Formal Debate : Information In DNA/RNA

[Calilasseia]

This post opens the formal debate on the following proposition:

The Information In DNA/RNA Necessarily Requires An Intelligent Designer

The debate will be structured as follows:

[1] An introductory post by each participant, with an upper limit of approximately 1,000 words;

[2] Ten principal debating posts by each participant, for the purpose of presenting evidence supporting each participant's case, with an upper limit of approximately 2,000 words per post;

[3] A concluding post containing final statements by each participant, with an upper limit of approximately 1,000 words.

Defending the proposition will be the user sticksnstones.

Opposing the proposition will be the user theropod.

Observers of this debate are reminded at this juncture that ONLY the two named participants above, plus any moderators/admins performing required moderation actions, are to post in this thread. ALL attempts to post in this thread by persons other than the aforementioned will be blocked.

A debate observation and comment thread for non-participants is provided here. Observers of the debate are directed to post in the comment thread provided. Participants in the debate are directed NOT to post in the comment thread, except to alert observers of such matters as requests for deadline extensions, if the relevant news has not been posted in a timely fashion by a moderator or admin. Whilst efforts to maintain such timely posting of news with respect to such matters will be maintained, observers are reminded that the moderators/admins have an entire forum to run, and thus may be otherwise occupied when the relevant developments first arise. The patience of observers and debate participants alike in this respect is duly requested, though serious issues will receive prompt attention.

In accordance with the conventions established by prior formal debates, the participant defending the motion will open the debate. Therefore, sticknstones is now requested to submit his first post for ratification. Once a ratified post by that user appears, the 7 day clock for a reply by theropod will begin ticking. The 7 day clock for a reply will be reset with the appearance of each new ratified post. Participants may choose to avail themselves of the facility to be notified by E-Mail when changes are made to the topic, in order to provide an additional reminder of the progress of the debate.

It therefore remains for me to declare this formal debate officially open, and ready to receive the opening post.

[sticksnstones]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"(Doyle 98).
This is essentially the argument that Intelligent Design advocates attempt to make, and the same argument I am going to attempt to make. I want to make you see that there is no other way that information could have arisen except through the concept of an Intelligent Designer.
In the whole debate of how the origins could have come about, there are only two decisions and two possibilities. One possibility is that life, the structure of modern biology, and man could have only come about without a design in mind. The other possibility is that there was a design in mind by some great intelligent designer whether that be God or an alien. Personally I bank on God because it philosophically makes sense. Even aliens must have had a beginning. There are no other possibilities for how life could have arisen since "ex nihilo nihil fit" or "Nothing can come from nothing" as first argued by Parmenides of Greece (IEP)
Science, since the 1950's-1960's, has come to realize that the universe did in fact have a beginning as where before, the general consensus had become that the universe was eternal. By the evidence of Edwin Hubble discovering that red shift means the galaxy is moving away, the universe must have been one small point of beginning at one time. We know that there was scientifically a point by where there was nothing, not even the laws of the universe (Schroeder 25). We are faced lastly with these only two options for life, (which is exciting to me because one of us has solved the greatest question in the universe) did life come about undirected (when I say undirected, I'm referring to life's origins, not N.S.), or did it come about with a designer. Furthermore, to the root of the issue, did the information that was needed to instruct the amino acids, proteins, DNA, and cells in its specific order just be? Shouldn't information come from somewhere? Information must be contained within a form. Surely RNA/DNA is not the god of all life and origin of information.
All of these concepts dwindle down to our origins and the origins of life itself.
The question essentially is, "Can the information in DNA/RNA can only have come from an intelligent designer?"
Definition of DNA as a storage device
I will first attempt to define what DNA is and its storage capabilities. Within DNA there are specifically sequenced (edit)chemicals that that are represented by letters. These letters represent information for everything that is you. A-T-C-G help form structures such as eyes, legs etc. DNA is essentially to existing. DNA is a genetic storage device (NHM). Genetic Storage device meaning the most complicated and small information storage blueprints ever to be discovered in the universe literally smaller than you can imagine, i.e DNA."Lehninger principles of biochemistry," describes it as "a marvelous device for stable storage of genetic information." The information represented by DNA is not unlike the information in a line of computer code. DNA is an instruction booklet (Lehninger 948). I'm attempting to bring this information closer to your world, If you've ever seen Jurassic Park, they kind of talk a little bit about how huge one single strand of DNA actually is. Not that some fictional movie is evidence by any means, but the information in the movie about DNA is correct. Essentially within the double helix of DNA is actually a wealth of information that could write thousands of books (that is of course an understatement).
Sequencing
How is it possible for proteins to form if it's chemical instructions (DNA) aren't formed. (edit)It is impossible for RNA/DNA to sequence itself. Combinations of amino acids that form proteins cannot be accounted for by natural processes that are not yet living. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet in a sentence are highly specific to meaning and having the application for information, so are the sequenced arrangement of amino acids to form proteins and proteins to form amino acids. There are in fact 200 different amino acids, but to sequence a mammalian creatures structure correctly, there are only 20. The McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of Science and Technology says,

"This specificity of sequence is one of the most remarkable aspects of protein chemistry. The number of possible permutations of sequence is even so small a protein as insulin, of weight 5732 with 51 amino acid residues, is astronomic: 10 to the (51) power permutations. Yet it has been established that the pancreatic cell of a given species has only one of these possible sequences. The elucidation of the mechanism conferring such a high degree of specify on the biosynthetic reactions by which proteins are built up from free amino acids has been one of the key problems of modern biochemistry"(McGraw-Hill 493)

No one knows how these lifeless amino acids could have formed by themselves before life. No one knows where the information could have come from to organize something so specifically. Many theorize, but they are only untested theories. Since there is no other solution by natural processes, and since the only free agent known to produce works of order within nature is intelligence (nature having the hallmarks of intelligence), Intelligence must be behind the specific order of God for there is no other choice. All other naturalistic explanations have failed. God chooses to show his glory even within the very fabric of matter and life itself.

P.S. It might be over 1,000 words with the work cited page.

Work Cited
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. IEP, 21 Apr. 2001. Web. 24 Aug. 2009.
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/parmenid/>.

The National Health Museum. NHM. Web. 24 Aug. 2009. <http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEPC/NIH/gene03.php>.

Nelson, David L., and Michael M. Cox. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition. New York: W. H. Freeman, 2004. Print.

Perlmann, Gertrude E. "Protein." McGraw-Hill encyclopedia of Science and. 9th ed. Vol. 14. New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 2002. 493-94. Print.

Schroeder, Gerald. Science of God the convergence of scientific and biblical wisdom. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Google Books. Web. <http://books.google.com/books?id=OqRxtkaFjVwC&dq=the+science+of+God&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=TlaUSprRAY3YtgPan93SDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false>.

Sherlock Holmes. NY: Dover Publications, 1859-1930. Google Books. 2003. Web. 24 Aug. 2009. <http://books.google.com/books?id=GsHv2b0gSx4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=related:ISBN1593080409&lr=#v=onepage&q=&f=false>.

(I re-read my statement and recognized that I was confusing some things. It should be correct now)

[theropod]

Greetings,

I humbly offer thanks to the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the moderators and administration of this forum, the fellow members and visitors reading this and my esteemed opponent. I offer a special thanks to "Calilasseia" for the oversight and arrangement of this debate. My second in this exchange will be "hackenslash", should events conspire to prohibit my continuation he will be notified and this debate can be dealt with appropriately.

--

I choose to make my opening post prior to reading that of my opponent. In this manner I feel I can present an opening that will better express why I feel there is no evidence in support of an Intelligent Designer. Possibly I am wasting my opening by this action, but a non emotional beginning is critical to the understanding of the subject. I choose to present my own thoughts, rather than allow myself to be distracted by any possible tactics my opponent might employ. In this move I hope to set my personal tone throughout this debate in the most calm manner possible, as if my opponent were a computer program designed by "Answers in Genesis" or the "Discovery Institute". No offense SticksnStones.

In composing this opening post I have asked myself several questions in regard to how much I really know about DNA/RNA, and the vast complexities that are represented there. I personally have a sub par education in the subject. I admit to not knowing, from memory, the chemical bonding arrangements of the DNA molecule. This debate is not about what I know. This debate is about whether there's anything in the DNA molecule that we can point to and see design. We're not talking about any old design, like design by selection, because this is Intelligent Design.

In order for us to be able to see, and detect, this design we'd really need to know what to look for and how to look. Of all the methods we've developed to date this design signature has not been established by any methods that can withstand review. This lack of review repeatability, to me, denotes there is a major problem with the position. Surely such a design would be obvious. If not obvious at least we should be able to detect it on a repeating basis. I have never seen documentation of this observation.

"Irreducible Complexity" has been shown to be incorrect, and this was the last serious challenge Intelligent Design presented to the current understanding of science. The school board at Dover, PA spent thousands of dollars to defend the thinking of professor Behee and his ilk, and lost. The evolutionary pathways to eyes, hair, hearing or any other "perfect" thing in it's "final" form have been demonstrated by a host of means. Nothing, including the whole of DNA, denotes a perfect state, as a perfect state would not change. No form of DNA is incapable of a static existence forever. This has been demonstrated by even the most basic of organisms, which by an alteration of their DNA became able to digest a material that previously was not a part of their metabolic intake. If the nylon digesting bacteria were intelligently designed where is the DNA code that prepared them to be able to digest a material that did not previously exist? Such evidence would be somewhat convincing support for Intelligent Design, but we do not see this.

Many species have become extinct over the course of the long and storied history of this world, and as far as we know all of them preserved in the fossil record were driven by DNA. If the design of these extinct species was bad, and they became extinct, it denotes a designer that was not intelligent. An intelligent design would have built in a survival mechanism for all these creatures, but the fact is over 90% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. However the Theory of Evolution, as we understand it today, shows us that those species that did survive these events gave rise to other species as empty environmental niches were filled and opportunities arose. The design we do see has been demonstrated to be a direct and observed result of the forces of nature. If we claim that nature is THE designer, and that nature is intelligent, we have to supply supporting evidence. I've never seen any of that either. All life today is just as much at risk of a mass extinction event as those Permian creatures long ago. We still do not possess the technology to divert a major bolide, nor could we halt another Deccan Trap eruption. Either of those could very well kill all of us and we have the highest intelligence that has ever existed on this planet. While a planet killer event is possible, where all life is erased, some life has survived similar past events, but never because of an intelligent design. Those that survive these events are able to do so because they have the preexisting DNA/RNA to survive and reproduce, which is a result of a half billion years of selection to survive.

Intelligent Design is supported only by the wishful thinking of those unable to accept the facts of observations of reality. Evolution by natural selection has been demonstrated in a wide variety of ways. No test has detected Intelligent Design. No honestly published peer reviewed hypothesis exists in support of Intelligent Design. Even the legal system in the USA determined that the notion of Intelligent Design is untrue. In light of these facts I cannot foresee what this debate can add to the body of knowledge currently in existence.

I provided no citations or references in this opening post because I felt it wise to spend my words economically in an effort to present a broad overview of my position. I will expand on this posting throughout the debate and will in these future posts supply a great deal of peer reviewed material.

Thank you, and let the fun begin.

RS

Last minute edit: I do not plan on allowing myself to be tempted into reading the peanut gallery for the duration of this debate, lest I be influenced by comments and use them as if they were mine.

[sticksnstones]

Thank you for your gracious introduction.

I want to attempt to keep this discussion on topic. The question decided on is not the question irreducible complexity, or whether or not an intelligent designer would allow species to die. The question is: "Can the information in DNA/RNA can only have come from an intelligent designer?"

It seems as though you are trying to make an argument against the general conclusion of ID, saying there is not a God and its proofs. I just want to redirect the conversation to the question put out. In this post, I will attempt to define the term "information," to better direct a response from you. I'll answer the only valid question I saw(one that seems to go with what we are discussing) that you put to me at the end of the post.

Within the double helix of a DNA strand lay specifically ordered chemical bonds, encoding an entity which modern science can not account for. This entity is called information. I call it an entity because information has certain characteristics that can only be defined as intelligent. I will attempt to explain.

Pythagoras, a mathematician in ancient Greece once theorized that all of reality is nothing more than numbers. Everything can be explained in mathematical terms, and the root of reality is based in math(Huffman). This concept is really not very far from the truth for within everything is information at a very molecular level. Even in the non-living we find structures and form on a microscopic level organized by the very laws of nature. However in living organisms we find highly more sophisticated levels of information organized by chemicals in DNA. DNA as I have already mentioned is a map used to construct amino acids into a meaningful structure that in turn makes a protein. These proteins form into molecular machines that basically do all of the work in a living organism.

Ideas, thought, and information are not physical things. They are outside the realm of matter. However the information of an idea is only conveyed by matter and the laws in place in our world. If I wanted to convey my idea for an invention I had, I could speak it using my mouth and the air and vibrations in the air into meaningfully sequenced words that you understand. This thought is conveyed by the natural laws set in place in the universe. Or I could convey this thought by writing it on paper. I could even convey my thought as I am doing now by using a computer keyboard. I am the originator of the information I am transmitting to you. My point being that information has no form unless it is given a form in the natural world. DNA is exactly this form for biological processes. It is specifically a chemical language that could not come by chance. If one human DNA strand were written out in its chemical language it would fill over 1,000 books 1,500 pages long It also carries instructions to over 24,000 distinct proteins (Alberts 200). In average font, one strand of DNA code written out could reach from the north pole to the equator (Gitt 93). The only thing in the known universe to generate coded information is only intelligence. Information is non-matter. When typing on your "Microsoft Word" program, you do not generally think that it was programmed by itself. After reading this finely tuned response, you do not believe that it came about by random variation (just kidding about the finely tuned). Information is always generated by a living intelligence and is then put into a form of matter or energy in the physical world.

In this picture you will see the literal language that tells amino acids to form into proteins:

http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/77/777-004-A700EB28.gif

This is like me telling you to put a cylinder is a car at a specific location. It works at the molecular level in a way that modern science does not completely understand yet. This is literally information in its physical form. The job of science is to discover how the form of information exists and who or what the sender is. If there is information, there is always a purpose. Information does not exist without purpose for that is the definition of information in the first place.

C.E. Shannon, a mathematician and information theory scientist says this about the nature of information and its transmitters.

"An information source which produces a message or sequence of messages to be communicated to thereceiving terminal. The message may be of various types: (a) A sequence of letters as in a telegraph of teletype system; (b) A single function of time f (t) as in radio or telephony; (c) A function of time and other variables as in black and white television — here the message may be thought of as a
function f (x;y; t) of two space coordinates and time, the light intensity at point (x;y) and time t on a
pickup tube plate; (d) Two or more functions of time, say f (t), g(t), h(t)—this is the case in “threedimensional”sound transmission or if the system is intended to service several individual channels in
multiplex; (e) Several functions of several variables—in color television themessage consists of threefunctions f (x;y; t), g(x;y; t), h(x;y; t) defined in a three-dimensional continuum—we may also think of these three functions as components of a vector field defined in the region — similarly, several black and white television sources would produce “messages” consisting of a number of functions of three variables; (f) Various combinations also occur, for example in television with an associated audio channel"( Shannon 5).

Basically for those who have no clue what he is talking about, he is saying in mathematical terms that there are certain limitations by which an information source must communicate an idea in the material world. There is a certain way that information can be identified in the world. Information must furthermore be submitted in this order:
INFORMATION SOURCE creates a MESSAGE ---->TRANSMITTER.
This transmitter then is received by a ---->SIGNAL RECEIVED and the message reaches its
----->DESTINATION(5).

Hopefully I have been able to nail the concept of information and its impossibility to create itself enough. My question for you is, how can the result of information come about in the natural world without first having an information source. When you see hieroglyphics you did not automatically believe that they were variations of chance because they are ordered pieces of information, so why in DNA with a code far more complex than any known information storage device and matter transmitter do you assume it was developed through natural processes? Do you believe that amino acids could have formed themselves in the natural world without a blue print into specific synthesis? Do you believe that DNA instructions that are the information to create all living things could have come about in the natural world disobeying the law of information itself? Information by definition has a purpose. How can information evolve without purpose?

"If the nylon digesting bacteria were intelligently designed where is the DNA code that prepared them to be able to digest a material that did not previously exist? Such evidence would be somewhat convincing support for Intelligent Design, but we do not see this."

I am not exactly sure what you are saying here. Any creationist believes that DNA and a nylon digesting bacteria were created simultaneously. You seem to be just going off randomly, and I do not see the context of what you are discussing.

Works Cited

Alberts, Bruce, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and Peter Walter. Molecular Biology of the Cell Reference Edition. New York: Garland Science, 2007. Print.

The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-83. Bell Labs. The Bell System Technical Journal. Web. 28 Aug. 2009. <http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf>.

Gitt, Werner W. In the Beginning Was Information A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature. New York: Master Books, 2006. Print.

Huffman, Carl. "Pythagoras." Pythagoras. Stanford, 23 Feb. 2005. Web. 28 Aug. 2009. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/>.

[theropod]

SticksnStones OP;

snip...
There are no other possibilities for how life could have arisen ... "Nothing can come from nothing" ...)

Virtual particles appear and destroy each other continuously. They come from nothing and return. This idea then becomes one of a lack of education in the subject, and wrong. (see refs: 1,A-1,B)

snip...

Can the information in DNA/RNA can only have come from an intelligent designer?"

You have failed to supply any real information which directly supports your position. Without evidence we are left to conjecture. None of your references meet the peer review criteria I warned you about before this debate began. In the absence of such work the notion of Intelligent Design, to me, remains unsupported. Without evidence there is no reason to accept the notion of Intelligent Design.

snip...

Essentially within the double helix of DNA is actually a wealth of information that could write thousands of books (that is of course an understatement).

No one is denying that a vast amount of information can be, and indeed is, contained in a single chromosome. I contend that this alone is no indication of design. The inability of Intelligent Design supporters to point to a specific data set that others can test for repeatability is the whole shooting match. This signature of Intelligent Design has not been pointed out. Your citations do not support your contention of Intelligent Design.

snip...It is impossible for RNA/DNA to sequence itself.

This is untrue, if I read your words correctly. Recent experiments (refs: 2,A- 2,F) (which are only a small collection of the body of work) have demonstrated quite clearly that RNA can self assemble and further replicating versions of themselves are formed. We have learned enough to know that the statement above is not true.

There are combinations of amino acids that form proteins and proteins that for RNA/DNA that cannot be accounted for by natural processes that are not yet living.

Name these molecules and think about this statement a little more. You are claiming that RNA/DNA exists which is not represented in any living organism? How could DNA/RNA be designed if it doesn't exist? You must support this statement with acceptable examples or retract it.

No one knows how these lifeless amino acids could have formed by themselves before life.

Do you mean cosmic (see refs: 3,A) amino acids? Or do you mean the comet dust (refs: 3,B) we recently captured containing a vital amino acid?

No one knows where this information could have come from to organize something so specifically.

So specifically... what? So specifically subject to mutation?

Incorrect (see refs: 2,A-2,F) . Just because you do not know how complexity arose does not mean that no one else does.

Many theorize, but they are only untested theories.

No. Scientists report their observations of reality. If those actually working in these fields are only hypothesizing how do they generate repeatable data? How does this slur, from ignorance, against science support your position of Intelligent Design? Your task is to provide supporting evidence, of a peer reviewed nature, that there exists an Intelligent Designer.

Since there is no other solution by natural processes, and since the only free agent known to produce works of order within nature is intelligence (nature having the hallmarks of intelligence), Intelligence must be behind the [b]specific order of God for there is no other choice. All other naturalistic explanations have failed. God chooses to show his glory even within the very fabric of matter and life itself.

Empty assertions all!

Cite an acceptable reference to show the hallmark of Intelligent Design in nature, retract the claim, or withdraw from the debate.

Cite an acceptable reference that you god exists, retract the claim, or withdraw from the debate.

Failure on your part to adhere to both of the challenges above will force me to seek moderator adjudication.

As to your first rebuttal;

I want to attempt to keep this discussion on topic.

This is the last thing you want. If so provide us with some evidence, of an acceptable nature, in support of Intelligent Design.

The question decided on is not the question irreducible complexity, or whether or not an intelligent designer would allow species to die. The question is: "Can the information in DNA/RNA can only have come from an intelligent designer?"

These issues are part of the topic, whether you understand why or not. I will not waste my word space in this posting explaining these issues further. The topic is actually, "The Information In DNA/RNA Necessarily Requires An Intelligent Designer".

It seems as though you are trying to make an argument against the general conclusion of ID, saying there is not a God and its proofs. I just want to redirect the conversation to the question put out. In this post, I will attempt to define the term "information," to better direct a response from you. I'll answer the only valid question I saw(one that seems to go with what we are discussing) that you put to me at the end of the post.

YOU mentioned God in your opening post. I made no mention of this supposed deity. By doing this you have tied the existence of this deity to your position. You are now obliged to supply evidence of the existence of this deity, as well as that of his/her Intelligent Design. Meet the challenge above.

Am I now to submit a series of questions only you find valid? I retain the freedom to pose any question I see fit. Should you lack the ability to provide a reasoned response to those questions is not my concern. (Meet the ruthless bastard theropod).

snip...

Hopefully I have been able to nail the concept of information and its impossibility to create itself enough.

The information/complexity you cite is not at question. You MUST provide evidence that this complexity and accumulation of information is the work of an Intelligent Design. You have failed.

My question for you is, how can the result of information come about in the natural world without first having an information source.

Addressed: (see refs: 2,A-2,H)

snip..., so why in DNA with a code far more complex... do you assume it was developed through natural processes?

No assumptions. Instead;
The facts. The observations. The repeatability. The lack of evidence supporting other hypothesis.
NO assumption of God-Done-It!

Do you believe that amino acids could have formed themselves in the natural world without a blue print into specific synthesis?

NO. Evidence prohibits belief. Evidence CONFIRMS these chemicals form in the absence of a designer. (see refs: 3, 4, 5)

]Do you believe that DNA instructions that are the information to create all living things could have come about in the natural world disobeying the law of information itself? Information by definition has a purpose. How can information evolve without purpose?

What I believe is irrelevant. Mutations must be shown to be Intelligently Designed, or ignored.

"If the nylon digesting bacteria were intelligently designed where is the DNA code that prepared them to be able to digest a material that did not previously exist? Such evidence would be somewhat convincing support for Intelligent Design, but we do not see this."

I am not exactly sure what you are saying here. Any creationist believes that DNA and a nylon digesting bacteria were created simultaneously. You seem to be just going off randomly, and I do not see the context of what you are discussing.

The nylon digesting bacteria is an example of new information being added to an existing genome. Nylon was first made in 1935 and a species of preexisting bacteria evolved the ability to digest it. This was accomplished via a frame shift mutation in its genetic code which added complexity to the genome. In order for you to claim to contain any sense of validity you must show this special creation of the bacteria and refute the findings of science. So far your position is unsupported. More importantly the evidence suggests there is no designer.

Either we accept empty assertions on your say-so alone, or look to the supported evidence to the contrary. For you to claim the explanations of natural selection have failed is itself a failed distraction. Even if natural selection cannot account for the complexity in RNA/DNA it does not automatically confer upon your position any more validity. You have failed to supply one iota of peer reviewed evidence in support of your position. You have wasted your opening post, and first rebuttal, by not presenting your peer reviewed work as was made clear before we began, and then you closed with a series of baseless assertions and started preaching.

I had hoped this would be a relaxed exchange.

REFERENCES:

1. Virtual particles

A.

Link dictionary.reference.com
virtual particle
–noun Physics.
an elementary particle of transitory existence that does not appear as a free particle in a particular situation but that can transmit a force from one particle to another."
n. A subatomic particle whose existence violates the principle of conservation of energy but is allowed to exist for a short time by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle."

B.

Link University of California Riverside: Physics web site.
"Some Frequently Asked Questions About Virtual Particles"

2. DNA/RNA experiments

A.

Link A Full paper.
"The Universal Ancestor"
"Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America"
Vol. 95, Issue 12, 6854-6859, June 9, 1998

B.

Link Full paper
"The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: Prebiotic Chemistry, the Pre-RNA World, and Time"
doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81263-5
Cell: Volume 85, Issue 6, 14 June 1996, Pages 793-798

C.

Link Full paper
"On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization."
Biology Direct 2007, 2:14doi:10.1186/1745-6150-2-14

D.

Link Full paper.
"Algorithms for computing parsimonious evolutionary scenarios for genome evolution, the last universal common ancestor and dominance of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of prokaryotes"
Biology Direct 2007, 2:14doi:10.1186/1745-6150-2-14

E.

Link PDF preview
"The Origins of Genome Complexity"
doi:10.1006/tpbi.2002.1596
Science 21 November 2003: Vol. 302. no. 5649, pp. 1401 - 1404

F.

Link Abstract/limited
"Horizontal Gene Transfer in Microbial Genome Evolution"
doi:10.1006/tpbi.2002.1596
Theoretical Population Biology: Volume 61, Issue 4, 1 June 2002, Pages 489-495

G.

Link Full PDF/ HTML VIEWABLE
"The origin and early evolution of mitochondria"
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4H7, Canada.

H.

Link Full Paper
"Early evolution: prokaryotes, the new kids on the block"
Biology Direct 2008, 3:29doi:10.1186/1745-6150-3-29

3. Cosmic Amino Acids

A.

Link Abstract/limited
"Interstellar Grains as Amino Acid Factories and the Origin of Life"
Journal Astrophysics and Space Science: Publisher: Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0004-640X (Print) 1572-946X (Online) Issue: Volume 253, Number 1 / 09, 1997: Pages 27-41
DOI 10.1023/A:1000532304150

4. Comet Amino Acids

A.

Link Abstract/limited
"Organics Captured from Comet 81P/Wild 2 by the Stardust Spacecraft"
Science 15 December 2006: Vol. 314. no. 5806, pp. 1720 - 1724 DOI: 10.1126/science.1135841

5. Earthly Origins of Amino Acids

Link Abstract/limited
"Amino Acid Formation in Gas Mixtures by High Energy Particle Irradiation"
Journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres: Publisher: Springer Netherlands
ISSN 0169-6149 (Print) 1573-0875 (Online): Issue Volume 28, Number 2 / 04, 1998: Pages 155-165
DOI 10.1023/A:1006561217063

[sticksnstones]

There are no other possibilities for how life could have arisen ..."Nothing can come from nothing"

Virtual particles appear and destroy each other continuously. They come from nothing and return. This idea then becomes one of a lack of education in the subject, and wrong.

Maybe you haven't read your own article closely enough....

In the first paragraph it states,
"We can say that the particles exchange "virtual photons" which carry the transferred momentum."
In the second paragraph it states,
"Since the wave is everywhere, the photon can be created by one particle and absorbed by the other, no matter where they are"(McIrvin).

Essentially, these virtual particles are actually "created FROM nothing" but they are not created BY nothing. You are only proving "ex nihilo nihil fit" or "Nothing can come from nothing" because without these particles to create the "virtual particle" you would never have had a virtual particle. So nothing (still) comes from nothing (Huffman). You might even be able to say, something comes from something and becomes nothing. If you have nothing, nothing will be. 0 equals 0, I learned that in kindergarten.

To remind you of my argument, I was making the argument that there are only two choices for where reality ( i.e. The Universe) could have come from. Since "nothing can (still) come from nothing" and we know with scientific evidence that the universe is not static and began with some sort of "big bang," life either came from random reasons and information did formed itself, OR some sort of intelligence created life. We know it couldn't have been an alien or something like that because there must have been a beginning even for the alien. This intelligence must have been an "unmoved mover" as described by Aristotle. (Bodnar)

Congratulations, we have now cooperatively proven this point. We should move to the next point now, unless you have other articles that could demonstrate how real particles vibrate to create other automatically absorbed photons.

Can the information in DNA/RNA can only have come from an intelligent designer?"

You have failed to supply any real information which directly supports your position. Without evidence we are left to conjecture. None of your references meet the peer review criteria I warned you about before this debate began. In the absence of such work the notion of Intelligent Design, to me, remains unsupported. Without evidence there is no reason to accept the notion of Intelligent Design.

1st source:
Are you actually questioning "Molecular Biology of the Cell." It is pretty much a text book.
2nd source:
I'm not sure what you are talking about. I obtained the article on Shannon from "Talkorigins." Are you questioning "Talkorigins" resources(Baldwin)?
3rd source:
Are you questioning "In the Beginning Was Information?" The book is based on Shannan's work. Besides this, have you read it? I highly doubt it.
4th source:
Or are you questioning Stanford's source on Pythagoras? What sources fail to present information about ID? You should be specific.

Even if these were not "peer review" sources, what makes you think their arguments are not valid? The peer review process is not perfect. For examples, the non-profit organization, "The Heartland Institutute" makes complaints about the peer review process abusing its power to promote misinformation out of political bias such as with the case of peer reviews "anti-biotechnology bias"(Miller). Point being, if there is bias, the peer review process is not free of its own problems. I suggest (for our own sake) we steer from "genetic logical fallacies" (logical fallacies link) and judge each others sources in their own context. I furthermore amend that we use the rules of logic to judge whether or not an argument is valid or not rather than trusting the opinions of others. For even in the past (say the 1800's) scientists were convinced of some very wrong things. Who are we to say that humanity has overcome all flaws and learned enough knowledge to not ever make even a peer reviewed mistake?

Judge arguments for what they are. Refrain from "Genetic Logical fallacies"(Logic), and please look up the term.

"Essentially within the double helix of DNA is actually a wealth of information that could write thousands of books (that is of course an understatement)."

No one is denying that a vast amount of information can be, and indeed is, contained in a single chromosome. I contend that this alone is no indication of design. The inability of Intelligent Design supporters to point to a specific data set that others can test for repeatability is the whole shooting match. This signature of Intelligent Design has not been pointed out. Your citations do not support your contention of Intelligent Design.

I specifically would like to answer your contention which is in bold. Before you can point out any supposed "lack" of evidence, I would like you to prove that your contention is even valid? What stops me from simply contending back with, "information is evidence of intelligent design?" Why is information not evidence for intelligent design? Why do you contend something that you do not even have the ability to prove is a real contention? How do ID supporters not point to specific data and tests that prove there is information can only come through a designer? HAVE YOU EVEN READ MY ENTIRE LAST POST REGARDING INFORMATION? Information theory is essentially an attempt to prove that information must have a source scientifically! Besides this fact, it is very testable.

"I contend," that you must first read my last post. Second "I contend" that it is your duty as a responsible analyst and debater, to be good enough to show me why an article on information theory is not good enough for your "testable" evidence.

Please read my article first.

snip...It is impossible for RNA/DNA to sequence itself.

This is untrue, if I read your words correctly, have demonstrated quite clearly that RNA can self assemble and further replicating versions of themselves are formed. We have learned enough to know that the statement above is not true.

1 (2,A). In your source paper that you submitted as a resource called, "The universal ancestor," it does not "demonstrate" anything quite clearly. It is nothing more than an untested argument for how life could have come together and began to generate information eventually able to mutate to become a living cell. This is absolutely not tested. It is testable, but unfortunately for you, there are no successful experiments of this actually happening. The author of the article even admits it to be an "argument" for he says, "I am indebted to Gary Olsen, Charles Kurland, and Ross Overbeek, for critical suggestions regarding details of the argument"(Woese) It is simply a hypothesis. This is a very bad example of a "quite clear demonstration"

2 (2,B). In your source paper, the author of it generally defeats everything he has to say and your entire argument in the first few lines when he says,

"There is no agreement on the composition of the primitive atmosphere, with opinion varying from strongly reducing (CH4 + N2, NH3 + H2O, or CO2 + H2 + N2) to neutral (CO2 + N2 + H2O).There is no geological evidence either way, although it is generally accepted that O2 was absent."

Why is this self defeating? Because without an understanding for the conditions of the environment in which amino acids are supposed to naturally form, how can you possibly believe this hypothesis can be tested? It simply can not be tested without the proper atmospheric properties.

3 (2,C). In your third source, again, I think the first paragraph describes very nicely what this article is about.

"The origin of the translation system is, arguably, the central and the hardest problem in the study of the origin of life, and one of the hardest in all evolutionary biology. The problem has a clear catch-22 aspect: high translation fidelity hardly can be achieved without a complex, highly evolved set of RNAs and proteins but an elaborate protein machinery could not evolve without an accurate translation system. The origin of the genetic code and whether it evolved on the basis of a stereo chemical correspondence between amino acids and their cognate codons (or anticodons), through selectional optimization of the code vocabulary, as a "frozen accident" or via a combination of all these routes is another wide open problem despite extensive theoretical and experimental studies. Here we combine the results of comparative genomics of translation system components, data on interaction of amino acids with their cognate codons and anticodons, and data on catalytic activities of ribozymes to develop conceptual models for the origins of the translation system and the genetic code."

As you can see, this is simply a "conceptual model." It is not a tested and proven theory. It is simply a model for how things might evolve. Again, this is not a "demonstrated" fact that RNA evolved or self assembled.

4 (2,D). In your forth link and paper, I really found it interesting. It is called, "Algorithms for computing parsimonious evolutionary scenarios for genome evolution, the last universal common ancestor and dominance of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of prokaryotes"
It actually proves a hypothesis for creationism. Creationists always believed that God created the world, and from then until now, there has actually been de-evolution in the DNA structure in gene transfer. This paper has some things to say about that. For example, it says,

"Biological considerations suggest that, on average, gene loss might be a more likely event than gene gain."

AND

"Algorithms were developed for constructing parsimonious evolutionary scenarios, which include gene loss and gain events, for orthologous gene sets, given a species tree. This analysis shows, contrary to expectations, that the number of predicted HGT events that occurred during the evolution of prokaryotes might be approximately the same as the number of gene losses."

I will admit it, these guys are being very honest with their work when they admit what is rather than what they expected. I think all evolutionist should work to do the same. Besides that, I do not see how this paper "demonstrates" how RNA could have formed itself. It only demonstrates how there is gene loss in horizontal transfer rather than the evolutionary idea of gene evolution to a higher and more evolved state.

5 (2,E). In your fifth source, I was unable to actually see it. Ironically this paper was about the "The Origins of Genome Complexity" and finally I was hoping for this promised "demonstration." Either the link is bad or the web site will simply not allow me to access it. Maybe you should cite a better source for me?

6 (2,F). In your sixth link and resource (2-F) you named an article called, "Horizontal Gene Transfer in Microbial Genome Evolution" which is really more of a dictionary definition for a term about how genes transfer information from other species. Hence the name of the article. This has nothing to do with experiments for RNA having the ability to assemble on its own. Either you made a mistake and mislabeled your reference, or you simply did not read your own source. Luckily you have me to read them all for you.

7 (2,G). Well basically, in your seventh paper, I do not see how a "mitochondria" has anything to do with "demonstrations" of how RNA self organized because mitochondria is an organelle which has the specific function of helping to produce energy in a cell. In other words, DNA/RNA helped produce it in the first place. So how do you suppose that this has any kind of "demonstration" for RNA self organizing? Please explain.

8 (2,H). In your last and final source, the article does not really answer the question. It goes into great depth to basically demonstrate that "life was born complex." Ironically, once again, this conclusion sounds very very similar to the creationists conclusion. It does not answer the question for how RNA self assembles or how it could have possibly created its own information in a self-organized fashion. Over all, your articles did not say anything about demonstrations of RNA self-assembling. You left me with many possibilities of how it could have possibly happened, but your initial statement was misleading and I suggest you rephrase it.

I am ok with an argument about how a testable model might have evolved, however, you specifically stated, "....have demonstrated quite clearly that RNA can self assemble and further replicating versions of themselves are formed." If you wanted an argument that matched your sources, you should have said that you have great arguments for how RNA could have formed on its own, NOT that it as been proven. Either you are dishonest, and hoped I would not read the articles or you are simply ignorant of what articles were about. Either way, I forgive you.

These really are great resources. I will enjoy taking the time to evaluate their ideas much more slowly so I can take everything in. I have never been one to let people tell me what to believe, even if the smartest man alive had told me the way something works, they still adhere to the most basic laws of thinking. Those laws are the laws of logical science. Good ol' Greeks.

"There are combinations of amino acids that form proteins and proteins that for RNA/DNA that cannot be accounted for by natural processes that are not yet living."

Name these molecules and think about this statement a little more. You are claiming that RNA/DNA exists which is not represented in any living organism? How could DNA/RNA be designed if it doesn't exist? You must support this statement with acceptable examples or retract it.

I am sorry, what are you talking about? This statement was already corrected in the very first post I made. If you go back you should be able to see that I edited it. Besides that, you seem to be responding over something I was not even discussing. Please define what you are talking about a little bit better.

"No one knows how these lifeless amino acids could have formed by themselves before life.


Do you mean cosmic (see refs: 3,A) amino acids? Or do you mean the comet dust (refs: 3,B) we recently captured containing a vital amino acid?

This argument has no weight. One of your own articles demonstrates that we do not know earth's early atmosphere. We only know that some amino acids can form through miller's experiment, but not all of them. We also know that in other experiments with different atmospheres, we can form different amino acids, but again, not all of them. Each experiment requires different early atmospheres. Again the problem is, we do not know what the early atmosphere was and there is no evidence for it (Lazcano/ Miller) (which should be some indication to you that this is another evidence for creationism).

Second, in a report more indepth than the report about space dust that you provided, I learned that the amino acid found was actually glycine (Steigerwald). However, after the impact of a comet that many theorists discuss to be 10x greater than our own hydrogen bombs (cite me), do you think that this amino acid would remain intact? And if it remained intact and has been flung halfway across the world's atmosphere, do you believe that this amino acid randomly had the ability to form itself into a meaningful pattern of DNA/RNA? Please, lets be reasonable and logical about this thing. I do not think it is necessary for me to try and compute the astronomical chances here. It should be obvious enough that your suggestion is ridiculous and unfounded. It remains in the world of untested hypothesis.

No one knows where this information could have come from to organize something so specifically.

So specifically... what? So specifically subject to mutation? Just because you do not know how complexity arose does not mean that no one else does.

Information does not mutate unless it is controlled by a living system. We are supposed to be talking about pre-living systems here having the ability to form themselves into meaningful sequences. And actually, no one else does know. It is not science if you are hoping meaningful complexity arose from non-information. That is called faith.

Many theorize, but they are only untested theories.

No. Scientists report their observations of reality. If those actually working in these fields are only hypothesizing how do they generate repeatable data? How does this slur, from ignorance, against science support your position of Intelligent Design? Your task is to provide supporting evidence, of a peer reviewed nature, that there exists an Intelligent Designer.

I wish that were true, at least with your so called "demonstrations" that you did not even read before submitting as sources. Maybe if you read them, you would have came to the same assessment I did and would have not used them as so called, "demonstrations" of RNA forming itself. Those sources are called possible untested hypothesis. I would have been happy to discuss this argument, but you thought they were actual evidence when they were not.

Since there is no other solution by natural processes, and since the only free agent known to produce works of order within nature is intelligence (nature having the hallmarks of intelligence), Intelligence must be behind the [b]specific order of God for there is no other choice. All other naturalistic explanations have failed.[/b] God chooses to show his glory even within the very fabric of matter and life itself.[/b]

Empty assertions all!

Cite an acceptable reference to show the hallmark of Intelligent Design in nature, retract the claim, or withdraw from the debate.
Cite an acceptable reference that you god exists, retract the claim, or withdraw from the debate.
Failure on your part to adhere to both of the challenges above will force me to seek moderator adjudication.
As to your first rebuttal;

I am not afraid of your terrible reading comprehension of your own sources. And I am not afraid of your lack of evidence for how information could have assembled itself. Heck, cite some proof at all for anything you said. You know I have been arguing some very good argument for design but you are unfamiliar with them so you do not understand its relevance. I suggest you take another look and read and comprehend what I say for one more try (second posted argument I made).

[b]I want to attempt to keep this discussion on topic.

This is the last thing you want. If so provide us with some evidence, of an acceptable nature, in support of Intelligent Design.

I have been providing evidence right now about how meaningful information can not arise naturally. That is evidence in support of design. I am attempting to eliminate all of your options so only one remains. When all options but one remains, you must conclude with only the last one available.

The question decided on is not the question irreducible complexity, or whether or not an intelligent designer would allow species to die. The question is: "Can the information in DNA/RNA can only have come from an intelligent designer?"

These issues are part of the topic, whether you understand why or not. I will not waste my word space in this posting explaining these issues further. The topic is actually, "The Information In DNA/RNA Necessarily Requires An Intelligent Designer".

I wish you would. So far you are down to having nothing hard to support your claims of self-organization. All you have are theories (and I would be fine arguing that but you said there was evidence when there was not).

"It seems as though you are trying to make an argument against the general conclusion of ID, saying there is not a God and its proofs. I just want to redirect the conversation to the question put out. In this post, I will attempt to define the term "information," to better direct a response from you. I'll answer the only valid question I saw(one that seems to go with what we are discussing) that you put to me at the end of the post."

YOU mentioned God in your opening post. I made no mention of this supposed deity. By doing this you have tied the existence of this deity to your position. You are now obliged to supply evidence of the existence of this deity, as well as that of his/her Intelligent Design. Meet the challenge above.

Am I now to submit a series of questions only you find valid? I retain the freedom to pose any question I see fit. Should you lack the ability to provide a reasoned response to those questions is not my concern. (Meet the ruthless bastard theropod).

Honestly, if you had read my post, you would have seen that I have been providing a very solid argument about the origin of information. You must defeat that argument or it still stands.

Hopefully I have been able to nail the concept of information and its impossibility to create itself enough.

The information/complexity you cite is not at question. You MUST provide evidence that this complexity and accumulation of information is the work of an Intelligent Design. You have failed.

Actually, if you had understood the argument, you might have seen that since there is no identified source for complex information, that is proof. You must prove that there is a way for complex information to form naturally without life to begin with.

My question for you is, how can the result of information come about in the natural world without first having an information source.

Addressed: (see refs: 2,A-2,H)

Read it. No.

So why in DNA with a code far more complex... do you [b]assume it was developed through natural processes?[/b]

No assumptions. Instead;
The facts. The observations. The repeatability. The lack of evidence supporting other hypothesis.
NO assumption of God-Done-It!

Exactly. Lets not have any assumptions. Maybe you should start with reading your sources instead of assuming they are about proof RNA is forming itself.

Do you believe that amino acids could have formed themselves in the natural world without a blue print into specific synthesis?

NO. Evidence prohibits belief. Evidence CONFIRMS these chemicals form in the absence of a designer. (see refs: 3, 4, 5)

Sorry, again, you should get your source straight.

]Do you believe that DNA instructions that are the information to create all living things could have come about in the natural world disobeying the law of information itself? Information by definition has a purpose. How can information evolve without purpose?

What I believe is irrelevant. Mutations must be shown to be Intelligently Designed, or ignored.

Why is what you believe irrelevant? What you believe is the "evidence" right? Besides that, mutations are not what the topic of discussion is about. We are talking about pre-life and information, not mutations. If we can get past information forming and have time to talk about life and mutations, we can talk about that. Until then, lets stick with trying to answer the discussion topic.

If the nylon digesting bacteria were intelligently designed where is the DNA code that prepared them to be able to digest a material that did not previously exist? Such evidence would be somewhat convincing support for Intelligent Design, but we do not see this.The nylon digesting bacteria is an example of new information being added to an existing genome. Nylon was first made in 1935 and a species of preexisting bacteria evolved the ability to digest it. This was accomplished via a frame shift mutation in its genetic code which added complexity to the genome. In order for you to claim to contain any sense of validity you must show this special creation of the bacteria and refute the findings of science. So far your position is unsupported. More importantly the evidence suggests there is no designer.

Yes, again, this has nothing to do with information creating in a pre-life condition. This is an example of pre-existing bacteria that adapted to digest nylon. This has nothing to do with non-life producing information.

Either we accept empty assertions on your say-so alone, or look to the supported evidence to the contrary. For you to claim the explanations of natural selection have failed is itself a failed distraction. Even if natural selection cannot account for the complexity in RNA/DNA it does not automatically confer upon your position any more validity. You have failed to supply one iota of peer reviewed evidence in support of your position. You have wasted your opening post, and first rebuttal, by not presenting your peer reviewed work as was made clear before we began, and then you closed with a series of baseless assertions and started preaching.

I had hoped this would be a relaxed exchange.

No,I have not failed as I have shown you. You have simply not read my last post or you have not understood it.


I will now list all of the arguments that you have not answered and still stand. I will simply assume that you had the inability to answer them because of your own lack of knowledge on the subject.

Theropod: "I personally have a sub par education in the subject. I admit to not knowing, from memory, the chemical bonding arrangements of the DNA molecule. This debate is not about what I know."

I must assume that you have not answered my arguments for this reason. I will now list what you left out so the debate question remains intact in hopes you will try and answer the debate question in the next response....


1. You have not prove how highly complex order can come from non-life (and yes, I looked through your sources for this answer but you misrepresented it as something it was not).
"However in living organisms we find highly more sophisticated levels of information organized by chemicals in DNA. DNA as I have already mentioned is a map used to construct amino acids into a meaningful structure that in turn makes a protein."

"Ideas, thought, and information are not physical things. They are outside the realm of matter. However the information of an idea is only conveyed by matter and the laws in place in our world."

You have only provided theories. I would be happy to discuss the theories and evaluate them, but you must withdraw your first statement, "....have demonstrated quite clearly that RNA can self assemble and further replicating versions of themselves are formed." Once you withdraw this statement, we can talk about your new question.

2. Information has a source, where is your source of information?
"I am the originator of the information I am transmitting to you. My point being that information has no form unless it is given a form in the natural world."

"Information is always generated by a living intelligence and is then put into a form of matter or energy in the physical world. "

3. "When you see hieroglyphics you did not automatically believe that they were variations of chance because they are ordered pieces of information, so why in DNA with a code far more complex than any known information storage device and matter transmitter do you assume it was developed through natural processes?"

4. "Information by definition has a purpose. How can information evolve without purpose?"

It has been a very interesting discussion and I have read some interesting new articles, thanks. However, I do not want to make this discussion a continuation of nit-picking details. I would much rather hear you disprove the discussion topic. As you have seen now, you do not have any proven examples of how information could have evolved from non-living matter. I suggest you focus on how information "could have happened" through non-living matter since you lack observed evidence.



Works Cited

Bodnar, Istvan. "Aristotle's Natural Philosophy." Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Standford University, 26 May 2006. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/>.

Huffman, Carl. "Pythagoras." Pythagoras. Stanford, 23 Feb. 2005. Web. 28 Aug. 2009. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/>.

Gitt, Werner W. In the Beginning Was Information A Scientist Explains the Incredible Design in Nature. New York: Master Books, 2006. Print.

Glansdorff, Nicolas, Ying Xu, and Bernard Labedan. The Last Universal Common Ancestor: emergence, constitution and genetic legacy of an elusive forerunner. Biology Direct, 9 July 2009. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.biology-direct.com/content/3/1/29/++++++++++++++++++++++/ARTICLES/BROWSE.ASP/ABSTRACT/COMMENTS/ABSTRACT>.

Gray, Michael W., Gertaurd Burger, and B. F. Lang. The origin and early evolution of mitochondria. Dalhousie University, 5 June 2001. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/gb-2001-2-6-reviews1018.pdf>.

Gray, Michael W., Gertaurd Burger, and B. F. Lang. The origin and early evolution of mitochondria. Dalhousie University, 5 June 2007. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/gb-2001-2-6-reviews1018.pdf>.

Information Theory and Creationism. Talk Origins, 2005. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/shannon.html>.

Jain, Ravi, Maria C. Rivera, Jonathan E. Moore, and James A. Lake. Horizontal Gene Transfer in Microbial Genome Evolution. Science Direct, 8 Aug. 2002. Web. 6 Sept. 2009.

Kobayashi, Kensei, Takeo Kaneko, Takeshi Saito, and Tairo Oshima. Amino Acid Formation in Gas Mixtures by High Energy Particle Irradiation. Springer Netherlands, 28 Oct. 2004. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.springerlink.com/content/g84m2r7t0644r0u7/>.

Lazcano, Antonio, and Stanley Miller. The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: Prebiotic Chemistry, the Pre-RNA World, and Time. Science Direct/ Cell, 3 Oct. 2000. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WSN-41BD7S6-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=e82dff6398a308377ea14eb1cfb4d4e3>.

Logical Fallacies. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/genetic/>.
Lynch, Michael. Testing Genome Complexity. Science AAAS, 16 Apr. 2006. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/304/5669/389b>.

McIrvin, Matt. Some Frequently Asked Questions About Virtual Particles. Physics FAQ, 1994. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html>.

Miller, Henry I. Abuse, Misuse of Peer Review Process Allow Spread of Scientific Misinformation. Heartland Institute, Apr. 2008. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/22938/Abuse_Misuse_of_Peer_Review_Process_Allow_Spread_of_Scientific_Misinformation.html>.

Mirkin, Boris G., Trevor I. Fenner, Michael Y. Galperin, and Eugene V. Koonin. Algorithms for computing parsimonious evolutionary scenarios for genome evolution, the last universal common ancestor and dominance of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of prokaryotes. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 6 Jan. 2003. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/3/2/>.

Molecular Biology of the Cell. The American Society for Cell Biology, 2009. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.molbiolcell.org/>.

Steigerwald, Bill. NASA Researchers Make First Discovery of Life's Building Block in Comet. NASA, 17 Aug. 2009. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news115.html>.

Woese, Carl. The Universal Ancestor. Proceeding of the Academy of National Sciences of the United States of America, 9 June 1998. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.pnas.org/content/95/12/6854.full>.

Wolf, Yuri I., and Eugene V. Koonin. Hypothesis on: On the origin of the translation system and the genetic code in the RNA world by means of natural selection, exaptation, and subfunctionalization. Biology Direct, 31 May 2007. Web. 6 Sept. 2009. <http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/14/++++++++++++++++++++++/ARTICLES/BROWSE.ASP/COMMENTS/ABSTRACT/ABSTRACT/comments>.

[theropod]

Greetings,

What sources fail to present information about ID?

None of your citations support your position of Intelligent Design in the RNA/DNA molecules. If I'm wrong show how your citations DIRECTLY support your position.

What stops me from simply contending back with, "information is evidence of intelligent design?" Why is information not evidence for intelligent design?

Nothing stops you, as you are doing this very thing.

How do ID supporters not point to specific data and tests that prove there is information can only come through a designer?

Then show the peer reviewed work you claim indicates Intelligent Design.

...Information theory is essentially an attempt to prove that information must have a source scientifically! Besides this fact, it is very testable.

Show the work where testing reveals that information is a DIRECT result of an Intelligent Designer.

...to be good enough to show me why an article on information theory is not good enough for your "testable" evidence.

Where is the repeatability we are able to see that there is a cause and effect which can be directly attributed to an Intelligent Designer?

Why is this self defeating? Because without an understanding for the conditions of the environment in which amino acids are supposed to naturally form, how can you possibly believe this hypothesis can be tested? It simply can not be tested without the proper atmospheric properties.

You obviously ignored the citations that show amino acids forming in deep space. The is no atmosphere in deep space in the sense that we have here on earth.

... Again the problem is, we do not know what the early atmosphere was and there is no evidence for it (Lazcano/ Miller) (which should be some indication to you that this is another evidence for creationism).

Do you have an issue with amino acids forming in space, where the is NO atmosphere? You claimed no one knew how these chemicals formed, but my citations make it very clear that you're wrong.

...However, after the impact of a comet that many theorists discuss to be 10x greater than our own hydrogen bombs (cite me), do you think that this amino acid would remain intact? And if it remained intact and has been flung halfway across the world's atmosphere, do you believe that this amino acid randomly had the ability to form itself into a meaningful pattern of DNA/RNA?....

Again, my beliefs are not at issue here. Obviously a full blown earthly bolide impact would leave little room for survival of these chemicals, but you earlier contended this formation of glycine was impossible. You were wrong. Not all organic matter entering the earths atmosphere is destroyed. Cosmic dust settles to the earth continuously. Amino acids could very well survive this*. (ref 1)

Information does not mutate unless it is controlled by a living system.

WRONG! Consider the following:
(Source):

Where the dunes become sparser - for example, near that icy hill - they break apart into "barchans". These are crescent-shaped formations whose horns point downwind. Barchans are also found on the deserts of Earth, and surely on many other planets across the Universe. They are one of several basic dune patterns, an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature under fairly common conditions.

Brachan field in the northern polar region of Mars.:
IMAGE

Information is contained in these patterns. We can see the prevailing wind direction, speed and duration from this pattern of information. We can also determine the clastic properties of the sand, the wetness, the size/weight sorting and temporal tracking. We can determine the atmospheric pressure, temperature and seasonal variances. This is a great deal of information that has formed in the absence of any Intelligent Design. Nature transmits a history of the environment over time. The mutations of this information are detectable. These naturally occurring formations indeed contain information which is altered/mutated by non living systems.

Since there is no other solution by natural processes, and since the only free agent known to produce works of order within nature is intelligence (nature having the hallmarks of intelligence), Intelligence must be behind the [b]specific order of God for there is no other choice. All other naturalistic explanations have failed.[/b] God chooses to show his glory even within the very fabric of matter and life itself.[/b]

Empty assertions all!

Cite an acceptable reference to show the hallmark of Intelligent Design in nature, retract the claim, or withdraw from the debate.
Cite an acceptable reference that you god exists, retract the claim, or withdraw from the debate.
Failure on your part to adhere to both of the challenges above will force me to seek moderator adjudication.

I note that you failed to meet these challenges. WHY?

I am not afraid of your terrible reading comprehension of your own sources.

This is clearly a personal insult/attack and against forum rules.

And I am not afraid of your lack of evidence for how information could have assembled itself. Heck, cite some proof at all for anything you said. You know I have been arguing some very good argument for design but you are unfamiliar with them so you do not understand its relevance. I suggest you take another look and read and comprehend what I say for one more try (second posted argument I made).

The fact remains that you assert there is a means by which to detect Intelligent Design, and yet have failed to produce one shred of supporting evidence, or means by which we can test for this design. Information alone can and does form by natural acts (see above and refs below). Sadly, you feel it serves you better to ignore these prime issues and wave off my demands for you to support your empty assertions., I am now obligated to seek the moderation ruling as I said I would.

I have been providing evidence right now about how meaningful information can not arise naturally.

You have asserted without citation and I have shown how meaningful information is formed by natural causes. Can you see the difference?

That is evidence in support of design. I am attempting to eliminate all of your options so only one remains. When all options but one remains, you must conclude with only the last one available.

Cite a peer reviewed publication which DIRECTLY supports your assertion. You must be able to show how this information is a direct result of an Intelligent Designer, and you have failed.

Honestly, if you had read my post, you would have seen that I have been providing a very solid argument about the origin of information. You must defeat that argument or it still stands.

You have have done nothing but assert your position and provided absolutely no evidence in support thereof. You must support your position with observations of reality.

Actually, if you had understood the argument, you might have seen that since there is no identified source for complex information, that is proof. You must prove that there is a way for complex information to form naturally without life to begin with.

No identified source equals Intelligent Designer? All that is proof of is how very little merit your position holds. So, we are to accept that BECAUSE you cannot pinpoint the source of information it automatically equals God-Done-It? Instead check this* (ref 3) out. I need not "PROVE" anything, as my position is that there is no evidence of Intelligent Design. The burden to support your position is your responsibility alone.

You really don't understand how this works do you? In order to claim that complex information is a direct result of Intelligent Design you must be able to support your position with observations of reality. I have yet to see anyone do this. Be the first.

My question for you is, how can the result of information come about in the natural world without first having an information source.

See above. See ref 2.

NO. Evidence prohibits belief. Evidence CONFIRMS these chemicals form in the absence of a designer. (see refs: 3, 4, 5)

Sorry, again, you should get your source straight.

So, you are saying amino acids do not form in deep space, and you have contradicting sources? Cite them.

Why is what you believe irrelevant? What you believe is the "evidence" right? Besides that, mutations are not what the topic of discussion is about.

You claimed above that mutations cannot happen apart for living influence, and that opens the door. I do not need to believe that which has supporting evidence. I accept it.

We are talking about pre-life and information, not mutations. If we can get past information forming and have time to talk about life and mutations, we can talk about that. Until then, lets stick with trying to answer the discussion topic.

What I believe could be based on anything, like your sources that do not support your position or are not of a peer reviewed nature. I accept that observations of reality trump empty assertions, but I believe there are uneducated persons too indoctrinated to understand the difference.

Do you mean topics that you have raised and now fail to support, such as the existence of a god? That amino acids cannot form in a comet or deep space? That information cannot form as a direct result of the forces of nature?

Yes, again, this has nothing to do with information creating in a pre-life condition. This is an example of pre-existing bacteria that adapted to digest nylon. This has nothing to do with non-life producing information.

You claimed this was not a case of anything but the mythical creation. Goal post shifting at its finest.

No,I have not failed as I have shown you...

I understand quite well you asserted there is a god, and yet you fail to understand that it falls to you to support this claim with DIRECT evidence.

I will now list all of the arguments that you have not answered and still stand. I will simply assume that you had the inability to answer them because of your own lack of knowledge on the subject."

Assume what ever the hell you like.

1. You have not prove how highly complex order can come from non-life (and yes, I looked through your sources for this answer but you misrepresented it as something it was not).

And this indicates design how, exactly? I showed, through my previous references, that there are alternatives to the notion of Intelligent Design. Proof is for distilled spirits and math.

2. Information has a source, where is your source of information?

See natural forming sources of information above and references below.

"Information is always generated by a living intelligence and is then put into a form of matter or energy in the physical world. "[/i]

Bullshit empty assertion. Supply a method to test for this, or a citation of any work in support of this. See above and refs below.

3. "When you see hieroglyphics you did not automatically believe that they were variations of chance because they are ordered pieces of information, so why in DNA with a code far more complex than any known information storage device and matter transmitter do you assume it was developed through natural processes?"

I can detect the design of hieroglyphics in the tool marks. Show the tool marks in RNA/DNA.

4. "Information by definition has a purpose. How can information evolve without purpose?"

In the world of genetics the purpose is to replicate, and RNA/DNA are IMPERFECT at replication. This alone implies a lack of design by an outside intelligence. This is why you must address mutations to genetic code.

I would much rather hear you disprove the discussion topic. As you have seen now, you do not have any proven examples of how information could have evolved from non-living matter. I suggest you focus on how information "could have happened" through non-living matter since you lack observed evidence.

Everyone reading this can see how you have failed to provide one shred of support of you position and have set an abusive tack that does not tend to make me want to remain civil. I have, within this posting, shown how information arises by acts of nature beyond a reasonable doubt. The burden lies with you to support your position, and not with me to disprove it.

Be aware that I am deadly serious about my challenge for you to retract, cite sources or withdraw. The time has past for you to adhere to those challenges.

---

REFERENCES:

* 1. Cosmic Dust

Link Abstract/limited
An assessment of the amount and types of organic matter contributed to the Earth by interplanetary dust
Advances in Space Research: Volume 33, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 57-66
Space Life Sciences: Steps Toward Origin(s) of Life
doi:10.1016/j.asr.2003.09.036
"A continuous, planet-wide rain of about 30,000 tons/year of [b]interplanetary dust accretes onto the Earth"...

* 2. RNA Self Replication

Link Abstract/limited.
Self-Sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme
Science 27 February 2009: Vol. 323. no. 5918, pp. 1229 - 1232: DOI: 10.1126/science.1167856
"...These cross-replicating RNA enzymes undergo self-sustained exponential amplification in the absence of proteins or other biological materials..."

*3 RNA Transitional Systems

Link Full Paper.
Emergence of a Code in the Polymerization of Amino Acids along RNA Template
PLoS ONE 4(6): e5773. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005773
"...We point out that the coding regime can naturally occur under prebiotic conditions. It generates partially coded proteins through a mechanism which is remarkably robust against non-specific interactions (mismatches) between the adaptors and the RNA template. Features of the genetic code support the existence of this early translation system."

4. Evolution of the Genetic Code

Link Full PDF
Co-Evolution Theory of the Genetic Code
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1975 USA Vol. 72, No. 5, pp. 1909-1912
"The theory is proposed that the structure of the genetic code was determined by the sequence of evolutionary emergence of new amino acids within the primordial biochemical system. more primitive form of Thr, is even nearer still to Met). Although Ser and Cys can enter into the Met-biosynthetic"

5. Evolution of the Genetic Code

Link Full PDF
Collective evolution and the genetic code
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2006
"A dynamical theory for the evolution of the genetic code is presented, which accounts for its universality and optimality. The central concept is that a variety of collective, but non-Darwinian, mechanisms likely to be present in early communal life generically lead to refinement and selection of innovation-sharing protocols, such as the genetic code. Our proposal is illustrated by using a simplified computer model and placed within the context of a sequence of transitions that early life may have made, before the emergence of vertical descent. the case of the code, we do know one particular amino acid measure that seems to express it quite remarkably in the coding context. That measure is amino acid polar requirement (3–5). Although the relatedness order of the code is marginally evident from simple inspection of the codon table (3, 4, 6–8), it is pronounced when the amino acids are represented by their respective polar requirements (4). A major advance was provided by computer simulation studies "

6. Evolution of the Genetic Code

Link Full PDF
Evolution of amino acid frequencies in proteins over deep time: inferred order of introduction
Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2002
"To understand more fully how amino acid composition of proteins has changed over the course of evolution, a method has been developed for estimating the composition of proteins in an ancestral genome. Estimates are based upon the composition of conserved residues in descendant sequences and empirical knowledge of the relative probability of conservation of various amino acids. Simulations are used to model and correct for errors in the estimates. The method was used to infer the amino acid composition of a large protein set in the Last Universal Ancestor (LUA) of all extant species. Relative to the modern protein set, LUA proteins were found to be generally richer in those amino acids that are believed to have been most abundant in the prebiotic environment and poorer in those amino acids that are believed to have been unavailable or scarce. It is proposed that the inferred amino acid composition of proteins in the LUA probably reflects historical events in the establishment of the genetic code."

7. Evolution of the Genetic Code

Link Full paper.
Evolution of the genetic code: partial optimization of a random code for robustness to translation error in a rugged fitness landscape
Biology Direct 2007, 2:24 doi:10.1186/1745-6150-2-24
"The standard genetic code table has a distinctly non-random structure, with similar amino acids often encoded by codons series that differ by a single nucleotide substitution, typically, in the third or the first position of the codon. It has been repeatedly argued that this structure of the code results from selective optimization for robustness to translation errors such that translational misreading has the minimal adverse effect. Indeed, it has been shown in several studies that the standard code is more robust than a substantial majority of random codes. However, it remains unclear how much evolution the standard code underwent, what is the level of optimization, and what is the likely starting point."

8. Self Encoding Systems

Link Full paper
Importance of compartment formation for a self-encoding system
May 21, 2002, doi: 10.1073/pnas.062710399 PNAS May 28, 2002 vol. 99 no. 11 7514-7517
"A self-encoding system designed to have strict “compartition” of the molecules, i.e., to contain only a single molecule of DNA in each compartment, was established, and its evolutionary fate was analyzed. The system comprised the Thermus thermophilus DNA polymerase gene as the informational molecule and its protein product replicating the gene as the functional molecule. Imposing strict compartition allows the self-encoding system to last up to at least the tenth generation, whereas the system ceased to work after the third generation when loose compartition initiated with 100 molecules was imposed. These results provide experimental evidence on the importance of compartition for the maintenance of a self-encoding system. In addition, the extent of diversity in self-replication activity of the compartments was found to be another vital difference in the evolutionary dynamics between the strict and loose compartitions. Although the system with strict compartition provides widely diversified activity of the compartments at each generation, the values of the activity diverge only within a small range in the system with loose compartition. When the variety in the activity of a compartment is small, functional selection becomes weak, and to conform Darwinian evolution may become unfeasible. Therefore, strict compartition is essential for the evolvability of a self-encoding system."

9. Rise of Genetic Code

Link Full paper
On the origin of the genetic code: signatures of its primordial complementarity in tRNAs and aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases
Heredity (2008) 100, 341–355; doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6801086; published online 5 March 2008
"If the table of the genetic code is rearranged to put complementary codons face-to-face, it becomes apparent that the code displays latent mirror symmetry with respect to two sterically different modes of tRNA recognition. These modes involve distinct classes of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRSs I and II) with recognition from the minor or major groove sides of the acceptor stem, respectively. We analyze the anticodon pairs complementary to the face-to-face codon couplets. Taking into account the invariant nucleotides on either side (5' and 3'), we consider the risk of anticodon confusion and subsequent erroneous aminoacylation in the ancestral coding system. This logic leads to the conclusion that ribozymic precursors of tRNA synthetases had the same two complementary modes of tRNA aminoacylation. This surprising case of molecular mimicry (1) shows a key potential selective advantage arising from the partitioning of aaRSs into two classes, (2) is consistent with the hypothesis that the two aaRS classes were originally encoded by the complementary strands of the same primordial gene and (3) provides a 'missing link' between the classic genetic code, embodied in the anticodon, and the second, or RNA operational, code that is embodied mostly in the acceptor stem and is directly responsible for proper tRNA aminoacylation."

10. Evolution of the Genetic Code

Link Full PDF
Recent evidence for evolution of the genetic code
Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 1992 March; 56(1): 229-264
"The genetic code, formerly thought to be frozen, is now known to be in a state of evolution. This was first shown in 1979 by Barrell et al. (G. Barrell, A. T. Bankier, and J. Drouin, Nature [London] 282:189-194, 1979), who found that the universal codons AUA (isoleucine) and UGA (stop) coded for methionine and tryptophan, respectively, in human mitochondria. Subsequent studies have shown that UGA codes for tryptophan in Mycoplasma spp. and in all nonplant mitochondria that have been examined. Universal stop codons UAA and UAG code for glutamine in ciliated protozoa (except Euplotes octacarinatus) and in a green alga, Acetabularia. E. octacarinatus uses UAA for stop and UGA for cysteine. Candida species, which are yeasts, use CUG (leucine) for serine. Other departures from the universal code, all in nonplant mitochondria, are CUN (leucine) for threonine (in yeasts), AAA (lysine) for asparagine (in platyhelminths and echinoderms), UAA (stop) for tyrosine (in planaria), and AGR (arginine) for serine (in several animal orders) and for stop (in vertebrates). We propose that the changes are typically preceded by loss of a codon from all coding sequences in an organism or organelle, often as a result of directional mutation pressure, accompanied by loss of the tRNA that translates the codon. The codon reappears later by conversion of another codon and emergence of a tRNA that translates the reappeared codon with a different assignment. Changes in release factors also contribute to these revised assignments. We also discuss the use of UGA (stop) as a selenocysteine codon and the early history of the code."

[Calilasseia]

MOD NOTE

The following comment:

I am not afraid of your terrible reading comprehension of your own sources

is unbecoming in a formal debate. Please refrain from such comments in the future, and concentrate upon the provision of substantive evidence for your claims.

END MOD NOTE

[sticksnstones]

THEROPOD,
YOU HAVE REPEATEDLY AND DELIBERATELY IGNORED MY ARGUMENT ASSERTING THAT ONLY PEER REVIEWS CAN PROVE A POSITION.
WE CAN NOT GO ANY FURTHER IF YOU WILL NOT READ MY ARGUMENT. PEER REVIEW IS NOT THE END ALL. STOP MENTIONING IT. ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS WRONG ABOUT A STATIC UNIVERSE. IF ONE OF THE GREATEST GENIUSES IN THE WORLD WAS WRONG, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK A GROUP OF SUB-GENIUS SCIENTISTS ARE TRUTH?
CITATIONS ARE SPECIFICALLY FOR SUPPORT IN AN ASSERSION, THEY ARE NOT, AND I REPEAT, ARE NOT THE EVIDENCE. IF A PEER REVIEW SAYS SOMETHING, IT IS NOT NECESSARILY TRUTH. (don't get me wrong, peer reviewed sources are great, but you seem to assert that I have written nothing unless it is a peer review...even though all my sources but one are peer reviewed)

IN THE FOLLOWING POST, I WILL WASTE MY TIME DISCUSSING THE BASICS. WE CAN OBVIOUSLY NOT MOVE BEYOND THE BASICS IF YOU REFUSE TO READ. I WILL DISCUSS THREE MAIN TOPICS:

1)HOW PEER REVIEWS HAVE FAILED IN THE PAST AND CAN NOT BE TRUSTED AS “ABSOLUTE TRUTH.”

2)THE HALMARKS OF DESIGN THAT I HAVE ALREADY POSTED

3)AMINO ACIDS

4)YOUR FLAWED ANSWER TO THE HIEROGLYPHIC ANALOGY.

5)EVOLUTION CLAIMS INFORMATION AROSE BY ITSELF. THERE IS STILL NO EVIDENCE.

WE WILL START WITH THE BASICS UNTIL YOU CHOOSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT I HAVE PROVIDED AN ARGUMENT. YOU WILL HEAR NO OTHER ARGUMENT FROM ME OTHER THAN A REPEAT OF WHAT I SAY UNTIL YOU ACKNOWLEDGE WHAT WAS SAID. I ASSERT THAT YOU'RE AFRAID TO FACE THE CLAIMS. THIS IS WHY YOU HAVE AVOIDED WHAT I SAID. HOWEVER, I DO FIND IT INTERESTING THAT YOU DID NOT CONTRADICT MY ASSESMENT ON YOUR BAD SOURCES. BUT THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE.





1)PEER REVIEW FAILS

note: (don't get me wrong, peer reviewed sources are great, but you seem to assert that I have written nothing unless it is a peer review...even though all my sources but one are peer reviewed)

“Even if these were not "peer review" sources, what makes you think their arguments are not valid? The peer review process is not perfect. For examples, the non-profit organization, "The Heartland Institutute" makes complaints about the peer review process abusing its power to promote misinformation out of political bias such as with the case of peer reviews "anti-biotechnology bias"http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/22938/Abuse_Misuse_of_Peer_Review_Process_Allow_Spread_of_Scientific_Misinformation.html. Point being, if there is bias, the peer review process is not free of its own problems. I suggest (for our own sake) we steer from "genetic logical fallacies," and judge each others sources in their own context. I furthermore amend that we use the rules of logic to judge whether or not an argument is valid or not rather than trusting the opinions of others. For even in the past (say the 1800's) scientists were convinced of some very wrong things. Who are we to say that humanity has overcome all flaws and learned enough knowledge to not ever make even a peer reviewed mistake?

Judge arguments for what they are. Refrain from "Genetic Logical fallacies"http://www.logicalfallacies.info/relevance/genetic/, and please look up the term.”

2)THE HALLMARKS OF DESIGN THAT I HAVE ALREADY POSTED
INFORMATION CAN NOT FORM ITSELF. IT ALWAYS HAS A SOURCE.

“C.E. Shannon, a mathematician and information theory scientist says this about the nature of information and its transmitters.

"An information source which produces a message or sequence of messages to be communicated to thereceiving terminal. The message may be of various types: (a) A sequence of letters as in a telegraph of teletype system; (b) A single function of time f (t) as in radio or telephony; (c) A function of time and other variables as in black and white television — here the message may be thought of as a
function f (x;y; t) of two space coordinates and time, the light intensity at point (x;y) and time t on a
pickup tube plate; (d) Two or more functions of time, say f (t), g(t), h(t)—this is the case in “threedimensional”sound transmission or if the system is intended to service several individual channels in
multiplex; (e) Several functions of several variables—in color television themessage consists of threefunctions f (x;y; t), g(x;y; t), h(x;y; t) defined in a three-dimensional continuum—we may also think of these three functions as components of a vector field defined in the region — similarly, several black and white television sources would produce “messages” consisting of a number of functions of three variables; (f) Various combinations also occur, for example in television with an associated audio channel"( Shannon 5).

Basically for those who have no clue what he is talking about, he is saying in mathematical terms that there are certain limitations by which an information source must communicate an idea in the material world. There is a certain way that information can be identified in the world. Information must furthermore be submitted in this order:
INFORMATION SOURCE creates a MESSAGE ---->TRANSMITTER.
This transmitter then is received by a ---->SIGNAL RECEIVED and the message reaches its
----->DESTINATION.”

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf

3)AMINO ACIDS (SPACE DUST AND SUCH)

THIS “ORGANIC” MATERIAL AS THEY CALL IT IS ACTUALLY JUST CARBON, OR OXYGEN OR SIMILAR ORGANIZATIONS OF CHEMICALS THAT ARE ACTUALLY QUITE COMMON IN THE UNIVERSE. WHEN IT SAYS, “FUNDAMENTAL” IT MEANS “FUNDAMENTAL.” YOU HAVE ONLY PROVEN THE EQUIVALENT OF A CONSPIRACY THEORY, A “WHAT IF.” YOU HAVE NO OBSERVED EVIDENCE OF THESE FUNDAMENTAL BUILDING BLOCKS PRODUCING INFORMATION AS NEARLY AS COMPLEX AS EVEN MATTER THAT WAS ONCE LIVING...AND YOU STILL HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE OF COMPLEX INFORMATION SYSTEMS DESIGNING THEMSELVES BY THE LAWS OF NATURE. SORRY.

“We have detected a significant abundance (2%) of
carbonyl (C@O), a fundamental organic building block,
by C-XANES, O-XANES and infrared spectroscopy in
both hydrated and anhydrous IDPs. We have also detected
a significant abundance (1–3%) of aliphatic
hydrocarbons by infrared spectroscopy in both hydrated
and anhydrous IDPs.”
http://xray1.physics.sunysb.edu/research/pdf_papers/2004/flynn_adv_space_research_2004.pdf



4)YOUR FLAWED ANSWER TO THE HIEROGLYPHIC ANALOGY.

I can detect the design of hieroglyphics in the tool marks.

TOOL MARKS? OBVIOUSLY THEY ARE CREATED WITH SMALLER MARKS THAN WE CAN POSSBIBLY EVER DETECT SINCE THE MACHINES USED ARE PROTEINS AND ENTITIES MADE OF MOSTLY H2O DO NOT HAVE SOLID MASS LIKE SAND AND STONE. YET YOU KNOW THEY ARE BUILT. WHETHER YOU SEE A TOOL MARK, IT WAS BUILT AND YOU MUST ASSUME THAT THE MARKS (if any can be left in entities consisting of almost completely water) ARE THERE. THE MARKS YOU SPEAK OF ARE THE EVIDENCE OF EXISTENCE. YOU SEEM TO BE RUNNING ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THERE SHOULD BE CHISEL MARKS ON CELLS. THE ASSUMPTION IS VERY ABSURD AND I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE NOT BEING SARCASTIC. TAKE THIS ARGUMENT SERIOUS.

5)EVOLUTION CLAIMS (complicated) INFORMATION AROSE BY ITSELF. THERE IS STILL NO EVIDENCE.

Information is contained in these patterns. We can see the prevailing wind direction, speed and duration from this pattern of information. We can also determine the clastic properties of the sand, the wetness, the size/weight sorting and temporal tracking. We can determine the atmospheric pressure, temperature and seasonal variances. This is a great deal of information that has formed in the absence of any Intelligent Design. Nature transmits a history of the environment over time. The mutations of this information are detectable. These naturally occurring formations indeed contain information which is altered/mutated by non living systems.

NO.
THERE IS INFORMATION IN THESE PATTERNS ,BUT TO CLAIM THAT THIS IS EVIDENCE FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF ALL INFORMATION IN THE UNIVERSE IS TO COMPARE A DEAD LEAF TO A LIVING TIGER (OR ANY ANIMAL). THIS IS CALLED A “FALSE ANALOGY,” IN LOGICAL ARGUMENTS. YOUR LOGIC IS IN ERROR. YOU ARE COMPARING THE WRITING OF A NOVEL TO HOW WATER SPLATTERS IN A PATTERN BY WAY OF GRAVITY PULLING IT TOWARDS THE EARTH. YOU WILL NOW NEED TO PROVE THAT THERE ARE LAWS IN THE UNIVERSE THAT COMPELL DNA TO FORM ITSELF SINCE YOU BELIEVE ASSERT THAT THIS IS THE WAY INFORMATION FORMED IN THE UNIVERSE (your thought process inevitably leads to this conclusion).

WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE MUTATION OF INFORMATION FOR THAT WOULD REQUIRE A PRE-EXISTENCE OF INFORMATION TO MUTATE FROM. WE ARE DISCUSSING INFORMATION FROM NOTHING AND WHERE IT CAME FROM. IT IS NOT IN DISPUTE THAT YOU ARE USING A FALSE ANALOGY. MY ARGUMENT HERE DOES NOT NEED TO GO FARTHER THAN THAT. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE EVIDENCE THAT STATES THAT INFORMATION NEEDS A SOURCE, SEE SHANNON'S WORK ….http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf

Information does not mutate unless it is controlled by a living system.

response:

WRONG!

mu⋅ta⋅tion
–noun
1.
Biology.
a.
a sudden departure from the parent type in one or more heritable characteristics, caused by a change in a gene or a chromosome.
b.
an individual, species, or the like, resulting from such a departure.
2.
the act or process of changing.
3.
a change or alteration, as in form or nature.
4.
Phonetics. umlaut.
5.
Linguistics. (in Celtic languages) syntactically determined morphophonemic phenomena that affect initial sounds of words.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mutation

OBVIOUSLY AS YOU CAN SEE, THE DEFINITION OF MUTATION IN THE FIRST PLACE IS TO CHANGE BIOLOGICALLY. AGAIN THIS IS SIMPLY AN EXAMPLE OF YOUR MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF THE STATEMENT I MADE. THIS IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHY YOU RESPONDED WITH A FALSE ANALOGY.

I need not "PROVE" anything, as my position is that there is no evidence of Intelligent Design.

THIS SEEMS TO BE YOUR BATTLE CRY. YOU HAVE NOT BROUGHT A SINGLE SHRED OF PROOF TO LIGHT. YOU MERELY SEEM INSISTANT ON BEING THE ULTIMATE CRITIC. YOUR ONLY ASSERTION IS THAT “CHANCE-DONE-IT.”
WHAT EVIDENCE CAN YOU POSSIBLY BRING TO SUPPORT THAT COMPLICATED INFORMATON FORMS ITSELF? YOU HAVE YET TO BRING A SINGLE ARGUMENT TO LIGHT.


:::ANALYSIS OF YOUR SOURCES:::

1ST SOURCE:
SEE POINT 3 CALLED “AMINO ACIDS”

2ND SOURCE:
THIS IS ABOUT RNA SELF SUSTAINING AND REPLICATING. NOT FORMING OUT OF NOTHIING. YOU MAY HAVE MISSED THAT PART.

3RD SOURCE:
“Although the molecular organization of genetic code is now known in detail, there is still no agreement on the reason(s) for which it has emerged.” http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005773

BASICALLY...NO ONE KNOWS, NOT EVEN YOUR THIRD SOURCE. IT JUST TOSSES OUT A POSSIBILITY, NOT A SURE HAPPENING.

4TH SOURCE:
“This theory, which may be called a Co-evolution Theory, is
readily tested. If many pairs of amino acids which bear a
nearest (in terms of the number of enzymic steps) precursor product
relationship to each other in a biosynthetic pathway
fail to occupy contiguous codon domains, the theory would
be untenable.” http://www.pnas.org/content/72/5/1909.full.pdf+html

IN LAYMANS TERMS, IF THESE AMINO ACIDS AREN'T CONTINUALLY TOUCHING ONE ANOTHER IN TO EVENTUALLY PRODUCE AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS IN THESE SPECIFIC DOMAINS, THIS THEORY FAILS.

I THINK HIS NOTE LEAVES YOUR THEORY IN QUESTION. AT LEAST HE'S HONEST.


5TH SOURCE:
THAT SOURCE IS UNREADABLE.
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/28/10696.full.pdf

6TH SOURCE:
THIS SOURCE SEEMS TO SIMPLY BE DISCUSSING HOW A PRE-EXISTING GENETIC CODE ALREADY EXISTED.
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/19/10/1645

7TH SOURCE:
BASICALLY THIS SOURCE SEEMS TO BE DISCUSSING GENETIC CODE ALREADY IN EXISTANCE. NOT GENETIC CODE CREATED FROM NOTHING.
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/24

8TH RANDOM SOURCE:
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/11/7514.full

BASICALLY, THESE SCIENTISTS CONSTRUCTED A DNA STRUCTURE IN A LAB USING NATURAL DNA PROCESSES ALREADY PUT TOGETHER AND OBSERVED IT WORK BY ITS OWN RULES. THEN IT FAILED CAUSE SCIENTISTS DO NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO CONSTRUCT SOMETHING ON THE GENETIC LEVEL THAT LASTS. THIS MAKES ME WONDER HOW YOU THINK SOMETHING CAN CONSTRUCT ITSELF....YEAH, GOOD TRY WITH THAT AS PROOF OF ANYTHING.

9TH SOURCE:
WITH SOMETHING THAT ALREADY EXISTS, THEY PUT OUT A HYPOTHESIS THAT SAYS IT CAN BE RECREATED. MIND YOU....ITS A HYPOTHESIS. BUT AN INTERSTING ONE. I WONDER IF IT WORKS.
http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v100/n4/full/6801086a.html

10TH SOURCE:
HONESTLY I'M TIRED OF READING YOUR SOURCES WITHOUT YOU MAKING ANY ARGUMENT OF YOUR OWN. I THINK I'LL PLAY YOUR GAME WITH THIS.
http://mmbr.asm.org/cgi/reprint/56/1/229



YOU DO NOT EVEN PRESENT YOUR OWN ARGUMENTS. YOU SIMPLY TOSS OUT SOURCES AND BATTLE VIA OTHER SCIENTISTS. FURTHERMORE, IT APPEARS AS IF YOU DON'T EVEN READ YOUR OWN SOURCES. YOU JUST POST THEM. I ASSUME YOU POST THEM WITHOUT READING OUT OF SOME SORT OF LACK TO TRY TO FORM YOUR OWN ARGUMENT.

RANDOM SOURCES FOR YOU TO READ:

1.http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:fZ5_eUQ_5jYJ:creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j22_2/j22_2_79-84.pdf+evidence+for+genetic+design&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
2.http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1388301/posts
3.http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&printerFriendly=true&id=2177

[theropod]

THEROPOD,

YOU HAVE REPEATEDLY AND DELIBERATELY IGNORED MY ARGUMENT ASSERTING THAT ONLY PEER REVIEWS CAN PROVE A POSITION.

In light of fact that 90% of your last response is a rude shouted diatribe, and typing in all caps is a well know internet form thereof, I refuse to quote anything from your posting except this first line because I consider this among the highest forms of rudeness. I will not lower myself to these disgusting attempts to bait me into a response based on emotion. Some people consider this a form of trolling, and to do so in a formal debate is disgusting. Note that I have highlighted the word ASSERTION above to point out that the entire accumulation of your postings to date have been a series of these. All of them are devoid of substance.

Does inability to provide support for your position piss you off this much? Didn't you realize this going into such an exchange? If so I feel such anger is misdirected towards me, as I don't care. In fact I am slightly amused to witness such a total drama meltdown.

Did you not take note of the moderation posting that divides our postings? If not I will repost that for you to read again and you may click on the link above to review said action;

MOD NOTE
The following comment:

sticksnstones wrote:I am not afraid of your terrible reading comprehension of your own sources

is unbecoming in a formal debate. Please refrain from such comments in the future, and concentrate upon the provision of substantive evidence for your claims.

END MOD NOTE

I suggest you attempt to adhere to the highlighted admonition above as I grow weary of the vacant claims you feel are valid. I also feel it is past time for you to at the very least retract the statement above and apologize. Of course you may proceed in blind and blissful ignorance of any wrongdoing on your part, as I do not expect any admission of a breach on honor on your part. You probably feel you are incapable of immoral behavior because of the war you have vowed to wage against all that is unholy, and all's fair in love and war.

You sure must have a different God than I was indoctrinated to serve, as humble and contrite behavior is clearly demanded by the gospels and the words of Jesus. I invite you to define exactly which god you follow. You previously claimed your God existed and is responsible for the "design" in Intelligent Design. Even though we all know you cannot supply one shred of evidence of this designer. I do not have to make an argument one way or another. This is your claim, so bear this burden as it is yours alone. (call me an optimist).

If you want to show that Intelligent Design is evidence for your God you need to first show this God is real. Then you have to show a clear marker of this designer in RNA/DNA. Is complexity a marker for this design? If this is your claim I have rebutted that with an increase in the genetic information in the nylon digesting bacteria. This increase in complexity, and thus information, arose as a selection response to the presence of a new food source. Nothing about this can be attributed to a preexisting design. It appears that life, once operational, is subject to these informational increasing mutations without exception. So that line of thinking is not open for your use. Funny you abandoned, or ignored, that subject in your last posting.

You rail against my sources, which while not providing the exact methodology to create living systems these sure further our understanding thereof, and in protest you bring forth the name of a faith-based think-tank called the "Heartland Institute" that has also never published a peer reviewed paper in support of ID. Until such time as a supporter of Intelligent Design can actually do some research, instead of just bitch and moan about the work of others, why should we pay any attention to these objections? Objecting without doing any independent work to show a working alternative and all that is left is empty assertion and slanderous attacks on a system that has an established track record of self correction. The same old tired song and dance we've seen for centuries. If such behavior were not trotted out as valid work it would be less revolting, but the fact it such is worthless tripe.

Peer review, when taken alone, is not the be-all and end-all of authority. What we see, however, is that across a wide range of studies conducted by many different individuals the image that emerges is one wherein life is a result of natural forces. In the absence of contradicting evidence we must accept this mass of study. Conscilliance is a word you should learn. A continually growing body of work has shown that the first life here was so very simple, and then as time has passed the complexity and diversity of life has increased. This has been shown to be an observable pattern of common descent via natural selection. SInce no signature, or tool marks, of an intelligence has been detected in all of these studies, and natural process have been observed creating this complexity, what are we to think?

Hieroglyphics, which you cited, are easy enough to detect as being the product of Intelligent Design BECUSE of the tool marks that the makers left behind. The information contained in RNA/DNA you keep harping about does not bear any such tool marks. NO, I do not mean literal tool marks, but a signature of design that you can assign, directly, to a designer. Instead we see a collection of chemicals that abide by well known and understood laws of physics, and the sources I cited provide is a baseline from which to understand this. No magic man evidence is seen in these studies, and as closely as we've been looking one would think such a signature would be evident. Mutations, which are well documented, in this genetic information alters the supposed design sometimes as often as every generation. So we see the genetic information being written anew with these alterations, and still we do not detect an Intelligent Designer.

When I cited barchan dunes that contain information I made no mention of this being the same pathway to genetic the formation of informations. I posted that in response to your ignorant assertion that information can only be formed as an act of intelligence, and that mutations can only happen within living systems. You were wrong on both counts, and still are. Your failure to withdraw such absurd statements defines your premise, and quality of rebuttal, quite well. The citations you say you have read, with faith colored glasses, explained possible means of genetic information formation in early replication reactions. Do you deny this is an accurate assessment of the events?

One thing needs to be made clear. This alleged designer must surely contain information of a far more complex nature than that of his creation or he will basically create himself. How did that supreme level of information come to be? Who, or what, designed the designer? This problem, "infinite regression", becomes an insurmountable issue for Intelligent Design and Creationism. You claim all information requires a designer, so by your own standards the designer must also have a designer. It's designers "all the way down!" You also claim that nothing can come nothing, and yet we are to accept that this designer arose from nothing. Talk about failing logic!

You posted some nonsense about us never being able to see the tool marks in RNA/DNA because we don't have a method to see itty bitty things. Are you serious? Do you not understand that we have imaged ATOMS? Amino acids are molecules that are made up of atoms. Imaging atoms that are the construction source of molecules has been done. Here is a image of the atoms in a silicone crystal.


Are you going to infinitely regress to sub atomic particles as the hiding place of design? It's doubtful that you understand how much we know about this sub atomic world, but suffice it to say no designer "sign", "tracks" or "chisel marks" have been found in that realm either.

I have already shown, and attempted to explain, that it is not my burden to PROVE evolution is responsible for the information in RNA/DNA. It falls to you to support your position. I refuse to be distracted from your claims, and the burden of support your assertions require. My sources strongly suggest a means by which this information has arisen, with observations of reality in support thereof. Live up to your responsibility to supply us any means we can detect design. It is highly likely that you don't have any means to do so. I do not doubt you understand the issue this creates for your position. Not my problem!

How do we falsify Intelligent Design? Any hypothesis that has no means to test for falsification is not science. Tell us how to go about falsifying Intelligent Design. What would falsify ID?

Since it seems you have an issue with reading my sources I have not provided any in this posting. Why should I? You seem incapable of understanding the wider view these papers provide, or the very narrow views down to the atomic level. You apparently do do not know that the elements in amino acid molecules contain both Carbon and Oxygen, as well as Hydrogen, Sulfur, and Nitrogen. Is there no end to that which you know very little?

Here is an diagram of the lysine molecule (an amino acid), and this is a part of a larger chemistry web site that can be found here;



See the "C"'s in the CH2 chain? That's Carbon in methylene. See the CO2 at the right end of the chain? That's Oxygen in carbon dioxide. Rather than complain of my lack of understanding you should educate yourself more completely in these matters. Your diversion through the "water world" of amino acids is as useless, and logical, as a screen door on a submarine.

I really grow weary of waiting for your postings to arrive late only to see this abysmal level of effort, zero respect and whining childlike tactics. And to think, I was ready to allow you another 3 day grace period. That tolerant attitude within me is now history. I suggest you withdraw from this exchange to save yourself further humiliation. The sad part is that obvious facts escape you because of you doctrinal blinders. I use the word "exchange" as this affair in no way resembles an honorable debate.

Schoolyard yelling, as I am now facing, always has influenced me to consider the source unworthy of respect

RS

[Calilasseia]

MOD NOTE

Since no communication requesting a deadline extension for valid reasons has been received from sticksnstones, and no further submissions to the debate thread have been received within the stated deadline, the debate is hereby declared forfeited in theropod's favour. This debate thread is now locked.

END MOD NOTE