:-) Loving this book

 

"Thus, I argued that intelligent design provides a better, 

more causally adequate explanation 

for the origin of the information 

necessary 

for the origin and development of life 

than either biological or chemical evolutionary processes.

(Where did the information in your DNA come from basically?

 (All DNA actually).

Biological and chemical evolutionary processes do not produce the information that's in DNA.

So where did it come from?

Everywhere else in nature when we see information? 

We see evidence of a conscious intellect behind it.

Just not here in the case of DNA or RNA?

Interesting...

(Thats sarcasm BTW)

 "It might also be that he thinks (a contemporary of the author) that: 

the mechanism of random mutation and natural selection generates new information, 

but, as noted in Chapters 9 and 10 

the extreme rarity of functional genes and protein folds in "sequence space" 

underscores the implausibility of that view.

(The protein folds alone in DNA alone are far to complex to be an accident.

Then theres the problem of where did the information in them come from?)

Oh it just keeps getting better :-).

"Thus, even if the evolutionary process started not with elementary particles or even with sugars, phosphates, nucleotide bases, and amino acids, but instead with all the functional proteins (or even with all other macromolecular components) necessary to sustain a one-celled organism, a trial-and-error process could not plausibly "search" the correspondingly vast space of possible combinations and have a realistic chance of finding one of the few special combinations consistent with the living state. Indeed, given the number of different possible ways to put together just the necessary proteins means that in all likelihood (to vastly understate the case) a cell would not self-organize even from such a biologically relevant set of components. As Tompa and Rose conclude: "The functional state is selected from a staggering number of useless or potentially deleterious alternatives. In particular, a simplified calculation is sufficient to show that the number of distinguishable states of the interactome exceeds comprehension. Consequently, the cell cannot self-organize by random assembly of its components."21

"...If even starting with a biologically relevant soup of information- rich macromolecules (not just their constituent parts) does not ensure that life would self-organize, then it follows a fortiori that the much less biologically relevant configurations of elementary particles or matter and energy fields present at the beginning of the universe would not ensure such a self-organizational origin of life either.

If so, then the deck was not stacked from the beginning to ensure the production of life. Instead, the improbable fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe-important as they are turn out to be merely necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the production of a living cell. So additional biologically relevant in- formation must have arisen after the beginning of the universe in order to produce life on earth. And yet, as we have seen, self-organizational laws as well as all other chemical evolutionary scenarios (see Chapter 9) have failed to account for the origin of the genetic information necessary to produce the first cell.22

(Thats the question to ask the atheist and the person that says they believe in evolution:

What was the origin 

of the genetic information necessary to produce the first living cell?

They simply do not have an answer for it.)

'Could intelligent design have played a role? In Chapter 9, I argued as much. I did so not just because chemical evolutionary models fail to account for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first cell, but also because we know-based upon our uniform and repeated experience that intelligent agents, and no other kind of cause, can and do generate specified digital information-the kind of information present in the biomacromolecules necessary for life.

So could a deistic evolutionist, or a theistic evolutionist of 

Lamoureux's stripe, posit the kind of intelligent design needed to explain the origin of biological information? Clearly not. We've seen that biologically relevant information must have arisen after the beginning of the universe for life to arise on earth. Yet, Lamoureux insists, and commit- ted deists necessarily must insist, that God's direct, discrete, or special creative activity played no role in the history of the universe after the big bang. Consequently, Lamoureux committed himself, as deists also must do, to a front-loaded design hypothesis."

'...verse by dispersing and disrupting those initial arrangements of matter and energy. Any extra entropy-compensating information front-loaded in the initial conditions of the universe would begin to experience degradation as well, especially given the intense energy driving the initial expansion of universe. Moreover, according to cosmologists, the elementary particles present in the early universe would not have even cooled enough to form stable atoms until about 380,000 years after the big bang. Is it even remotely plausible that biologically relevant information in any physical medium or configuration could have survived the intense heat of the early universe and then have been transmitted with adequate fidelity across vast expanses of space to direct the construction of a living cell on earth 13 billion years later?

(You already know the answer to that question, dont even pretend that you don't.)

"In any case, unpredictable quantum fluctuations 

in the location and energies associated with subatomic particles 

would have further 

and irreversibly exacerbated information loss. 

Such fluctuations-constantly at work in the subatomic realm-underlie what physicists call "quantum indeterminary" These unpredictable fluctuations make it effectively impossible to forecast the evolution of subatomic material states, because the fluctuations destroy information about the location, energy levels, and trajectories of subatomic particles.25 And since a deistic God would not be involved in the universe after the beginning, such a deity would have no control or influence over these otherwise inherently random fluctuations and thus no basis for knowing or forecasting their effects. That would have made it effectively impossible to know at the beginning of the universe just what kind of information or configurations of mass-energy would be needed later to overcome or compensate for such unpredictable entropy-producing quantum effects.

(Okay so God is not a deistic God but a theistic one.

 The part I wanna get to is:

"These unpredictable fluctuations

(Quantum fluctuations at the start of the universe)

 make it effectively impossible to forecast the evolution of subatomic material states, 

because the fluctuations destroy information about the location, energy levels, and trajectories of subatomic particles)

I dont know what you hear?

But I hear:

Ecclesiastes 3:11

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.)

Indeed, given the facts of molecular biology,

(Where did the information in DNA come from?)

 the axioms of information theory,

 

(Signal degrades over time and distance, 

Attenuation we called it back in my networking days.

Sit at the access point of the cable coming in the building?

Or run you a cable 1000 feet away from the access point?

Which station you think has the  faster stronger signal?)

the laws of thermodynamics, 

Nothing evolves from chaos to order.

Everything goes from order to disorder over time.

If I do a "wheelie" on my bike doin 100 mph down river road?

The more I do it?

 The more likely something is going to go catastrophically wrong eventually.)

the high-energy state of the early universe, 

(Just the heat alone...)

the reality of unpredictable quantum fluctuations, 

and what we know about the time that elapsed between the origin of the universe and the first life on earth, 

explanations of the origin of life 

that deny the need for new information after the beginning of the universe 

clearly lack scientific plausibility."

This chapter and the previous two have shown that only theism provides a causally adequate explanation for the whole ensemble of evidence about biological and cosmological origins under consideration. Deism can explain the origin of the universe and its fine tuning, but not subsequent Infusions of functional biological information into the earth's biosphere. Panspermia might in the explain the origin of biological information on earth, but it does not explain the ultimate origin of biological information. Nor can it explain the origin of the universe or its fine tuning. Material and pantheism fail to account for all three key classes of evidence since they deny a preexistent transcendent intelligence."

Just your everyday light hearted fair from yours truly this morning :-).

I love you baby.