An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, July 15, 2018, 04:38 (2105 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

After my initial request to have my hypothesis vetted, I ran into a couple of common problems. First was a problem of definitions, which I will try to clarify here, the other is more of Story Time, for those that just have to have it.

Information

When we talk about information in the context of evolution, we are talking about Information Theory. "Abstractly, it can be thought of as the resolution of uncertainty.." On a more practical level, it is about communicating a clear message over chaos; finding out if there is chance that a monkey banging on a typewriter forever would eventually produce shakespear, and when that chance becomes impossible for practical purposes. It also ties in closely with Coding Theory which is primarily concerned with the removal of redundancy and the correction or detection of errors in the transmitted data.

DNA is a quaternary system comprised of AGTC. These genetic bits are read in nucleotide triplets known as codons. There are only 64 possibilities from these 4 characters, AGCT, and they are used to create amino acids, which are in turn used to create proteins. What's interesting is that quaternary is more efficient at storing information, that is, more can be stored using a smaller number of bits. Coding Theory would call this compression.

But God...

Leave God, or any other designer, out of the conversation. That's philosophy or religion, not science. Besides, it is ultimately unecessary. You can study a car, and know the car was designed, without having to make inferences about the designer. You can, however, make inferences about how the designer thinks by studying what was designed and how. Still, inferring possibilities about the nature of the designer is not science.

Q&A

Do I believe in God? Yes.
Do I think he dabbled? Yes.
Is that pertinent to this hypothesis? Only that the designer dabbled, or not. Noting an overall increase in the amount of information in a system means the information had to come from somewhere, and observation tells us that these changes would need to happen between generations, essentially. If they were present in the parent, why weren't they expressed, and how were they acquired? If it is possible to acquire new genetic information gradually, why wasn't that information being processed prematurely, thus killing the host?

Could David or DHW be right? Absolutely! Just point me to the evidence.

Language Difficulties

I've noticed that there has been some difficulty in even thinking about biology without evolution. It is so engrained into thought patterns that even when arguing against it we use a language that was developed entirely to support it as truth, and the language is so fluid and murky as to be meaningless. Are you including Abiogeneis (which violates the Law of Biogenesis) as part of what you mean when you say 'Evolution'? Do you mean common descent and random mutations acted upon by Natural selection? Do you simply mean 'to change'?

You *think* in terms of evolution, such as species. Species that are subjectively classified and whose very classifications are problematic because genetic information disagrees with what we see and have though of as important. Every definition of species fails to match all the data, yet you think speciation is real, without evidence. Any time I press for hard definitions there is a lot of harumphing and paper shuffling. You *think* in terms of Macroevolution, huge leaps of fully complete genetic information, even with all the missing evidence.

In short, how can you hope to find a counter theory to evolution if you only think in terms of evolution?

Falsifiability

You can not prove a negative, and there is little that can be claimed with 100% certainty. However, you can prove something false. Just test it. That is the root of falsifiability. Falsifiabiilty is key to the concept of repeatability, which is fundamental to science. For a statement to be predictive means that, if you were to assume that statement as true, and analyze some data using that assumption, the results should be what you expected, or at the very least near to it. Again, this is key to repeatability. That means that a statement made scientifically should be both predictive and falsifiable.

When I state that the genetic language is a designed language, ubiquitous throughout all life, that statement is both predictive and falsifiable. Find an organism that doesn't use DNA, and it is false. Prove experimentally that what we see can happen by chance, and it is at the very least, on shaky ground. Prove objectively (by intermediate fossils or direct observation) that microevolution leads to macroevolution and it could be considered false, or at the very least on shaky ground. If a statement I made is not falsifiable or predictive, let me know and I will restate it.

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.