So I clicked on the banner for CosmicFingerprints from this very SDMB (see? I do my part) mostly because it wasn’t clear whether they were pro- or anti-.
So I checked their atheist riddle. It was all so very TLDR for me and I haven’t bothered to check the actual discussion at the quoted site. What caught my attention was the whole “DNA is a code and codes are a sign of purposeful intelligence and not natural occurrences”. At first sight the whole argument looks like a truism to me making sleight of hands with definitions. I just cannot figure out exactly what is wrong and what to call it.
Help?
Note to mods: I really have no idea what’s the right forum for this question. Mods feel free to kick this one around until it falls in the Game Room or something.
If DNA is a code, then so are bird songs, bee dances, ant trails, the tides, and the seasons. When evaluating anti-science arguments like this, remember, just because some guy on the internet can’t imagine how life could have come into being without help, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
Ayup. That’s pretty much why, for example, the irreducible complexity argument is crap: a complex entity is only irreducible if an observer is too dumb to figure out how it might be reduced; to a smarter observer, it’s entirely reducible.
Here’s a great video on “irreducible complexity” where a guy wrote a program to see what happens when you put watch parts in a box and see if it evolves into a watch.
I actually have to disagree here. DNA is a code in the sense that it is known to contain information; this is not the same as the tide or the seasons because they do not contain information.
The flaw with the argument in the OP isn’t the assertion that DNA is a code, but that a code is “a sign of purposeful intelligence”. This assertion, at least from what is available in the OP, is nothing more than an unsubstantiated claim.
DNA does not “contain information”, it only has the illusion of containing information. DNA is an extremely complex series of molecules that happen to do very well at not getting immediately dispersed into their raw materials for a short period of time.
To draw on the examples used, are bird songs and bee dances information? Are they excused from being natural occurrences for being made by an intelligence (birds and bees) for a purpose? (Is there really any information in a bird song?)
I think that a better example of natural information would be all those things animals use to attract their mates (bright colors, loud noises, just size). They convey the information of “Hey, I am strong enough to waste energy making this. You want these genes for your kids”. And there is really no intelligence behind them.
Likewise tree rings. The “contain information” in the sense that we can use the rings to ascertain the age of the tree and to establish the approximate date of certain things that have happened to the tree. But the tree doesn’t lay down the rings for the purpose of recording these things. The fact that we can extract information from the rings is a useful coincidence.
Well, no. The information on the DNA (how to make proteins) is being interpreted as intended. I don’t think it is the same case as tree rings. Anyone on my example of sexual characteristics?
Not quite it, but you also asked about bee dances - they tell the other bees where to fly in order to get pollen. They aren’t mating dances, but complex combinations of “butt-waggles” and moving around to convey direction and distance.