One of the most common dodges used by Intelligent Design creationists is to use a vague definition of their subject so that critics have nothing specific too attack, and also so they can accuse anyone who disagrees with them of using a strawman argument. For example, they claim that organisms exhibit “specified complexity”, which cannot have evolved and requires a designer. If someone rightly points out that their definition of complexity is nowhere close to what real complexity theorists use, they can say, “Ah, but I’m talking about specified complexity, which is something different,” which leaves you adrift and wondering what the hell they’re talking about. I read that whole ghastly tome by Meyer titled Signature in the Cell, and he throws around that phrase willy-nilly and never bothers to define “specified”.
Now David Klinghoffer is complaining about Lawrence Krauss’s performance in a recent debate, claiming that he mischaracterized ID creationism horribly. Nowhere in the post does he tell us what Krauss said, and he’s also not quoted in the creationist post he’s citing, which is weird and annoying because they’ll just use the ambiguity to weasel away some more, but Klinghoffer does approve a given definition of ID creationism, saying this is exactly accurate
.
In his opening statement Meyer defined ID as the idea that certain features of the natural world are better explained as the product of a guiding transcendent intelligence than as the result of unguided natural processes. By way of example he showed that new functional protein configurations, which Darwinian evolution must discover by chance, actually cannot be discovered that way. Not only that, but these proteins possess new and functional information — the sort of thing that in other contexts we always ascribe to intelligent causes. Therefore it’s reasonable to conclude that this biological information (and other information-rich features of life) also was the result of an intelligent design.
Well, good. The jello has been nailed to the wall, sorta. The premise of his post is that ID creationism’s critics ignore what ID creationists actually say, and instead claim that what the critic is saying they’re saying is stupid. Now we’ve got something exactly accurate
from a creationist, so let’s take it apart and see why what they’re literally saying is stupid.
In his opening statement Meyer defined ID as the idea that certain features of the natural world are better explained as the product of a guiding transcendent intelligence than as the result of unguided natural processes.
OK, so where’s the evidence that this guiding transcendent intelligence
exists? Why are you postulating it? And don’t try to tell me that the failure of unguided natural processes (a failure you haven’t yet demonstrated) implies the existence of your transcendent intelligence. If evolutionary processes don’t work, then my hypothesis that it’s done by love rays emanating from mysterious Planet Q, which is in orbit around the sun out beyond Pluto, ought to be the default fallback explanation. Oh, you don’t like that? I also have a theory about quantum vibrations guiding evolution, that should win. And if you reject that, I can invent a thousand others.
You cannot say that something is better explained by invoking a being you can’t define, can’t measure, can’t even show the slightest evidence that it exists. Show me your god’s hand in action — and don’t run away to that pretext that you didn’t say “god”. A guiding transcendent intelligence
is as good a definition of a god as any other.
So that’s Stupidity #1: saying magic man done it, but trying and failing to cloak it in pretentious language like guiding transcendent intelligence
. Same difference, guys.
By way of example he showed that new functional protein configurations, which Darwinian evolution must discover by chance, actually cannot be discovered that way.
I do not understand how you can claim a new functional protein configuration cannot be discovered by chance. These guys are big on saying that DNA is a string of digital information. It’s a sequence of nucleotides of 4 possible kinds. You can generate all possible combinations of X nucleotides made up of 4 kinds of nucleotides using a computer and a random number generator, have it tell you the sequence of the protein that would be synthesized from them, make the protein yourself, and see what it does. There is no obstacle anywhere in there. There are no forbidden combinations when you make them by chance.
It’s even easier when you start with a known functional sequence, and only change it one or a few nucleotides at a time. Again, no magic barriers.
This is Stupidity #2, the “You can’t get there from here” argument. There are sequences that are or may be impossible to get to by incremental selective processes, but as soon as you admit that chance processes operate, there is no sequence that is impossible. Just unlikely.
Not only that, but these proteins possess new and functional information — the sort of thing that in other contexts we always ascribe to intelligent causes. Therefore it’s reasonable to conclude that this biological information (and other information-rich features of life) also was the result of an intelligent design.
This is an argument that assumes its premises. It is not sufficient to say that we know intelligent causes can do something, therefore every time something happens it is due to intelligent causes. It is particularly egregious when a critic points out that single nucleotide changes can occur in DNA by chance processes, and the creationist waves his hand and claims that no, it was due to the action of an intelligent agent…and therefore the claim that all new information in proteins is a consequence of intelligent causes remains unchallenged.
That’s Stupidity #3, the standard question-begging and circular reasoning we always get. Apparently, cosmic rays, environmental teratogens, and accidents by DNA polymerase are all caused by intelligences and intent and design.
In fact, about the only thing that isn’t caused by intelligence, according to the geniuses at the Discovery Institute, is fracking. No sentient entities behind that, no sir!
Well, of course they are: those “intelligences” are called “demons”, their “intent” is evil, and their design” is sin. However, those intelligences are not transcendent (or at least not as transcendent as The Intelligent Designer™’s intelligence).
This also explains why, after the Last Judgment, the Second Law of Thermodynamics will be repealed.
Moreover, that change of one or a few nucleotides could result in a frameshift, which would be a small change at the nucleotide level but a big change in peptide sequence.
well-known example
I especially like your ‘jello has been nailed to the wall’ analogy. That is as good a summary of their argument as any.
My impression of ID proponents is that you can explain evolution to them in all its detail ’till the cows come home, but the information goes into a transmogrifier in their brain where it gets all scrambled, and then its passed on to their frontal lobes. So you say ‘…a simple peptide can start with a range of activities, which are generally inefficient at first. If a particular activity imparts increased fitness, then selection from mutations may produce slightly different forms of that peptide which are slightly better at carrying out that activity. Repeat this process over many generations, and eventually the peptide is seen to be far more efficient. Natural selection has a random component (mutation), and a decidedly non-random component (selection).” Then this description gets all scrambled in their brain, and what is passed on to their frontal lobes is ” Natural selection has a random component (mutation), and #%%&#_#$%%&$%^$ over many generations the peptide is seen to be far more efficient”.
I agree, to the extent that this definition is still pretty useless – after all, what does “transcendent” really mean? I can read the dictionary, of course, but there’s plenty of room for equivocation there too.
It used to be that the ID folks got very upset when one said they were proposing god as the designer. “Oh no,” they’d say, “it could be anything, such as aliens — we’re agnostic as to what the designer actually is.” But here Klinghoffer has given the game away with “guiding transcendent intelligence”. Any transcendent intelligence is just a god, right? We’re no longer talking about any other option that a god.
these proteins possess new and functional information
New York City’s electrical grid, down to the smallest toaster oven and iPhone charger, is the total effect of a smallish number of fairly simple rules. If you look at the entirety of the power grid you can say “no human could design this!” which is true – it’s unmanageably huge and complex. Yet it emerges from applying some simple rules, recursively, with the occasional 1D20 roll on the “which direction does the cable go?” table. The creationist looks at the total ‘information’ encoded in a genome and says it’s unmanageabley huge and complex, then concludes that it could only have been poofed into existence. They would as well seek the designer of the NYC power grid. Something so amazingly complicated could not just arise out of a simple procedural generator.
I’m surprised that games like Elite and No Man’s Sky, which generate entire galaxies procedurally, haven’t been freaking out creationists. They demonstrate – just like the rest of reality – what you can do with a few simple rules and a couple of dice: you can have a universe of detail and complexity and there’s no transcendent intelligence behind it, just cryptographic pseudo-randomness and a decision tree.
A thing that’s bothering me about “guiding transcendent intelligence” is: by what mechanism?
Since they’re being very careful to avoid saying “goddidit” it cannot simply be written off as “a miracle” so this intelligence, this sufficiently advanced alien mind, must be practicing it’s animal husbandry on all life by some mechanism.
Are they using nano-scale 3d printers to build proteins? Psychic power mind control to force their chosen selected breeding? Do they have an Quantum 12th dimensional piano that selectively disturbs butterflies to flap wings on other continents in ways that they can see effects through the Chaos because they’re aliens?
I want to know exactly how they think Brainiac-5 is doing all this.
Any transcendent intelligence is just a god, right?
The coder that wrote the simulation that the creationist is instanced in could just be a newbie creator who randomized some of the settings on their universe simulator. Does that make them “transcendent”? I guess.
Universe Sim2.0 is going to fix some of the bugs in 1.0, where it was too easy to generate universes that collapsed into megamassive black holes right away. And that GPU error where the whole thing sometimes appears as a single pixel – that’s been fixed – now it correctly simulates expansion depending on the ratio of dark energy you dial in. I think they’re refunding some game-time to all the players who lost their early universes when the accidentally deleted the pixel containing the universe.
karpad@#7:
Psychic power mind control to force their chosen selected breeding?
There are too many conservation laws that would be violated by The Hand Of God. If it moved – even in Strange Ways – it’d be detectable.
Imagine the fun if some researcher discovered that a co-worker who was praying was emitting something. Prayons: do they have mass? If so do you get lighter when you pray a lot? I’m guessing you’d cool down slightly, too.
Marcus Ranum #9
Are these Prayons steerable?
If you pray at Jesus, can Ganesha intercept the Prayons?
The inability to define what they really mean is why I just keep asking IDiots to show with other evidence that their designer exists, like the pooferies/atomic 3-D printers where the new species come into existence. Then point and laugh at their tap dancing act to avoid showing real evidence.
Transcendent as opposed to immanent, a divinity that is active in the world like the biblical god they’re careful not to name, means one that you cannot refute because like ID it is too fuzzy to be pined down.
@Marcus Ranum 9: you are presently emitting photons and you are losing mass until you replenish it by eating so prayons may not entail loss of mass of the relativist kind. Further study will be warranted.
Perhaps we should try accelerating prayers in the LHC.
karpad #7 wrote:
I think you answered your own question: “psychic mind power.” Sometimes called “psychokenesis,” it involves the ability to move or create physical objects just by thinking about it and applying will power.
This seems to seem intuitive to them. God is invoked as the Main Mind, sure, but when you explore how theists think about how their own minds work, they feel as if their thoughts and desires exist sui generis, on nothing, and act without physical mechanism even in their own body. Mind moves hand by magic. Even when they know better intellectually, the tendency is to revert back to the folk common sense of the untutored child if their ‘spiritual’ button is pressed.
That may be why they don’t seem to see anything problematic about bringing in “guiding transcendent intelligence.” ALL intelligence is guiding and transcendent. God’s is just different in magnitude, not kind.
Right, but nonetheless a transcendent intelligence is still a god, right? To any first approximation of the notion of “god’?
@Marcus Ranum:
To answer your questions:
1. Yes.
2. Of course, even religions have mass! And the conservation of mass must be maintained, just ask the pope!
Unfortunately, prayon disease can result, with significant holes in your brain from locations where the prayons were highly concentrated. Apparently, it can render your brain a mass of swiss cheese.
You put way too much work into it, PZ. IDiocy consists of exactly three elements.
1. Paley’s Watchmaker Analogy.
2. Science can’t explain it.
3. Evolution is false.
Read Klinkle’s quote and you find all three.
No need for details.
This is a rather subtle piece of weaselry that tends to go unremarked, but it’s not an accident that IDists usually carefully avoid using the term “information” without qualification.
What they’re hoping is true is that there is some sort of physical reason that prevents information being spontaneously created, and William Dembski has spent much of his career trying to prove that. The reason he uses similarly qualified terms like “complex specified information” and “specified complexity” (as appears here) is because information, as well understood for many decades, has exactly the opposite property, and he knows that (although avoids saying so).
Many people incorrectly assert that there is no connection between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy when discussing the frequent creationist claim that the second law of thermodynamics somehow asserts that information cannot be created without nebulously-defined “intelligent intervention”. That’s not actually the biggest problem with this creationist argument; there actually is a direct relation between these two forms of entropy (this has been well established since the 1960s) but the 2lot ends up saying exactly the opposite of what creationists hope it does, specifically:
That is, creating information is actually thermodynamically free, and it’s erasing information that requires an external energy source.
Leaving aside any arguments about closed systems (and the fact that we have external energy sources), this is obviously something of a showstopper for IDists, and the motivation behind Dembski’s handwaving about “complex specified information”. The reason he came up with this term in the first place is that he needs a do-over, and the reason he’s never been able to come up with a decent definition for it is because one just doesn’t exist that does what he wants. CSI, and it’s various progeny, are essentially defined as “whatever kind of information thingy that can only be created by divine intervention”. And they can’t come up with a workable definition for it because it just doesn’t work…
This is turning into a conversation of mass…. The Catholics do it every Saturday night.
Wow! So Meyer actually “showed” that new functional protein configurations, which Darwinian evolution must discover by chance, actually cannot be discovered as a result of unguided natural processes, but require a “guiding transcendent intelligence”.
Where did he publish? Nature? Science? Journal of Irreproducible Results?
I love that word, “transcendent”. What it seems to mean in practice is that you can ask “OK, all the intelligence we know about is in living things that have evolved biologically; from what did your ‘guiding intelligence’ evolve?”, and the True Believer gets to answer “It didn’t evolve.” You then say, “OK, the intelligence we know about develops and gains knowledge through interaction with its physical and social environment; from what did this “guiding” intelligence gain its knowledge?”, and the True Believer gets to answer “from itself or nothing.” So you say, “OK, then this is an intelligence that works exactly as we have seen intelligence work in other contexts, except that it doesn’t evolve or learn like any intelligence we’ve ever seen in any other context?” And the True Believer answers, “Yeah, now you’ve got it, it’s a transcendent intelligence.” And then you say “AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!” and the True Believing pigeon poops on the chessboard, knocks it over, and flies off to brag about how it won another debate.
in essence, this is all creationism itself really is.
And the magic IDer just happens to be the same as the magic man in their fave holey book, what a surprise.
I’m still not sure if creationist “sciency-sounding” gibberish is meant as a defense-by-vagueness or is simply calculated to impress the troglodytes that adhere it to, since in their book using words with more than three syllables is all but grounds for a professorship to Harvard.
Don’t know why it took me till earlier today to figure it out, but think on this:
The ID creationists make much of their “open-mindedness” when they pretend to adopt agnosticism towards whether any causes of life might be natural or supernatural. This N/Sn agnosticism is a key tool in convincing others that they are the ones truly willing to consider all the options.
However. they are not agnostic at all with respect to N/Sn.
Consider:
…………………..Natural…………………Supernatural
Unguided………..1………………………………2
Guided…………….3………………………………4
They consider Nat/Ung, reject it as impossible because reasons, and then conclude that guided must be the answer.
However, they’ve never considered Super/Ung. If there were a species of kinda dumb wizards one universe over, whose magic caused unpredictable, but highly unlikely, things to occur in adjacent universes when the wizards cast (or maybe mis-cast) their spells, that would address their concerns that information can’t (in our universe, under our rules) be created…or at least their “complex specified info” can’t.
But my dumb, careless wizards are not an intelligence that could possibly guide universe creation. Nor are they even aware of the consequences for other universes of their magic actions.
Voila! Every “defect” they consider to exist in nat/ung universe creation & life-evolution is cured, but no guiding intelligence exists.
If they want the credit for being “agnostic” as to super/naturalism they need to prove that unguided supernaturalism could not possibly have occurred before they should be advocating that they are in any position to say that a disproof of unguided naturalism would say anything at all about the quality of “guidedness”.
There’s a hypothetical case of “can’t get there from here”: suppose a long (for suitable definition of “long”) sequence of base pairs is fixed in the population, and has the property that EVERY mutation within a large enough radius (in some suitable metric) is highly explosive. A mutated germ line cell would result in an exploding fetus destroying itself and possibly the mother. A population lacking that sequence could not evolve it, because any near miss would result in an exploding fetus.
The hypothetical is absurd, of course, but it illustrates that one could in principle define genetic islands not reachable by evolution. The problem with this argument is not the concept per se, but the fact that creationists make no meaningful effort to identify such islands. Instead they wave their hands and declare at random that this or that is an example of such.
If alien life evolved with a completely different genetic code, based on the same nucleotides as terrestrial life, it’s probable that there is no evolutionary path between any terrestrial organism and any alien organism. If visiting aliens left some pet thargs behind, we would probably recognize them as alien with high confidence by the fact that you can’t get there from here genetically. We might even be able to deduce that intelligent aliens transported them here, on the grounds that alien bacteria from asteroids would not have left only one surviving lineage as advanced as the tharg.
Marcus Ranum #6
I think that electrical analogy (or metaphor) is brilliant and I’m going to steal it.
I always viewed more as a marketing campaign designed to take advantage of the extremely gullible.
#2 Thanks for the link to the nylonase example, Reginald, which was new to me. However, the comments at that page include a link to a later paper from the same research group, which seems to retreat from the earlier view about frame shift.
I’ve done some work with solid phase peptide synthesis. There certainly were some combinations that may as well have been forbidden. Just try getting 5 or more cationic functional groups into a single decapeptide with a usable yield. Perhaps a ribosome can do it but my lab couldn’t.
Chigau@#25 – Have fun! It’s worked pretty well whenever I’ve deployed it. I like inventing new stuff that’s off the creationists’ playbook; they don’t know how they are supposed to respond.
Good grief. Snowflakes? Electrical grids? There doesn’t appear to a single comment here that has any empirically-based conception of what information is.
Same for IDiots, as they don’t understand what empirical evidence means.
Biological information either progresses by evolution or it “poofs” into existence. Pick your case and show evidence, other than pure information theory, to back it up. Hint: Genomes.
It only “progresses” by evolution (whatever that means) if a physical system is specifically organized to accomplish what must be accomplished, and it never “poofs” into existence. That is our universal experience.
Biosemiosis.org
*gets popcorn*
biosemiosis @ 32
*browses website*
My goodness, that’s a lot of words to say, “DNA is like writing, therefore there is a writer”.
hey, can I interject to send you on my own tangent?
I’d like to see how you describe the RNA world hypothesis, and how that compares to your own, um… “hypothesis”.
that should speed things up a bit.
,,,and please, everyone, let’s save the timecube scores until after the presentation?
:)
…and one more thing…
monitors should notify PZed we got a live one.
this is gonna be fun.
Biomosis, either show conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary designer, like his “pooferies”, or have the honesty and integrity to admit you have nothing, and are wrong. I haven’t met an IDiot yet with sufficient honesty and integrity to even consider they may be wrong. Which shows you how wrong they are….including you.
Well, you could read my post #17, which spells out some of the relevant (to this discussion) results of just over half a century of the study of information. Short version: it really, really doesn’t help the creationist/IDist position. At all.
Ichthyic #37
wut?
Since biosemiosis has yet to return, and I’m bored, and it’s relatively on topic, I’m going to make a few critiques and thoughts of the website biosemiosis.org.
1) It buries the lede. The conclusion it comes to is that intelligence is responsible for DNA, and yet it barely even mentions it at first. Most academic papers have the most important part in the abstract, right up front, but the website goes through nearly two thousand words before even approaching it.
2) There are very few citations. There’s a bibliography, which means there’s at least an acknowledgement of standard scholarship methods, but with no inline citations or references except on the final page of the website, it’s uncertain where any of the concepts or statements of fact in the website originate.
3) In fact, there’s no attribution anywhere at all. There’s no author credited with the text nor any indications that the site is associated with any research or educational institution or organization.
4) The language is extremely dense and jargon-laden, suggesting the intended audience is academics already familiar with many of the concepts involved, not casual readers or interested laypersons.
These are all fairly broad, and not necessarily indicative of a deliberately deceptive presentation of information. The next, however, is:
5) It quote mines. On the final page, it quotes Eugene Koonin saying, “even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation-replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is P<10^-1018", and follows this with, "This is a incomprehensibly large number – orders of magnitude larger than all the particles of matter in the entire observable universe."
However, searching for that line in the paper cited, The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life, reveals that the very next paragraph starts with “The model considered here is not supposed to be realistic by any account.” In other words, it was a deliberately unrealistic model used as an example, yet biosemiosis.org is using it as if it was evidence for its position.
Except that that “jargon” is actually gibberish as far as I can tell. It brings up “information” as a term (a field with which I’m very familiar) frequently, for example, but uses it in a way that suggests the author doesn’t have any actual idea what that term means.
Rasalhague @ 42
Fair enough! It doesn’t really surprise me, since excessive use of technical terms or misapplied jargon is a common sign of junk science. I’m just not familiar enough with the subject to judge it, so I focused on the structure and presentation of the site rather than the content.
Snoof @43:
Yes, understood. There’s plenty of red flags to go around…
I guess “biosemiosis” has baled. I wonder if he/she will be back tomorrow?
It does not go unnoticed that no one here isolated any core empirical observation made on Biosemiosis.org and provided any challenge to it. I suspect the reason for this is simply because the core observations of semiosis are not even controversial. Every instance of translated information ever known to exist requires one arrangement of matter to serve as a representational medium and a second arrangement of matter to physically establish what is being represented. This is an organizational necessity. Like all instances of translation, the genetic translation system preserves the natural (and necessary) discontinuity between the arrangement of the medium and the determination of its effect within the system. The cell accomplishes this by isolating the establishment of the code from the reading of the codons, (i.e. the amino acid-to-anticodon association is temporally and spatially isolated from the codon-to-anticodon association). This discontinuity is a physical necessity for translation to occur, and is evident in all instances of semiotic translation. This local discontinuity is what makes it possible for a spatial arrangement of nucleobases in a codon to specify a particular amino acid during synthesis. It is what begins to allow combinatorial permutations and enables open-ended heredity. It enables the system to have the informational capacity it needs to record itself into memory. I can certainly appreciate the fact that this all sounds foreign to you, but that is only because you are likely unaware of the data – which has been documented in physics literature starting about half a century ago by physicists such as Howard Pattee and others. Core predictions of the system go back even further than that, and were confirmed by experiment.
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Snoof:
The text is written for interested and earnest readers who have some basic awareness of the issues at hand. Those types generally have not reported any substantial difficultly in understanding it.
While I certainly do not ignore it, I am not overly worried or possessed about the scholarly crowd; the data has been in the literature (and thus in their possession) for decades on end. (Bibliography)(Timeline) Moreover, none of the empirical observations that confirm semiosis in the cell are even controversial. Wrestling among ideologically-motivated scholars is an activity best left to themselves. That’s the beauty of empiricism; authoritarians are irrelevant, the facts are not going anywhere.
This isn’t about me.
I think you might be surprised at what interested audiences understand. This is the year 2016, in the age of information.
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Rasalhague
I see you envision yourself as a master of these concepts, at least to the extent that you can argue against the people (and their conceptions) that you see as your intellectual enemies. In this case, those things are of little or no consequence.
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Nerd
Let me understand you here: Unless you are given “conclusive physical evidence” of something that happened 3.5 billion years in the deep unobservable past, then you’ll see it as confirmation that you can safely ignore physical evidence in your hands today. Has it not yet occurred to you that no one can ever show you “conclusive physical evidence” of an event in the deep unobservable past? Likewise, has it not yet occurred to you that you just placed a standard on evidence that you yourself cannot obtain for your own beliefs (regardless of what they are) unless you are agnostic on the origin of life? Perhaps you should ease back and let someone else do the talking.
You didn’t state any material observation I made that was wrong. But I get it that you are one of those who is simply compelled to tell someone to f-off if they don’t think like you — regardless of evidence.
You don’t need me around for that.
Why? You haven’t proven YOUR point with citations from the peer reviewed scientific literature. And any literature that holds the babble inerrant is by definition is religion. As Dover v. Kitzmiller determined. You lose.
Nice lie. Shows your dishonesty. Typical of those pretending their religious ideas are scientific. Don’t talk, point. You can’t. We both know that.
Umm. Okay. I have no idea what that means. Sounds like handwaving to me, given that you don’t respond to any of the points that I made.
That’s not how it works. You can’t just post a link to a website and say “my argument is in there somewhere”. If you have an argument, make it here. By all means include website references as cites, but you have to specify what your argument is first.
…and here it is. This is exactly the kind of chicanery I was complaining about in #17 before you showed up. It has been long established in information theory that there is no mystery as to where information comes from; in fact, closed systems tend to the state in which they contain maximum information. This isn’t an intuitive result, but it’s what we find (it’s been understood since the 1960s).
So creationists, hoping for a different answer, complain that they’re not talking about that kind of information, but something else that has the word “information” in it that they just made up. Hence “complex specified information” and “functional information” and “biological information” that have no well-specified definition and no purpose other than an attempt to contrive the result they want.
And then go back (like you did in your post #30) to pretending that they’re talking about information. They’re not. The term “information” already has a meaning well understood since 1948 and has a large body of work associated with it (and, by the way, is a spectacularly successful theory with practical real world applications).
Why don’t you start by telling us what “translated information” is, and why it’s different from “information”?
biosemiosis @ 45
I can’t tell if this is a subtle dig at my intelligence or a handwave. Either way, it doesn’t explain why the website doesn’t put the conclusion front-and-center, unlike, say, an academic journal article or any other sort of explanatory/informational presentation.
See, that’s just funny, because nowhere does the site contain any actual empirical data, nor any links to it. It’s not interested in arguing to academics because they already have all the data, but it doesn’t provide any sources for people who aren’t academics either. Almost the entire document appears to have been created ex nihilo, devoid of any sort of context or grounding in other research or scholarly discourse.
“Dimensional semiotic memory utilizes a finite set of iterative (repeating) representations which are recognized in their system by the spatial orientation of each representation.”
So the site isn’t interested in arguing to academics, and yet it leaves jargon-intensive sentences like that laying around for “interested audiences”, not even bothering to define its terms for the layperson.
Also noted: Not addressing the blatant quote-mining.
Rasal
Notice that your response doesn’t actually address the content of the observation?
I don’t present anything in contradiction to Shannon theory. Why would I do that? The paper is linked from my bibliography. But are you suggesting that a precise or approximate description of the rate-dependent system is an answer to rate-independent organization and control? It isn’t, and it never has been. This has been well-understood for decades. (Howard Pattee: The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut).
What is it you think this is about? Shannon unambiguously assumes symbolic material. The issue is the contingent organization required to establish the symbol and its translation in a physical system. Is the anticodon-to-amino acid association spatially and temporally isolated from the codon-to-anticodon association, or it is not? Is the output of the system determined by the arrangement of the input?
You accuse me of chicanery (i.e. deception and trickery). Don’t be the last person on earth to misunderstand Shannon. If you don’t understand the second paragraph of the paper, or if you think the diagram in Figure 1 is irrelevant, then study it some more.
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Snoof
I was doing you a favor. You don’t understand what Koonin was saying. Deliberately inflating the rate of RNA production is (among other things) what makes his model unrealistic. In other words, he was inflating the availability of RNA just to get the needle to move. In reality the odds are much worse than his calculation would suggest. Your accusation of quote mining is ridiculous and makes you appear to be carelessly grasping for an objection to make.
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Since neither of you are going to address the actual content of the observations, I gather that this conversation is at an impasse.
It was at an impasse when you were unable to provide conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity/designer. You can’t win with presuppositional religious thinking. You must use the methods of science correctly. Which you can’t do.
We know you are nothing but crank. Otherwise, you would be publishing in the peer reviewed scientific literature, not hiding at a bullshit website.
Because you haven’t made an observation until you define what your terms are. My complaint was that creationists resort to defining new terms that have the word “information” in them precisely because if you use the well-defined term the argument clearly doesn’t stand up. So instead we have an “observation” written in terms that you haven’t defined.
I’ll repeat my request from the previous post: tell us what you mean by “translated information” and why it’s different from “information”.
Sixty-three years ago Francis Crick wrote a letter to his 12 year-old son and explained to him that he and his partner James Watson had constructed a model of how DNA molecules could hold encoded information. Fifty-eight years ago we discovered the molecules that allowed the translation of that encoded information to occur. Fifty-five years ago we demonstrated experimentally that the information contained in the genome was held in a reading-frame code, and in that same year, we began the process of finally breaking the code that holds the information in the genome. And just this month in 2016, documentation was presented that we have now built a minimum viable genome of 473 genes. These include 324 genes of explicitly known function, mostly involved in the processes of transcription and translation (establishing the functionality of the information system itself) and another 149 genes whose function was unknown, but whose inclusion had been experimentally proven to be necessary for robust viability. Yet, you want someone to recite to you what genetic information and translation are, and if not, then you will have nothing to say about the universal observation that all instances of translated information preserve the discontinuity between the medium of information and its effects – including the information translated from DNA. And if the issue is broken down for you in its most unambiguous terms (the anticodon-to-amino acid association is spatially and temporally isolated from the codon-to-anticodon association) you still refuse to engage. It’s irrational.
You are so intent to dodge what is being presented and get back to your familiar and irrelevant diatribe about ID and Dembski and CSI. Be my guest.
Ok. I have no problem with that.
…and this is where I’m (again) asking you to be more specific about what your terms. What do you mean by “translation” from an information point of view?
I’m asking you to define what you mean by translated information and why you think it’s different from information. And until you do that, for sure I can’t respond with examples of :
because you’re not providing a definition of what translated information is, and instead are only alluding to this concept as occurring somewhere in a specific example.
I’m asking you to abstract the concept you’re referring to, not provide additional layers of detail of your one example. You assert that there is a general principle here, so define what that general principle is.
more like “not even wrong”.
@chigau:
you know exactly what I mean.
don’t pretend.
Still not seeing citations to the peer reviewed scientific literature where our troll is the author. If they can’t/won’t define their terms specific enough to be falsified, they are not even wrong. They are nothing but a presuppositional poseur/crank.
Their facade is exposed by their own actions and words….
Rasal,
How could you miss it? Biological function is organized by the translation of an informational medium (i.e. heritable memory), but the products of translation are not determined by the arrangement of the medium.
The translation of heritable memory requires two arrangements of matter; one arrangement to serve as a representational medium and a second arrangement to establish what is being represented. And the organization of the system must preserve the natural discontinuity between the arrangement of the medium and the determination of its effect. Why? Because no object in the physical universe inherently represents or signifies any other object in the physical universe. In other words, the observed functional effect “present leucine for binding now” is not an effect that can be determined from the surfaces properties of three nucleotides. The capacity to specify a thing among alternatives is fundamentally a product of organization – an organization that establishes a local systematic representation (and in the case of a self-replicating system, this representational association must be formalized in memory). This is exactly what is found in the cell; predicted in theory and confirmed by experiment. None of the material observations are even controversial.
Secondarily, the origin of the heterogeneous cell cycle requires (at a minimum) that enough of these individual associations are established at the same time and place (along with a coding structure) in order to have the informational capacity to record and translate the amount of information that the cell requires to describe itself into memory. This is not only supported by observation and unambiguous logic, but confirmed by the latest experimental research mentioned in my prior post.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Now, quid pro quo. What of this would you like to argue? Is the anticodon-to-amino acid association spatially and temporally isolated from the codon-to-anticodon association, or it is not? Is the output of the system determined by the arrangement of the input?
Ichthyic
Not really.
You can use the Report a Problem link on the side bar any time you want.
It goes to a mailbox that only PZ sees.
I have no idea how he sorts his mail.
You should really know better.
biosemiosis,
you came in here complaining that:
and then introduced a new term “translated information”. I keep asking you for a definition, but you repeatedly respond by talking about microbiology. That’s not what I’m asking. If this is about information, please tell me, in the abstract, what is translated information and how is it different from “information”?
Let me try this another way. Just about every physical object encodes information. If it interacts in some way with some other object, then there will be mutual information between the states of those two systems. Is this the same or different than the “translated information” that you’re talking about?
Rasal,
Ahh, so there will be no quid pro quo.
Not only that, but you’ve ignored my direct answer to your question, and indeed, the entirety of my last post. Instead, you’ve gone back to the top of the conversation and will attempt the conflation all over again — anything but answer the simple questions I have raised.
Which is irrelevant compared to YOU providing scientific, not theological, evidence for your conclusions. Science is MIA, and any attempts to have you go there are met with theological obfuscation and avoidance of the real issues.
Either provide conclusive physical evidence, physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained, like the genomes), origin. Until then, nothing but presuppositional theology from you.
Theological argument, I am right until you show I am wrong, and I am never wrong. That’s where you are and can’t/won’t move from.
Science requires you to presume you are wrong (your deity doesn’t exist), and then by real evidence (not shown to date) and with peer review, demonstrate that your theory fits the data as explicitly defined with definitions agreed to by both you and your critics. You fail here.
No, you have not directly answered my question, or answered it at all. You started here talking about information, and that is what I engaged you on, but you keep wanting to talk about microbiology.
My question seems like the obvious one, and I’ll repeat it here: how are you defining “translated information” and how is it different from “information”? This is a term you introduced, and you should expect to have to define it, which you haven’t done. And in the meantime, no, I can’t respond to your demand to produce other examples of it. Obviously.
And no, I’m not going to engage you in a discussion about microbiology. You wanted to talk about information.
Rasal,
You want to ignore the biological and genetic context of the conversation and limit yourself to information alone, okay:
How does every object “encode” information? What does the word “encode” mean here, and how is that different (or the same) than the encoding that Shannon was writing about when he drew Figure 1 in his 1948 paper, and talked about communicating messages (information) in the form of symbols from source to receiver?
It’s the same; I’m using the term as having it’s well-understood meaning.
Rasal,
I’m sorry, that just doesn’t make any sense. You equate the mere state of an object as “information” which will then become “mutual information” when it interacts with another object. On the other hand, Shannon’s conception talks about encoding (messages) information in a system of symbols which are transmitted from source to receiver. In fact, in opening up his paper, he describes it as the central issue: “The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point” (Shannon, 1948).
Here is just one of many extensive examples of his discussion on the transmission of symbols:
So please clarify, how are your two conceptions of information the same?
that’s not exactly right. I wouldn’t describe information as “becoming” mutual information. Rather, there exists mutual information between the variable representing the state of the receiver and the variable representing the state of the transmitter if those two variables are not independent.
This is exactly what Shannon is describing, although he includes more specifics as to the relationship.
Nothing above is at all unconventional.
Rasal,
Again, that makes no more sense the second time you said it. Simply adding the words “transmitter” and “receiver” doesn’t do anything. When Shannon talked about transmitters and receivers he was talking about devices that transmit symbolically-encoded information from one point to another point, and having to overcome and counteract such things as signal-to-noise ratio. Where is the transmitter in your scenario? Where is the receiver? Where is the symbolically-encoded information? Where is the one-point-to-another-point? What is the signal-to-noise ratio between two objects merely interacting with one another? Where is the signal?
Ok, I’ll try to spell it out in more detail.
Bear in mind that Shannon’s motivation for developing this theory was to understand how communication systems work, and thereby design more efficient communication systems, and that’s still what we use it for. But information theory is fundamentally a mathematical abstraction; just because you can apply it to a system doesn’t imply there’s some sort of intent or meaning or purpose to what’s going on.
The specific case of Shannon’s that you quote in Fig 11 is a simple case in which the transmitted variable and received variable are discrete and have the same alphabet with defined transition probabilities. There’s a variant of this more typically used as a simple example, known as a binary symmetric channel, in which the input and output variables have a binary alphabet and there is an equal transition probability (if you google for “binary symmetric channel” you’ll find many references that look a lot like Shannon’s figure, but without the first value).
What we know have is a transmitted variable (conventionally X) that has a value treated as random for purposes of this analysis, with some distribution usually presumed to be known. We also have a received variable (conventionally Y) that is also random, but there is a relationship between the distributions of variables Y and X for which we can define a value of mutual information. What this is saying is that observing Y tells you something about X, and mutual information is a way of quantifying how much.
The noise and signal to noise ratio are related to the transition probability in this model. For another explanation with more detail that I can type see, for example, here:
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/sqc/EL334N/InfThe-L5.pdf
or look up the Wikipedia page for “mutual information”.
You’ll notice that almost no time is spent talking about concrete examples of a transmitter or a receiver, or what kind of signals are involved, or where the noise comes from. Because it’s really not important when you’re talking about what is a mathematical abstraction.
The fact that you don’t understand what I said is not the same as “it doesn’t make any sense”. I thought you understood information theory? This stuff is what you would find in any textbook.
Yes, I am quite aware. Now are you going to tell me how every object encodes information in symbols, as described in Shannon’s paper? Will there ever be a point where you are able to acknowledge that you are not talking about encoding information in symbols?
Still no peer reviewed citations from Biosemiosis. Shows with prima facie evidence a presuppositional religious crank without any concept that they are wrong, much less so wrong they aren’t even wrong. Funny how easy it is to separate the chaff, Biosemoisis, from the wheat of real science.
Sure thing. You were just pretending not to understand, right?
The description of the source as producing “symbols” is just a partitioning into a sequence of variables. The abstraction talks about a source variable and a receiver variable, which have a relationship (as I have patiently explained for you) and each instance of a value assigned to these variables constitutes a symbol.
The answer to the question “is it raining today?” is a sequence of symbols that constitutes an information source. And the rate of information generated by that sequence of symbols will depend on the probability that it rains any given day. A variable describing the moisture measured at a particular point each day is also a sequence of symbols, and each of those symbols will have mutual information about corresponding symbols in the first sequence. In other words, the moisture measurement tells you something about whether it rained today.
A variable describing a randomly shaped rock falling off a cliff has mutual information with a variable describing the shape of the imprint it leaves in the mud at the bottom.
It’s. An. Abstraction. So yes, you can talk about the information encoded in pretty much anything, and yes, you can describe it as encoded in symbols.
You want more references?
biosemiosis: Late to the show, but something looks dodgy to me. From your site;
How is the inanimate environment ‘non-information’? For example, a muon has certain ‘encoded’* info (charge, mass, spin, etc), and this information is translated by its possible interactions (Standard Model) into physical effects, like decay. Complicated behaviour (like self-replication) can emerge from simple underlying behaviour, no?
*Maybe I’m misusing ‘encoded’? Please clarify.
Rasal:
Sure thing. You were just pretending not to understand, right?
I think the underlying point I’ve been making to you has been painfully obvious from the very start.
Let us see what you say:
Good grief man.
So right off the bat we find that your claim of information being “encoded” in everything is entirely wrong.
You produce symbols to describe the surface irregularities and physical being of the rock, and you produce more symbols to describe the make-up and consistency of mud, and then you use even more symbols to manipulate those symbols — eventually leading you to your grand result, encoded in symbols. Then you turn around to the poor rock, and say, “See, I knew you had encoded information in you”. And of course, as we develop even better theorems and systems of description, the results we obtain from our work becomes even more accurate and useful, which leads you to the only reasonable conclusion you could make – everything contains encoded information, like a rock falling into mud.
If there was ever a fitting scenario for the phrase “You’re confusing the map with the territory”, this is it. This is the very reason the line was created in the first place. There is nothing you know about the external world that you obtained except by way of a representation, and you’ve turned that fact into an anthropocentric dumpsterfire of reasoning. Rocks don’t contain “encoded information”, Rasal.
And you don’t have a grasp of information quite to the extent you think you do.
You spent several posts demanding answers to what you thought were “gotcha” questions, but which should be obvious to anybody who’s ever taken information theory 101, and the answers to which don’t support your position at all. And then when I provided the answers you claimed that you knew that all along. That just doesn’t pass a basic laugh test.
lolwut? Again, slowly: it’s an abstraction. That’s what information theory is.
Pick up literally any introductory text on information theory and you will find examples exactly like the ones I gave you. Go on, google it. I’ll wait. Or I can just post some for you.
Neither do you. Please post links your papers on this topic in the peer reviewed scientific literature (not from IDiot/creobot web sites). Proof of your expertise. Which is lacking. Your religious argumentation is proof of your total bias.
Quit trying to hide behind information theory. Information theory is not the problem.
The problem is a user who thinks that “every physical objects encodes information”.
Lol.
Here’s what I originally said:
Let me add some more detail to that, and maybe this will clarify things for you. There is physical state associated with every physical object. That state, and whatever processes that contributed to that state, is initially unknown to us. The state is therefore an encoding of one or more stochastic variables (that we can choose to represent as a single variable). If there is an interaction with another object, such that the state of that other object now depends on the initial state of the first object, then there is mutual information between those two state variables. The “encoding” doesn’t need to involve some sort of sentient intervention. Information is encoded provided that there is a mapping from some stochastic variable to the physical state.
The fact of whether it is raining today is a sequence of stochastic variables that constitutes an information source. The volume of each of a sequence of raindrops is a sequence of stochastic variables encoded in a physical state.
Here’s one reference to an introduction to information theory that includes the “is it raining today” example similar to what I used earlier. It’s from the same course I linked to earlier:
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/sqc/EL334N/InfThe-L1.pdf
This one contains a description of the information entropy of a horse race:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall12/papers/Chapter6.pdf
There isn’t any magic here. It’s just math…
One more reference for you, if you want something more formal:
The physics of forgetting: Landauer’s erasure principle and information theory
Contemporary Physics, 2001, volume 42, number 1, pages 25± 60
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/55905.PDF