Complexity of gene codes (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 23:14 (4858 days ago) @ David Turell

David has drawn our attention to a long article about the genome, which consists of "layer upon layer of life all the way down". David says that "the DNA code is alpha. No one can yet see the omega."-I don't see how anyone can with confidence maintain that such an intricate mechanism could fashion itself by accident, but I was particularly struck by statements near the very end of the article, which raise all manner of questions:-"Having plunged headlong toward the micro and molecular in their drive to reduce the living to the inanimate, biologists now find unapologetic life staring back at them from every chromatogram, every electron micrograph, every gene expression profile. Things do not become simpler, less organic, less animate."
"The hopeful thing is that molecular biologists today — slowly but surely, and perhaps despite themselves — are increasingly being driven to enlarge their understanding through a reckoning with genetic contexts. As a result, they are writing "finis" to the misbegotten hope for a non-lifelike foundation of life, even if the fact hasn't yet been widely announced. It is, I think, time for the announcement."-I may have totally misunderstood this, and do please correct me if I have, but I presume he means that this research heralds the death knell of the theory that life can come into being from non-living materials (abiogenesis). At first glance, this may seem like a poke in the eye for our materialist, atheist friends, but is it? If Planet Earth had a finite beginning, and indeed if our whole material universe had a finite beginning, where did life spring from, if not from a non-lifelike foundation? Even if our material universe didn't have a finite beginning, but has been here for ever, the same question has to be asked. And the answer can't be a supernatural power that deliberately created the mechanism, because if it had been deliberately created, that power must also have used non-living materials.-No matter how many layers of life it may have, the genome is still material, and so we're left with the argument that material life has always been there ... shades of BBella's views, linked to aspects of process theology? ... which runs counter to every theory of finite beginnings, and makes God the Creator superfluous. I'd have thought that for theists as much as for atheists, the hope for a non-lifelike foundation of life still burns bright.-What have I missed?