>>Now, does anyone have a TV set that plays DNA?
Peter Vibert replied:
>It's called a cell. Or, if you want to get detailed, it's a coordinated
>series of mechanisms using components that include RNA polymerases,
>transcription factors, ... not to mention unwindases, helicases, ligases...
>and ribosomes and tRNAs and elongation factors ... and tRNA-synthetases
>...etc etc.
I nearly died laughing here. Of course you are correct. :-)
>
>Why do we "know" that the DNA carried a message? Because we get out a
>"functional" protein at the end. How do we recognize a "functional"
>protein...??
>
Lets define the term not as message, with DNA, but in terms of design. The
real question is one of intended functionality or randomly produced
functionality. This is where the discussion I had with Eddie Olmstead last
month comes in. What christians have claimed for almost 50 years, that one
and only one sequence of a given polymer is capable of performing a given
task, is wrong. This is being discovered in directed evolution experiments
all over the place. In fact new drugs are being developed by making random
strings of organic polymers. Now, if 1/100,000,000,000,000 sequences of a
given stretch of DNA are able to product a protein molecule which gives that
same functionality, it is less clear that the protein system was designed (in
the classical apologetical use of that term), unless one does as I prefer to
do, state that the fact that 1/10^14 give the same functionality IS ITSELF
evidence of design. Why should so many polymers give rise to the same
functionality? If I were designing a system which had the requirment that
random events were going to happen, I would design a system with lots of
redundency. The protein/DNA/RNA polymers have LOTS of redundancy in their
sequence space.
>The regression is of course endless. Knowing whether there is "meaning" or
>"message" is, in a _reductio ad absurdum_ sense, undecideable if we do not
>take for granted that our rationality is real (though imperfect) and not an
>illusion.
>So even our esteemed colleague in science Richard Dawkins agrees that
>biological systems have "the appearance of design". Deciding how things got
>to be that way is probably logically (mathematically?) undecideable, and it
>requires a deliberate act of belief/faith/trust to recognize the hand of
>God in Creation (or perhaps deliberate disbelief to NOT recognize it - both
>views have Biblical warrant).
>
Agree, that it requres belief.
glenn