> DAVID: Exactly. At issue is the source of that information. Information is not material. It is concepts and instructions.
> 
> dhw: Information is also data which may be contained within material but need not have been consciously created. It is analysis and use of data that requires some form of consciousness.-Your statement appears to be a pipe dream. What data are you trying to describe? We can look at a stone and describe it and we have created data in the description. A crystal has organized data in the form of the shape of its lattice work, but that data supplies only a simple information of the structure of the crystal. I am talking about instructional information which DNA supplies. Horse of a very different color. Please describe the 'data' you are referring to.
> 
> dhw: If the first cause is energy endlessly transmuting itself into matter, whether consciously (theistic) or unconsciously (atheistic), information will also constantly be appearing de novo.
> DAVID: You are playing the something-from-nothing game. 
> 
> dhw: No I'm not. I think you are confusing de novo with ex nihilo. I am following the process whereby every innovation (de novo) has a cause, and the first cause is eternal energy producing new matter. You subscribe to the same first cause, but insist that it is self-aware.-I'm not confused. I fully believe in a first cause, nothing ex nihilo, because nothing can come from nothing.
> 
> dhw; You might as well say that it is very unreasonable if not totally impossible for the amorphous energy you call God to have been possessed of all the complex information required to create the complex information resulting from the big bang (if it ever happened). There is no consistency in the argument that energy cannot produce information, and therefore energy must already have had all the information all the time.-I will emphatically declare energy by itself cannot produce instructional information. Only a mind can. Life requires instructions.-> DAVID: Intelligence had to come into being before anything else. From your viewpoint, it came from no where. I'll stick with cause and effect....
> 
> Another dogmatic statement that has no justification. From my viewpoint intelligence MIGHT have preceded the formation of our material universe (I am an agnostic), and it might have evolved from the interaction between mindless energy and matter.-Mindless energy and matter cannot produce instructional information. Yes, dogmatic, and supported by many philosophers. 
> 
> As always you seize on the biological processes, which apply equally to ourselves. There are chemical processes at work when we are attracted to food, when we use energy to move, when we swallow and when we digest. But like ourselves, bacteria communicate, cooperate, take decisions. All these activities require chemical processes that are directed by mental processes, but when it comes to non-human organisms you focus exclusively on the chemicals.-Yes, because they cannot think.
> 
> Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> dhw: You have done the same with your latest post, which concludes with the quote: “...such processes are not controlled by magical powers but by the interaction of biochemistry and mechanical forces.” Materialists would say exactly the same about our own behaviour, and then you would be up in arms..... The strange thing is that you are not a materialist, and yet you insist on accepting materialism for some organisms, reject it for humans, and hum and haw when it comes to some of our fellow animals.-Much of our body works in a materialistic way. I've described that with my reference to the kidney and liver. My response is graded by the complexity of the evolutionary ladder. Bacteria do not think. Cambrian animals had a degree of mentation, primates more so, and humans a huge jump beyond. Progressive complexity of the nervous system and of brains.

Romansh: http://www.science20.com/stars_planets_life/calculating_odds_life_could_begin_chance&am... 
> > The results were amazing. After only 4 rounds of selection and amplification they began to see an increase in catalytic activity, and after 10 rounds the rate was 7 million times faster than the uncatalyzed rate. It was even possible to watch the RNA evolve.-Nice try. You've picked out a line from an article I know well and have used in my books. I'm referring to this study in the column you presented:-"Now I will recall a classic experiment by David Bartel and Jack Szostak, published in Science in 1993. Their goal was to see if a completely random system of molecules could undergo selection in such a way that defined species of molecules emerged with specific properties. They began by synthesizing many trillions of different RNA molecules about 300 nucleotides long, but the nucleotides were all random nucleotide sequences."-Started with trillions of possibilities!!!-Then used electrophoresis:-"Nucleic acids can be separated and visualized by a technique called gel electrophoresis. The mixture is put in at the top of a gel held between two glass plates and a voltage is applied. Small molecules travel fastest through the gel, and larger molecules move more slowly, so they are separated."-You left this out purposefully. Was such an apparatus present 3.6 billion years ago?-From the article:-"Bartel and Szostak's results have been repeated and extended by other researchers, and they demonstrate a fundamental principle of evolution at the molecular level. At the start of the experiment, every molecule of RNA was different from all the rest because they were assembled by a chance process. There were no species, just a mixture of trillions of different molecules. But then a selective hurdle was imposed, a ligation reaction that allowed only certain molecules to survive and reproduce enzymatically."-Conclusion for wishful thinking atheists: What is described is intelligent design in laboratories, nothing more. Where do all the nucleotides and polymerizing enzymes on early Earth come from? And so far from the lab research done to date, no ribozyme developed in a lab can reproduce with the accuracy of life on Earth today. and without that accuracy there is no life!

It is a series of functional relationships:

https://evolutionnews.org/2020/04/the-parts-of-cells-dont-explain-the-origin-of-cells/

"Here is a paper that should be in the files of everyone thinking about biological design. It is Peter Tompa and George Rose’s “The Levinthal Paradox of the Interactome” (2011), from the journal Protein Science.

***

"Starting with basic facts about cell biology, Tompa and Rose explain that the parts of cells do not explain the origin of cells. To understand the origin of cells, one must focus on the functional interrelations of those parts, which relations occupy the very tiny space of “alive” in the incomprehensibly larger space of “not alive.”

***

"Any relation or interaction within a cell is not a material object. It is not a part or a thing. The relations that matter to the living state are functions, and, while requiring material parts, the functions cannot be reduced to those parts. Relations are inherently higher-level properties. Tompa and Rose argue that the space of possible interrelations that fail to yield the living state is so much larger than the tiny neighborhood of “alive” that, if the living state is disrupted, the parts of the cell will never find their way back to that state. Instead they embark on a one-way or irreversible random walk out into the universe of not-alive. This is why a bacterium whose membrane or cell wall is disrupted by sonication in a sterile buffer will never come back to life — even though, at that moment, all the molecular parts (DNA, RNA, ribosomes, proteins, lipids, etc.) are co-present in the same microenvironment.

"The essential relations have been lost, irretrievably. The living state, a system of relations, presupposes material things. It is not, however, a material thing itself, and cannot be reduced to materiality. Thus, the bottom-up approach to the origin of life cannot possibly succeed, because it is committed to a category error (i.e., error = the parts of a system are causally primary). Category errors do not yield to further effort. (my bold)

***

"Note carefully: Tompa and Rose do not themselves support a design view of the origin of life. They argue that some unknown, incremental pathway assembled cells: “Presumably, early‐earth life forms originated through an accumulation of changes of ever increasing complexity” (p. 2077). But their interactome analysis does not explain how that pathway would have been traversed, without design – only that (as noted above) having the parts on hand will not yield a cell.

***

"Einstein, in a famous 1918 letter to his friend Michele Besso, put the general epistemological point this way (quoted by Gerald Holton, emphasis added):

…"a theory which wishes to deserve trust must be built upon generalizable facts. Old examples: Chief postulates of thermodynamics [based] on impossibility of perpetuum mobile. Mechanics [based] on grasped [ertasteten] law of inertia. Kinetic gas theory [based] on equivalence of heat and mechanical energy (also historically). Special Relativity on the constancy of light velocity and Maxwell’s equation for the vacuum, which in turn rest on empirical foundations. Relativity with respect to uniform [?] translation is a fact of experience. General [Relativity]: Equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. Never has a truly useful and deep-going theory really been found purely speculatively."

Comment: Darwinism is purely speculation, although he used some generalizable facts that were true to this day. Darwin was wise not to attempt origin-of-life speculation in view of this definition of life. Tompa and Rose make the full case for design and refuse to follow it to the logical conclusion. I believe this is because religions have contaminated human thinking about the non-human greater power that must exist.