WHO Wrote the DNA Code?
The Nonexistent Intelligent Designer?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

I, myself, often wondered how it came about. It seemed to me that, barring a natural explanation, that by itself ought to be evidence in support of a Creator God such as Intelligent Design proposes. A Mister Perry Marsh (not the Perry March tried for murdering his wife in Nashville) suggests that on his website and dares all comers to try proving otherwise at www.cosmicfingerprints.com/iidb.htm

Well, now that I no longer feel alone in wondering about that, I decided the time had come to see if something finally had arrived that would set my atheist self onto a different path. I should hope so, I could make lots of money as a Xian, and life would be a lot easier for me in the good ol' US of A. Maybe, I wondered, Mister Marsh had appeared in time to save me from the dire poverty supporting atheism has sunk me into, so that I could go back to making Xian music and singing Jesus Hallelujah songs on tapes and CDs like I wanted to away back when, regain the friendship, trust and admiration of my family and the LUV people who cross the street to avoid me, and do so while no longer suffering from that gnawing feeling in my gut that something is not quite right with the world I am living in.

That gnawing feeling put me into Naval Hospital at Great Lakes, Ill, where I received doctorly advice about repressing my feelings and my thoughts, which I began acting on then, and continue to until today.

So, if what Mister Marsh says is true, why am I still an atheist?

Mister Marsh's writings to follow are mainly from eMails or his newsletter as stored on my computer.

Mr Marsh wrote:

"In particular I take exception to your statement: 'Materialism has more than adequately been demonstrated and verified true.' There is no  materialistic explanation for the origin of coded information. If you know of a scientific experiment which proves otherwise, then post it on the discussion board - because the guys over there could use some help." And: "The information age itself is an affront to materialism, because information is immaterial as Norbert Weiner said almost 50 years ago."

I believe you mean "nonmaterial". A reference would be nice so we could check the context and see whether Mister Wiener meant to imply nonexistence or irrelevance.

It would be too easy here to turn the tables and demand that he prove the negative (that he prove there is no proof equates with the Xian demand to prove there is no god) but I, not being a Xian, will not stoop to such silliness as to demand him to prove there is no proof there is no god, and by doing so take the discussion from a round of Negative Proof fallacies into the fallacy of Circular Argumentation. If they need help at your discussion board, tell them to look here. This page can be found at http://www.atheistlloyd.com/Content/DNA.html

To rely on an "authority" is a logical fallacy, without some establishment of that authority's credence. Mister Wiener may have been the all-time World's Greatest Mathematician, but I would never want his advice about the changing of diapers. I would go to an expert for that, and that would be the likes of Richard Dawkins in the case of DNA, genetics, and the information relevant to evolution. Too many times people rely on authority for information outside that person's area of expertise, after which an adventure into fallaciousness follows.

Besides, I believe Mister Dawkins more than adequately trashed that statement in his The God Delusion. Beyond that, all of existence is not much else than information about how to replicate, and DNA is nothing more than that. Who or what decodes the DNA? Why, of course, DNA does it while it replicates. What or who else would it be for? To proclaim it to be "God" or "an intelligence" is an assumption based on hearsay that has never been adequately demonstrated but has often been subjected to the apologetic process. Apologetics are not proof, they are only excuses.

We have only recently recognized DNA as code, and then only after experiments suggested its existence. Did ID'ers do those experiments? No. Of course not. All ID amounts to is an advanced theistical method to attempt to trash science in the minds of other hosts of religious memes. Everything ID says and does has only that aim and, so far, only that accomplishment.

To say something is immaterial is to proclaim it irrelevant. I cannot understand how anyone could say that about information in general, maybe about some information in particular. Having no body nor form is an inaccurate description, since it must be materially present to even be recognizable as code or information. DNA is materially present, for certain. To proclaim something as being other than what it is makes the affront; to understand something as other than it is makes for religion.

You have to remember, it is not my job to prove anything, as I am not the one making proclamations about anything. I am only responding to those made by Mister Marsh, the value and veracity of which awaits demonstration. Am I calling him a liar? No, only that he has yet to demonstrate whether a mistake has been made or whether some more material (information) awaits his presentation. All that is required for me to accept his story that an Intelligent Designer wrote a DNA code, is for him to produce the designer so that he can testify in his own behalf. Why should I take someone's word in lieu of that?

The least material information I can think of offhand arrives in the form of memes. As information, they take many forms: as ideas present in a human's mental system, as scripts on paper, stone, wood, or whatever; as magnetic variations on a prepared medium; as vibrations of air whenever they are vocally expressed and of eardrums and variations in an electrical signal when received; as photon variations when transmitted; as variations in phosphor patterns on computer and TV screens: All of them are material presences of one kind or another, all of which require interpretation to gather their meaning.

Elsewhere, Mister Marsh proclaims,

"Messages, languages and coded information never, ever come from anything else besides a mind. No one has ever produced a single example of a message that did not come from a mind."

  Nature can create fascinating patterns - snowflakes, sand dunes, crystals, stalagmites and stalactites. Tornados and turbulence and cloud formations. But non-living things cannot create language. They *cannot* create codes. Rocks cannot think and they cannot talk. And they cannot create information.

That may all very well be true, but it's not. To start with, information does not always come in the form of a message. Everything around any of us is full of information. The message about that information most likely comes from any mind that interprets it and feels interested enough to convey it to others. All of those examples of  "patterns" you gave contain the information inherent to their designs, and it takes a mind to interpret that, to work with that, and find applications for human usage of that information. Interpreted information is what a message contains, and is not the message itself.

Only a mind can look at patterns and see information inherent to them. Your very own statements show it does not require a mind to originate that information. If we don't recognize it does not mean it isn't there. That you may not recognize information latent in the patterns on an Indian blanket, does not mean it cannot be read by another. Layers of rock in the ground form patterns of rings in the soil from which geologists gather information that may be meaningless to you. The rings on a stump, for another example, contain information that a human mind can see the tree's history in, and know what years it suffered drought, floods, fires, and so forth, all the work of mindless Nature. Layers of ice sampled by drilling cores in the Arctic form patterns from which geologists can learn information about millenniums of history, and in which you'll see no pattern, only dirt. The gorgeous patterns formed on canyon walls, to go back to that, also portray information, as do the patterns formed on tortoise shells. Humans read that information and interpret it from Nature's language into our own. You can accredit an Intelligent Designer with all of that, but Nature will be all you can find present. It begs the question: Is it coded if humans can read it and find sense in it?— or can humans read it and find sense it it in spite of there being no code? Is it a "code" only because it appears to carry a set of instructions?— or does it only appear to carry a set of instructions, in spite of that being only a byproduct of an evolutionary process?

DNA is a product of evolution as certainly as any other pattern from which humans can gather information. Follow our complex DNA backwards down the chain of development to the simple self-replicating proteins that have no DNA or RNA at all, and you will see the instant message they offer in support of evolution: It is apparent that life forms in which DNA developed early on had good survival characteristics, and good evolutionary characteristics, and that the early, simple start of that enabled the processes of evolution to develop the complex forms we live with (and are) today. We must never forget the billions of years that passed between that simple start and now that left plenty of time for all the needed kinds of developments. Nor must we forget the entire DNA process had a long head start by developing in RNA. Newest information points toward invasive viruses as the source of genetic coding found in Earth's life forms. Is the god named God an invasive disease?

RNA is generally a single strand of genetic information, while DNA forms a double strand described as a ladder. DNA can synthesize RNA, and both are exactly what one would expect to develop in the briny, warm soup that blanketed early infant Earth. Have you checked to see what's in your swamp lately?

"Proof" comes from evidence that convinces. All Mister Marsh has proven is what I already knew, and convinced me about it to the point of confirmation. What he has done is get me interested enough it caused me to follow up on his claims and to assemble a picture of how DNA could have risen, and toss out whatever puzzle pieces won't fit. That could have gone in favor of his statement, but his ID-based statement failed to find anything beyond rhetorical support. The hard evidence belongs to the evolutionists.

Mister Marsh has described prehistoric times in a way that demonstrates the presence of parasitic memes, and has little to do with any kind of Intelligent Designer. It points one in a direction of concurrence that it's from memes the idea of an existent god named God arises, and from that the further idea of Intelligent Design. It is about that, not about information at all, but about misinformation. No wonder he would claim that information is immaterial.

Memes, once gathered into a memeplex, serve to perpetuate and spread self-originated ideas that can be copied in all the ways he described. They need no "code" to hook themselves into a human host, no "code" for passage onto paper or computer screens, and no "code" for passage into another host. The user provides the code. The language they use already exists and evolved from grunts and other such sounds, and so they are doing nothing more than attaching themselves to the meanings inherent to that.

Plus, there are also no apparent patterns inherent to information as we use it. Truth be told, information is gathered in most cases from the absence of pattern and from patterns that we interpret into forms also absent of pattern, that generate images in our minds, and it is therein that we perceive the patterns. Absence of pattern also contains information that can be read and utilized, and so pattern is not necessary to language, except to express information that has been interpreted. There is no pattern, for instance, in the structure to this sentence, but it does contain the information that no pattern is present in the information passed in this sentence. It is up to whomever reads it to interpret it into brain signals along with whatever that person would add to flavor it.

But then, if we proclaim a sentence to portray a pattern simply because it contains sequences of letters and numbers and punctuation, then we might as well proclaim the sands of the deserts to be patterned. In that case, the amount of variety would have no effect on our determinations and we would have to agree that, if the desert sands are not patterned because they are so numerous or so unreadable, then sequences of acid-spots are equally illegible to most of us, and so are not patterns. Patterns have little to do with codes: A system of symbols, letters, or words given certain arbitrary meanings.

The key is in the word, 'meanings', which refers to the information that can be gained from something. Biologists refer to the steps on the DNA ladder as 'words', and the individual specs as 'letters'. The usage of such a shorthand leads toward such misinterpretation as is present in Mr Marsh's premise, and perhaps scientists could take warning from such unintended results.

But, what if we allow them to be words. Who or what wrote them, who were they for to be read, and how did they come about? We will get to that.

Also from Mister Marsh:

"DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and structures very similar to words, sentences and paragraphs. With very precise instructions and systems that check for errors and correct them. To the person who says that life arose naturally, you need only ask: "Where did the information come from? Show me just ONE example of a language that didn't come from a mind."

Show us one that did, and describe the process. You will describe evolution while doing so. All languages evolved from the original grunts and animal sounds to the present complex formulated grammatical systems we use now. All you have done here, by avoiding my response, is to apply rule number three.

Here, we are left to decide whether we are talking about information, or talking about the tools used for transferring that information in whatever processes are relevant. Language is a tool, not information. Information is what one uses language to interpret, the same as an Englishman must interpret French in order to pass its meaning on to others. The meaning inheres from the interpretation and understanding but not from the language, the alphabet used, nor from the medium used for passing it from one mind to another, nor from inferring meaning from the natural substances wherein it may be found. It arises from the mental images it generates, or not at all.  Read this: Can you read this? Do you see any patterns in it?—or any meaning?

Let me assert that language evolved the same as all other aspects of existence. Language is not useful without meaning, and it is the human mind that finds if meaning is inherent to patterns and learns to interpret them into a patternless form that can be understood. If a pattern cannot be interpreted, it appears meaningless only because its meaning cannot be discerned "by a mind". Dog barks, for example, while quite meaningless to us, appear to follow patterns that provide information to other dogs. Snowflakes appear meaningless, but I'll bet their patterns portray meaning if only we could understand their stories.

So, we may not even recognize a pattern, let alone a meaning, but it does not necessarily follow that meaning is there, none is there, nor that a later generation may not wonder about how dense we were in our own time. We may even refuse to recognize an apparent pattern in order to avoid its implications, but that does not banish its presence nor erase its meaning to other minds, whether in the present or the future. You call it a "language" because it conveys information; I call it "meaningful" for that same reason, but not because of any pattern inhering to it.

French is a language. To me it is meaningless; to a Frenchman, it means everything and English may only be jibber-jabber to him, but both evolved within the circumstances from which they arose, and developed to best fit those circumstances. Yet: We may no longer find meaning in the grunts, screams, moans and clicks of the origins from which they evolved.

Sales talk (hyperbole) does little to convince anybody other than a loyal customer. I imagine thousands of "atheists, skeptics and hostile people" know the solutions but that Mister Marsh cannot grasp or refuses to grasp the meaning inherent to their information. As above, the finest codes are meaningless to anyone who cannot comprehend them, or refuses to acknowledge them. That does not mean they are any less meaningful, nor meaningless, to everyone capable to interpret them. His basic premise is flawed in that respect, and that is enough to destroy any ability to convince whomever finds meaning in that; and, meaning inherent to patterns is what human minds will perceive to be a "code", whether rightly or wrongly. As before, it never requires a mind to originate information.

Whistles, tweets and bleeps coming from outer space originally had astronomers convinced we were receiving messages that we needed to learn how to interpret. Later, convinced it was "just space noise", they decided it was not from humanoids located near far-distant stars, but came from certain kinds of exotic stars, and decided it was meaningless, not a code after all.

What have we been learning of late? --those shrieks, squeals and music-like signals do have apparent patterns, and we can interpret those patterns to learn their sources and ferret the meaning from that. If patterns do have meaning, they do so whether or not we recognize it, that we only have to recognize and that we only need to interpret so we can read the code that's hidden there, the same as we would interpret the pattern-like squeals of a machine running low on oil, but fail to read anything at all from the chaos of other sounds emanating from it, even though a myriad of patterns may be hidden there.

So, if mindless Nature produced DNA, how did it come about? The process is called accretion.

 To the left represents all points toward the distant past; to the right, the future. Intelligent Design runs counter to natural evolution, as it flows from the supremely complex toward the simple as though the God it portrays has been dying or diminishing for all these millenniums. That is the opposite of accretion and represents attrition. Evolution portrays advancement into the future where, in spite of consequential setbacks and restarts, human beings will learn to design increasingly complex but ever-tinier machines the size of molecules and maybe smaller. The need for life to survive on an increasingly crowded planet with limited resources demands that of us.

Don't jump onto the "See! A complex Designer is creating a more complex design!" bandwagon. It just is not so. Nanotechnology may seem complex but the product will be very singular in purpose, for the most part (although who knows what the future may hold).

The graphic shows how life arose by comparing evolution's story with Intelligent Design. Looking at it will show you that a gray area exists between what is "alive" and what is "material" or "substance" (although that is not represented, it can be inferred) in the form of self-replicating proteins. What that shows is that a primitive kind of life (or, sub-life) existed long before RNA and DNA arrived on the scene. We easily understand DNA patterns as having been caused by pollution that had entered cells' systems, postulated to be via invasive viruses, four kinds of which could take root there and replicate.

If microscopic bits somehow entered the picture and had an effect that also replicated, that kind of activity had millions (billions?) of years to evolve by reoccurrence: that is, if it happened once, it could happen millions of times. If a pattern resulted from it, it had to be because that was the best "fit" for the situation. It does not mean that, in Nature, it acted as a "code" however strongly we interpret it that way. Nature is a blind process, it does not read, and evolution is the blind and mindless process by which nature developed. For a process to be described as "mindless" cannot infer a "code" for it to follow. My defense against Mister Marshall's assertions is that the DNA "code" is, really and truly, no more than just another pattern from which we have learned to derive information, however it got into the picture. By accident? Not really. It happened because it could happen, and because it had time to, and because it improved the condition under which some forms of life existed by making it a better "fit". If DNA is caused by pollution, it only means that our cells have more dirt in them than an amoeba's.

Maybe it is a mistake to call a pattern a "code" without explaining to the IDers that it is a code to us, and a result of a natural process that associates the bits of matter that brought about a mutation with the process of replication. Lots of those mutations were probably "one-ofs" but those that reproduced would introduce a subtly different lifeform, to which it had to eventually happen again.

And again (millions of times).

To me, that looks obvious. I suspect that, to people like Mister Marsh, it looks just as obvious but that his preconceptions represent too great of a vested interest for him to acknowledge that.

Besides, if you have looked at the untouchable air he has imposed on his claims, his fear of losing face represents another vested interest he has to maintain.

.

[ Return to TOP ].

"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —