Complex specified information

From PhiloWiki

What is the explanation for the significant amount of information content within DNA?

Christian views

The information content within the cell suggests a designer [p 74] and cannot be explained by evolution [p 223].

Case for a Creator from   Lee Strobel

The heart of Dr. Meyer's argument is found in this scientifically-loaded passage: "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion."

In simpler terms, the mechanism of natural selection, central to evolutionary theory, cannot possibly account for the development of so many varied and complex life forms simply by mutations in DNA. Rather, some conscious design--thus requiring a Designer--is necessary to explain the emergence of these life forms.

Panicked Evolutionists: The Stephen Meyer Controversy from   Albert Mohler

Secular views

The aim of Dr William Dembski's book No Free Lunch is to demonstrate that design (the action of a conscious agent) was involved in the process of biological evolution. The following critique shows that his arguments are deeply flawed and have little to contribute to science or mathematics. To fully address Dembski's arguments has required a lengthy and sometimes technical article, so this summary is provided for the benefit of readers without the time to consider the arguments in full.

Dembski has proposed a method of inference which, he claims, is a rigorous formulation of how we ordinarily recognize design. If we can show that an observed event or object has low probability of occurring under all the non-design hypotheses (explanations) we can think of, Dembski tells us to infer design. This method is purely eliminative--we are to infer design when we have rejected all the other hypotheses we can think of--and is commonly known as an argument from ignorance, or god-of-the-gaps argument.

Because god-of-the-gaps arguments are almost universally recognized by scientists and philosophers of science to be invalid as scientific inferences, Dembski goes to great length to disguise the nature of his method. For example, he inserts a middleman called specified complexity: after rejecting all the non-design hypotheses we can think of, he tells us to infer that the object in question exhibits specified complexity, and then claims that specified complexity is a reliable indicator of design.

The only biological object to which Dembski applies his method is the flagellum of the bacterium E. coli. First, he attempts to show that the flagellum could not have arisen by Darwinian evolution, appealing to a modified version of Michael Behe's argument from irreducible complexity. However Dembski's argument suffers from the same fundamental flaw as Behe's: he fails to allow for changes in the function of a biological system as it evolves.

Since Dembski's method is supposed to be based on probability and he has promised readers of his earlier work a probability calculation, he proceeds to calculate a probability for the origin of the flagellum. But this calculation is based on the assumption that the flagellum arose suddenly, as an utterly random combination of proteins. The calculation is elaborate but totally irrelevant, since no evolutionary biologist proposes that complex biological systems appeared in this way. In fact, this is the same straw man assumption frequently made by Creationists in the past, and which has been likened to a Boeing 747 being assembled by a tornado blowing through a junkyard.

This is all there is to Dembski's main argument. He then makes a secondary argument in which he attempts to show that even if complex biological systems did evolve by undirected evolution, they could have only done so if a designer had fine-tuned the fitness function or inserted complex specified information at the start of the process.

Not a Free Lunch from TalkOrigins  Richard Wein