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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Biological Information

Form

As presented by Stephen Meyer and, in cruder form, by Frank Turek and Ray Comfort:

  1. DNA contains information in the strict sense: a four-letter code, read in three-letter words, specifying the sequence of amino acids in proteins. Bill Gates: "DNA is like a computer program, but far more advanced than any software we have ever created."
  2. In the whole of human experience, information and codes come only from minds. We have never seen a message written by an unguided process.
  3. Therefore the information in DNA came from a mind.

My Positions

  1. "Information" is an Equivocation. In Claude Shannon's sense, information is a measure of improbability in a sequence, and mutation produces it freely; rain on a roof has Shannon information. In the semantic sense, information is a message with a meaning for a reader, and DNA has none: there is no sender, no reader, and no meaning. The ribosome is not interpreting a text; it is a molecular machine in which a chemical sequence causes another chemical sequence by binding. Meyer's "specified information" is William Dembski's measure under another name and inherits all of its problems (Argument from Specified Complexity).
  2. Premise 2 is false. Natural selection is a known non-mental process that produces functional information, by Meyer's own measure, and the production has been watched. Richard Lenski's E. coli evolved a new metabolic pathway in a flask; in-vitro evolution produces ribozymes and aptamers with new functions from random sequences; Thomas Schneider's ev simulation shows information in binding sites rising under selection exactly as the theory predicts. Premise 2 is an induction from human artefacts, which is William Paley's argument with a double helix on the cover.
  3. "Code" is a metaphor that the argument takes literally. The genetic code is a mapping between codons and amino acids implemented by transfer RNA; its origin is an open research question with several serious hypotheses (stereochemical affinity, co-evolution with amino-acid biosynthesis, error minimisation), and it is not a language. Calling it one and then asking who wrote it is Reification.
  4. The argument is the Origin of Life Argument in a different coat. Once a replicator exists, selection accounts for every subsequent increase in information; the only gap is the first replicator, and that gap is not evidence of a mind (Appeal to Ignorance).
  5. A mind that produces information is itself information-rich. If information needs a prior mind, the designer's information needs a prior mind, and the regress is stopped only by Special Pleading.
  6. The experts the argument cites do not support it. Hubert Yockey, whose work on information theory and biology Meyer draws on, rejected intelligent design explicitly, as did the information theorists whose definitions are borrowed.

Sources

  • Meyer, S., Signature in the Cell (2009)
  • Gitt, W., In the Beginning Was Information (1997), for the cruder version
  • Szostak, J. W., "Functional information: Molecular messages", Nature 423 (2003)
  • Hazen, R. M. et al., "Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity", PNAS 104 (2007)
  • Schneider, T. D., "Evolution of biological information", Nucleic Acids Research 28 (2000)
  • Koonin, E. V. and Novozhilov, A. S., "Origin and evolution of the genetic code: the universal enigma", IUBMB Life 61 (2009)
  • Yockey, H. P., Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (2005)

Also see