PZ Watch 08.18.10

A couple of days back, PZ went off on Ray Kurzweil. One of the things PZ said has bothered me in several different aspects. PZ said this:

”To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism.”

To try to interpret this, let's organize the thoughts in that sentence:

1. Ontogeny builds species-specific properties of the organism using genome data.

2. Ontogeny gets this ability as an emergent property, [ O ].

3. [ O ] comes from “genome regulatory components” plus environment.

Assuming that the environment contains no instructions for [ O ] since the environment has no regulatory component (it just is - exists without meaning), then the environment would provide merely data, used by the “regulatory components” of the genome. So the genome does, in fact – based solely on PZ’s input – contain the program. Or perhaps it contains code elements that self-assemble into program(s) for specific targeted regions, after modifying itself based on environmental data inputs.

Either way, if what PZ is saying is accurate, then his attack on Kurzweil (for this reason) does not stand up: the code is in the genome.

Taken purely from PZ’s description, the emergent property [ O ] sounds suspiciously like self-modifying code. Or if not that, then a seriously complex decision set that takes into account environmental variables of all types before making an organism. (And modifying the instructions based on the environmental input?)

Most emergent properties are accidents. For example, hardness, clarity, and beauty are accidental side effects of compressing carbon into diamonds. The emergent properties that evolutionists like to claim, are not accidental in the same sense as secondary effects. Emergent properties such as [ O ] in PZ’s scheme are essential to the formation of the organism. So in the case of current genomic theory a la PZ, the organism is the accident: the secondary effect of the emergent properties of the genomic code and the environmental data.

The idea that the organism is the secondary effect is OK it seems to me, except for two things. First, how did all that get pounded into a molecule before there were organisms for the molecule to create as secondary effects? Second issue, that the environment is a huge variable which is not defined, nor is its interaction capability defined, nor its limits, if any, defined. It remains a mystery, just like the content of the genome, and the question of how proteins know how to assemble into organisms, much less bring them to life.

PZ’s explanation is just a single sentence though, and not too much can be expected from that brevity. But, of course, the sentence should support the original contention, which is that Kurzweil is “completely wrong” in thinking that the genome contains the program, and it does not support that contention.