Nancy Pearcey@NancyRPearcey
How DNA gives evidence of a Mind at the origin of life:
"We need at least two levels of explanation to account for living structures—a physical and an organizational explanation. This is best illustrated in the DNA molecule. The bases, sugars, and phosphates that comprise the nucleotides in DNA are ordinary chemicals and react according to ordinary chemical laws. Yet those same laws cannot explain the sequence of bases that spells out the message in DNA.
In the words of chemist Michael Polany, the sequence of bases is “extraneous to” or “independent of” the chemical and physical forces in the DNA molecule. That is, the sequence is not determined by inherent physical forces. It is precisely this “physical indeterminacy” that gives the DNA molecule the flexibility to appear in a variety of sequences, like words on a page.
And if physical forces do not determine the structure of the DNA molecule, then we need to search outside of physics for its organizing principle. We need a second level of explanation.
This becomes clearer if we draw an analogy to human language. The words you read in a book are written in ink. Yet their sequence did not arise from the chemicals in the ink, nor from any chemical interaction between the ink and the paper, nor even from the electronic impulses in the computer when it was originally keyed in. The information is completely independent of the material medium used to store and transmit it.
Exactly the same reasoning applies to the information in DNA. It is independent of the material medium—the strand of chemicals—used to store and transmit it. If we knew how to translate the message encoded in a DNA molecule, we could write it out using other material. We could write it in Magic Marker, in crayon, in finger paint. We could even write with a stick in the sand. And it would still be the same message.
Changing the material medium does not change the message. Information is independent of the material substance that stores and conveys it.
And because a message is independent of the material medium, it does not originate from the medium. The DNA message does not originate in the chemistry of a DNA molecule—any more than the text in a book arose from the paper and ink used to print it.
Yet that is precisely what the reductionist maintains. He proposes that the forces in the chemicals themselves originated the information in DNA. This is tantamount to saying that the ink wrote the words in a book, that the ink molecules spontaneously organized themselves into a complex arrangement of words and paragraphs.
In reality, of course, the words on this page were constrained by the principles of the English language—rules of grammar, interpretation, and sentence construction—along with the rules of logic and reasoning. By the same token, Polanyi argues, the information in the DNA molecule is constrained by special organic rules and principles—principles not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry."
(from The Soul of Science)
