Steve: I don't see why any new laws of the universe are required for life.

For one, we do not know how known laws lead to life.

It would be much better to simply find a small peptide which can replicate itself by serving as a template. The rules of chemistry easily allow peptides to form with no special input. It might be something as simple as the right amino acid bath in the presence of polyphosphates and self-assembled phospholipid bilayers. Given how fast life appeared on earth I suspect the answer will turn out to be simpler than we think.

Lead us through this. Assume you have a self-replicating peptide. What happens?

steve:I don't see why any new laws of the universe are required for life. It would be much better to simply find a small peptide which can replicate itself by serving as a template.

I prefaced my remarks by saying:

If computers must be constructed in a certain order with specified parts, and if living cells must also be constructed in a certain order with specified parts….

In other words, if the analogy between constructing computers and constructing living cells is close to identical. If not, then who knows? You might be right. And it's good to see someone not giving up on protein first scenarios! Sydney Fox can use all the help he can get!

And if we did discover them, the universe would resemble a very contrived reality, which would certainly make the case for its own intelligent design far stronger than it currently is. Likewise with laws that would guarantee the production of living cells or self-replicating computers.

I don't see why any new laws of the universe are required for life. It would be much better to simply find a small peptide which can replicate itself by serving as a template. The rules of chemistry easily allow peptides to form with no special input. It might be something as simple as the right amino acid bath in the presence of polyphosphates and self-assembled phospholipid bilayers. Given how fast life appeared on earth I suspect the answer will turn out to be simpler than we think.

We also have observed empirically that the computer factory pipeline (in totality) is always more complex than the computers they make. There is no free lunch in the manufacture of computers in real life. Why should we expect the reverse to be true in OOL where very simple chemical soups make computers more complex than the soup?

To see how solid this argument by analogy is, substitute another valid predicate:

We also have observed empirically that the computer factory pipeline (in totality) is always operated by human beings…there is no a-human lunch in the manufacture of computers in real life…why should we expect the opposite to be true in OOL?

Salvador T. Cordova: It is not a matter of ignorance, but information loses definition without the possibility of uncertainty.

Zachriel: Quite the contrary, it is a matter of ignorance. If we already know the content of a message, then no matter how complicated the bit-stream, no Shannon Information is being transmitted. On the other hand, a random bit-stream has maximum Shannon Information as we cannot predict the content of each succeeding bit.

Salvador T. Cordova: If Zachriel insists that there is no uncertainty in a communication stream, he ought to be able to predict what will appear in tomorrow's newspaper.

Huh? That is contrary to what I wrote. News, by definition, contains Shannon Information because we are uncertain as to its content. But a random stream of letters has more Shannon Information than (an equal length sequence from) the Wall Street Journal. Do you understand why?

Salvador T. Cordova: For information to be present, the laws of nature must allow uncertainty.

It has nothing to do with uncertainty in the laws of nature. Shannon's Information Theory is perfectly consistent with a deterministic universe.

1) Could the original computer come about without the aid of intelligent design?

2) Once the original computer came about, could it design machines without additional information (programs that allow it to learn, and instruct it to design machines)?

3) The current discussion: Could self-replication computers (or living organisms) come about without the aid of intelligent design?

It seems logically possible that there are undiscovered laws of the universe that are rich enough in content that they could generate a self-replicating computer or living cells. But what would they be like? If computers must be constructed in a certain order with specified parts, and if living cells must also be constructed in a certain order with specified parts, then these undiscovered laws must essentially describe the events that must take place, and the order that they must take place in for all of this to happen.

Let's take a simpler example to see why: Baking a cake. In order to bake a cake, one must have the right ingredients, in the right amount, combined in the right way, in the right order, and placed in an appropriate container, and placed in an appropritate source of heat, and baked for the appropriate amount of time. If laws of nature existed that made sure this happened, they would be far different from any that we have yet discovered. And if we did discover them, the universe would resemble a very contrived reality, which would certainly make the case for its own intelligent design far stronger than it currently is. Likewise with laws that would guarantee the production of living cells or self-replicating computers.

Sal, incompressibility of data doesn't mean much. Generate a string of (pseudo) random numbers using a standard random number generator and try to compress it. The zip file will have essentially the same size. Is there much meaning in a string of random numbers? Not necessarily.

Thank you for bringing forward this point…

The fact that a small algorithm (the pseudo-random generator) generated the pseudo-random string implies the data is compressible, ZIP was simply unable to find a more compact compression than the generating algorithm….

But as far as OOL goes, the idea is to find a compact set of simple conditions which spawns a self-replicating computer more complex than the original set of simple conditions. An honest search for OOL is essentially a search for a compression.

Trevors, being an atheist possibly doesn't think ID is a solution.

A physicist by the name of Hubert Yockey (Oppenheimer's student), who has left affiliation with the ID movement, thinks the OOL question is unsolvable by science because of the problem posed in finding a small set of conditions which can build a self-replicating computer….

Yockey published a peer-reviewed book by Cambridge University Press.

See: http://www.cynthiayockey.com/p...

The origin of life is unsolvable as a scientific problem.

Proven by Dr. Hubert P. Yockey (Information Theory and Molecular Biology, Cambridge University Press, 1992; Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Predicted by Nobel laureate Niels Bohr in 1933

It's too bad AIguy is taking a break, because he would be someone that could offer a good opinion on these matters….

A minimal self-replicating computer seems to be no smaller than about 5000 bits (and this is being optimistic since von Neuman's self-replicating automata had 100,000+ parts). Can we compress this down to say 20 bits, or twenty simple conditions for an OOL solution?

Even though Yockey apparently despises ID, I think he found a specification (in a self-replicating computer) that is the delight of ID proponents.

I suppose he rather disdains the enormous adoration the ID movement has sent his way. Oddly he was listed as a part of ARN once upon a time,

http://www.arn.org/infopage/yo...

and even this Christian organization:

http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1...

I think that's worthy of a post. What do you say, Bradford?

Might be worthy of a post, but not much more. The article contains a number of unsupported assumptions ("cells were very different when life began 3.5 billion to four billion years ago"; "[cells] lacked the structures and proteins that now make them tick"; etc.).

The research is not even close to creating a living cell, at least not in the sense of anything that would be recognized as a living cell today.

Certainly interesting research worth following, and I do expect that at some point in the next decade or so someone will succeed in creating a "functional" cell.

At that point, it will have been empirically demonstrated that intelligent agents can create living cells (as if such demonstration were needed).

Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living Cell

I think that's worthy of a post. What do you say, Bradford?