Response to Darrel Falk’s Review of Signature in the Cell

Response to Darrel Falk’s Review of Signature in the Cell By Dr. Stephen Mayer Note: Dr. Darrell Falk, a professor of biology at Point Loma Nazarene University, reviewed a signature book in the cell, in a blog post by the Biologos Foundation called Science & the Sacred. 1985 saw a conference that brought to my attention an important question in the biology of the emergence of life, the question of the interpretation of the emergence of information necessary for the production of the first living cell. I was working as a geophysicist in the field of digital signal processing, a form of information analysis and technology, and then a year later at the Graduate Institute at the University of Cambridge where I completed my doctoral thesis in the philosophy of science after completing interdisciplinary research in the scientific and methodological issues of the biology of the emergence of life, and continued in subsequent years to study the question of the emergence of life, and wrote scientific articles Peer-reviewed and peer-edited on the subject of biological origins, as well as co-author of a textbook on biology, and published last year [2009] a signature book in Cell after researching its topic for more than two decades, a book that provides a lengthy assessment of the competing underlying theories of the emergence of biological information and the related issue Since the book's completion, it has been endorsed by many prominent scientists, including Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Scott Turner, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York, and Professor Norman Nevin, one of Britain's leading geneticists. However, in his recent review on BioLogos, Professor Darrell described me as simply a well-meaning but unqualified philosopher and believer, lacking the scientific expertise to evaluate life-creation research, and having overlooked promising pre-life simulation experiments that had recently emerged. Valcke relied on just two of those experiments to conclude that I had been too quick to judge that pre-life chemistry could not explain life’s emergence. The central argument in my book is that intelligent design – that is, the activity of a rational conscious agent and mastermind – explains why the information necessary to produce the first living cell is best explained, and I say this for two reasons that we know from our consistent and repeated experience that I see, as Charles Darwin sees it, as the basis of all scientific explanations of past events. First, intelligent agents have proven the ability to produce large amounts of qualitative information functionally (especially in digital form), and second, no unguided chemical process has shown to be sufficient. Valcke does not refute this claim in any part of his review, nor does he provide another explanation for the emergence of biological information. To do so, he needs to prove the existence of an undirected physical cause with the ability to produce functional biological information away from directing a mastermind’s mind or activity. To support his claim that I rushed to make judgments, Falk first cited a scientific study published in the spring following the publication of my book, a paper authored by Manchester University chemist John Sutherland and two of his colleagues. Starting with tricarbon sugar (D – glyceraldehyde), and another compound called 2-aminooxazole, Sutherland successfully synthesized pentacarbon sugar linked to a phosphate base and group, i.e. he produced ribonucleotide. The scientific press rightly celebrated this experiment as a qualitative transporter of pre-life chemistry because chemists previously believed (as I mentioned in my book) that the conditions needed to synthesize the synthesis were inadequate. Sutherland’s research, however, does not refute the central argument in my book, nor does it support even the claim that it is too early to conclude that only intelligent agents demonstrate the ability to produce qualitative information functionally. In chapter 14 of my book, I describe and disprove the RNA world scenario, and in that chapter I present five major problems inherent in the theory. Sutherland's research only partially explains the first and most basic of these difficulties: the generation of foundational building stones or monomers in plausible prebiotic conditions, but it avoids the most serious problem of explaining how the foundations of nuclear acidity (whether DNA or RNA) acquire their "generic" order. Yet Sutherland's work does not correspond to the conditions before real vitality, and this is represented in three ways that really confirm my argument. Sutherland first chose to start his reaction with the right (molecular) macromolecules only of the three-carbon polysaccharides required to start the chain reaction. Why? Because he knew that not doing so would give a biologically insignificant result, if Sutherland chose to use the right-and-facilitated racemic mixture of the right-and-macilitated macromolecules, the reaction would generate an undesirable combination of stereoisomers. There is no source of such a non-racemic mixture of sugars in any reasonable prebiotic environment. Second, the reaction used by Sutherland to produce ribonucleotides involved many separate chemical steps, and at each step of the multi-step reaction Sutherland himself intervened by purifying the reaction product from the previous step, removing the unwanted byproducts, thus preventing by his own will and thought and armed with the experimental technique the occurrence of any intercepting cross-reactions, the nightmare of every chemist who researches pre-life chemistry. Third, Sutherland followed a "prescription" or highly accurate procedure, carefully selecting the chemical reagents, and planning the order of their addition in the reaction sequence, as well as choosing which side products to remove, and when to remove them. These recipes by chemists represent what the late Hungarian physical chemist Michael Polanyi calls "intelligent instructional interventions." In sum, the problem is not only that Sutherland’s experiment did not address the larger fundamental problem of arranging nucleotide bases for itself in functionally qualitative sequences, but that the success of the experiment in producing life-friendly chemical components actually proved the indispensable role of intelligence in generating that chemistry. The second experiment that Falk cited to refute my book further illustrates this problem, and I mentioned this experiment in a paper by Tracy Lincoln and Gerald Joyce, in which they demonstrate what appears to be the ability of RNA to self-replicate, thus giving realism to one of the key stages of the RNA hypothesis. However, Falk is the one who came to the wrong conclusion in this paper. The main problem facing researchers in the emergence of life is not the synthesis of prebiotic building blocks (discussed in Sutherland’s research) or even the synthesis of the self-replicating RNA molecule (which Joyce and Tracy failed to prove to be realistic: see below), but rather the basic problem is to make the chemical building blocks rank themselves within a large information carrier molecule (whether DNA or DNA). The Lincoln-Joyce experiment described by Falk didn't solve this problem, or at least it couldn't solve it without Lincoln-Joyce's intelligent sequence intervention. First, the "self-replicating" RNA molecules they create are incapable of copying the template of genetic information from free chemical monomers like the polymerase mechanism does in real cells. Lincoln and Joyce's experiment actually confirms three claims I made in a book Signature in the Cell. First, the experiment demonstrated that the ability to self-replicate, even simple functional replication in RNA, depends on specific sequences of substrates (i.e., information-rich) in these molecules, and second, it showed that the ability of genetic information to replicate, even partial replication, in RNA molecules arises from the intervention of chemists, i.e. from the intelligence of what the RNA engineers designed and produced. For nearly sixty years, researchers have tried to take advantage of pre-life simulation experiments to find a realistic way in which life is formed by simple rigid chemicals, and then support the theory of chemical evolution. While these experiments sometimes have interesting facts about the conditions under which certain small molecules produce (or do not produce) different reactions that allow for large biological molecules, they have never shown us how information in these large molecules (especially DNA and RNA) is created. This lack of chemical specificity is exactly what allows DNA and RNA to function as information carriers, and it is also what rules out attempts to explain the emergence of information – the exact sequence of bases – in those molecules as the inevitable result of chemical deterministic interactions. Despite the above, Prof. Falk believes that reaching negative conclusions about the adequacy of purely non-directed chemical processes, or worse, by concluding the existence of intelligent design, is fundamentally premature, and he believes that such thinking in fact abandons science, or commit the fallacy of “argument from ignorance,” but this reveals his misunderstanding of science and the basis of his design argument. The laws of conservation of energy in thermodynamics, for example, negate certain results. The first law says that energy is never created or destroyed, while the second law says that entropy in a closed system will never decrease with time. More importantly, we have great confidence in these laws because they are based on our regular and repeated experience. We also have accumulated experience today showing that what I call qualitative or functional information (especially if it is coded in numerical form) does not arise from purely physical or chemical precursors. The engineering of the ribosomal enzyme in fact, and the pre-life simulation experiments that Professor Falk recommends to me, lends inductive support to this generalization. On the other hand, we know that there is a reason (or pattern of reason) that has been shown to produce qualitative information functionally. Wherever we find information (whether it is hidden in a radio signal, or engraved in a rock statue, or written in a book, or engraved in a magnetic disk) and trace it to its source, we always find that it came from a mind, and it is not just the result of a physical process, so the discovery of qualitative information functionally and digitally coded along the structure of DNA has a positive proof of the existence of a previous structure of intelligent designer. This conclusion is not based on what we already know. Professor Falk’s rejection of this knowledge as knowledge, and his rejection of the design argument based on it, reflects his own commitment to finding a solution to the question of the emergence of life within a rigid physical structure. Falk and his colleagues have stated in the Biologos that they believe in the doctrine of systematic naturalism, the idea that in order for the world to be a world, we must confine ourselves to simulating physical experiments only for all phenomena. We see in the structure of information-rich life a clear indicator of intelligent activity, and we start looking at living systems accordingly. If that makes us philosophers rather than scientists by Professor Falk's definition, so be it. But now I think the bullet has bounced back in its owner's throat. — Source: Published on Facebook's "Braheen Center" page https://www.facebook.com/braheen.org/posts/pfbid03987Ncx9bLdPdZqPP6Y6mRHMaNv8xg4L1bdPPk9Uh1EdkCtTzgH3LMZj55GKf3icl