It must be clear by now why Yockey is so interested in calculating the information content of proteins: it shows that life cannot arise by chance.
The discussion above demonstrates clearly, however, that the minimum information content of the protobiont must be in the range of hundreds of thousands to several million bits. Scenarios on the origin of life must show how a complexity of that magnitude, which is characteristic of organisms, was generated. (p.244)
That such scenarios do not exist is the basis of William Dembski’s book Intelligent Design. The subtle difference is that Yockey probably would say that we never can know whether such scenarios are true or not. The reader of Yockey’s book soon notices that Yockey attacks paradigms as: the existence of primeval soup (Ch 8), the origin of life from primeval soup (Ch 9) and self-organization (Ch 10). Yockey claims and demonstrates that “there is no evidence for a primeval soup” (ch 8.4) and is very critical of the current theories of the origin of life:
The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from non-living matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology. (p284)
This is identical to what a creationist such as Phillip Johnson [2] believes. The difference is that Yockey’s statements are inspired by a thorough analysis of the information content of DNA and proteins and his subsequent realisation that there is too much information to have arisen by chance alone. Furthermore, Yockey does not conclude ‘design’. Despite his agnosticism, Yockey claims that we know that life originated on Earth. The explanation may be beyond human reasoning powers (agnostic!). Scientists should admit ignorance. We must accept the existence of life as an axiom (p335). Yockey claims that all textbooks written for college undergraduates present the primeval soup paradigm as an established fact. I checked Ridley (1996) [3]: Yockey is right about this one.
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