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Okay.
Now the last thing we were talking about
was the fact that this is kind of a paradox
that every creature on the planet is imbued with a survival instinct.
To survive and reproduce, and to care for their offspring.
Except maybe alligators.
And the paradoxical inevitability of death.
The inevitability of death is really kind of an interesting thing because
[Pause to reset the microphone's volume.]
because our society doesn't want to talk about death in that,
we don't tell ourselves through our media or in any other way
that the main thing that is going to happen to you in your life
is that you are going to die.
You are here, but you're just here as a passenger.
You're going to die.
So, it's a real paradox and as Schiller points out,
there is no reason for our organism to not be immortal.
I mean just a little design, a change here and there,
and it would be entirely possible.
And the thing is that we don't know for sure whehter or not that is in our DNA already.
Because, we are going to get into the DNA part here in a minute.
So hang on.
So we've got here the survival instinct versus the inevitability of death.
And then you notice another thing about the Life System
which is, one of the design features is reproduction
and no two organisms are identical.
Now this is the result of *** reproduction, not asexual reproduction
or, say, mitosis.
In the early days of the Earth when life originally began to proliferate on the planet
all reproduction was basically by cellular mitosis.
You know, there was a cell split and every daughter organism was identical
to the mother organism, except maybe at some point one of them had
a chance random mutation, then it passed it on to each of its two daughter organisms.
But the unique thing about *** reproduction
is that when two organisms come together and produce an offspring,
the interesting thing that happens at the moment that the DNA
is getting ready to combine and form a complete set for the child
or the offspring, is that it unzips and it comes apart in pieces
and reassembles itself in a new order.
And then matches up with the other parent
and then you have a completely and totally unique individual.
The only individuals on Earth that are exactly alike are identical twins.
So that's a design feature, *** reproduction.
Now, is this a design feature that was already
in the DNA of the asexually reproducing individuals,
the early single celled organisms?
Was it something that was just there waiting to turn on?
Say for example, when there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere?
Was oxygen in the atmosphere a precondition for that particular DNA segment
to kick in and say, "Okay, now we are going to start reproducing sexually"
which then created the vast explosion of different types of species?
That is an interesting question.
So, anyhow, the design feature.
So, what you can conclude from that is,
it seems important to the Living System to have a large population
of diverse organisms, which can serve to create
a large enough surviving and varied genetic pool
that will occasionally produce novel and important species survival attributes,
which will cover as much diverse biosphere geography as possible
so that at least some Living System organism and their offspring
will survive both long term, steady-state, slowly changing biosphere conditions
and short term and possibly localized catastrophic events
that regularly wreak havoc on the planet.
Remember the ad for renting the planet.
We've got this planet that's really a crappy place that changes a lot.
And guess what?
It gets hit by comets fairly frequently.
It has earthquakes, it does weird things, it has floods,
famine and plague, climatic changes.
A living system that's going to rent this rock really has to have some things on the ball.
So this is what we are seeing in the designed system of the Living System. Okay?
So. Why is the system designed as it is?
The obvious answer seems to be the one thing
that all members of the Living System have in common:
the DNA library which propagates Life itself and more.
Because it's obvious that the Living System,
(and we saw this when we were looking at the graphs of all the different species
that have come and gone, come and gone, and how they proliferated
all over the planet like mold on a cheese)
that the obvious intent of the Living System of which we are just a very small part
is to survive over enormous periods of time.
Billions and billions of years.
And again, why? To preserve the DNA.
Is it a prime function of the Life system
to gain in complexity over time so that an intelligent organism,
such as *** Sapiens (and others) evolve?
Because this is what a lot of people assume.
That is was all just there just to evolve us because we are the greatest thing
since sliced bread and flushed toilets, right? [Laughter]
Or, is the prime function to survive through TIME,
and humans are dispensable?
So it seems the goal of evolution, per se, is to BUY TIME,
(billions of years of it)
allowing the Living System to carry out its Design Intent.
Evolution is nothing more than a means to an end,
one of the mechanisms responsible for the adaptive capability of the system.
Now, let's talk about species attributes versus biosphere attributes.
A species attribute is anything that a group of individuals have in common
that enables them to survive in a particular niche on the planet.
For example, heat or cold tolerance.
If you are in an environment and you have a range of temperatures
that your organism can survive.
If it gets hotter or colder, you're not going to survive.
But if you are just exactly adapted to that particular range of temperatures,
that is your species attribute.
That I am able to tolerate these temperatures and that's me.
The biosphere attributes are what is in the biosphere.
This particular environment gets this hot and this cold.
And the objective of evolution is to ensure that the species attributes
match the biosphere attributes.
That is, if you are in an environment that has a range of temperatures,
you will survive in that environment.
If that environment changes, then you've got a problem.
Except evolution has allowed for that.
This is a graph of the heights of ten year old boys in a particular community.
And what you will notice about this is that it forms a bell curve.
Some of these little boys are pretty short, some of them are pretty tall.
But most of them, the vast majority of them, are right in here, okay?
Now, you can take a bell curve with species attributes.
Because of *** reproduction everybody has got some changes in them.
They've got some different tolerances.
Like a husband who is married to a wife that can't stand cold.
And he wants everything cold, he can tolerate the cold.
He always throws the covers off. So they are different in their heat tolerances.
Maybe not to the point of dying of the changes,
but they're definitely different.
And that's a small range of difference there.
So here in this particular example,
you've got what is called SA8, that is, Species Attribute 8.
You've got a population of organisms that are living in a pond.
And one of their attributes is that they have to have
a certain salinity of the pond, or a certain PH value.
And we know each one of these attributes of the requirements of this species,
this one celled organism, and their number.
So in this particular case, cold tolerance is Species Attribute 8.
This is their temperature tolerance.
So most of the population falls into this bell curve.
They can tolerate these temperatures. So this is the percentage of the population.
So the highest percentage of the population can tolerate a temperature
in the mean range of the possible temperatures for this environment.
So you have a margin of safety here.
Which means that the temperature never gets colder than this.
So what happens if all of a sudden, through climatic change,
it starts getting really cold?
What do you think is going to happen?
What's going to happen is that if it gets cold, all the creatures that are,
say this line moves here, say this line moves over, the temperature moves over.
So this line represents the highest temperature,
and this is the lowest temperature.
So say the highest temperature moves over to here
and lowest temperature moves over to here.
What you have here is going to be a kill zone.
All these people are going to die.
One celled organisms, whatever they are.
They're all going to die.
Then what is going to happen is that all the ones that live, that continue to live,
are going to reproduce and they are going to pass on the genes
of being in this range of being able to survive that particular temperature.
The ones who did survive are going to die.
So, the point of this is that we don't evolve in response to changes in our environment,
but rather the Living System has a plan.
It has already within any population those who will survive the change.
Does everybody really got that?
It's not that something happens, it's not that the outside is forcing evolution.
It is that because of *** reproduction, evolution is prepared
for these events that happen on our planet.
It's prepared to get cold, and it is even prepared
because it has spread species all around the planet
to prepare for anything that comes for the express purpose of survival.
The survival of the Living System.
Now, let's look at the laws of thermodynamics versus the Living System.
There are two laws of thermodynamics.
The first one is that the energy of the universe is constant.
And, basically this is kind of a closed system interpretation.
And it also says the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.
Entropy means that everything is just kind of moving to a state of equilibrium.
And once in that state of equilibrium
there is no action and nothing is going on.
In other words, it kind of tends to decline into resting,
like when have a swinging pendulum,
entropy makes it swing slower and slower and slower and slower.
Pretty soon it stops and it's not doing anything at all.
So that's a good way of thinking about this.
These laws are involved in the production and spending of energy
in the Living System as well as every other phenomenon in the universe.
This first law tells us that energy is neither created nor destroyed.
It can only be converted from one form to another.
But the question is asked whether the first law was violated when our universe
first came into existence via the Big ***.
Because, if our universe came into existence,
and energy can neither be created nor destroyed,
then how did that happen?
The case can be made that the universe was never created,
but that it actually predates time as pure energy/information.
It is thus not defined in terms of time.
The first law of thermodynamics shows that energy transfers across system boundaries
are classified as either work or heat transfers.
And the energy of the system itself may change in any process
that goes from one state to another.
The direction of flow is the concern of the second law of thermodynamics
which states that every process that a thermodynamic system may undergo
can go in one direction only, and that the opposite process,
in which both the system and its surroundings
would be returned to their original states, is impossible.
So formidable an influence is the second law
that it should come as no surprise that
it is a formidable challenge to any Origin of Life theory.
A system in an equilibrium state
is one that undergoes no further detectable change.
If a system is not in an equilibrium state,
a spontaneous change is not merely possible,
it is inevitable and irreversible.
However, the Living System is one that is NOT in an equilibrium state.
What logically follows is that
Living Systems have the capacity to maintain all of their subsystems
in a state of disequilibrium.
So basically, being alive, being part of the Living System,
Life itself in a sense is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
At the microscopic level, each individual reaction
functions according to the classic interpretation of the second law,
no different from non-living systems.
In fact, it's because of the nature of chemistry
and the nature of the elements of our universe
that cellular processes actually can take place.
For example, the assemblying of a protein.
When a protein is assembled by ribosomes, it assembles all the little pieces
in a long polypeptide chain,
and then it releases it into the the cell.
It is the second law of thermodynamics that causes it to make a protein
because what happens is that all the different atoms in this polypeptide chain
are seeking equilibrium and they begin to connect to the natural
other atoms that then create the bonds that causes it to fold into
its characteristic shape that makes it a protein.
So at certain levels, these laws operate within a living system.
But there are other things about the cellular activity that
are definitely not in line with the law of thermodynamics.
So in the end, applied intelligence, that is information,
is the only factor than can predictably defy the laws of probability
and is obviously the only factor that can defy the information component
of the entropy provisions of the second law of thermodynamics.
Thus, intelligently applied energy introduced into any system
is able to overcome randomness and to control the outcome of events.
Because of course, the second law of thermodynamics deals with these
little atoms that are floating around in the primordial soup
that are supposed to hook up with each other and create life.
Well, it just doesn't work that way because
if they are all seeking to find some sort of equilibrium state,
they are not going to connect up and become more and more complex
without input from an intelligent energy.
Okay, so you take a box of coins.
And you take this box and you shake it up, and you shake it up, and you shake it up.
You want them all to be heads. It's never going to happen.
Well okay, it could happen. Say you have 25 coins.
But how many millions of times are you going to have to shake that box
to make them all come up heads? Do you have any idea?
[Ark answers: "Not enough for the life of the universe."]
Yeah, the universe, I mean it just isn't going to happen.
However, if you reach into that box with your hand and turn them all over,
you can very quickly create a situation where there is complete order in that box.
And, the only reason the principle of the second law came to light
in the first place was in the connection with the efficiencies of steam engines,
and it had nothing to do with any innate understanding of entropy of complexity.
And yet somehow, this little second law of thermodynamics
which was devised to study machines, was applied to living existence.
And of course, they want all human beings to be machines.
They don't want them to be living systems.
They don't want them to have consciousness.
So the confusion is simply because the second law comprises a two-part imperative,
tying together two very distinct concepts --energy losses and disorder--
within the concept of entropy.
The first part involves bookkeeping of energy,
similar in a sense to the first law, where energy is neither created nor destroyed.
While the second law relationship of energy loss and disorder
may always hold in the natural non-living world,
it is definitely not the case in a Living System phenomenon.
This can be explained in only one of two ways:
either the linkage between energy and disorder is not as absolute
as our traditional interpretation implies,
or living systems violate a major provision of that law.
The only logical solution is to allow a decoupling of the energy and information
components of entropy to allow them to be independent entities, because in fact, they are.
If a system is natural and inanimate --that is, not living--
it will naturally tend toward disorder over time and will decay
If the system is a living system, it will by definition,
tend toward increased order over time.
The fundamental difference must be directly linked to some faculty
that maintains the continuous intelligent supervision controlling
all of the dynamic activities in the living cell
and the cessation of which signifies death and decay.
The only reason, as I said, the principles of the second law
came to light was because of machines.
(We've got a problem because somebody messed up all of my notes here.)
Anyway, let's see what's coming up next and then we'll know where we are. Oh yes.
Since human intelligence is a direct result of the increasing
complexity phenomenon characteristic throughout the Living System,
the creation and operation of machines by humans is merely
an extension of that very same Living System phenomenon.
So we come back once again to the idea that somewhere, somehow,
something’s made living machines on our planet and imbued in them
the ability to evolve and grow and to create human beings.
But we can't let that take us away because as we have seen,
species can come and go and we are possibly no exception.
And there is a possibility that we are, but we aren't going to be complaining about that.
We are reminded that this state of
increasing complexity characteristic of biological systems
is contrary to every known non-living phenomenon.
The moment that we neglect to keep up the intelligent control
that maintains order within the subsystems of our mechanical machines,
they will spontaneously head us in the direction of equilibrium
and eventually cease to function.
If you don't put gas your car, if you don't keep it maintained,
it's going to end up in the junk yard.
So intelligence exists at the species level within the system's sophisticated use
of distribution statistics that permits species to anticipate biosphere changes,
adapt accordingly, and thus be able to control somewhat evolutionary destiny.
We also find many examples at the Living System level,
within the system wide feedback checks and balances
that characterize interactions across all species.
And that is, different species,
like if you have a bunch of rabbits,
a population of rabbits and they get to be too many,
then you have a handy population of foxes that is going to eat a bunch of them.
We should really think about that seriously
in consideration of the fact that human beings now amount to 7 billion on this planet
and there really is more than the planet can support.
So life in any system where the information and energy components of entropy
are decoupled such that the former component can decrease
while the latter always increases.
We need to depersonalize intelligence from its egocentric roots
and expand its meaning and application to include
some fundamental characteristics of the universe in general.
Neither intelligence nor information can be derived
from random events because, according to the laws of thermodynamics,
neither exists in a non-living environment.
And there is no practical point in deferring the origin of intelligence
to the natural laws of nature
because they are ruled by the second law
and the spontaneous tendency towards the equilibrium state and greater randomness.
It becomes obvious that if the source of such intelligence
could not derive from the fledging biosphere itself,
that is, from within the random state of its chemical constituents,
then it had to have been imposed from outside.
So if the Living System is designed to last for billions of years,
and the purpose is to maintain a library of information stored in the DNA,
who is it for?
If we are just one of infinite numbers of species
that have lived in the past 3.8 billion years on this planet,
we just happen to be, as far as we know, the last kind to live.
And if we can tell from a design analysis of the system
that it is intended to last for billions of years
and if we can tell from the design analysis that
what it is indeed intended to conserve is DNA
because that is the one thing that all species share in common,
then who is it for?
So now we need to take a little short divergence.
We asked the question, "who is it for?"
So hold that in your minds.
Okay. Now, I like this little quote because... This is Erwin Shrödinger
and we already quoted him on the other part when he was talking
about negative entropy and positive entropy, and it's from the same book, actually.
And he says the most interesting thing.
"It is impossible for a single mind fully
to command more than a small specialized portion of it.
I can see no escape from this dilemma than some of us
should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories
at the risk of making fools of ourselves."
And some of us do.
"Matter and energy comprise the surface structure of the universe.
The surface structure is readily perceived by our senses.
The internal structure is more subtle.
It consists not only of matter and energy, but of information as well."
And that is Tom Stonier, "Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe"
and he died not too long ago.
So the first thing I want to talk about is our perceptions.
Our familial social programming. Our historical experience
and why it is that we sometimes have trouble perceiving things as they are.
Take a squirrel, for example.
A squirrel, he knows for some instinctive reason that he must collect acorns
and bury them for the winter.
When a fellow squirrel dies, he thinks nothing of it.
He doesn't make up stories about acorns being gifts from god
or being brought by the aliens or being bombs,
that could explode and cause him to lose his mind.
He has no life that makes him think about these things in any way
other than a totally practical pragmatic way.
When a friend squirrel dies, he's gone.
When the acorn is there
he knows what to do with it, when he gets hungry he eats.
Human beings seem to be the only ones who make up completely irrational stories
about phenomena in our universe that bear absolutely no relationship
to what is really going on in the ground.
You can say that we all have an internal mental map, a map of the universe.
We have a map of our world.
And, the question is how close our mental map is to what is actually real?
I mean, how many people have phobias?
You have agoraphobia, claustrophobia, you have any number of phobias.
And you know a phobia is just an exaggeration of this tendency.
You go out into an open space
and you feel like something terrible is going to happen to you
if you are not protected inside your house.
How rational is that?
Well, for somebody who doesn't have any problem it’s obviously clearly totally irrational.
If you have claustrophobia
you get in an elevator and all of a sudden you can't breathe,
you start having an asthma attack.
Well somebody who is standing right there
and looks at a person who is having a claustrophobia attack,
can think that this person is nuts.
"You're being totally irrational.
Nothing is coming after you.
This is an elevator, for god's sake!
You just push the button, it gets you to the next floor and you get out.
It’s only for a few seconds, can't you just control yourself?"
But to the person who is suffering from it, it is such a big illusion,
it’s such a big thing that they can't master it, they can't control it.
Their free will detector has really gone off on a plane.
But the thing is that most of what we think about our world is part of a program.
It is part of what we have been inculcated with.
Because human beings seem to be,
because of their neoplasticity the fact that
everything is hard wired into them.
There's something else that exits in them that helps them to form social groups.
And social groups apparently were necessary for survival.
In the Paleolithic times, people
had to get along to support one another or they died.
So there is this neoplasticity that allows a group to form
its own kind of rules and then they get,
put it on to all their children and they all grow up.
They know how everybody behaves and this is, how in their culture,
you know, what is expected of them.
How to behave, what is polite, what is not polite,
and they all perform to it.
And if you look around the world
you see all different kinds of cultures everywhere.
For example, France is a very specific kind of culture.
Spain has a different kind of culture. American culture is different.
We have been doing a lot of talking recently about
the differences between American culture and the French culture.
The French don't value truth.
They value being able to argue intellectually very well.
It doesn't matter whether they arrive at truth.
It doesn't matter, what matters is that they argue extremely well.
That they are rational, that there are logical points, or masterful,
that they have the best quotes from the best sources.
And in the US, it’s a little bit different,
even though they have been taken over by the same disease since 9/11,
it still use to be that in the US, truth had a very high value
and I think that is probably from the Protestant ethic,
while France is still pretty much controlled by the Catholic church,
whether it is a secular state or not, but still.
So, you can take a child and say,
you can take a child from a very primitive culture,
say from the darkest jungle in the Amazon and you can bring him into,
if he is an infant, you can bring him in
and you can raise him in a modern western culture
and he will learn and adapt and will be just exactly like any modern western kid.
And by the same token you can take a western baby,
and give it to this primitive tribe and it will grow up to be just as savage
as the other children in that savage tribe.
You can take... this is something that was done during World War II.
There were a lot of Jewish children
who were taken and raised in non-Jewish households.
And they became completely non-Jewish
in terms of their ethnicity or their religious practices
or their different customs and so forth.
So the point is that the way a person is, is not the way they have to be.
That it is enculterated.
We believe what we believe, we think what we think,
we behave the way we behave, because it is programmed into us.
And this goes to more than just cultural norms.
What we believe is a lie. What we believe is the truth.
These are things that are not necessarily natural to us.
So the point is that our perceptions are programmed.
And one of the main programs that has been put
on to most of humanity for the last 50 years is the material nature of our world.
That is, matter. Matter rules.
There are a whole lot of things that are being done, propagandized.
Food, drink, social ideas, sexuality, all that sort of thing.
It's all being changed. So, that's our perceptions.
The question is: can information exist outside of the human brain?
When a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it produce a sound?
How many people think that if it falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it,
it still produces a sound. anyway?
Raise your hand.
Okay, how many people believe that if there is nobody there to hear it, it doesn't?
So, we are about equally divided.
Some people think that if there is nobody there to hear it,
it doesn't produce a sound.
And other people... okay, so how about if it depends on how you define sound?
[Ark answers: "I vote for both."] He voted for both!
Well, the thing is that there can actually be
two correct answers depending on how you define sound.
If you define sound as meaning an event upon the ear drums on a witness,
then clearly when the tree falls
and there is no ear drum there to receive that sound, then there is no sound.
However, if you define sound as the movement of waves through the air,
whether or not there is anybody around
then yes, it does make a sound.
The thing is that the first answer is egocentric and relativistic
because such an answer will get in the way of an objective analysis of reality.
If everything is all about egotism,
how are we ever going to understand how the universe sees itself?
If you were not here and only the universe was, would that tree make a sound?
Okay. Basically it would be like saying that if we leave the lights on in a room,
as soon as we leave the room, even though we left the lights on,
the light no longer exists.
Or as soon as we turn off the radio or the TV,
the room is no longer filled with radio or TV wave transmissions.
Our civilization has created whole institutions
to store information outside of our brains.
Libraries, art galleries, museums, radio waves, computer disks, books.
It was not until the invention of time keeping devices,
that time was uncoupled from life events.
In wasn't until the invention of devices that do work
that energy was uncoupled from things.
Galileo began to study cannonballs to analyze force and motion.
Before that time, matter and energy were not separate.
In the Aristotelian world view,
the fact that you could heat metal meant simply
you were adding more of fire, one of the elements, earth, air, fire, water.
If you added more fire to the metal, that would change the metal into something else.
It wasn't that the metal got hot,
it was a fundamental change by the addition of fire.
We are presently facing the necessity to uncouple information from our brains
where it generally resides in very subjective formats.
Scientists are exploring the natural properties of information
including its structure, dynamic behavior and statistical features.
Who would have thought that information had structure and dynamical features?
Information is more than something we manipulate inside our heads.
Electronic devices transmit information in a physical form.
DNA carries the information that instructs a single cell
to become a lion or a mouse.
That is, DNA is a physical substance that carries information,
and has been doing so for several billion years to our knowledge.
And that is, information existed long before our brains came to be.
Can information be processed outside the human brain?
At the most primitive level, we can input into a computer two numbers: 5 and 7
and instruct the computer to add them and get back the number 12.
The 12 is not entered by the human operator.
So, the computer processed that information and gave him something
that he didn't put into it.
This is very different from things that just store information,
such as books, videos or paintings.
And certainly, information is processed at the cellular level,
as in the activity of the ribosomes in constructing polypeptide chains.
There are different forms of energy:
mechanical, chemical, electrical, heat, sound, light, nuclear...
In the same way, there are different forms of information.
Human information is only one form.
When a radio transmitter emitting radio waves carrying human information
also imposes patterns of information
such as frequency and modulation on raw energy.
Computers impose their own logic patterns on information.
You know 0 and 1, yes and no.
The raw energy that is "informed" by the radio transmitter
is electrical and might come from a steam energy
that imposes patterns of information on heat
to cause it to produce electricity.
At each step, the energy becomes more organized
as it is processed by human created information machines.
That is, under certain circumstances,
machines can convert energy into information and vice versa.
The same can be said for printing presses and computers,
electronic signal generators, clocks, spinning wheels, looms and more.
That is to say that even when it’s not doing anything, a machine stores information.
An automobile is a storehouse of information.
And the Living System is a storehouse of information.
A good engineer that has never seen an automobile before,
can look at one and figure out what it does, what the different parts are,
how it works and everything about it
because it has that information inherent in its form and structure.
The same is true with the Living System.
Information, therefore, seems to be a property of the universe.
It is part of its internal structure.
The term "information" includes data, knowledge, insight, and wisdom.
There is a spectrum: A datum is a small chunk of information,
at the low end of the spectrum, moving to facts, organized to knowledge,
and further organized to wisdom.
All of these represent increasing levels of complexity.
Knowledge, insight and wisdom represent
the increasing complexity of organized information in people's heads.
We define new information as that which is perceived or transmitted
without making a judgment as to its accuracy or reliability.
That is, information has an independent reality.
Meaning does not, [inaudible] perceptions.
Because you get raw information from the universe.
Pretend you are a squirrel. There is an acorn.
It is an acorn and not an alien. It is not a bomb.
You know it is not anything other than an acorn. Something to eat.
Your squirrel buddy dies, he's gone.
And he is not gone from a happy squirrel hunting ground.
You don't have to imagine
that there is more to the event than what is there.
I mean that is just pure raw data.
And I'm not saying that what we do with information,
that asserting meaning or inferring meaning is the wrong thing to do about it.
I'm trying to point out that if you want to really work with something
you have to separate your own preconceptions from the data
before you can even begin to manage it properly.
Meaning is the interpretation of information in relation to some context.
A radio picking up Morse code in a foreign language is detectable,
but not necessarily comprehensible.
A book written in a foreign language carries information
but may be incomprehensible to the readers.
And a person who speaks English looks at a book written in French,
he at least recognizes much of the letters,
but if he looks at a book written in Arabic,
the only thing knows is that it’s a book and contains information
but he recognizes nothing.
So there is a lot of evidence of the fact that information exits
in a context that we don't even recognize yet,
such as looking at the Living System itself
as something that can convey information to us.
We must not confuse the detection and/or interpretation of information
with the information itself.
Information is considered to be distinct from the system which interprets it.
Information is.
It does not need to be perceived to exist.
It does not need to be understood to exist.
It requires no intelligence to interpret it.
It does not have to have meaning to exist. Information is.
Items which conveyed no information of any interest at all
to Dr. Watson, were loaded with clues for Sherlock.
Information and organization are intimately related.
All organized structures contain information.
No organized structure can exist without containing information.
What did we just say about the automobile?
Somebody who knows how to read it, can read it and tell you whole lot about it.
It has information inherent in its organization.
Therefore, the addition of information to a system
manifests itself by causing a system to become more organized, or reorganized.
An organized system has the capacity to release or convey information
to the person who figures out how to read it or extract it.
Energy is defined as the capacity to perform work.
Information is defined as the capacity to organize a system
or to maintain it in an organized state.
It is impossible to perform useful work
without an input of both energy and information.
But as noted, machines can convert energy into information
and information into energy.
This may be an important esoteric concept and deserves more investigation.
So, communication systems, including the Cassiopaean transmissions,
are for the purpose of bridging the space between two or more receptors
(intelligent beings).
Example: Source: a man on a telephone.
An encoder: the mouthpiece of the telephone.
A message: the words the man speaks.
A channel: the electrical wiring (now electrical impulses) travels.
A decoder: the earpiece of the receiving telephone.
A receiver: the ear and mind of the listener.
We asked the question just a little while ago,
who is or what is the information contained in a living system,
the inner library for?
Let's see if I can get back to where I was...
Oh no, my notes are all messed up here. I'm going to be in trouble now, people!
Ah, here we are, alright.
That's what you get for having a hundred pages of notes.
We already mentioned the "Origin of Life: The 5th Option", by Bryant Shiller.
Bryant Shiller does some really interesting things talking about DNA
because among the things that he has done
is a systems engineering analysis about how DNA splits and recombines
He can tell you exactly how many hostile recombinations there are
because he worked them all out.
And he can show you what possible mutations occur
inside the universe or what possible mutations occur from external events.
He can tell you the inherent mechanisms because he has a systems engineering analysis of it.
For example: did you know that..., well I better tell you about the DNA
before I can tell you that. Hang on.
What we've got here, as you see, is your standard picture of DNA.
And what you have in your cell nucleus is 23 pairs of chromosomes
and they kind of look like this. Okay?
And then you take this, a piece of this,
this is just a little bit of this part zoomed in from this place right there.
And it stretches out into these little balls like this
and each one of those little balls around over to this ...
and you end up with this. Okay?
So you have this ladder-like structure with these little ladder rungs on it.
Chromosomes are made of tightly wound DNA and protein.
Genes are found along the length of the chromosomes.
A gene is a segment of DNA that contains instructions
for making a specific protein or proteins.
There are 3 billion base pairs in the human genome.
Those are the base pairs right there, those little rungs of the ladder,
there are 3 billions of them.
Each twist in a DNA coil takes 10 nucleotides
and is about 3.4 nanometers long.
The DNA strand is normally compacted forming millions of tight coils
around a core made of protein filaments called histones.
The histone surface has a path of positive charges (it is alkaline)
that precisely match the pattern of negative charges along the DNA double helix.
It is thought that the histone scaffolding behaves somewhat like an accordion,
relaxing and permitting the DNA coils to separate when a particular segment,
--a genetic instruction-- needs to be copied, and then bunching up again
after the copying is complete.
This right here is not the copying activity necessarily.
This is..., yeah it is.
Because what happens is that the cell needs something.
And the little cell machines go over and make,
you know, it’s like having a tape collection,
millions of tapes or CDs,
and somehow this little machine that knows what piece of DNA is needed,
goes over to these 23 pairs of chromosomes,
and it knows which one of the 23 to go to,
knows how to emit the enzyme to inform it to relax,
to open up and relax just a little segment of this
very long string of DNA so that it can make a copy.
And then it makes a copy like a photocopy
and takes it out of the nucleus of the cell,
it takes it to the ribosome
which then assembles the polypeptide protein that is needed.
Now, we're talking about, right there, just to do that,
just to make a protein, we're talking about intelligence
that just staggers the mind.
How is this going to happen in the primordial soup,
you know like "Hey, I've got a plan for how we can do this.
You look like a pretty nice amino acid,
let's get together and do this sort of thing." This is nuts!
These are the percentages of your DNA that are used for various activities.
Before the Human Genome Project, it was thought that the human genetic library
must have something like 100,000 genes,
each of which coded for a single protein, enzyme or instruction.
We have now been informed
that there are only 30 to 35,000 genes in the human genetic library
(unless they've changed that, you know, this changes as they research more).
However, if all the information contained within human DNA
were written on paper, it would have about a billion words,
3 letters each, which is 5,000 volumes of 500 pages each.
But the genetic content, the part that actually codes for protein,
is only 8% of the total
and the other 92% is often referred to as "junk".
That means that only 400 of the 5,000 volumes in your theoretical library
are devoted to instructions.
And the remaining 4,600 volumes are about what?
"Exons" is the term used to describe
an expressed gene or an expressed sequence,
that is, genes that do stuff.
"Introns" are called intervening sequences of stuff,
that doesn't do anything as far as anyone can tell.
And as you can see, there is a bunch of it.
Genetic information is encoded in the DNA molecule as a series of bases
running up and down the ladder-like structure. The rungs are the base pairs.
The base pairs serve as a kind of genetic alphabet of four letters.
The four letters of the DNA alphabet are themselves composed
of two sets of complementary nucleic acids
that are attached to each other via chemical bonding.
The ends of the rung are attached to the ladder frame also via chemical bonding.
When they say "chemical bonding" what they really mean is that there is a chemical
that has to have some extra atomic activities going on, electrons and protons,
they kind of keep each other together.
The important thing is the actual information is coded in the base pairs
that are strung along the ladder.
So we have an alphabet of four letters.
Four chemical letters: A, T, G, and C,
which stand for the names of the four nucleotides bases:
Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine.
A pairs always and only with T, G pairs only with C.
So, G and C can pair only as G-C or C-G.
Similarly, T pairs only with A, as T-A or A-T.
This exclusive complementarity
is at the heart of the copying of a genetic message from anywhere
as well as the replicating of the whole DNA library
when the cell reproduces itself.
When the DNA replicates during cell division,
the ladder-like structure unzips along its length.
One side with its half base pairs
goes to each of the new cells being produced.
This procedure permits each half to reconstruct its corresponding other half
by gathering from within the cell the missing complementary components
to make up the complete DNA molecules.
In other words, it knows if it splits out in the middle
it knows what it has to pair with, because there are only two possibilities.
Transcription is when a gene is extracted from the DNA library
and transferred to the translating machines of the cell, the ribosomes,
to be read and interpreted, and the instruction followed "to the letter."
So we already talked about when a cell calls for a working copy of a gene,
there are mechanisms that search for and locate the gene wherever it is.
Once the beginning and end portion of the DNA... [film skip ]
So anyhow, the important thing about this...
Oh, those little "handtruck" things are called Transfer RNA
and deliver the individual amino acid building blocks.
See those little handtrucks?
You know, it comes along and it brings amino acids
and gives it to this, and this is reading the piece of DNA
and it's constructing it, it's adding these things to the string,
and then it tosses out this, and another one comes along.
Do you really understand the amazing complexity of this process?
And you think it's not informed by a tremendous amount of information?
I mean this is, this systems analysis of this process
tells you how much information is contained in there.
So, anyway, now we are getting to something
really kind of fun and interesting.
Now, while pondering whether such a system could arise naturally,
consider as well where the whole genetic coding system might have come from.
These are two very separate entities:
the intelligent machinery that carries out the instructions
and the DNA that carries the instructions.
Because DNA is just like a one-dimensional map, just like a book.
It carries the information, it didn't write it.
That's the important thing.
Now, we use such one-dimensional map all of the time,
as in sequences of numbers written on a notepad that we dial into a telephone
to connect us to one of a billion phones on the planet, or more.
The numbers tells us the precise sequence of numbers to push
that reproduces a series of tones, which activates the telephone company equipment,
which connects us to the party we want to speak to.
There is no intelligence in the numbers.
The intelligence is in the way the system exchange interprets
the pushing of a sequence of buttons.
The system is set up to interpret the low level information
that the caller inputs to initiate the call.
This is processed through a series of intelligent and sophisticated subsystems
and ends in you being connected to the person you are calling.
The sequence of the symbols themselves, whether in a DNA or in a phone number,
must be used in a specific and restrictive way to initiate a chain of events
that results in specific results.
Can additional information be incorporated into sequential information systems
in order to expand their versatility?
A phone number can be enhanced.
A keypad can be used as a coding device with letters of the alphabet
included along with the numbers.
Thus you can "call ATT" or you can call anything.
This additional level of information is designed into the phone system
in order to engage the intelligence of another system of the human brain.
It's easier to remember "call ATT" than 1155188
because the mind can associate both the reason for the number
together with a phrase that translates into the required dialing sequence.
Of course, "call ATT" would be useless if you did not know how to read.
The same information format that is utilized
in the one-dimensional genetic mapping of protein amino acid sequences.
A word composed of letter sequences is a linear map.
And if you can't read, that's all it is:
a series of symbols that convey nothing to you.
We presently use the English alphabet to represent the amino acids
that make up the polypeptide chains that fold into proteins.
If we can use the alphabet to represent a genetic sequence,
perhaps the genetic code alphabet could also include messages
that could be understandable to us if only we knew how to read.
Now. Take a word... These are the letters of the English alphabet
that have been assigned to these various amino acids.
Here you have, and this is interesting but it might get a bit too technical.
You find that this particular amino acid can be written in four different ways.
That means that mutations can urge pieces of DNA that absolutely do nothing
until another major connecting mutation takes place.
As long as mutations can occur and the same amino acids keep [inaudible]
because the system is designed to accommodate that.
In this design analysis
this system coding of proteins is really, really worth reading.
And as you see, there are a couple of things
that have only two or three sequences of code for them
and then there is a stop.
At the end of every codon, when it is finished,
there is a stop code.
That's the stop code right there.
Take the word "WARNING".
You can write it as ugc, gcu blah, blah, blah, blah,
and then we transfer it into,
from the RNA to the regular DNA language.
You convert the "u" to a "t"
and this is the word "warning" written in DNA.
The point being that those billions and billions of introns could be a code,
which would give a reason to why the Living System
was designed to survive billions of years.
Now, let me just show you something.
This is an article from the Science News,
They have been discovering that... this is back in 1994,
"The non-coded regions of DNA contain language properties.
"The focus neglects some 90 percent of the DNA in a cell.
Long ignored as 'junk', considered junk, this noncoding
DNA nevertheless carries its own message.
The language-like properties. One mistake, and the code will be misread."
And here is another one.
This is from Scientific American:
"Investigators have found that 'junk' parts of the genome of many organisms
may be expressing a language.
The vast majority of genetic material in organisms
from bacteria to mammals consists of noncoding DNA segments,
which are interspersed with the coding parts.
Some kind of organized information. Junk DNA follows the of structure language.
There has to be some kind of hierarchical arrangement of the information
to allow one to use it in an efficient fashion
and to have some adaptability and flexibility.
Well, Shiller's analysis of it,
and how it could be preserved for billions of years,
because this is important to know his analysis of how mutations occur
in order to understand how it could be that something like that
could survive literally for billions of years
carried in the Living System on this planet.
I want my other file back. I think I'm done with this one.
This is what Bryant Shiller says:
"It is somewhat astonishing to discover an information system
that can convey language in an alphabet just like we do,
one that predates humans by billions of years
and has only come to light in the last 50." Billions of years people.
Think about it.