[Vincent]“Scientist have used computer simulations to produce what is supposed to show evolution. Those experiments are misleading to the because computers do not produce results that are not intended beforehand”
computer simulations illustrate intelligent design, at the bottom of
replies to Larry Moran posts
groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-39lhabF61ut8sU1%40individual.net
How do you account for the origin of the recorded-in-DNA/
genetic instructions within:
a human? a bacterium? the first biological lifeform?
Do you disagree with any of the Dawkins or Dobzhansky below?
Dawkins, Richard. 1995.
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian
View of Life (USA: BasicBooks), 172pp. On 17:
After Watson and Crick, we know that genes
themselves, within their minute internal structure, are
long strings of pure digital information. What is more,
they are truly digital, in the full and strong sense of
computers and compact disks, not in the weak sense of
the nervous system. The genetic code is not a binary
code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some
telephone systems, but a quaternary code, with four
symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily
computerlike. Apart from differences in jargon, the
pages of a molecular-biology journal might be
interchanged with those of a computer-engineering
journal.
On 19:
Genes are pure information-- information that can be
encoded, recoded and decoded, without any degradation
or change of meaning. Pure information can be copied
and, since it is digital information, the fidelity of the
copying can be immense. DNA characters are copied
with an accuracy that rivals anything modern engineers
can do.
On 150-151:
Indeed, the whole DNA/protein-based information
technology is so sophisticated-- high tech, it has been
called by the chemist Graham Cairns-Smith-- that you
can scarcely imagine it arising by luck, without some
other self-replicating system as a forerunner.
1985 Cairns-Smith: “Present-day organisms are manifestly pieces of
‘high technology’, and what is more seem to be necessarily so.”
groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1123558517.582123.223890%40o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com
I highly recommend the excellent chapter “The Power and the Archives”
in
Dawkins, Richard. 1987.
The Blind Watchmaker (NY: W.W. Norton &
Company), 332+pp. On 111:
…DNA whose coded characters spell out specific
instructions for building willow trees that will shed a
new generation of downy seeds. Those fluffy specks
are, literally, spreading instructions for making
themselves… It is raining instructions out there; it’s
raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff-
spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is
the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were
raining floppy discs.
Forrest, Stephanie. 1993. “Genetic Algorithms: Principles of Natural
Selection Applied to Computation”
Science 261: 872-878. On 872:
An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for
accomplishing some specific task-- sorting numbers,
formatting text on a page, or diagnosing car problems.
Many algorithms can be readily implemented as
computer programs. Thus, an algorithm is the general
description of a procedure, and a program is its
realization as a sequence of instructions to a computer.
Dobzhansky, Theodosius. March 1973. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense
Except in the Light of Evolution”
The American Biology Teacher,
125-9. On 127:
The entire evolutionary development of the living
world has taken place not by invention of new
“letters” in the genetic “alphabet” but by elaboration of
ever-new combinations of these letters… The
meaning of a word or a sentence is defined not so
much by what letters it contains as by the sequence
of these letters. It is the same with heredity: it is
coded by the sequences of the genetic “letters”-- the
nucleotides-- in the DNA.
For mentions of “information” in DNA, see Dawkins (1987), 112, 115,
116, 122.
Related to quality control in biology: Dawkins (1987), 125, 126, 129;
Science 286: 1881-1905 (1999).
