Has Science Buried God… because it figured out the origin of the genetic code?
DNA, how important is it?
It dictates what we and every living thing become – but it is not life.
It is key to the formation of life out of non-life – but how did it become?
It holds perhaps the most foundational concept yet of our universe that has been discovered – information (knowledge) itself.
Lennox now moves into the genetic code and its origin in Chapter 8. I will not get into what DNA is, but at the heart of DNA are four chemicals that essentially form a code or a language (A, G, C, and T for Adenin, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine, respectively). Pairs of these chemicals (letters if you will – 3.5 billion for the human genome) form the rungs of a ladder (the double-helix structure) in a specific sequence that holds the information needed to form a living organism. The mechanism for how the information in DNA is communicated within in a living cell is so complicated that Lennox quotes evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary:
“The existing translational machinery is at the same time so complex, so universal, and so essential that it is hard to see how it could have come into existence, or how life could have existed without it.”
And Lennox goes into some detail on what is known of the interworking of DNA. However, what I’m fascinated with is how did DNA ever come about in the first place? The indication from what is known is that DNA is dependent on life more so than the other way around which implies an “irreducible symbiosis” not capable of being explained by simplistic models of origins. The code is viewed as ancient and has not appeared to change for over 2 billion years. All living things use the same 64 word code. In addition, there does not appear to be a chemical cause for the ordering of the code (if so the information that was able to be communicated would be severely restricted).
Lennox then goes on in Chapter 9 to discuss different kinds of information, the complexity of information, and methods (e.g., algorithms) of simplifying information. You’ll have to read this if interested, but the bottom line is that “a DNA sequence… exhibits the specified complexity necessary for it to code that protein and is consequently algorithmically incompressible, and thus random from the mathematical point of view”. The significance of this is that “No law of nature could achieve this” (Paul Davies). We just have no category for how the information encoded in DNA is produced. Lennox goes on to say, “if chance and necessity, either separately or together, are not capable of biogenesis, then we must consider the possibility that a third factor was involved. That third factor is the input of information.”
Lennox admits this assertion raises many protests. It is an appeal to a ‘God of the gaps’-type solution. And admittedly this could be construed as lazy thinking … “we don’t know how it happened, therefore God did it”. However, as Lennox points out, “It is also very easy to say ‘evolution did it’ when one has not got the faintest idea how, or has simply cobbled up a speculative just-so story with no evidential basis… a materialist has to say that natural processes were solely responsible… As a result it is just as easy to end up with an ‘evolution of the gaps’ as with a ‘God of the gaps’… it is easier to end up with an ‘evolution of the gaps’… since the former solution is likely to attract far less criticism…”
At the heart of this discussion is the question, “whether molecular machines (of whatever kind) can generate novel information”. Brillouin, an information theorist, says “A machine does not create any new information, but it performs a very valuable transformation of known information.” In other words, whatever produces the information has to be more complex than the information produced.
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Pingback by Has Science Buried God… because it figured out the origin of the genetic code? – McNetwork — March 20, 2009 @ 2:29 am
Sweet synopsis Greg. Thanks for writing this series.
Comment by kalie.b — March 30, 2009 @ 1:24 pm