Of course the bird brings information with it. Natural processes are quite non-random, therefore they contain lots of information. And that information can be transmitted by some medium to other natural processes which may or may not be affected by it.

Good, we have some agreement here. But I htink you have an ambiguous concept of “random” and “information”

Natural processes are governed by “law” – the laws of chemistry and physics – and in principle, given enough information, we can calculate all past and future events. That was the goal of Stephen Hawking’s search for the Theory of Everything, although he has since decided that it cannot be discovered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

Random is the word we use for unguided or unplanned action, but that doesn’t mean (in light of the TOE) that it isn’t guided by necessity (law).

Information is not guided by necessity, it is arbitrary. There is no necessity for English to use the collection of letter “apple” to describe an apple, we could use the French word “pomme”, but both describe the same entity. In the case of living organisms there is no physical or chemical “law” determining the placement of the four DNA “letters” TGAC, the combinations are chemically and physically arbitrary, the placement of the “letters” is determined within the constraints of a “language”.

Chiefley, I think I’ll let Dave re-state what he meant in his analogy, because I know that what you heard is not what he meant.

This might help the discussion proceed

Where and how did the complex genetic instruction set programmed into DNA come into existence? The genetic set may have arisen elsewhere and was transported to the Earth. If not, it arose on the Earth, and became the genetic code in a previous lifeless, physical-chemical world. Even if RNA or DNA were inserted into a lifeless world, they would not contain any genetic instructions unless each nucleotide selection in the sequence was programmed for function. Even then, a predetermined communication system would have had to be in place for any message to be understood at the destination.

[...]

All known metabolism is cybernetic–that is, it is programmatically and algorithmically organized and controlled.

Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life.

Trevors JT, Abel DL.
Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Department of Environmental Biology, Room 3220, Bovey Building, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, N1G 2W1. jtrevors@uoguelph.ca

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15563395

Yes, you did say that and I apologize for ignoring it. I am very interested the rest of your ideas on this and I am interestetd in what you find as you go further into the book you are reading.

I am not sure if the objection was within already living organisms or with the original mechanisms that encoded information in self-replicating molecules. Either way, the paper and ink example fails to point out anything special about DNA or any medium through which natural processes inform other natural processes and possibly affecting their behavior.

So I believe when it comes to self replicating chemistry, all you have is personal incredulity to offer in support of your appeal to ignorance having merit.

I also said there were difficulties in principle; and that I would come back to discuss that more at a later time. Please don’t jump to the conclusion that all I have is personal incredulity.

As for science’s weaknesses, I am very aware of the limitations of science in terms of the epistemology of ultimate truth (whatever that is). So no need to spend time disabusing me of scientism. In short, I am aware that the veracity of scientific findings and theories can only be judged by their documented and demonstrated utility.

I also recognize that some areas of the human experience many never be addressed by science, and being myself a devout Christian, I can think of many of those aspects that I don’t expect science to ever address. I don’t agree, however, that the relative speed at which certain fields of science progresses in respect to other fields is a very good indication of ultimate success in a given field. It is often a nonlinear process in which breakthroughs in some fields require breakthroughs in other fields.

For example, the research on brain functions has taken off exponentially due to the presence of realtime MRI devices which had to wait for dozens of technologies to be available. So averaging the achievements in that field over the last 200 years compared to others is somewhat misleading.

I can’t speak for morality, ethics, love, and other such aspects of the human experience that may or may not be spiritual, but I can say that there is a huge differernce between those things and the investigation of self replicating chemistry.

So I believe when it comes to self replicating chemistry, all you have is personal incredulity to offer in support of your appeal to ignorance having merit. One can cite people who share that personal incredulity as well as one can cite people who are vigorously working in the field publishing papers and expecting further results.

Science has been very successful in opening new doors of knowledge. We did not know of germs a few hundred years ago, we did not have a germ theory of disease until much later, and it wasn’t until around WW II that we had the first antibiotics to provide confirmation of the germ theory. This illustrates a general principle that we have seen time and time again: the progress of science pushes back ignorance and reveals knowledge; and that knowledge has always been in accordance with natural law and/or chance processes operating naturally.

Science has been supremely successful in the past, and therefore we can count on its success continuing, and more seemingly intractable questions of today turning into explainable phenomena tomorrow.

That is actually an accurate depiction both of the history of science and of its expected future and I think we can count on it, but for some significant exceptions. Science has been extraordinarily successful in many areas but has provided no real answers whatever with respect to that which is our most intimate experience: consciousness, qualia (perception), the persistent sense of self-identity, morality, truth, reason/rationality. Science has been able to describe some physical correlates of these phenomena, but that’s nothing like explaining the phenomena. Science has some theories regarding an evolutionary history leading to reasoning in humans, but it hasn’t been able to explain nearly enough of it, or where it has come closest it has done so by explaining it away. There is no past history of explanatory success in these most crucial aspects of human experience.

These topics have been discussed many times here in the past, and I am somewhat wary of mentioning them, because each one of them could be a blog post of its own with a couple hundred comments following.

So those who point to science’s past trajectory of increasing explanatory power need to take note that there is a vast hole in its explanations. Everything in that hole has something in common: each of them is very personal, very human, and arguably spiritual.

What science has not been able to explain successfully is the experience of being a person.

You are right: our lack of empirical understanding of abiogenesis is in itself no kind of proof that it did not occur through natural processes. I agree with that, and I firmly support empirical origin-of-life research. If we find out a way it could have happened through natural processes, that’s knowledge, and knowledge is always of value. If that happens, I’ll have to re-examine a lot of conclusions I have come to about how life came to be.

It is certainly reasonable to study and see whether self-replicating molecules can do what it takes to acquire and express biological information, or even anything analogous to it, with an information content approaching that of the simplest life.

There are, however, some serious difficulties in principle with the possibility of nature producing that at the very beginnings of life. By a difficulty in principle, I mean something that presents a logical hurdle that nature is not likely to be able to have overcome by any stretch of scientific imagination. It’s why you read OOL researchers saying they really don’t have answers now (though they’re not giving up, nor would I encourage them to).

I’m reading Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, which lays out those in-principle difficulties at greater length than I have previously studied, so I’ll withhold further comments on this topic until I’m further along into the book.

Tom,
I made no claims about nature in my response. I was simply saying that your claim about our lack of understanding of abiogenesis is in itself no kind of proof that it did not occur through natural processes. What we know about the universe is thousands of times greater than what we knew 100 years ago. And what we will know 100 years from now is vastly more than we know now.

That we don’t understand everything about nature is no proof that one particular understanding is false. Use of gaps in our understanding to refute a theory is called an Appeal To Ignorance, which, for reasons I just stated, is not a useful appeal.

For example, 100 years ago we did not know how to cure diseases with antibiotics, but that was not proof that the germ theory of disease was wrong.

To save some time in our discussion, I am not offering this complaint as support of natural abiogenesis either. All I am saying is that appeals to ignorance have no standing here.

But I am maintaining that in that we see plenty of self replicating molecules in living organisms as well as self replicating molecules outside of organic life, it is reasonable to pursue that line of investigation in regard to abiogenesis.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja00099a003
http://www.springerlink.com/content/d7620w6622022751/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8700225
http://www.azom.com/news.asp?newsID=17531

Do you suppose the bird brings any information with it?

Of course the bird brings information with it. Natural processes are quite non-random, therefore they contain lots of information. And that information can be transmitted by some medium to other natural processes which may or may not be affected by it.

My example speaks directly to the veracity of the ink and paper analogy that Dave was using to suggest that a natural process could not encode information on a chemical substrate. I believe any of us could easily imagine plenty of counterexamples to this claim using ever simpler natural encoders.

For example, the trees in my woods have changed colors and are dropping onto my lawn. They have responded to the information that is brought to them through the rather non-random process of the oncoming winter.

For another example, my immune system becomes more effective against a given flu virus after it has been once exposed to it. The flu virus has come to me carrying information about itself which ends up being encoded somewhere in my immune system. Later, my immune system uses that information to recognize and respond to the threat of that particular virus.

This second example is more like the DNA example, where some non-random natural processes in nature encode information on it that ends up getting used much later in subseqquent naturl processes when the DNA is used to express traits in an offspring.

Also, your last statement “Or at least, no one has figured out how….” is simply an appeal to ignorance, which is immediately disqualified.

But if you say “nature has figured out how…” that is an appeal without evidence. There is no sign anywhere in nature that it has figured out how to produce information approaching the order of that in a DNA strand. The only evidence for it, at least at the origin of life, is this:

1) We know there was some first appearance of life having information like that found in DNA.
2) We know that nature produced it, because we don’t believe in an intelligent designer.
3. Therefore we know that nature can produce life with information like that found in DNA.

Here is my favorite counter-example. It is an elegant experiment to determine the reliance of migrating birds on star constellations for navigation.

Sounds impressive… how does the fact that a living being (a being which I suggest exhibits characteristics of design) has the particularly startling capacity (from the evolutionary perspective) to navigate by the stars prove that random chemical processes can produce information? You assume what you set out to prove.

Re: random processes vs. natural selection. Even allowing for the dubious claim that natural selection is not random (predators, climate change, natural disaster, disease) it is still a random process until the “self replicating molecule” (a lovely, vague, and completely hypothetical entity) forms through what must necessarily be random processes – unless, of course, you are suggesting it was designed.

Additionally, there is considerable research being done in how pre-Darwinian abiogensis may have taken place. I recommend looking up the work of Carl Woese.

I submit that there is no reason why natural processes cannot encode information on a chemical substrate. And furthermore there is no indication that the workings of a cell are not governed by chemistry, mostly determined by genetic information. (the rest by other chemical influences).

Here is my favorite counter-example. It is an elegant experiment to determine the reliance of migrating birds on star constellations for navigation.

http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v083n03/p0361-p0367.pdf

http://www.culturaleconomics.atfreeweb.com/Anno/Polanyi%20Lifes%20Irreducible%20Structure%20Acience%201968.htm

It has been so shamelessly ripped off by the Discovery Institute, that they fail to recognize that it implies the exact opposite of what P was saying about hierarchical complexity and boundary conditions.

The analogy also fails because there is no indication that chemistry does not explain how genes are expressed and how they manage the workings of a cell. And there is no indication that the chemical processes of a cell are random. One can simply read a Chemistry 101 textbook to find that out.

As for the “no one has figured out how random chemical interactions could compose detailed instruction sets” comment, I submit that this is simply an appeal to ignorance, which is disqualified from the get go. That we don’t know exactly how the first replicating organic life forms were formed is no indication that the process of evolution does not explain what gave rise to the diversity of life.

Furthermore, there is considerable excellent work going on in the field of pre-Darwinian abiogenesis. I invite you to look up the work of Carl Woese and see how much he has published on the subject.

Really? I thought atheism asserts that the universe originated from the laws of physics,…

While that is essentially correct it is also essentially false. Within the on text of the Big Bang the “laws of physics” do not exist until a few seconds after the Big Bang event. They are potentialities which are not actualized until the universe exists. There is no “laws of physics” until there is a universe. Theoretically the “laws of physics” could be different which is what led some physicistst (atheist) to speculate that the universe was “fine tuned” for life, also known as the “anthropic principle”.

… and life originated according to the laws of chemistry.

Again, that is essentially correct and it is also essentially false. Life utilizes chemical processes which proceed according to the “laws of chemistry” but the substructure of life in not an expression of the “laws of chemistry”. When biologists study cell functions they find an underlying set of instructions which cause different components of the cell to perform particular tasks. An analogy I find helpful is that one can describe a book by describing the chemistry of ink and paper but the chemistry of ink and paper can not explain the book. It cannot tell you what the book contains because the contents of the book, the letters on the pages of the book, contain information which eists independent of the medium in which it is expressed. It is not composed by the “laws of chemistry”. (Or at least, no one has figured out how random chemical interactions could compose detailed instruction sets)