The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control [Paperback]

David L Abel (Author, Editor), Kirk K Durston (Contributor), David K.Y. Chiu (Contributor), Donald E Johnson (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2011

“The First Gene: The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control” is a peer-reviewed anthology of papers that focuses, for the first time, entirely on the following difficult scientific questions: *How did physics and chemistry write the first genetic instructions? *How could a prebiotic (pre-life, inanimate) environment consisting of nothing but chance and necessity have programmed logic gates, decision nodes, configurable-switch settings, and prescriptive information using a symbolic system of codons (three nucleotides per unit/block of code)? The codon table is formal, not physical. It has also been shown to be conceptually ideal. *How did primordial nature know how to write in redundancy codes that maximally protect information? *How did mere physics encode and decode linear digital instructions that are not determined by physical interactions? All known life is networked and cybernetic. “Cybernetics” is the study of various means of steering, organizing and controlling objects and events toward producing utility. The constraints of initial conditions and the physical laws themselves are blind and indifferent to functional success. Only controls, not constraints, steer events toward the goal of usefulness (e.g., becoming alive or staying alive). Life-origin science cannot advance until first answering these questions: *1-How does nonphysical programming arise out of physicality to then establish control over that physicality? *2-How did inanimate nature give rise to a formally-directed, linear, digital, symbol-based and cybernetic-rich life? *3-What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for turning physics and chemistry into formal controls, regulation, organization, engineering, and computational feats? “The First Gene” directly addresses these questions.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Few specialists exist in the world in either of two new scientific disciplines: ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics. Because of the paucity of researchers in these two fields, the Editor of this anthology was forced to introduce both scientific disciplines by contributing most of the chapters in this initial anthology. Hopefully, this work will seed a long list of contributors to the next ProtoBioCybernetic and ProtoBioSemiotic anthologies. No two fields of science are more fascinating and challenging. Donald E. Johnson is uniquely qualified to contribute to both of these fields by virtue of having multiple PhD’s in chemistry, information theory and computer science. His book Programming of Life is a national best seller, and contains much material directly relevant to this anthology. His book Probability's Nature and Nature's Probability (A call to scientific integrity) also takes an honest look at the constraints of probabilistic resources on what could possibly have occurred randomly over large periods of time. David Chiu is a mathematician and Kirk Durston is a biophysicist, both at the University of Guelph. Their peer-reviewed science journal publications have centered on the difficult problem of measuring the change in Functional Sequence Complexity (FSC) of proteins during evolution. Change in the FSC of proteins as they evolve can be measured in “Fits”— Functional bits. The ability to quantify changes in biofunctionality during evolutionary transition represents one of the most important advances in biological research in recent decades. See especially, Durston, K.K.; Chiu, D.K.; Abel, D.L.; Trevors, J.T. 2007, Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins, Theor Biol Med Model, 4, 47 (Free on-line access at http://www.tbiomed.com/content/4/1/47). Because this book is also being made available in e-book format (e.g., for Kindles), many awkward internet links have been deliberately left in the text and reference lists. A glossary is included to define and expound on many technical terms used within this anthology. David L. Abel, Director The Gene Emergence Project Department of ProtoBioCybernetics & ProtoBioSemiotics The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: LongView Press (November 2, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965798895
• ISBN-13: 978-0965798891
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.8 x 9.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #439,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biophysics

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29 of 44 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars THE FIRST GENE, THE LAST WORD ? November 16, 2011

By Danzil Monk

Format:Paperback

THE FIRST GENE
The Birth of Programming,
Messaging and Formal Control.
(LongView Press TM-Academic Biological Research Division New York, N.Y.)

Dr. David L. Abel is without a doubt one of the greatest scientific thinkers of our day. An experienced researcher in the fields of Molecular Biology and Information Systems and Management, he is the father of the scientific disciplines of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics and the director of the worldwide Gene Emergence Project. Indeed, he is an extraordinary life-origin specialist.

This book makes it clear why he is established as a champion of true science thought and a nightmare to those who would pollute real science thinking with naturalistic agendas.

The introduction alone will no doubt send chills down the spines those who for many years have striven to separate and ignore the relationship between the question of origin and the story telling upon which some so called "science" is based. In the introduction he makes this gripping statement:

"Why would a prebiotic environment have "cared" whether anything functioned? How could inanimate nature have recognized, valued, pursued or worked to preserve the "usefulness" of certain molecules? Undirected evolution has no goal. Natural selection favors only the fittest already-programmed, already-living organisms. Evolution cannot program at the genetic level.
"Survival of the fittest" does not explain the generation of the very first organism, fit or unfit.

Even bacteria depend upon highly integrated circuits and metabolic schemes regulated by DNA instructions and RNA controllers. Genomic prescriptive information is now known to be multidimensional. How did thousands of molecular machines, biochemical pathways and cycles get integrated into such a sustained, cooperative, goaloriented, holistic metabolism? Can physico-chemical propensities and/or mutations program logic gates and integrate circuits? How could chance and/or necessity (the fixed laws of physics) have computed the formal algorithms needed to organize life?

While some scientists might wish to sweep these questions under the rug for being too "metaphysical," they are as foundational to the science of biology as mathematics is to physics. Addressing such questions is the only path to understanding the emergence of the first genetic instructions, metabolic regulation, and life itself."

If the introduction does not sufficiently grip those guilty of polluting science with pseudo-science and out right deception, while at the same time giving hope to those sincere science advocates who have been discouraged by the prominence of just so stories being pushed as science, then Dr. Abel's dedication should serve as both a potent warning of what is to follow as well as a word of encouragement:

"This anthology is dedicated to all those challengers of Kuhnian Paradigm Ruts who risk their careers and reputations raising an eyebrow of skepticism over theories that are pontificated to be fact by a thoroughly entrenched hierarchy and majority, but which are in fact unfalsifiable, completely unsubstantiated empirically, lacking a single prediction fulfillment, and not even logically defensible."

This powerful statement is promptly followed by a Table of Contents that would convince the hostile scientist who does not want to be convinced to read no further and just claim ignorance of the book's existence, while inspiring the true seeker of origins understanding to set aside some quality time to take this journey.

The chapter titles are:

1. What is ProtoBioCybernetics?
2. The Three Fundamental Categories of Reality
3. The Cybernetic Cut and Configurable Switch (CS) Bridge
4. What utility does order, pattern or complexity prescribe?
5. Sequence Complexity in Biopolymers
6. Linear Digital Material Symbol Systems (MSS)
7. The Genetic Selection (GS) Principle
8. The Birth of Protocells
9. Examining specific life-origin models for plausibility
10. What might be a protocell's minimal "genome"?

However, the chapter titles do not give the best hint of what the reader will be exposed to; it is the five to seventeen subtitles in each chapter that really tells the reader how extensive this examination will be. Some of the subtitles are: "Chance Contingency", "Constraints vs. Controls", "Laws vs. Rules", "Exploring the birth of Control", "What is Complexity?", "Pattern vs. Noise", "Structure vs. Chaos", "What about Neural nets?", "Functional Sequence Complexity", "Is the hypothesis of self-organized emergence falsifiable?", "Emergence of spontaneous controls", "What is the Cybernetic Cut?", "Can spontaneous combinatorial complexity generate organization?", "Genetics is a linear digital Material Symbol System", "Can a computer analogy be applied to life?", "Physical Science Limitations" and "Is Physicality chaotic or organized?".

Having given fair warning to the reader, Dr. Abel and his colleagues, (Dr. Donald E. Johnson, Chapter 10, Dr. Kirk K. Durston & Dr. David K.Y. Chiu, Chapter 5), embarks on an amazing exploration and examination of the question of origins with an insight and frankness that is both refreshing and gratifying and which offers a level of edification far too rarely seen in this field of science.

In the introduction he states:

"Evolution theory is quick to offer an explanatory model for how existing Prescriptive Information (PI) in genomes could have been progressively modified:

Extremely rare beneficial genetic mutations can occur and be preserved through differential survival and reproduction of the fittest phenotypic organisms.

Painfully lacking within evolution theory, however, is an explanation for how any Prescriptive Information (PI) got written or programmed into the genome in the first place. The origin of initial genetic/genomic instructions and epigenomic regulation is typically side-stepped by life-origin science. The whole point of The Origin of Life PrizeTM was to stimulate research specifically into this neglected area. After over a decade of submissions to the Origin of Life PrizeTM, no submission has made it past the first tier of naturalistic scientists screening the submissions and judging their relevance.

The origin of control and regulation in nature is the subject of this anthology. It is also the focus of a new scientific discipline known as
ProtoBioCybernetics. "Cybernetics" is the study of various means of steering and organizing controls, not just the effects of mere physicodynamic constraints....

A closely related new field is ProtoBioSemiotics. Controlling messages would have had to be sent, received and understood at their destination in any early protocellular metabolic scheme or system. Constructive controlling messages are meaningful and functional. Such messages steer events toward computational success or algorithmic optimization; they are not just meaningless, redundant, extremely low-informational signals such as pulsars give off.

How did a prebiotic natural environment of mere mass/energy interactions generate meaningful, functional messages? How did chance and necessity prescribe the ability of the receiver to follow arbitrary rules required for decoding? How could the laws of physics and chemistry have enabled molecules to understand linguistic-like symbol systems, and act on such messages within the first protocells? This is the subject of ProtoBioSemiotics.

This anthology specifically addresses questions that for all too long have been swept under the rug of honest scientific investigation. The result has been prolonged entrapment in the greatest Kuhnia paradigm rut in the history of science."

As demonstrated above Dr. Abel seems unafraid to boldly address issues that have been rendered taboo by many in the scientific community. This lack of intimidation is further evident in statements as this on page 28:

"Chance and necessity are completely inadequate to describe the most important elements of what we repeatedly observe in intra-cellular life, especially. Science must acknowledge the reality and validity not only of a very indirect, post facto natural selection, but of purposeful selection for potential function as a fundamental category of reality. To disallow purposeful selection renders the practice of mathematics and science impossible."

This is an amazing acknowledgement coming from a prominent member of the science community.

On page 33 we fine another example of Dr. Abel's bold frankness and piercing insight as he states:

"Choice Contingent Causation (CCC) can generate extraordinary degrees of unique functionality that has never been observed to arise from randomness or necessity. Highly pragmatic choice contingency is consistently associated with purposeful steering toward potential utility.

The kind of contingency associated with sophisticated cybernetic function is invariably associated with what philosophers of science call "agency." The hallmark of agency is the ability to voluntarily pursue and choose for potential function. Potential means "not yet existent." If anything is repeatedly observable in science, it is abundant evidence of agency's unique ability to exercise formal CCC in generating potential formal functionality.

The only exception to human agency's unique ability to do this is life itself, which is of course what produces agency. Life itself is utterly dependent upon cybernetic programming--a phenomenon never observed independent of agency. Thus we are confronted with still another chicken-and-egg dilemma of life-origin science. Whatever the resolution of this riddle, one thing is for certain. Read more ›

27 of 42 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Materialists Beware: The First Gene Defends a Strictly Scientific, Non-Materialist Conception of Biological Origins November 17, 2011

By Casey Luskin

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Can a book that is essentially devoid of the term "intelligent design," doesn't talk about "specified complexity," and makes only scant mention of "irreducible complexity," offer an argument that is friendly to teleology in biology?

A new technical book, The First Gene, edited by Gene Emergence Project director David L. Abel, shows that the answer to that question is "yes." Materialists will not like this book because its arguments are 100% scientific, devoid of religious, political, or cultural concerns, and most importantly, compelling.

The arguments in The First Gene are rooted in the fields of ProtoBioSemiotics or ProtoBioCybernetics, which according to Abel answers questions like:

"How did a prebiotic natural environment of mere mass/energy interactions generate meaningful, functional messages? How did chance and necessity prescribe the ability of the receiver to follow arbitrary rules required for decoding? How could the laws of physics and chemistry have enabled molecules to understand linguistic-like symbol systems, and act on such messages within the first protocells?" (p. xvi)

Likewise, the field of ProtoBioCybernetics "specifically explores the often-neglected derivation through 'natural process' of initial control mechanisms in the very first theoretical protocell." (p. 1) Thus, the subtitle is "The Birth of Programming, Messaging and Formal Control."

Formal control is a major theme of this book, where "uncoerced choices" (p. 4) are used to actualize functional goals that fit into abstract categories. This Platonic idea finds support in mathematics, language, and computation, where non-physical entities exist and have meaning apart from their physical form. Thus, Abel explains that "None of these formalisms can be encompassed by a consistently held naturalistic worldview that seeks to reduce all things to physicodynamics." (p. 5) In Abel's view, such "formalisms depend upon choice contingency rather than chance contingency or necessity." (p. 5) Yet life is built upon formalisms.

The First Gene investigates a number of different types of information that we find in nature, including prescriptive information, semantic information, and Shannon information. Prescriptive information is what directs our choices, and it is a form of semantic information -- which is a type of functional information. In contrast, Shannon information, according to Abel, shouldn't even be called "information" because it's really a measure of a reduction in uncertainty, and by itself cannot do anything to "prescribe or generate formal function." (p. 11) Making arguments similar to those embodied in Dembski's law of conservation of information, Abel argues that "Shannon uncertainty cannot progress to becoming [Functional Information] without smuggling in positive information from an external source." (p. 12) The highest form of information, however, is prescriptive information:

"Prescriptive Information is much more than intuitive semantic information. PI requires anticipation, "choice with intent," and the diligent pursuit of Aristotle's 'final function' at successive bona fide decision nodes. PI either instructs or directly produces formal function at its destination through the use of controls, not mere constraints. Once again, PI either tells us what choices to make, or it is a recordation of wise choices already made." (p. 15)

In Abel's view, if you're going to explain the origin of prescriptive information, then "Choice Contingency (Selection for potential []not yet existing[] function, not just selection of the best already-existing function) must be included among the fundamental categories of reality along with Chance and Necessity." (p. 25) He further argues, "Chance and necessity cannot generate formal controls. Chance and necessity cannot pursue 'usefulness.'" (p. 263) Moreover:

"No physical entity can "self-organize" itself into existence. An effect cannot cause itself. Organization is the effect of choice-contingent determinism, not physicodynamic determinism or chance." (p. 264)

So how does prescriptive information arise? Abel explains that "Only agents have been known to write or program meaningful and pragmatic linear digital PI" (p. 40) for "We are hard-pressed to provide empirical evidence, rational justification, or references showing how programming can be accomplished without intentional choices of mind (crossing The Cybernetic Cut)." (p. 78)

Other contributors to the book include Kirk Durston and David Chui, who develop similar methods of measuring functional biological information. They introduce three types of information: Random Sequence Complexity (RSC), Ordered Sequence Complexity (OSC) and Functional Sequence Complexity (FSC), where "The primary feature of FSC that distinguishes it from RSC and OSC, is the imposition of functional controls upon the sequence." (p. 161) They then measure the FSC for various protein families, showing that functional protein sequences are rare. They believe there is "almost infinitesimal size of functional sequence space relative to the size of the entire sequence space for a given number of sites." (p. 175)

Chemist and computer scientist Donald E. Johnson, author of Probability's Nature and Nature's Probability, has a chapter looking at the "minimal replication and control information" required for a protocell. He lists many requirements, such as "A robust information structure that can be self-maintained (including error-correction)" (pp. 414-415) or "Controlled chemical metabolic networks are needed that can selectively admit 'fuel' (redox, heat, photons, etc.) into the cell and process the 'fuel' to harness the energy for growth, reproduction, manufacturing of needed components that can't migrate in, and other useful work." (pp. 413-415)

Johnson critiques both the RNA world hypothesis and metabolism-first scenarios for the origin of life. The RNA world hypothesis suffers from the "the infeasibility of forming functional RNA by chance" (p. 405), whereas metabolism-first scenarios cannot achieve life-like replication, and complex chemical catalysts are unlikely to be available on the early earth. The problem, Johnson explains, is that "inanimate nature" cannot "write those programs and operating systems" (pp. 407-408) found in life, and "Coded information has never been observed to originate from physicality." (p. 408)

From reading The First Gene, a number of minimal theoretical and material requirements for life emerge:

*High levels of prescriptive information
*Programming
*Symbol systems and language
*Molecules which can carry this information and programming
*Highly unlikely sequences of functional information
*Formal function
*An "agent" capable of making "intentional choices of mind" which can "choose" between various options, select for future function, and instantiate these requirements for life.

Let's return to the question posed at the beginning of this post: Can a book which doesn't talk about "intelligent design" make an argument that is friendly to design and teleology?

Anti-ID conspiracy theorists love to say that those pesky creationists are always changing their terminology to get around the First Amendment. ID's intellectual pedigree refutes that charge, but The First Gene adds more reasons why that charge should not be taken seriously. The book offers highly technical, strictly scientific arguments about the nature of information, information processing, and biological functionality. Even a cursory read of this book shows that its contributors are just thinking about doing good science. And this science leads them to the conclusion that blind and unguided material causes cannot produce the complexity we observe in life. Some agent capable of making choices is required to produce the first life.

18 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The First Gene: A major challenge in OOL research December 10, 2011

By Felipe Aizpún

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

A new book, The First Gene, by David L. Abel represents a landmark on origin of life (OOL henceforth) research. The relevance of this outstanding volume is made more evident if we look into OOL research history. From Oparin's seminal works in the first half of the last century, until the more current experiments on "artificial" life undertaken by Craig Venter's laboratory team, emergence of first living organisms has been considered to be a matter of chemical evolution, perhaps in a warm little pond...

It has been assumed for more than a century that advances in scientific discoveries will finally yield a satisfactory explanation for the way in which biological entities were fortuitously formed on Earth. Different approaches have been taken and scenarios have been imagined to try to conciliate the simultaneous appearance of the two main functional characteristics that make living organisms a wonderful enigma for investigators, metabolism and replication. In the last years, many scientists have been inclined to postulate an RNA world as the most likely scenario for the origin of the first cells.

Nevertheless, latest advances in biology are far from giving us the much- desired answers to the enormous enigma surrounding the origin of life. On the contrary, the more we know the more we feel that the inextricable complexity of biological systems elude the grasp of any traditional explicative model that researchers have laid out. In 1984 a book was published that openly defied existing theories on the OOL enigma entitled The Mystery of Life's Origin by Thaxton, Bradley and Olsen. The book offered a critical evaluation of current views on prebiotic or chemical evolution. Nowadays, the outstanding Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer has presented a comprehensive critique of all proposed naturalistic scenarios and theories about the emergence of life as a non-intentional non-finalist event in an inanimate universe. Meyer has introduced the necessity, not only to account for bio-chemical difficulties inherent to the problem of the origin of the first life on earth, but also to address the major enigma of the origin of the genetic information that rules the processes of life.

What Meyer and many others are showing is that the old paradigm, based on chemical evolution as the origin of random unguided emergence of life, is incapable to offer satisfactory answers to the question in dispute. That has been proven to the extent that many prominent champions of the orthodoxy are looking for new approaches to support the necessary naturalistic explanation of the enigma; supposing that no scientific solution can be likely reached in the field of biology, they are then shifting their views to the field of cosmology. Apparently, multiverse cosmology, based on string theories and eternal inflation, seems to be the only alternative to non naturalistic explanations. This is what, for instance, microbiologist and genomic specialist Eugene Koonin (Senior Investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Maryland, USA), purports in his recent book "The Logic of Chance". According to Koonin, the origin of life field is a failure without even a plausible coherent model or a validated scenario to offer. Life is a chicken-egg problem, a puzzle; we remain unable to explain how a coupled replication-translation system might have emerged by chance.

Koonin himself makes his personal calculations for the probability of the emergence of the first living system by chance, and he has to admit that calculations lead us far beyond the limits of the available probabilistic resources in the time of existence of the known Universe. The origin of life requires such a succession of exceedingly unlikely steps, he says, "that the final outcome seems almost like a miracle."

But naturalists and materialists never disappoint. If all available probabilistic resources are not enough, the only thing we need to do is increase these resources to an unlimited scenario, just to make sure that we will not need to increase them again in the future. The cosmological model of eternal inflation (no matter how speculative, or devoid of scientific support it is) gives us the opportunity to assert that within the model, emergence of even highly complex systems by chance is not only possible, but (in his own words) "inevitable." Whether things occurring both "inevitably" and "by chance" are a new ontological category or just a poetic oxymoron is something that remains unclear. What is clear is the fact that The First Gene appears just in the right moment because it is precisely this "way out of the origin of life conundrum" (Koonin's own words) that Dr. Abel challenges with extremely compelling arguments.

Abel's reasoning strongly reminds us that life can not be understood if we do not contemplate on the role and meaning of information in the intricate mechanisms of the most elemental living organisms. We can say in light of the most current scientific knowledge that properties of living beings are best described by the laws that govern information rather than by the laws that govern matter. Hence, Abel displays a solid argument for life as the realm of cybernetic organisms governed by semiotic processes. As a consequence of this analysis a new category of causation becomes necessary to complement the traditional dichotomy between chance and necessity: choice contingency.

Choice contingency is an essential category that completes the available resources in terms of causation and allows us to make reality rationally understandable. Information is already by all means a constitutive element of nature, along with matter, energy and physical laws that constrain the capacity to change and move material entities. Therefore, Abel postulates what I consider the central message of his work, the principle of supremacy of formalism, not physicality. F>P becomes a central argument that vindicates the necessity to address the cybernetics of life processes.

"The key to life is controls, not constraints. Because life is so dependent upon true controls rather than mere constraints, life clearly traverses the Cybernetic Cut. It cannot be reduced to physicodynamics." (p.68)
"The Cybernetic Cut is the great divide between physicality and formalism. On the one side of this canyon lies everything that can be explained by the chance and necessity of physicodynamics. On the other side lies those phenomena than can only be explained by formal choice contingency and decision theory." (p.71)
"Chance and necessity produce no useful nontrivial organization or work." (p.110)

Neither chance nor necessity (fixed law) can program configurable switches to integrate circuits or organize formal utility." (p.152)

"The inanimate environment cannot program. The laws of physics and chemistry cannot program. Environmental selection cannot choose logic-gate settings at the nucleotide polymerization level of organization prior to computational halting. Undirected natural selection cannot pursue any goals. It cannot select for potential function. It cannot generate linear digital instructions to achieve eventual formal organization and function. Natural selection (NS) is eliminative, not creative [68, pg 70]." (p.163)

"No physical entity can "self-organize" itself into existence. An effect cannot cause itself. Organization is the effect of choice-contingent determinism, not physicodynamic determinism or chance." (p.191)

And finally, as a consequence,

"The Formalism>Physicality (F>P) Principle states that Formalism not only describes, but preceded, prescribed, organized, and continues to control, regulate, govern and predict physicodynamic reality and its interactions" (p.346)

From here on, no scientific theory on the origin of life can possibly disregard the challenge that Abel has settled in this book as a milestone in the history of biological research. Information as a constitutive element of reality forces biology to become a multidisciplinary framework where physics and chemistry must integrate information theory. As someone has once stated, in the information age, the notion that random errors can produce highly sophisticated biological information, information-processing machinery and the associated error-detection-and-repair mechanisms and algorithms is preposterous. The awareness that formalism precedes and prescribes physicality represents an overwhelming attack to the traditional reductionism of the reigning paradigm. The "form" vindicates its primacy as the element that rules the process of emergence of any living organism. Prescriptive Information (PI) according to Abel governs the processes of life, and this is perfectly true. But I would like to add something else; the form is the key concept that rules, for instance, the process of development of any multicellular organism. Hence, the form is not the outcome of the expression of genes through the process. The form governs the process and prescribes where and when genes are going to be turned on or off. Prescriptive Information, as all information instantiated in a symbolic material system is necessarily intentional, and is about something. In this case, it is about the biological form that has to logically precede information itself.

What Abel teaches us, in the end, is that the conundrum of the origin of life cannot be reduced to a problem of insufficient probabilistic resources. Far from that, the problem traditional naturalistic explanations must face is one of lack of causal adequacy. There is no rational causal relationship between low informational lawful processes, let alone chance, and the emergence of highly complex functional biological structures governed by formal cybernetic information rich systems. Read more ›