David Campbell wrote:
>PR:
Looking at cosmology: where should biological information have been
stored
between the big bang and the origin of life? You explicitly included
"biological systems" among the "basic entities" which God "from the
beginning, when the creation was brought into being from nothing,"
gifted
with all of the capacities needed (H.J. Van Till, "Special Creationism
in
Designer Clothing: A Response to 'The Creation Hypothesis'", PSCF 47
(1995):
123). The alternative option, that the information emerged spontaneously
whenever needed, a concept for which there is no evidence whatsoever, is
extremely unlikely.<
DC:
The spontaneous production of novel biological information occurs all
the
time with every mutation. Is there a threshold amount of information
that
you consider to exceed the abilities given to creation? How is this
determined (both what the threshold is and whether it is met)?
PR:
I discussed this question in my paper "How has life and its diversity
been produced?" PSCF 44/2 (June 1992), pp.80-94. Natural selection,
which does transfer some information from the environment to the
organism, is woefully inefficient doing this job. Whenever some novel
function has to emerge (not just by modification or recombination of
preexisting ones), at least the first few mutational steps (until a
minimal selectable functionality is achieved) correspond to a mutational
random walk through nonselectable intermediates. In such a random walk,
the probabilities of fixation of all intermediates multiply to global
probabilities of the whole process which can be transastronomically
small.
Peter
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