It from Bit or Chance and Necessity ?

When referring to the universe and taking into consideration the fine tuning required for the universe to come into existence, most physicists have had to conclude: It did not happen by chance.

When referring to life and taking into consideration the information content of DNA and the complexity of the organisms required to support life, there are a growing number of scientist that have had to conclude: It did not happen by chance.

In 1949, a "bit" was defined by Claude Shannon as the smallest possible quantity of information. In 1989 the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, a pioneer of nuclear fission, offered up the catchphrase: It from Bit. He went on to say "every it – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence ... from bits."

In his book Why Us?, British MD James Le Fanu claims, as have many others, that the cell is a highly automated factory. The claim is that the cell is more complex than any factory that has ever been built and possibly even more complex that all the factories that have ever been built.

Yet in his book Chance and Necessity, French Nobel biologist Jacues Monod has famously claimed that the origin of life is purely a product of chance.

Evolutionary theory claims that small random mutations in the DNA have accumulated over billions of years so that bacteria eventually lead to today’s human, us. Le Fanu states:

Bacteria seem so simple yet they are billions of times more complex than a grain of sand. The simplest bacteria has about 470 genes. But the number of genes varies wildly as the complexity changes. Multi-cellular life came in 500 million years ago in the Cambrian explosion. The blind millimeter long roundworm (C. Elegans), with just 959 cells has 19,100 genes whereas the prodigiously more talented fly has a genome of only 13,000 genes and we, humans, have about 25,000 genes.

Le Fanu goes on to state:

So we share all sorts of genes with such organisms as bacteria, the worm, the fly and the mouse. But how are living things so vastly distinctive from each other? As an example, the same master gene, Pax 6, controls the formation of the eye in both flies and mice and in fact all eyes. It is very difficult to conceive how the relative master genes for vastly different species could have chanced upon the correct sequence of turning the various genes on and off to generate the appropriate part such as the eye. It is as if the ‘idea’ of the fly (or any other organism) must somehow permeate the genome that gives rise to it, for it is only through the master genes of the embryonic fly’s knowing it is a fly that they will activate that sequence of switches that will give rise to those appropriate structures.

Wow, exciting stuff. Is it It from Bit or is it Chance and Necessity ?

A small Vashon book group will be discussing Le Fanu’s Why Us? Sunday, June 3, from 4 to 5:30, at the Vashon Senior Center, 10004 SW Bank Road. All are welcome. Please join us. Bob Blomgren, blomgren@centurytel.net.