Programming of Life Reviews
"The Programming of Life is an excellent freshman level review of the formal programming, coding/decoding, integration, organization, Prescriptive Information (PI), memory, regulation and control required for a physical object to find itself “alive.” Donald E Johnson, with Ph.Ds in Chemistry, Information Theory and Computer Science, is uniquely qualified to unpackage the strong parallels between everyday cybernetic design and engineering and the workings of the cell. I highly recommend this book." David L. Abel, Director, The Gene Emergence Project, Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, The Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc.
"In the pandemonium of forward progress regarding the design of technological systems based on natural science, Dr. Johnson pauses to contemplate the implications of these discoveries and developmental theories of information science as they apply to the current theories of the origin of life and species diversity." Joshua A. Mitchell, Biologist / Regulatory Project Manager, US Army Corps of Engineers
"This is currently the best book covering the relationship between genome and computer architectures." Jonathan Bartlett, Director of Technology/Author / Speaker
"You have put together an amazing array of quotations from scientist of all persuasions, and given so much information that I think that anyone who wants to dismiss [information]... from the equation of life must be doing so out of some religious zealotry rather than from a hard look at the facts. Jim Pappas, Author/playwright/producer
Broaden Your Appreciation for Life's Complexities,
A few years ago a good friend asked me what the likelihood was of the current version of evolution theory being correct. I had never been asked the question before and didn't have an answer in mind. My response was that I thought that there was some slight possibility that it could be correct, but that possibility was clearly a lot less than 10 percent. I noted at the time that much of the evidence that evolutionists cite appears to have mistaken the ability of genetic code sequences to be turned on and off by environmental influences for creating new species. Studies, for instance, of Darwin's finches have shown that what Darwin observed in the Galapagos were not new species being formed by trial and error over the eons, but rather genetic potential being turned on and off by quick shifts in the weather.
After reading Programming of Life, I can safely correct my false views. Like many scientists, my views of how complicated life is were wildly oversimplified. Life is often talked about in physical terms, using everyday analogies. When we mentally employ those analogies, we misstate the problem.
Dr. Johnson concisely defines life in terms of its information content, citing many different scientific sources. Viewed from this more complete perspective, there's no chance that the current evolutionary theories are correct.
I found it refreshing to see such an examination be conducted solely from a scientific perspective. Too often, evolution is uncritically praised or challenged in nonscientific ways. For those who like to understand a subject, it's better to use scientific concepts and perspectives to address a scientific theory.
Clearly, a new theory for the origin of species is needed. Who will provide one?
If you would like to get past any misunderstandings you have about how random interactions might have created life, read this book.
I couldn't help but think that high schools, colleges, and universities would be well served to have independent libraries available that specialize in thoughtful resources for understanding ourselves and our world from both the perspectives of thinking (science and logic) and faith (the Gospel). Otherwise, many young people will graduate from whatever school they attend with many incorrect views about the world.
The Programming of Life book is excellent!,
"The Programming of Life by Donald E. Johnson is an excellent presentation of the parallels between the everyday practical cybernetics of computer science and the programming, control and regulation mechanisms of cellular life. The book is easily understandable by non biologists, and seems to be written on a college freshman level. It has good illustrations. It also has extensive citations and quotes from peer-reviewed literature. It's perspective and content are well supported, and should be readily received by a properly skeptical scientific community (of which I am a member). The book is a fun, quick, interesting read of under 150 pages. In my opinion, the book is amazingly underpriced for what it provides. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It provides a unique education that I have never seen available from any source other than technical scientific literature, but it is wonderfully explained in lay terms. This would be a great mini text for public high school AP Biology classes."
Bringing Life Sciences Into the Twenty-First Century,
This book is very readable for anyone with a modest mathematics or science or computer science background to include, of course, computer programming. The light will really shine as the reader comprehends these topics as operating in profound ways at the lowest level of life. It made me wonder how such purposeful, directed information came to be in the very first cell, at the origin of all life.
The book is replete with attributed quotes, references, and appendices expanding upon difficult topics introduced in the text. I believe it should be on the shelf of all scientists and mathematicians. "
While initiatives such as the Origin Of Life Prize have encouraged researchers to find non-super-naturalistic processes that might explain the origins of prescriptive information, no offerings to-date have withstood the test of scientific scrutiny. Indeed all known cases of such information invariably point to the work of a mind. Johnson emphasizes the relevance of probability in his espousal of this inference- the simplest form of life was found to be 10exp80,000 times more likely of having a mindful than a non-mindful source.
Johnson repeatedly stresses how the information content of DNA is analogous to the information carried on a computer disk drive.Within such a schema, each of the enzymes that decode the information can be seen as individual computers that bring `meaning' to the code through the RNA that is transcribed and the proteins that are translated. 23,000 genes make up the human genome. And the multi-functional nature of these genes in self evident in the way that RNAs are differentially spliced and glued together.
Johnson's perspective packs a might punch on the evolutionary edifice. Computer simulations and evolutionary algorithms such as MeThinksItIsLikeAWeasel and AVIDA have failed to show how evolution can generate prescriptive information since pre-specified targets, unrealistic protection of replication instructions and unrealistic energy rewards abound in each of these systems.
While the battle over the categorization of junk DNA rages on amongst biologists, Johnson gives us a succinct and well-buttressed view on the subject: "Researchers are discovering that what has been dismissed as evolution's relics are actually vital for life". There is no evidence that new prescriptive information can be built up by genetic rearrangements such as transposition, inversion, duplication or point mutation. We can therefore understand Lynn Margulis' reference to the Darwinian claim as a `half truth' grounded in religious ferocity. This half truth forms the foundation for Johnson's final attack as he considers the merits of irreducible complexity and Craig Venter's recently produced artificial genome. Rather than showing how an organism could arise from scratch, Venter's enterprising achievement revealed the need for careful engineering of existing parts into a form that could be introduced into an existing organism.
Johnson's writing style is captivating. The extensive range of resources he draws from only serves to build confidence in the factual accuracy of his case. What a terrific read. Sheer brilliance. "
After reading Programming of Life, you will realize that it is far more likely that the Rosetta Stone inscription is really the lucky result of mindless erosion than it is that the astounding functional complexity of a single cell came about mindlessly and accidentally. Far more information than is inscribed on the Rosetta Stone had to be correctly inscribed in the DNA molecule, a biological storage device (analogous to the disk drive in your computer), that contains the digitally encoded instructions required for the assembly of the protein machines that enable the cell's metabolism.
Dr. Johnson makes clear how infeasible the proposition is that prescriptive information, like that in the code for Microsoft Word, or in the instructions in the DNA molecule, came about mindlessly. What completely natural, mindless, accidental scenario could bring about the digitally encoded instructions required for building the necessary nanotechnology for that first life form's metabolism and reproductive ability? As Dr.Johnson puts it, "For abiogenesis, we could consider ... the probability of forming ... the simplest form of living organism known as 10^-340,000,000 [Mor79]. These figures make these scenarios operationally falsified [Abe09U]. There really is no need for them, however, since the probability of a purely physical source of information contained in life is 0 (impossible, according to information science) based on alphabet requirements for information transfer [Sha48, Yoc05p182] and the complex coding and prescriptive cybernetic information processing systems in life."
As one who has been doing computer programming for years, having written telephony software to manage digital switches and created a program language compiler and interpreter, I knew intuitively that digitally encoded instructions creating complex functionality do not and cannot come about mindlessly. Dr. Johnson enables one to transition from intuitive knowledge to exact understanding. This is true especially regarding the light information science sheds on the matter.
If it is unlikely that the Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphs, came about mindlessly, it is even more unlikely that the one who created the inscription on it came about mindlessly.
The ultimate foundation of living systems is informational -- not chemical, stochastic, or a combination of the two -- and Don's beautifully articulated and well documented book lays the groundwork for understanding basic information-theoretic concepts (Shannon, functional, prescriptive) and how they relate to biological systems.
Some familiarity with basic mathematics is advised, but this should not be a problem for people with a reasonable high-school education.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough, especially for those with inquisitive minds.