands my point and misunderstands the form of abiogenesis research. As I have already stated, I am not an expert in that field. Find an expert in that field, read their work, and address your misguided questions at them.
These experiments show no such thing! They don’t even come close. At best, they demonstrate some degree of analogous structure between DNA and Natural Language – a slight similarity that can easily be attributed to the fact that they both evolved from a common ancestor. The same can be said, to a lesser extent of the analogous relationship between e. coli and Linux – which the authors likewise attribute to evolutionary pressures:
From a topological standpoint, it is intriguing that two distinct evolutionary processes
both lead to the emergence of hierarchy in the control and regulation layouts, probably because hierarchy is a most effective way to transfer information and coordinate processes.
But the authors are careful to note, in the immediate following sentence:
Nevertheless, we have observed several intrinsic differences between the two hierarchical networks.
And their summary comparison table notes more differences than similarities:
I will close by noting that you carefully avoided my “summation” above, which demonstrated that DNA and human language are neither “identical” nor “highly similar”. Until you address it, I will give short shrift to any further assertions of similarity.
I will also be increasingly intolerant of your seemingly-random habit of bringing up metaphors when neither I nor the paper under discussion have mentioned them.
There has been a considerable amount of argumentation on this thread conflating analogy with (a high degree of) similarity.
I therefore decided to make a post addressing solely this issue.
A tiger and a great white shark can be considered to be analogous, in that each is an apex predator. This analogy does not however mean that they are particularly similar overall – they have profound differences in morphology, physiology, hunting strategy, etc, etc, etc.
In fact analogies tend to be noteworthy because of overall dissimilarity. One is unlikely to see an analogy made between Emperor Penguins and King Penguins. If two things are too similar overall it tends to obscure the single point of analogy that is being attempted to be made.
Therefore it is unreasonable to take papers pointing to an analogy between two things as meaning that they are highly similar. It is highly likely that they mean the exact opposite, that it is the overall differences between them that make the single point of analogous similarity worthy of mention.
The obvious dissimilarity between human languages and genome sequences is that the former is entirely made up, while the latter is actual stuff. We are left to wonder how something abstract is identical in whatever degree to a concrete object.
This means that saying analoguos and almost identical are essentially the same thing. Here is an example I gave before from the source…
“A classic example of an analogy is the describe the human mind like a computer. They are not identical, but considering the mind to be like a computer can create greater understanding of the human mind.”
Prove it then and stop making assertions.
In isolation, that is correct. But I was saying that when you combine these experiments with the observations of quasi-identical properties between languages, we can infer a common designer. This is what I was getting at.
Finally, as I told you before, my argument does NOT require them to be the same or identical. This part of your objection is irrelevant. The fact is there is a strong analogy between both languages and you acknowledged this already. So case closed!
