They do stick up for evolution as God’s means of creating, which of course causes some negative reactions. But they are right there with Francis Collins in terms of faith commitment. In terms of the old ASA list, think more along the lines of George Murphy or Loren Haarsma or Keith Miller or Terry Gray, definitely not PVM.

To see some of their evangelical commitment, go under Projects, Workshops on their website and see material about the 2009 workshop they co-organized with Tim Keller.

I know humans parse things better than machines but I’m stumped on “As a glimpse inot what I hope to discuss then, my feeling is that his description of the biochemistry of living cells is generally accurate but not so close for OOL research”

I think you are telling me to wait a bit but I’m not sure. If so then I am fine to hold off. I need to read all the asa posts/comments on your blog re information again, and then try to respond. However I am not an expert in information theory and any way I think Shannon or Chatin/Kolg… algorithmic theory is not what they should be talking about as Dembski does in his books and now SIC does to some degree.

One of their problems at Biologos is that it is not possible to subscribe to their blogs or to comments so I find them hard to follow. Have written in a suggestion to them…

Also I do not know much about the people at BioLogos since Francis Collins became the Surgeon General. The impression I get from reading other sites on the net is that they are more into naturalistic evolution-OOL than anybody I have seen here with the exception of PVM who dropped out quite a while back from the email list. Maybe I have gotten a bad impression as the people now running BioLogos are not on my radar screen at all.

Randy you are correct in that you summarize the explicit argument made in SIC. However, as I have read Meyer’s book I have become impressed with another message that seems more implicit.

That message is based on the

1. sheer intricacy of the human cell and the details of how proteins are made and then new dna etc
2. state of research and thinking on OOL at the time Meyer’s did his research for SIC: as far as I can see they have not progressed very far and I understand why people are proposing the multiverse as a possible solution.

These observations lead one to think that the probability of any wholly naturalistic solution is extremely low and approaches zero, what I intuitively think of as 10**-100. In other words unless God acted in what has been described as the governance aspect of his sovereignty that the first cell probably would not have begun the path to life as we know it.

What I would like to do is try to separate concerns as much as possible between the ID conclusions and arguments and the more general message that natural factors leading to the first cell seem improbable. The first concern is what Randy is getting at and many here including myself are not comfortable with the ID argument as science and there appear to be numerous threads addressing that concern. Since I can’t make a post on this blog and this post seems relatively inactive I’d like to kick off a discussion here on this implicit message of SIC.

First two disclosures:
A. I have not read very much about front loading ideas except as Mike Gene wrote on the asa mailing list. But from what I have read I do not find them compelling but that may just be my lack of study.

B. Since my high school education occurred on two continents and three locations I managed not to receive any formal education at all in biology, thus all I know on the subject I have learned as result of reading books on evolution and the odd Sci Am that I pick up. I would far rather read about physics, cosmology, and mathematics than biology.

I agree with other commentators that the ID portion of the book is rather wordy and repeats arguments that have been made in prior ID books. However, that said I found the segment of the book dealing with what I’m referring to as the implicit message very good and extremely helpful although someone with training in the field likely found those portions rather boring.

I have two questions:

I. Is Meyer’s overview of how the cell functions and replicates accurate? I expect so as I don’t read much in the blog sphere about people like Dawkins or PVM trashing that part of the book.

II. Is the description of the state of the research in OOL correct at the time the book was written? Have there been great leaps in understanding since the research was done and OOL is now a more or less solved problem, in other words has something equivalent to Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” been published in the technical literature?

(Note to editors I have created this post in wordpad and copied and pasted the contents into the comments window. On other blogs I have lost comments when I hit submit or have paged up in the window and seen something interesting and then navigated away from the blog thus loosing all my comments, at which point I give up in frustration. I checked things in notepad and hope no rtf formatting gets copied over. I also find it much easier to write my thoughts when I can see a decent sized window.)

Yes, there can be redundancy in so far as different physical configurations can induce the same effect. That’s not the mark of meaning or abstraction.
Yes, there are certain requirements for a physical system to convey information of any kind. That will become clearer as we discuss Shannon’s theory of information.
For now, let me just repeat the basic point I want to make, which is that the only real evidence of an intelligent source of information is abstraction. The purely functional type of complex specified information may or may not be from an intelligent source.

It isn’t always easy to ascertain abstraction in a system and it may remain ambiguous. One possible test would be to test for invarience with respect to the basic definition. If dashes become dots and dots become dashes throughout the entire system, including the encoder and the decoder, what happens? The message still comes through. In other words, there’s nothing inherent about the dash and the dot that requires them to have a specific meaning. It’s an abstract assignment of meaning. But indeed, the physical interaction between the signal and the decoder must be set up as designed. The presence of abstraction is evidence that Morse code transmission is from an intelligent source. The physical configuration is necessary for all types of information, whether from an intelligent source or not.

Stay tuned.

Randy

I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I’d like to pursue this just a bit further.

I’m still trying to grasp the difference between functionality and abstraction. I understand that a sentence encoded in some alphabet and semantic has a meaning that is independent of its medium (encoding). Whereas, functionality, you say, depends upon its physical realization.

Functionality is not a one-to-one relationship. Chairs can function as a chair, and yet vary considerably in material and design. Yet two identical physical arrangements will serve the same function. We might say that function supervenes on the physical arrangement.

It is not clear how this is different from the relationship between meaning and its physical expression. It seems that meaning too supervenes on the physical medium (whether it be sound, or letters, etc.). Yet the same physical expression produces the same meaning.

So let me try again. Functionality depends upon its physical characteristics, you say. Depends in what way? Without a given set of physical properties, it cannot function properly. The same appears true of say the written word or audio system. The meaning is conveyed through a certain medium, but it order to do so properly the physical properties of ink and paper, sound and medium must have certain physical properties. Meanings cannot be conveyed by humans under water.

I’ve backed myself into a hole. I can’t find a distinction. Maybe you can help.

I note in ending one thing about my Morse Code Decoder. If I had never seen a Morse Code Decoder before, all I could tell about it is that it converts sequences of dots and dashes into thin lined drawings (we call them letters, but that’s more than I would know). The interesting thing about this process is that it appears to have no function. This is not true for the DNA machinery. The coding appears to serve as a part of a larger process, we call it protein synthesis. The Morse Code Decoder appears to have been ripped from a larger context. And this is interesting because in saying this we seem to be saying something about meaning. We don’t expect to find disconnected and “incoherent” processes. We expect to find “wholes.” In a sense this is the engine behind Paley’s watch. In the case of the Morse Code Decoder it appears to be “fatherless.” It’s existence causes us to infer that it has a “father.” This “father” is the missing chain of being in a cosmological argument. It may not be a personal creator, but we require that it have a progenitor, a creator of some kind.

bill

I agree with what you have said, although how you know that is the entire ID issue.

But I don’t think you answered what I was trying to get at: Is the Morse Code Decoding machine an appropriate analogy to DNA and all its machinery?

You seem to be saying no. But it’s not clear to me why you say so. Remember if some alien civilization found a Morse Code Decoder in the desert somewhere they wouldn’t have the privileged kind of information that you have.

bill