Posted: Apr 13, 2012 4:22 am
asyncritus wrote:The comparison of natural selection and mutations to the running of a genetic algorithm of some kind is pure nonsense.
The DNA sequence that codes for a functional protein exhibits the specified complexity necessary for it to code for that protein, and is therefore algorithmically incompressible, and a mathematician would therefore describe it as random. Paul Davies says: 'Can specific randomness be the guaranteed product of a deterministic, mechanical, law-like process like a primordial soup left to the mercy of the familiar laws of physics and chemistry? No it couldn't. No known law of nature could achieve this'.
He also said that: 'We conclude that biologically relevant macromolecules simultaneously possess two vital properties: randomness and extreme specificity. A chaotic process could possibly achieve the former property but would have a negligible probability of achieving the latter'.
Clearly this makes the genome an impossible object.
Should someone produce an algorithm which 'creates life', then the following objections are raised immediately:
1 What was the parallel in the primordial soup for the computer's designer?
2 What was the parallel for the algorithm's writer?
It's very obvious, isn't it, that neither was present in the primordial soup busy trying to produce the first life?
Perhaps not, to the bright sparks assembled here.
Specified complexity is a bullshit term invented by Bill Dembski, it has no proper application in the sciences. Despite Dembski's insistence that proteins contain large amounts of specified complexity, noone knows how to calculate the amount, including Dembski himself, making the assertion that some entity contains "large amounts" of it, null and void.