Is There Evidence of Something Beyond Nature?

Another good Lennox Video - Is there evidence of something beyond nature?

At the Veritas Forum at Harvard, Oxford Mathematician John Lennox argues that there is evidence of transcendence beyond nature. Semiotics - signs like letters and numbers - cannot be explained in a purely reductionist fashion but require an appeal to the mind.

 

 

Paul Davies on the Origin of Life as an Information Problem

"Based on simple mathematical models, we think it may have happened suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting into flame." 

IDvolution - God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.

Paul Davies on the Origin of Life as an Information Problem

The Guardian features an interesting article by Paul Davies: “The secret of life won’t be cooked up in a chemistry lab: Life’s origins may only be explained through a study of its unique management of information.” Davies writes, 

"If we cast the problem of life's origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware – the chemical substrate of life – but ignore the software – the informational aspect. To explain how life began we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.

To take a simple example; whether a cell expresses a gene can depend on mechanical stresses or electric fields acting on the whole cell by its environment. Thus, a change in global information (a pattern of force) at the macroscopic level translates into a change in local information movement at the microscopic level (switching on a gene). More generally, a range of signals received from its environment help to dictate how a cell's DNA is distributed and transcribed. Walker and I propose that the key transition on the road to life occurred when top-down information flow first predominated. Based on simple mathematical models, we think it may have happened suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting into flame"

A new definition of species

I had predicted this a number of times before.  As we study genetics further we will find a better way to classify species.  Alas, here we have a new paper that

Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species

Recent experimental data from proteomics and genomics are interpreted here in ways that challenge the predominant viewpoint in biology according to which the four evolutionary processes, including mutation, recombination, natural selection and genetic drift, are sufficient to explain the origination of species. The predominant viewpoint appears incompatible with the finding that the sequenced genome of each species contains hundreds, or even thousands, of unique genes – the genes that are not shared with any other species. These unique genes and proteins, singletons, define the very character of every species. Moreover, the distribution of protein families from the sequenced genomes indicates that the complexity of genomes grows in a manner different from that of self-organizing networks: the dominance of singletons leads to the conclusion that in living organisms a most unlikely phenomenon can be the most common one. In order to provide proper rationale for these conclusions related to the singletons, the paper first treats the frequency of functional proteins among random sequences, followed by a discussion on the protein structure space, and it ends by questioning the idea that protein domains represent conserved units of evolution.

Information - the Word, The Logos

This is a video worth watching.  The Q an A is also interesting.  The tide is turning....

More support for IDvolution - God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.

"the displacement problem  - where every attempt to explain the origin of information absent an intelligent agent either fails or it surreptitiously smuggles in the effect of intelligent agency...."

... "a byproduct of this artificial restriction on reasoning that excludes the reality of something of which we all know, which is mind, agency has certain causal powers that nature itself by itself does not have and when we encounter effects that we know only agents can produce it is rational to infer the activity of agency not to exclude it on principle and say well we must be scientific"

'Intelligent Design: The Most Credible Idea?' A Lecture by Dr Stephen C Meyer

The third axis: Information - the "breath" of God, Creative Reason.

The third axis: Information - the "breath" of God, Creative Reason.

. More support for IDvolution.



Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics

Review

"This is the anthology we have been waiting for ... seminal papers deal with matter through the history of Greek thought, seventeenth-century materialism and twentieth-century dematerialism, the need for a new scientific world view in the light of the quantum nature of the universe, and the storage and transmission of information in biological systems with the new knowledge of their genomes and development ... Philosophers, theologians and scientists all have their say, wrestling with the theme of God as the ultimate informational and structuring principle in the universe."
Professor Sir Brian Heap, St Edmund's College, President, European Academies Science Advisory Board, German Academy of Sciences

Product Description

Many scientists regard mass and energy as the primary currency of nature. In recent years, however, the concept of information has gained importance. Why? In this book, eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians chart various aspects of information, from quantum information to biological and digital information, in order to understand how nature works. Beginning with a historical treatment of the topic, the book also examines physical and biological approaches to information, and its philosophical, theological and ethical implications.