As I said, you were quite correct to point out that the information in DNA has meaning, i.e. is symbolic information. This is a stronger claim than saying merely “specified complexity.” However, as tribune7 and I have pointed out, that doesn’t reduce the strength or the significance of the fact that it has high specified complexity, which by itself indicates intelligent agency.

Even though a quantitative measure of the specified complexity in DNA may look only at the intrinsic complexity in the DNA itself, by pointing out it has meaning, your point also shows that the complexity of the associate translating machinery must be counted as well. Without that, there can be no symbolic meaning. Symbolic meaning is extrinsic.

In other words, you have succeeded in making the case for intelligent design much, much stronger, and not any weaker. Thanks for making an important point.

duplicating the recipe for building X does not, of itself, enable you to build something other than X (which was already possible).

I would like to hear the rest of your argument filled out explicitly.

For example, are you supposing instead duplication plus subsequent modification of the duplicated gene(s)? (If so, the argument would fail. Please note, “of itself”.)

But what I would really like to hear is your response to the main point, i.e. whether it one can reasonably draw the conclusion that undirected matter and energy would construct the first symbolic information translation machinery.

Another poster alluded to some post of yours that he seemed to think was relevant. However, he neglected to provide a link or reference to it.

Regarding your post at 21, I have the vague feeling that you want us to draw some conclusion from your reference, but I don’t know what you intend. So… what then? Is there an reasoned point that follows?

Following this same line of reasoning, it seems to me that the same can be said for “complex specified information” (CSI).

There is nothing in Dr. Dembski’s various explanations of CSI that necessarily requires that such information be meaningful.

But that wouldn’t be necessary with regard to the intent of CSI, which is to detect design rather than to ascertain the success of the design, and I guess that’s why the emphasis on specificity rather than meaning.

For instance, CSI (and Kolmogorov) would not indicate that there is less information in “George Washington was the first president of the U.K.” than “George Washington was the first president of the U.S.” yet CSI would accurately indicate “George Washington was the first president of the U.K.” to be designed despite it’s obviously lower information content.

A hypothetical example of specified complexity that is not symbolic would be peer-replicating strands of RNA. The arrangement of the bases would matter, making it specified complexity, not random complexity. Yet in that case, the specification (e.g. ability to replicate) would be functional without being symbolic.

Sounds like a viroid to me.

Or, if you want something really remarkable, these.

p.s. BTW, I believe you misrepresented Wells. He never claimed that duplication of genes/information would never have any effect, and he certainly never claimed that deleterious duplications are not possible. His intended point was sound, i.e. duplicating the recipe for building X does not, of itself, enable you to build something other than X (which was already possible). That is a very reasonable observation.

It’s not reasonable if we are talking biology.

Allow me to introduce the Hawaiian Silversword Alliance. A collection of genera that contradicts this particular assertion. Enjoy.

Ribosomes are crucial to life because they produce the proteins that control the chemistry of plants, animals and humans. Working separately, the three laureates used a method called X-ray crystallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
…
Ramakrishnan described his work on ribosomes as an attempt to understand “this large molecular machine that takes information from genes and uses it to stitch together protein.”

He said he and others had been using X-ray crystallography to build an “atomic picture of this enormous machine.”

“Now we can start figure out how it does this complicated process,” he said.

It is interesting also how the author did not fail to insert an utterly gratuitous association with Darwin’s theory — something that has nothing at all to do mapping the structure of ribosomes.

Their work builds on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and, more directly, on the work done by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in medicine for mapping DNA’s double helix, the citation said.

This is another sad example of how Darwinism tends to ride on other coattails for credibility.

The problem for materialists is that this makes the origin of symbolic information impossible to solve by means of undirected chemical and physical processes. The reason is that you can never get to symbolic information until you have the machinery to implement a symbolic language (e.g. a genetic code between codons and functional proteins).

Yet, without having information-driven construction, building something like ribosomes is beyond the reach of undirected, mindless processes that neither know of nor care about creating symbolic information.

The laws of chemistry and physics have never needed symbolic information. They can be entirely fulfilled without it. Rocks, tars, and other meaningless goo will serve just fine. Mindless matter has neither need nor intention nor the means to pursue symbolic information translation machinery.

p.s. BTW, I believe you misrepresented Wells. He never claimed that duplication of genes/information would never have any effect, and he certainly never claimed that deleterious duplications are not possible. His intended point was sound, i.e. duplicating the recipe for building X does not, of itself, enable you to build something other than X (which was already possible). That is a very reasonable observation. It would uncharitable to deny it has a legitimate meaning.

That does not invalidate specified complexity, a concept that existed before Dr. Dembski’s work advancing that area. Specification can be in terms of function and is not limited to symbolic meaning, but it does include cases of meaningful symbolic sequences.

A hypothetical example of specified complexity that is not symbolic would be peer-replicating strands of RNA. The arrangement of the bases would matter, making it specified complexity, not random complexity. Yet in that case, the specification (e.g. ability to replicate) would be functional without being symbolic.

For example, trisomies in humans are almost always fatal, despite that fact that the extra (i.e. third) copy of the relevant chromosome may be (indeed, often is) identical to one or the other of the pair of chromosomes with which it is paired. So devastating is the addition of an extra copy of a chromosome that only one such trisomy is survivable in humans: trisomy 21, which causes Down syndrome.

The problem here is that biological information is fundamentally different from most (perhaps all) of the different definitions of information listed in Dr. Dembski’s post. As I have pointed out in other threads, biological information is meaningful information, in that biological information (especially that contained in the genetic material) is encoded. That is, it “stands for” something else in the same way that the letters in a phonetic alphabet “stand for” phonemes, or in the way that strings of letters “stand for” words, which of course “stand for” the concepts associated with them. Biological systems contain multiple layers of such meaningful information, and as hdx points out, the quantity of such information matters as much as its quality (i.e. its “meaningful” content).

In particular, both Shannon and Kolmogorov information lack any trace of “meaningfulness”. Indeed, both are essentially measures of the relationship between the bits of a message, and have no intrinsic relationship with the meaning of the message (if it has any, which it need not).

Following this same line of reasoning, it seems to me that the same can be said for “complex specified information” (CSI). There is nothing in Dr. Dembski’s various explanations of CSI that necessarily requires that such information be meaningful. Indeed, I have never seen a clear and concise description of the “meaningfulness” of biological information in any of the various theories of information, including Dr. Dembski’s. Until such a description is forthcoming, it seems unlikely that any such theories (including Dr. Dembski’s) will have any bearing on the nature or properties of biological information.