From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 12:17:19 EDT
Hi Jay,
I am going to reverse my response compared to the way you wrote it. You
wrote last:
>
>All I really care about is whether someone believes Jesus was
>exactly who he
>said he was, that we each need his sacrifice and resurrection to
>be with him
>when everything is finally revealed that great gettin' up
>mornin'..fare thee
>
Absolutely. We agree that this is the most important thing. But, it doesn't
mean that if a person believes who Jesus says he was that we can then allow
that person to misuse facts, misuse logic and generally ignore truth.
You then wrote:
>
>To me, random mutation as the genesis of life as we know it is an unproven
>subjective claimed to be objective solely by acclamation by those who doubt
>the truth of the Bible and strive to find the truth in things far too
>complex to be fully measured by any tools we will ever make or fully
>explained by any wisdom we know how to write. Not to say we shouldn't be
>striving all the while...and one man's facts may be another man's bananas,
>theoretically speaking...
Let me draw another analogy. Life is an information circle. Information
flows through many loops in a living system. From DNA, to the cellular
machinery and then from the cellular machinery back to the DNA. Too often
people miss this subtlety of life. They think information is a one-way
street, DNA->RNA->protein->death. The cellular machinery and the DNA are two
sides of the same information. A mold so to speak, of the other. One can't
have DNA without cellular machinery and you can't have cellular machinery
wihtout DNA. Lowenstein writes:
"However, an unfortunate misusage has crept in in recent years. In the
aftermath of molecular biology's triumpha march waving DNA as its banner, it
became standing practice to refer to DNA as '*the information,' reserving
this term for that molecule alone. Perhaps that came about because this
do-nothing molecule comes closer to the abstract essence of information than
the three-dimensional expressions do, or perhaps, because this molecule
appears to be the source of information when we look just at a little
stretch of the flow, outside the circular context. Old habits die hard, but
let's hope that this one proves the exception because such restricted usage
of the term obscures the picture. The molecules in both biological realms
carry information--an RNA, a protein, or a sugar is as much an informational
molecule as DNA is. The quantities they carry individually are different, to
be sure, but if wwe could weigh tth total amounts of core information in
the molecules of the two realms, they would about balance--the two realms
are but the flip sides of the same information." Werner Lowenstein, The
Touchstone of Life, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 114-115
Now, this is like is something like we see happening in nature. The
moleucules of air move randomly, bumping into each other. But when heating
overheats a part of the ground, the air picks up the heat, and begins to
rise. That rising makes a low pressure area so air flows into it from all
direction. But the coriolis force causes the air to spontaneously form a
loop with feedbacks. The air that flows in, heats and then begins rising,
drawing more air in from the outer regions. The rising air rises, cools and
spreads out at some height. But as it cools it begins to sink, flowing into
the regions evacuated by air flowing into the rising column. This completes
the loop.
This loop is a convection cell. It feeds itself, organizes the air motion,
gives information to the molecules as to how they should move, and in
general this loop governs everything from dust devils to tornados to
hurricanes. In Hurricanes, if you have ever been through one (I have been
through 2) you can see the grand circulation of the hurricane, but there are
also tornados which organize themselves from the eddies occurring in the
larger structure. And then even small 100 m high dustdevil type circulations
occur in hurricanes as well but they are quickly ripped apart.
We, meaning living beings, are information loops. They didn't have to start
out as complex as they are today. They could have easily started as a few
molecules of RNA which mediated each other's construction. Mutation would
find other cases and the feed back loop was on. Just like the rising of
heated air can lead to a hurricane, information loops led to matter storms.
We are matterstorms. We self-organize in our mother's womb's enlarge our
selves by consuming lots of energy (which parents refer to as 'eating us out
of house and home') and then the storm dissipates when death occurs.
So, it isn't all wishful thinking as you would prefer to believe. We see
information flows on several levels all with feedback loops. The
Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction in chemistry has a macroscopic organization
which is an informatoin loop in a dish containing malonic acid, potassium
bromate, and ceric sulfate. Look it up on the internet.
http://people.musc.edu/~alievr/ is a good one with a movie. Where did the
information for the spiralling waves of this reaction come from? Is God's
finger stirring the waters there?
Loops feedback information and give time for mutation to find novel
additions to the loop.
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