Group

Here is an important article that does not appear to be webbed.

It consists of an paper that Phil Johnson submitted on the topic of
information to Biology and Philosophy, a journal whose aim is to discuss
"meta-theoretical analysis, both about the very nature of biology, as well as
about its social implications," and "aimed at a broad readership, drawn
from both the sciences and the humanities" (Click on "Aims and Scope" at
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0169-3867/contents).

Johnson posed the following fundamental conundrum for scientific
materialists:

"The arrangement of nucleotides directing protein synthesis is no
more determined by the chemistry of amino acids than the
arrangement of letters on a page of Don Quixote is determined by
the chemistry of ink and paper If chemical laws dictated the
arrangement of letters and words, then books would contain no
information not already contained in the laws of chemistry
Darwinism attributes information creation to mutation. but this is
to give the phenomenon a label rather than an explanation.
(Additional terms like "variation" or "recombination" are even less
informative-) Our everyday experience is that linguistic
communications, including computer software like Dawkins own
blind watchmaker program, cannot be reduced to the material
medium in which they are encoded and emerge only from
preexisting intelligence. Materialists may be satisfied to assume
that intelligence is the product of unintelligent causes, but non-
materialists will want to see proof. ... Understanding the
irreducibility of the genetic information puts the so called
evolution/creation debate in a completely new light. Much of what
biologists call "evolution" - e.g., selective breeding, industrial
melanism in the peppered moth, and the famous variations among
the finches of the Galapagos - fits comfortably within a creationist
paradigm. The point of creationism is to assert that God is the
creator, not that God created types of organisms in so inflexible a
form that they cannot vary in response to environmental changes. If
the term "evolution" had not become loaded with naturalistic
philosophical connotations, and if creation had not become
misleadingly identified with what Darwin called the "fixity of
species," one could say that "special creation" and "polyphyletic
evolution" are two ways of describing what observation has
revealed: a substantial amount of variation occurs in nature, but it
occurs within boundaries. The fundamental issue in dispute
between creationists and scientific materialists is not whether
"evolution occurs," but whether unintelligent material processes
created the genetic information that manifestly exists. If George
Williams is correct that information and matter belong to separate
domains, and if the domain of information is therefore not a
product of the domain of matter, then no materialistic evolutionary
theory can explain the most important element in life."

What makes it additionally interesting was that both Dawkins and the
leading Darwinist theoretician George C. Williams responded (most
reluctantly I understand-see tagline). Their responses are after Johnson's
paper below. Dawkins' response is mainly ad hominems, but Williams to
his credit tries to deal with Johnson's point (albeit unsuccessfully-
see below).

I have also included as a tagline quote, Johnson's brief comment on their
response. Here is his punchline:

"Does it require no more intelligence than the wind possesses to write
Don Quixote or Windows 95-or to specify the genetic information required
to create Miguel Cervantes or Bill Gates?"

Because that is what Williams and Dawkins believe! But then they *have*
to. On their basic materialistic-naturalistic philosophical assumption,
nature (i.e. at bottom *only* material particles in motion) is all that exists.
So if information today exists in the form of human intelligent designers
who can create literary works like Don Quixote or computer software like
Windows 95, then nature simply *must* have been able to create it, in the
time available, with only the materials at hand, no matter how inadequate
natural processes like the wind making patterns on sand may seem!

I will add this to my "Articles posted to CED" page
(http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones/cedartic.html).


Steve

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Biology and Philosophy 11:535=538, 1996 (c) 1996 Kluwer Academic
Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Is Genetic Information Irreducible?

PHILLIP E. JOHNSON University of California School of Law (Boalt
Hall) Berkeley, California 94720=7200 USA

In his 1992 book Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges,
George C. Williams stated that organisms consist of two separate
domains, which Williams called the "material" and the "codical." The
former is the domain of chemistry, including particularly the
nucleotides of DNA and their chemical components. The codical
domain consists of non-material information. The information encoded
in DNA is fundamentally distinct from the chemical medium in which
the information is recorded, just as the information conveyed in a book
is fundamentally distinct from the ink and paper on which it is printed.

Williams explicitly invoked this analogy between biology and literature:

Don Quixote is information. most often coded as a pattern of ink on
paper, but it can exist in many other media. It is often transmitted
visually and stored ephemerally in human brains. It has no doubt been
recorded on disks and magnetic tapes for transduction into sound for
transmission to brains of people unable to read ink on paper. In any
medium, Don Quixote can form an archive from which copies can be
made to any other medium, but no matter what the medium, it is
always the same book [Williams, 1992,p. 11].

In an interview published in 1995, Williams made the consequences of
the analogy for biology still more explicit:

Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two
more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of
matter.... These two domains can never be brought together in any kind
of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." You can speak
of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms because they both
have mass and charge and length and width. You can't do that with
information and matter. Information doesn't have mass or charge or

536

length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn't have bytes.... This
dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two
separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately,
in their own terms.

The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of
base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA
molecule is the medium, it's not the message. Maintaining this
distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely
indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution.... In biology, when
you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools,
you're talking about information, not physical objective reality
[Brockman, 1995, p. 43].

That sounds like straightforward metaphysical dualism - except insofar
as it is weakly qualified by two unexplained phrases, one near the
beginning of the passage and the other at the end. If genetic
information and matter are only "more or less" incommensurable, then
they are not incommensurable at all. Incommensurability, like
omnipotence or uniqueness, is an all-or-nothing quality. If the closing
phrase implies that only physical entities can be objectively real, it
denies what the rest of the passage seems to assert. Information is a
separate, non-physical domain of objective reality. The information
contained in Don Quixote, or the Chicago telephone directory, is no
less objectively real than the paper on which it is printed.

If matter and information are truly incommensurable, then Darwinism
cannot be true as a theory of information creation. Darwinism is based
upon materialism, and posits the creation of genetic information by the
material forces of random mutation and natural selection. If the
analogy to literature is valid, this is like trying to explain the origin of
Don Quixote by invoking only the chemistry of ink and paper and
omitting the contribution of the author.

No one denies that a book requires an author, but scientific materialists
vehemently deny that genetic information comes from an intelligent
source. One of these materialists is Richard Dawkins, who recently
wrote that the discovery of the structure of DNA and the genetic code

'has dealt a final killing blow to vitalism - the belief that living material
is deeply distinct from nonliving material. Up until 1953 it was still
possible to believe that there was something fundamentally and
irreducibly mysterious in living protoplasm. No longer. Even those
philosophers who had been predisposed to a mechanistic view of life
would not have dared hope for such total fulfillment of their wildest
dreams [Dawkins 1995, p. 17].

The quoted passages from Williams imply that, on the contrary, there is
something fundamentally distinct in living organisms, and it is the
genetic

537

information.* The discovery that some or all of this information is
recorded in DNA, as Don Quixote and the telephone directory are
recorded on paper, in no way implies that the message is reducible to
the medium. That the genetic information is irreducible does not mean,
however, that it is "mysterious" in the sense of being inaccessible to
normal experience. Information is as much a part of everyday life as
matter itself. Perhaps that is part of the reason that biologists have been
slow to appreciate the significance of the irreducibility of genetic
information. Their philosophy assumes that the alternative to strict
materialism in biology is a mysterious 'elan vital," a term that suggests
something ghostlike or uncanny.

The materialist rejoinder to a matter/information dualism must be that
the special qualities of information are an instance of "emergence,"
meaning the tendency of unpredictable properties to appear when
different kinds of matter are combined in certain ways. Just as water
has qualities not present in the particles that make up hydrogen and
oxygen, DNA has properties not present in the elements and
compounds of which it consists. According to materialism, genetic
information is not a distinct metaphysical entity but an emergent
property of organic chemistry - and so, by a more indirect route, is the
mind of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. To a materialist
reductionist, clear thinking about biology requires not maintaining the
distinction between the medium and the message, but, on the contrary,
attributing all seeming non-material entities to the material base from
which they emerged

Is genetic information a distinct non-material substances or an
emergent property of DNA chemistry? If there is disagreement, how
can the dispute be resolved by scientific testing - meaning testing that
does not assume the very materialist reductionism which is in question?
If we judge the dispute in terms of the evidence available today, the
dualists have the stronger case. The arrangement of nucleotides
directing protein synthesis is no more determined by the chemistry of
amino acids than the arrangement of letters on a page of Don Quixote
is determined by the chemistry of ink and paper If chemical laws
dictated the arrangement of letters and words, then books would
contain no information not already contained in the laws of chemistry

Darwinism attributes information creation to mutation. but this is to
give the phenomenon a label rather than an explanation. (Additional
terms like "variation" or "recombination" are even less informative-)
Our everyday experience is that linguistic communications, including
computer software like Dawkins own blind watchmaker program,
cannot be reduced to the material medium in which they are encoded
and emerge only from pre-

* Williams singled out Dawkins as one who redefines a replicator in a
way that makes it a physical entity duplicating itself in a reproductive
process," adding that Dawkins was misled by the fact that genes are
always identified with DNA" [Brockman, 1995, p. 42]

538

existing intelligence. Materialists may be satisfied to assume that
intelligence is the product of unintelligent causes, but non-materialists
will want to see proof.

The computer analogy answers the classic argument against mind-body
dualism, which is that for non-material "mind stuff" to influence matter
would violate the known laws of physics. There is no violation of
physical law when information is encoded in matter in order to permit
matter to be organized in anew and surprising ways. The information in
the computer software (and the hardware too, for that matter)
nonetheless comes ultimately from an intelligent source outside the
computer, and is not merely an emergent property of silicon and
electricity in combination. Why should this not also be true of the
vastly more complex genetic information?

Understanding the irreducibility of the genetic information puts the so-
called evolution/creation debate in a completely new light. Much of
what biologists call "evolution" - e.g., selective breeding, industrial
melanism in the peppered moth, and the famous variations among the
finches of the Galapagos - fits comfortably within a creationist
paradigm. The point of creationism is to assert that God is the creator,
not that God created types of organisms in so inflexible a form that
they cannot vary in response to environmental changes. If the term
"evolution" had not become loaded with naturalistic philosophical
connotations, and if creation had not become misleadingly identified
with what Darwin called the "fixity of species," one could say that
"special creation" and "polyphyletic evolution" are two ways of
describing what observation has revealed: a substantial amount of
variation occurs in nature, but it occurs within boundaries.

The fundamental issue in dispute between creationists and scientific
materialists is not whether "evolution occurs," but whether
unintelligent material processes created the genetic information that
manifestly exists. If George Williams is correct that information and
matter belong to separate domains, and if the domain of information is
therefore not a product of the domain of matter, then no materialistic
evolutionary theory can explain the most important element in life.

References

Brockman. J.: 1995, The Third Culture, Beyond the Scientific
Revolution, Simon & Schuster.
Dawkins, R.: 1995, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
Basic Books.
Williams, G.: 1992, Natural Selection, Domains, Levels, and
Challenges Oxford University Press.

(Johnson P.E., "Is Genetic Information Reducible?", in Ruse M., ed.
"Biology and Philosophy: Special Issue on Biology and Religion," Vol.
11, October 1996, pp.535-538)
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Biology and Philosophy 11:539-540, 1996. (c) 1996 Kluwer
Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Reply to Phillip Johnson

RICHARD DAWKINS

When I open a page of Darwin I immediately sense that I have been
ushered into the presence of a great mind. I have the same feeling with
RA Fisher and with G.C. Williams. When I read Phillip Johnson, I feel
that I have been ushered into the presence of a lawyer. A few years ago
there was one called Norman MacBeth who wrote a book called
Darwin Retried, in which he made a great song and dance about
bringing the acumen and training of the 'legal mind' to bear upon
Darwinism. His stated conclusion was that Darwinism would not stand
up in a court of law, but the only thing he demonstrated with any
enduring success was the limitations of the legal mind. His book is now
happily forgotten, but Phillip Johnson seems to have the same style of
argument.

It is in the nature of the adversarial system for settling disputes that
advocates must on average be right on 50% of occasions and wrong on
50% of occasions. The advocate is paid to argue with the same
conviction when wrong as when right, and he is paid to seize upon any
point, however Specious or even stupid, which may influence a jury in
the desired direction. When a lawyer seizes upon a stupid argument we
may pay him - along with his fat fee - the compliment of assuming him
to be a blackguard not a fool, knowingly cashing in on the limitations
of the jury. But a case can be made that really successful advocates do
a better job of misleading others if they have first misled themselves.

The point George Williams is making in his Don Quixote analogy is an
extremely simple one, but it is just tricky enough to have jury-
misleading potential if used aright. As Peter Medawar wittily re-
expressed the dangers of a little learning, '...the spread of secondary
and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of
people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who
have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical
thought.' Williams was saying, correctly. that information is not
reducible to the material medium in which it is encoded, for the simple
reason that the medium may change from one material (say paper) to
another (say magnetic tape). Johnson, almost incredibly, tries to turn
this

540

into an argument against materialism and in favour of dualism. If it
were that easy, there would be nothing left for philosophers to do.
Johnson would not only have triumphed over Darwinism. He would
also be hailed as the greatest philosopher of the age, for his brilliant
demonstration that dualism is finally proved by the existence of the
humble tape recorder.

See how the trick is done. Don Quixote was written by a creative,
intelligent human author, Cervantes. It is also a stream of alphabetic
characters on paper which can be translated faithfully into a different
medium, say a magnetic tape, a CD-ROM or a punched paper tape.
Both these points - the creative author and the independence of data
from its medium - are true and both are important, but they are not the
same as each other. Williams would not deny the first but, as it happens,
it was the second point that he was making. To see the distinction
clearly, simply replace Don Quixote in his paragraph by a hypothetical
book of nonsense character strings. Any book is not the same as the
ink it is written in, because it could be etched on a CD-ROM and
would still be the same book. The point has nothing to do with
emergence, nor - though Williams and I would accept both as valid,
separate points- does it have any connection with Cervantes's creative
intelligence. Johnson, with a true lawyer's instinct for the misleading,
has pounced unerringly on the wrong point. The only interesting
question raised by his paper- and it is not a VERY interesting question
- is whether Phillip Johnson really believes the stuff he writes or
whether he is just a good lawyer.

(Dawkins R., "Reply to Phillip Johnson," in Ruse M., ed. "Biology and
Philosophy: Special Issue on Biology and Religion," Vol. 11, February
1997, pp.539-540)
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541

Biology and Philosophy 11:541, 1996. (c) 1996 Kluwer Academic
Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Reply to Johnson

GEORGE C. WILLIAMS

I can easily explain the 'unexplained phrases' that Johnson noted in my
writings. The material and codical domains are only 'more or less'
incommensurable because they do in fact share one descriptor, time. As
noted in the 1992 work cited, the conversion of the material library at
Alexandria into CO2 and H2O coincided in time with the destruction
of the information in that library. My 'physical objective reality merely
meant the material domain as opposed to that of information- I neither
doubt that information can be treated objectively nor deny Johnson's
point that it is part of everyday life.

Johnson's argument is based on some obvious fallacies, such as
information requiring an intelligent author The pattern of slow-moving
waves in sand dunes records information about what the wind has been
doing lately. Their shadow pattern observed late in the day is
information about the structure of the dunes and less directly about the
wind. The only author recognizable here is the wind. Similar
patternings must arise in any complex molecular mixture, including the
prebiotic. If one kind of molecular pattern influences others in ways
that increase the incidence of that pattern, a hypercycle subject to
natural selection has arisen. This would be analogous to some pattern
of dune shadows making it more likely that the responsible winds
would occur more frequently. That the author of genetic information is
as stupid as the wind is apparent in the functionally stupid historical
constraints discussed in Chapter 6 of my 1992 book.

I suppose that evolutionists do claim that natural selection creates
genetic information, but I think their intended meaning is that it edits
information. The original texts were chemically generated patterns,
informative only of conditions prevalent at their points of origin.
Subsequent editing included such things as the selective saving of
transposed elements and tandem duplications, and the fusion of the
genetic texts of previously separate lineages. An example of such
fusion is the origin of eukaryote cells perhaps a billion years ago. I see
no reason to doubt that this sort of editing could produce books much
bigger than Don Quixote in a billion years.

(Williams G.C., "Reply to Johnson," in Ruse M., ed. "Biology and
Philosophy: Special Issue on Biology and Religion," Vol. 11,
February 1997, p.541)
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"I sent a preliminary version of my analysis of the matter information
problem to an academic journal called Biology and Philosophy, edited by
Michael Ruse, hoping to draw a response from Williams and Dawkins My
paper, titled "Is Genetic Information Reducible?" was published in the
October 1996 (vol. 11) issue of that journal (which appeared belatedly in
February 1997) . Dawkins and Williams did reply. My essay is on pp. 535-
38; their replies are on pp. 539-41. Both of them state, correctly, that the
problem of accounting for the origin of the information is not difficult if
the information content of the organism is sufficiently low. Dawkins
imagines a case of a hypothetical book of nonsense character strings" (p.
540). Williams observes that "the pattern of slow-moving waves in sand
dunes records information about what the wind has been doing lately....
The only author recognizable here is the wind" (p. 541) . True enough, but
the wind does not produce the kind of highly specified information
required for a book or computer program or organism. Williams then gets
to the crucial point, arguing that "the author of genetic information is as
stupid as the wind" because, in Williams's opinion, animal bodies
incorporate certain functionally stupid historical constraints." That's the
issue, all right. Does it require no more intelligence than the wind
possesses to write Don Quixote or Windows 95-or to specify the genetic
information required to create Miguel Cervantes or Bill Gates?" (Johnson
P.E., "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," InterVarsity Press:
Downers Grove IL, 1997, pp.127-128.
http://members.aol.com/Mszlazak/Intelligent.html)
Stephen E. Jones http://members.iinet.net.au/~sejones
Moderator: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CreationEvolutionDesign
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