Life Origin

A Scientific Approach

Edited for the Non-Scientist

#10 How did life’s initial programming get read, interpreted and processed?  

The reading and processing of a program is a whole different animal than the programming itself. 1-3   How inanimate nature could have programmed life seems to be an insurmountable problem. 4-25  But that is not the end of the nightmare for naturalistic, physicalistic worldview presuppositions.  

How could chance and necessity (physical law), mass and energy, have read and processed the first programming instructions? 

Instructions come in the form of meaningful, semantic messages. 8   Instructions constitute Prescriptive Information (PI). 6, 9, 26   A program is a representation of meaningful instructions.  The program is a sequence of particular choices which, if followed, produces needed function.  A program uses a symbol system to record these specific purposeful choices. 13, 14, 17, 22, 24   But a symbol system is abstract and conceptual, not physical. 6, 10, 12

Material Symbol Systems (MSS) do exist. 17, 27   Physical tokens are used on which meaningful symbols are inscribed.  An example is the game of Scrabble.  The blocks of wood are physical tokens (physical symbol vehicles).   But, when we rearrange the physical tokens, what we are really doing is abstractly and conceptually rearranging representational symbols.  When we create words, we are formalizing meaning.  We may use the physical blocks of wood, but the words we create are purely formal.  Under no circumstances can the blocks of wood arrange themselves, by the laws of physics, into meaningful words.  

The same is true of nucleotides.  They are physical tokens.  They cannot arrange themselves by the laws of physics and chemistry into meaningful sequences in DNA.  Nucleotides cannot generate formal instructions for how to make proteins and RNA controllers. 

So when we come to the processing of DNA instructions (that is, the processing of genetic programming: "computing life"), the first question we have to ask relevant to life origin is, “How could mass and energy read and interpret a symbol system that formally (abstractly and conceptually) represents purposeful choices?  Representationalism isn’t physical or chemical.  It’s purely formal. 12

How could physicality have processed the first representational program, even if non-living nature could have written that program?

The simplest cell requires many programs and minicomputers to process the most ingenious parallel programming known to computer science.

How could both the program and the processing equipment just happen to have evolved at the same time and place?

Do we have any idea just how much blind faith is required to believe that both the programming and processing of sub-cellular life “just happened”?

The problem of the birth of sub-cellular life is just the beginning.   Well down the line of macro evolutionary blind faith is the belief that the male and female urogenital tracts both of every genus or family just happened to evolve at the same time and place for each species to be able to procreate.  We have no idea how conceptually complex is the male urogenital system, and how conceptually complex is the female urogenital system, for each genus or family. 

How could the male urogenital tract, in all of its detail (Cowper’s glands, prostate, testicle, epididymis, vas deferens, urethra, corpus cavernosa, glans penis, viable meiotic spermatozoa, etc.) of any “genus” or “family” just happen to evolve at the same time and place as the female urogenital tract, with all of its specific reproductive organ system requirements (including female vulva, vagina, lubricating glands, cervix, fallopian tubes, ovaries, follicles, ova, menstrual cycles, hormones like progesterone, estrogen, prolactin,etc.) just for mating to be possible?  Then gestation and delivery has to be fully mapped out by extensive programming, and eventually processed when the time comes.

The study of anatomy and physiology can be purely scientific.  The dogmatic, fanatical belief that all of this unique sexual and reproductive design and engineering came into existence at the same place and time, for each sex, each and every time a new kind of animal or plant "evolved" is absurd.  Such a faith system is not only pure metaphysics, it is irrational metaphysics. Some would go so far as to say that it is nothng less than superstition. 



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  2.          D'Onofrio DJ, Abel DL, Johnson DE.Dichotomy in the definition of prescriptive information suggests both prescribed data and prescribed algorithms: biosemiotics applications in genomic systems. Theor Biol Med Model. 2012;9(1):8    Open access  at http://www.tbiomed.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-1749-1748.pdf [Last accessed March, 2015].

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26.          Abel DL, ed The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control. New York, NY: LongView Press-Academic; 2011.

27.          Rocha LM. Evolution with material symbol systems. Biosystems. 2001;60:95-121.