Irrelevant question. The question wasn’t, “Who created the immune system?” The question was, “Where did the information to make antibodies come from”. In you analogy, the question is, "Where did this piece of information in that text of Hamlet come from? And the answer, of course, is that it came from Miss Random. Shakespeare certainly didn’t create it.[quote=“deliberateresult, post:1043, topic:4944”]
Ahh, but the intelligent agent is indeed discernable! As you concede multiple times in your reply to me, your “DNA has prescriptive information for carrying out a specific function”. Now, recall the exact wording of my claim:
“every single time we trace functional prescriptive information to its source, that source is always an intelligent agent, and never natural processes,”
I think the word you need to consider here is “source.” Your memory B cells do indeed perform a biological function; a function that was programmed into them from the beginning (more on this in a moment), bearing witness to an intelligent agent at its source. To the point currently under consideration, a copying error to original text cannot possibly occur absent the existence of the original text. Therefore, the original text is the source and the copying error is simply that: a copying error. Can a copying error result in a different coherent message? Sometimes. And I grant that this truth opens up an entirely different discussion when it comes to biological systems (which I will be happy to have). However, it remains true that the original message is the source.
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As far as I can tell from you entire response, the word “information” in your statements has no meaning at all. It doesn’t mean semantic information – meaning of the message – because the meaning of the final message was not present initially. It’s not the string of symbols being output, as it would be in information theory, because they weren’t present initially either. Perhaps you can define what you’re talking about in some way, because at present I see no way of having a rational discussion about an undefined term.
Well, I would say that there’s a great deal of novel information in human DNA, but I’d also say that my B cells contain lots of novel information. Once again, I have no idea what you mean by “information”. I cannot think of any definition by which human DNA has novel information while B cells don’t. In both cases, there’s a DNA sequence that is replicated with random modifications, yielding a new sequence. In both cases the initial sequence is functional, and so is the final sequence.