DNA, Where did the code come from?

If you agree, Farmer, than why do you think everyone who doesn't adopt your panadaptionist neo-Darwinian theories is a creationist, I wonder

This is exactly the kind of doubletalk you expect from IDiots.

Youre being disingenuous . I dont accuse everyone, just those that use such an argument to assert that a great schism in science is occuring (thus making a default to GAWDIDIT sound reasonable).

Don't know about you, but I was thinking of my A2K friends FBM, Frank and now Farmer.

But please elaborate on the specifics of why it's BS..

It does, however, reflect current evolutionary theory

Thats one of the old timers, started under Gould I believe. Theres pharyngula, Sandwalk, Talk Origins archive, Bionet, GSA news, NCSE, and several other , more associated with Universities .

Which ones do you not like?

“Disputes between men pertinaciously obstinate in their principles are the most irksome. The same blind adherence to their own arguments is to be expected in both; the same contempt of their antagonists; and the same passionate vehemence in enforcing sophistry and falsehood; and, as reasoning is not the source from whence either disputant derives his tenets, it is in vain to expect that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.” (David Hume)

I don't like any of them

Most biologists, I suspect, will happily own up to the fact that they think of the organism as engaged in strikingly directed and meaningful activity. The lion stalking the gazelle, the bird building a nest, the larva spinning a cocoon, the rose flowering, the cell dividing and differentiating, the organism maintaining its own way of being amid the perturbations of its environment — they all reflect a kind of intentional pursuit we would never attribute to dust, rocks, ocean waves, or clouds.

Biologists, that is, will acknowledge that, at molecular and higher levels, they see almost nothing but an effective employment of a thousand interwoven means to achieve a thousand interwoven ends — all in an almost incomprehensibly organized, coordinated, and integrated fashion expressing the striving of the organism as a whole. The organism, they will say, as it develops from embryo to adult — as it socializes, eats, plays, fights, heals its wounds, communicates, and reproduces — is the most concertedly purposeful entity we could possibly imagine. It does not merely exist in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry; rather, it is telling the meaningful story of its own life.

And then they will take it all back.

What we see through the microscope is what we see with our unaided eyes: life comes from life. Living cells, with all their displays of agency, come from other living cells. Open any journal of any sub-sub-subdiscipline of biology, and you will immediately be overwhelmed by suggestions of agency even at the lowest levels. Molecules, we are told to a fault, are bent on regulating, signaling, stimulating, responding, controlling, assisting, suppressing, healing, repairing, sensing, coordinating — and all in a way that can be understood only contextually. There is nothing at any level of observation, whether above or below macromolecules, that is not caught up in the meaningful life of the organism as a whole.

Such, then, is the living reality that Dawkins refers to as the “appearance of design” or the “illusion of design and planning.” It is also what Dennett has in mind when he writes, “All the Design in the universe can be explained as the product of a process that is ultimately bereft of intelligence, in other words an algorithmic process that weds randomness and selection to produce ... all the intelligence that exists.”

Dawkins and Dennett sometimes seem fixated upon design, presumably as a result of their severely constraining preoccupation with religion and with the “creationism” or “intelligent design” promulgated by some religious folks. Although the word has its legitimate uses, you will not find me speaking of design, simply because — as I’ve made abundantly clear in previous articles — organisms cannot be understood as having been designed, machine-like, whether by an engineer-God or a Blind Watchmaker elevated to god-like status. If organisms participate in a higher life, it is a participation that works from within — at a deep level the ancients recognized as that of the logos informing all things. It is a sharing of the springs of life and being, not a mere receptivity to some sort of external mechanical tinkering modeled anthropocentrically on human engineering.

One answer will occur immediately to anyone properly educated in conventional evolutionary theory: random mutation...

As for genetic mutations specifically, the crucial point was already made by Oxford University biophysicist Norman D. Cook in 1977: “Biological intervention through enzymes and enzyme systems is the principal mechanism of in vivo mutation.” Biologists commonly interpret such mutations as random errors in vital processes such as DNA replication, but “if ... changes in the genetic material are indeed mediated by other cellular molecules, then the idea of ‘randomness’ lacks all but the most trivial descriptive meaning, referring only to our knowledge of the mutation event.”[8].


Furthermore, as British radiologist B. A. Bridges pointed out: even studies of radiation-induced mutation in bacteria have shown that cellular repair systems are “necessary for nearly all of the mutagenic effect of ultraviolet and around 90 percent of that of ionizing radiation.”

We are no longer free to imagine that evolution waits around for “accidents” to knock genes askew so as to provide new material for natural selection to work on. The genome of every organism is actively and insistently remodeled as an expression of its context. Genetic sequences get rewritten, reshuffled, duplicated, turned backward, “invented” from scratch, and otherwise revised in a way that prominently advertises the organism’s accomplished skill in matters of genomic change. The illustrations of this skill are so extensive in the contemporary literature that there is no way to review it adequately here.

Most of the scientists referenced on this web site have come to a wide range of conclusions about different aspects of evolutionary change. Many see evolution as a complex process with distinct mechanisms and stages rather than a phenomenon explainable by a small number of principles. The divergences and multiplicity of ideas, opinions and theories on this website are necessary since many fields of evolutionary biology remain relatively unexplored.

The Third Way web site provides a vehicle for new voices to be heard in evolution debates. It will be a forum for accessing empirical data on areas that have been glossed over by Neo-Darwinian viewpoints. The goal is to focus attention on the molecular and cellular processes which produce novelty without divine interventions or sheer luck.

It is also what Dennett has in mind when he writes, “All the Design in the universe can be explained as the product of a process that is ultimately bereft of intelligence, in other words an algorithmic process that weds randomness and selection to produce ... all the intelligence that exists.”