"We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects." -- Einstein
It is almost impossible, when describing the nature of DNA, and the function of DNA, to avoid using terms which imply intelligence and intention. This is how Microsoft's Bill Gates put it:
"DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we've ever devised."
A software program is designed. It contains the product of intelligence: instructional information. The information itself is not the same as the medium on which the instructions reside. You can store software instructions on a hard drive, in internal memory, on a printout, on a magnetic disk, on paper tape, or on punched cards. There are two discrete objects involved, the instructions, and the medium on which they are captured.
If we came across 48 feet of library shelves filled with 384 volumes of highly inter-related and inter-dependent information, we would concede that this information was the product of intelligence. We would laugh at anyone who suggested that this information popped into place of its own accord, without a guiding intelligence. Put this same information in the form of DNA encoding, and suddenly we've got zero design and zero intelligence at work. Yet the results obtained vastly exceed anything that supposedly intelligent human beings could ever hope of matching.
We know about software is that it is often written iteratively and progressively, with refinements and extensions and additions of functionality. Yet, we don't hold this against the programmers; we don't accuse them of being engaged in a mindless process; we understand that their iterative efforts represent intelligence at work. Whether a program takes an hour to write, or a year, it's still intelligence at work, regardless of the process used and the time taken.
Another thing we know about software: it may not work as well as we would like; it may contain bugs, or, as Bill Gates might put it, "known issues". A program written by a human being may not even "work", or may not perform a useful function -- yet we still accept the instructions, as faltering as they may be, as evidence of intelligence at work.
Sometimes, a programmer will take a framework of code and use it for other purposes; it's called reusability, and it's considered a desirable design technique. A whole design paradigm, object-oriented design, is based on this concept of extendability and reuse. When programmers use this technique we call them smart, not stupid, or, worse, mindless.
DNA is like a software program that contains more logic than would fit in the world's largest encyclopedia.
And so I ask you to consider, whether the code took six days or six billion years to write, "who wrote the code?".
3 comments:
By what necessity must the code in DNA have a discrete author?
Because in all of human experience of reality, encoded information implies intelligence at work. The intelligence could be, arguably, plural and collaborative.
Also, by the necessity of sufficient cause. Any effect must have a sufficient cause.
A cell has enough information to fill and encyclopedia and yet a human for example has 10 to 75 trillion cells depending on our age; yet these independent cells are strangely dependent. The 'necessity' comes from the fact that these interactive anomalies by nature are unto themselves an encyclopedia, time and time again each minute step of the way. The interdependence necessitates this 'necessity'.
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