*****************
Werner Gitt
A code system is always the result of a mental process (it required an intelligent origin or inventor)… It should be emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All experience indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity is required… There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.
[1997. “In the Beginning was Information.” CLV, Bielefeld, Germany. Pp. 64-67, 79, 107. (Werner Gitt is ’n inligtingspesialis. Kyk Is there really a God? How would you answer?]
Information (which is what a code consists of) always comes from an intelligent source—a basic law of information science:
“There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.”
[A conclusion of the 7th International Conference on the Origins of Life, Mainz, July 1983. Gitt, Werner. 1997. In the Beginning was Information. CLV, Bielefeld, Germany. pp. 64-67, 79, 107. Kyk The creation information argument—how does it stand up to the charge of circular reasoning, and more?]
“No information can exist without an initial mental source; i.e. information is, by nature, a mental and not a material quantity”
“No information can exist in purely statistical processes”
[Werner Gitt, “Information: The Third Fundamental Quantity”, Siemens Review, Vol. 56, No. 6, November/December 1989]
*****************
Physicist Paul Davies (no creationist) says:
‘We now know that the secret of life lies not with the chemical ingredients as such, but with the logical structure and organisational arrangement of the molecules. … Like a supercomputer, life is an information processing system. … It is the software of the living cell that is the real mystery, not the hardware.’ But where did it come from? Davies framed the question this way: ‘How did stupid atoms spontaneously write their own software? … Nobody knows … ‘.
[Davies, P., Life force, New Scientist 163(2204):27–30, 18 September 1999. Kyk The creation information argument—how does it stand up to the charge of circular reasoning, and more?]
*****************
Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza
“Evolution also results from the accumulation of new information. In the case of a biological mutation, new information is provided an error [sic] of genetic transmission (i.e. a change in the DNA during its transmission from parent to child).”
[Luigi L. Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, peoples and languages, North Press, New York, 2000, p. 176. Kyk The creation information argument—how does it stand up to the charge of circular reasoning, and more?]
*****************
Margulis, L. & Sagan, D.
“Mutation accumulation does not lead to new species or even to new organs or tissues.” (p. 11)
“Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies.” (p. 29)
[Margulis, L. & Sagan, D., Acquiring genomes. A theory of the origins of species, Basic Books, New York, 2002. Kyk The creation information argument—how does it stand up to the charge of circular reasoning, and more?]
*****************
Late chemical evolutionist Leslie Orgel:
”Living things are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.”
[Uit The Second Law of Thermodynamics]
*****************
Carl Sagan (ateïs)
“…mutations occur at random and are almost uniformly harmful – it is rare that a precision machine is improved by a random change in the instructions for making it. All point mutations that have been studied on a molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not increase it.”
… Mutasies kom lukraak voor en is byna eenvormig skadelik – dit is selde dat ’n presisiemasjien verbeter deur ’n ewekansige verandering in die instruksies om dit te maak. Alle puntmutasies wat op ’n molekulêre vlak bestudeer blyk om die genetiese inligting te verminder en nie te vermeerder nie.
[Carl Sagan, 1977, The Dragons of Eden, Hodder and Stoughton, London, p.28.]
*****************
Hubert Yockey (nie ’n skeppingsleerder nie)
”The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers … [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance.”
Die toevallige oorsprong van die lewe uit ’n oeroue sop is onmoontlik in waarskynlikheid op dieselfde manier as wat ’n ewigdurende masjien ’n waarskynlikheid is. Die uiters klein waarskynlikhede bereken in hierdie hoofstuk is nie ontmoedigend vir ware gelowiges nie … [egter] ’n Praktiese mens moet aflei dat lewe nie toevallig gebeur het nie.
[Uit Spontaneous generation and perpetual motion machines, Yockey, H., Information Theory and Molecular Biology, Cambridge University Press, p. 257, 1992.]
*****************
Francis Crick
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
“Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts…”
[Uit Designed by aliens?]
*****************
Sir Fred Hoyle
‘The neo-Darwinist is now reaching the point of dignity in the history of science that the Ptolemaic system in astronomy, the epicycle system, reached long ago. We know that it does not work. And that is interesting. Because from the actual structure of the chromosome we can demonstrate that the human species did not come from a progressive humanisation of a pre-human.’
Quoted from Conference Paper dated October 1975, The Beginning of Life, by Professor Jerome Lejeune, Chair of Fundamental Genetics, University of Paris, France.
‘If there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non-biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes [proteins produced by living cells] have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well-known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon… . In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on the Earth.’
Sir Fred Hoyle, British physicist and astronomer, The Intelligent Universe, Michael Joseph, London, 1983, pp. 20-21, 23.
[Uit Neo-Darwinism like ptolemaic cosmology lejeune]
*****************
Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life
‘The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models: hence one can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts.’
Dickerson, Richard, Scientific American, Sep. 1978, p.70
[Uit Dickerson: Chemical evolution and the origin of life]
*****************
Davies, P.
“Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell.”
[Uit Perry questions evolution, Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie University, Sydney, New Scientist 179:32, 12 July 2003.]
*****************
Lee Spetner
(Gelowige. Nie ’n evolusionis nie.)
All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.
Alle mutasies wat op molekulêre vlak bestudeer is het gelei tot ’n vermindering in genetiese inligting, nie ’n vermeerdering nie.
*****************
John Horgan
(Evolusionis)
Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began.
[Uit Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began]