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excerpt from the discussion:

Tour: “[Concerning the origin of life,] my argument has always been, molecules don’t care about life, organisms care about life, molecules don’t care, they don’t know how to move toward life, they have never been shown to move toward life, there’s no interest in moving toward life, they have no brain, no desire to move toward life, and so when you set up a target and say, here is a cell, I want you to move toward that cell, you’ve already heavily biased the system, and now what you’re saying is, the information that I input to say, I want you to make this cell, that’s an enormous amount of information that I’ve put in there, and I’ve heavily biased the system to try to go toward that when, in its own view, it would have no desire to go toward that than to go in the other direction.”

Dembski: “Well, you’re absolutely right, everything from field of evolutionary computing, computational intelligence, underwrites that, that it is the computer programmer, the designer, that’s inputting all this information… when you talk to the materialistic biologists, it’s as though once you get natural selection working, it’s just magic so, to your point, once you can get some simple little replicator, just some string of some ribozyme, then it’s all just gonna bootstrap, it’s all just gonna run, and the information will just magically materialize, and finally, presto chango, you’re going to have a cell, and it’s just nonsense, and it’s the evolutionists in this case that are the mystery mongers, I think all the real science here is on our side [Intelligent Design].”

Tour: “Yes, well, I’ve said you can’t get the ribozyme, because you can’t make the sugar, so that you can’t make the ribose, and if you had the ribose you can’t hook these together, because you get two five-linkages, you get three five-linkages, your yields are so low, but, anyway, I’ll give you the ribozyme, and not just the ribozyme, but all the amino acids you want in [the right] form, I’ll give you all the sugars that you want in [the right] form, I’ll even hook them together for you, and in any sequence that you want, and so you can have whatever information you want, get it from a living cell, and now all I’m asking you to do is to take all those components, which I just took out of a living cell, I deconstructed it and put them all in front of you, in your pristine laboratory, not in a cave, not under a rock, now go ahead and assemble a cell that’s gonna have life – nobody! nobody! would ever say that they could assemble a cell from that! and so, when they come with these little things, that they have a ribozyme and then you [automatically] get a cell, I mean, it’s kinda silly, people have made youtube videos, they have a ribozyme, and all these components, now all you need is some millions of years and you’ll have a cell – where do you get that? if you can’t do it in your lab, how do these things construct? there’s a huge amount of information [needed], even from the components to the full assembly, because they [the constituent parts] have no idea they want [or need] to go toward the full assembly, there’s no desire to do this, molecules have no desire to move toward life.”

Dembski: “Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, the information problem, I think, the neo-Darwinist wants to put it in terms of, it’s all in the genetics you know, there we’ve got the full body plan, but it’s not in the genetics [there are no blueprints in the genes]… the information problem is immense… and I’ve heard [Darwinists] saying, in hushed tones, well, natural selection is just smarter than us, natural selection can do it but we can’t – and it’s almost a substitute of natural selection for God, and then we are the crazy ones because we believe in God…”

Tour: “Their [natural] selector is their intelligent designer, they are the one who are grabbing the concept of intelligent design and putting it upon their selector, because a selector has to be extremely complex, generally more complex than the thing it’s selecting…”