iapetus said:
The famous creationist, Dr Werner Gitt (something you neglected to mention when citing him previously, which might be considered germane by some...) I can't find any useful references to him other than those associated with creationist websites, which suggests to me that he isn't exactly highly respected outside that narrow and somewhat biased clique.
None of his books appear on the reading list of any information science course.
The idea that complex behaviour can not emerge from a simple ruleset is one that always stuns me when people put it forward - perhaps it's my background in AI that makes it so obvious to me that they're wrong.
"The retired Dr Gitt was a director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Braunschweig), the Head of the Department of Information Technology. Three prerequisites must be fulfilled in order for the German Ministerium to award the title Director and Professor at a German research institute, on the recommendation of the Praesidium. The person concerned must be:
-A scientist. I.e. it is most definitely an academic title.
One who has published a significant number of original research papers in the technical literature.
-Must head a department in his area of expertise, in which several working scientists are employed"
(
Source)
Let's get this straight: I am not arguing X is true because "Person X" said so. About, Dr. Werner Gitt, he is a qualified scientist for his position. To immediately debunk what he has to say about his field because he is a creationist and because he doesn't appear in
your limited amounts of literature in a list of science courses (I highly doubt you looked through your stash of scientific peer-reviewed science journals) is absurd. Perhaps, you aren't debunking him but questioning his position based on a "suggestion that he is not respected in useful references". What about all other qualified and respected scientists (wheather creationist or evolutionist) that didn't make it to your limited reading list? By these absurd conditions it is unfair to label them as being "questionable". I have a hunch, that it
might be the case that Dr. Werner Gitt is simply questionable to you by other reasons, like the fact that he is an outspoekn creationist that to many evolution-indoctrinated people ring a bell that says "wacko" or "pseudo-scientist", etc. And to clear up what I think might just be inevitable anyways: I am pointing out some basic points about "X creationist scientist being questionable by these premises" and not defending Dr. Werner Gitt
per se (merely saying that someone is qualified doesn't necessarily imply I am defending him). In summary, one cannot debunk someone when the reasons for the debunking cannot even hold up. I come off as if trying to teach you a lesson about something, which I don't mean to. Arguing a point online has some serious social baggage attached to it.
Since you imply that you'll be taking an information course, with new knowledge you gain you can critique an article from Dr. Werner Gitt that was published on Technical Journal (First published: TJ 10(2):181187 August 1996) which contains material that can be understood by anyone that knows elementary concepts about information science. That outta be fun. Seriously, not sarcastically.
------------------------------------------------
Do The Mario, although informative and although I can take out my high-school sophomore Biology book and read it myself, your post doesn't address the issue. To me your two posts are examples of a tactic known as "elephant hurling", hoping that by showing an overload of information (quantity) might be equated to validity (quality)
You should've addressed a vitally important issue; the origin of life through lifeless chemicals instead of focusing what
happens after the fact. First address the issue that grants merit to the following issue (prove the pre-supposition being valid). If one doesn't do this, one would have to do some serious inductive work with the handy tool of Bayes's theorem.
Here are some quotations from Scientific American's 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense, and their rebuttal by
Dr. Jonathan Sarfati. SA in bold.
The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids, and other building blocks of life could have formed
. [SA 81]
JS: Actually, they have found out how some major building blocks
cannot be formed, e.g., cytosine. The proposed prebiotic conditions that biochemists attempt to recreate in the laboratory are unrealistic because it is highly unlikely that the alleged precursor chemicals could ever have concentrated sufficiently, and these chemicals would have undergone side reactions with other organic compounds. Cytosine is far too unstable, anyway, to have accumulated over deep time because its half life is only 340 years at 25° C.1
and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units
. [SA 81]
JS: This is just bluff, since spontaneous polymerization is a major hurdle for non-living chemicals to overcome.2 So is producing molecules all of one handedness.3 Chemical evolutionists have yet to solve these problems, let alone produce any self-replicating system which has any relevance to cells.4
laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young. [SA 81]
JS: Again, wishful thinking, partly motivated by the hopelessness of current theories about life spontaneously generating on earth. There are several problems, including the following:5
The amounts of these chemicals are tinyfar too low to contribute to biological processes.
The wide variety of compounds in itself counts as evidence against chemical evolution. Even with pure compounds used in experiments, the results are meager, so how much worse would they be with the contaminated gunk produced in the real world?
Sugars are very unstable, and easily decompose or react with other chemicals. This counts against any proposed mechanism to concentrate them to useable proportions.
Living things require homochiral sugars, i.e., with the same handedness, but the ones from space would not have been.
Even under highly artificial conditions, there is no plausible method of making the sugar ribose join to some of the essential building blocks needed to make DNA or RNA. Instead, the tendency is for long molecules to break down.
Even DNA or RNA by themselves would not constitute life, since its not enough just to join the bases (letters) together, but the sequence must be meaningfuland this sequence is not a function of the chemistry of the letters.
Even the correct letter sequence would be meaningless without elaborate decoding machinery to translate it. Unless the decoding machinery already existed, those instructions could never be read. Similarly, this book would be useless to a non-English-speaker, who may know the Roman alphabet but lacks knowledge of the code of the English language to convert letters into meaningful concepts.
(
Source)
----------
The easiest thing to do is to quote websites, etc. I realize that, but this particular rebuttal to SA outlines the issue of the improbability of life and information (decoding encoding systems that are necessary for information) arising from matter, subjects which I've insisted in being integral to answering a part of this thread's question.
