Silk here: Could Be???????????????????
Information: A modern scientific design argument
All the design in living things is encoded in a sort of recipe book
with lots of information. Information describes the complexity of a
sequence - it does not depend on the matter of the sequence. It could
be a sequence of ink molecules on paper (book) - however the
information is not contained in the molecules of ink but in the
patterns. Information can also be stored as sound wave patterns (e.g.
speech), but again the information is not the sound waves themselves;
electrical impulses (telephone); magnetic patterns (computer hard
drive).
The anti-theistic physicist Paul Davies admits: `There is no law of
physics able to create information from nothing' (this issue, p. 42).
Information scientist Werner Gitt has demonstrated that the laws of
nature pertaining to information show that, in all known cases,
information requires an intelligent message sender, a conclusion
rejected by Davies on purely philosphical (religious) grounds. Thus a
modern version of the design argument involves detecting high
information content. In fact, this is exactly what the SETI project
is all about - the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence involves
trying to detect a high-information radio signal, which they would
regard as proof of an intelligent message sender, even if we had no
idea of the nature of the sender.
In living things, information is all stored in patterns of DNA, which
encode the instructions to make proteins, the building blocks for all
the machinery of life. There are four types of DNA `letters' called
nucleotides, and 20 types of protein `letters' called amino acids. A
group (codon) of 3 DNA `letters' codes for one protein `letter'. The
information is not contained in the chemistry of the `letters'
themselves, but in their sequence. DNA is by far the most compact
information storage/retrieval system known.
Now consider if we had to write the information of living things in
book form. Dawkins admits, `There is enough information capacity in a
single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30
volumes of it, three or four times over. Even the simplest living
organism has 482 protein-coding genes of 580,000 `letters'.
Let's suppose we had the technology to go the other way, and store
books' information in DNA - this would be the ideal computer
technology. The amount of information that could be stored in a
pinhead's volume of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books
500 times as tall as the distance from Earth to the moon, each with a
different, yet specific content. Putting it another way, a pinhead of
DNA would have a billion times more information capacity than a 4
gigabyte hard drive.
Just as letters of the alphabet will not write the Annals of Ennius
by themselves, the DNA letters will not form meaningful sequences on
their own. And just as the Annals would be meaningless to a person
who didn't understand the language, the DNA `letter' arrangements
would be meaningless without the `language' of the DNA code.
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