Diagnostic features of the taxon


I’ve been reminding everyone for 12 years now that Paul Nelson made a specific, quantifiable creationist claim and failed to deliver a promised explanation. This is not unusual. Jeffrey Shallit describes the common elements of the so-called ‘scientific’ creationist, and it’s astonishing how widespread these traits are. One of them is their eagerness to make explicit claims coupled with a reluctance to actually back them up.

The illustrious Robert J. Marks II, professor at Baylor University, is an example of this last characteristic. Back in 2014, he made the following claim: “we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”. I wanted to see the details of the calculation justifying this claim, so I asked Professor Marks to supply it. He did not reply.

Nor did he reply when I asked three months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked six months later.

Nor did he reply when I asked a year later.

It’s now been two years. Academics are busy people, but this is pretty silly. Who thinks the illustrious Professor Marks will ever show me a calculation justifying his claim?

That sounds so familiar. Maybe if you wait 13 years he’ll show you a calculation? Hope springs eternal!

Comments

  1. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    lets try:
    mt rushmore = 4 faces sculpted
    mt fuji = a mountain/volcano
    4>1 QED

    or is he playing with words? Mt Rushmore has MORE info than Fuji
    and 8 letters vs 4 letters QED again!
    ===
    completely disregard all the myths and religious respect and more surrounding Fuji. You know it is one of the most revered places that people contemplating suicide flock there to enact to be released from the earth that torments them. And all the architecture on the mountain and all the architecture surrounding it to provide highlighted view of the mountain. So thousands flock to gaze at Rushmore while 10s of thousands go to Fuji to actually walk up the path with stairs?
    ..

    we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji”

    is that ‘inclusive we’ or ‘exclusive we’? As in, he refers to a group behind him (exclusive we), or everybody listening to him (inclusive we)? me thinks he just being assertive that he thinks Mt Rushmore has more info than Fuji, because he can contemplate the history of those four former presidents while Fuji is “just a mountain that is near Tokyo”.
    pffft, you know, some of the most famous and respected art from Japan is Hokusai’s 36 views of Fuji. The Great Wave of Kanagawa being the most famous. [letting my Hokusaimania showing through]

  2. Owlmirror says

    I dunno if this is limited to creationists; I can think of more secular instances of overreaching claims…

    (I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.)

  3. congenital cynic says

    Well, you need to tease out two different ways of viewing the problem. First, if he means the actual mountain itself, and not a photo: If you look at this from point of view of Information Theory, in which Claude Shannon equated information with entropy, then one would have to conclude that Mt. Rushmore has lower entropy (more organized), and that therefore the less ordered structure of Mt. Fuji has more information.

    If you look at it as it’s worded, and it’s the “picture”, then you have a couple of ways to look at it. If you just look at identical sized raw photos, they each have the same amount of information taken in: digits for each colour channel and the alpha channel for each pixel. So they would have the same amount of information. But if you compress them, the photo of Mt. Rushmore is likely to be more compressible (larger fields of nearly uniform colour), and thus can be represented with less information.

    So, not knowing what the person meant in terms of information (which would appear to be something other than what the information theorist would see), looks like he’s flat out wrong. Maybe creationists have their own idea of information?

  4. congenital cynic says

    @owlmirror #2
    A nod to Fremat’s last theorem? But that was proved (mind you, it took 358 years)! I don’t think there’s any way to prove the creationist’s “information” conjecture. I don’t even know what context this arose in. Strange.

  5. leerudolph says

    congenitalcynic@4:”So, not knowing what the person meant in terms of information (which would appear to be something other than what the information theorist would see), looks like he’s flat out wrong. Maybe creationists have their own idea of information?”

    Jeffrey Shallit was only being half-snarky (or, maybe, metasnarky?) when he referred to “the person” in question as “The illustrious Robert J. Marks II”: Marks is, apparently, actually an accomplished (maybe even non-snarkily illustrious—Shallit’s mathematical specialties and expertise are much closer to Marks’s than mine are) information theorist. Wikipedia says: “His contributions include the Zhao-Atlas-Marks time-frequency distribution in the field of signal processing and the Cheung–Marks theorem in Shannon sampling theory” (my bolds): I think it’s fair to assume that “what the person meant in terms of information” really ought NOT to be “something other than what the information theorist would see”.

    This of course adds some serious weight to Shallit’s request for “Professor Marks to supply” “the details of the calculation justifying this claim”: in other circumstances such a request would be primarily a rhetorical ploy, because a random creationist crackpot would clearly not have the computational chops to supply any such calculation, and the request would merely highlight that ignorance (and some bad faith) ; in this circumstance, its rhetorical force is increased, because this particular creationist crackpot clearly DOES have those chops, so the highlighting of Marks’s bad faith takes center stage and is immensely well lighted.

  6. congenital cynic says

    I wasn’t aware of his credentials. But it still seems to me that his assertion violated the foundational ideas of IT. I studied it in the context of the statistical theory of communications, and have read some of Shannon’s early papers, so I’m no expert, but this just seems wrong to me. And given the fact that he hasn’t responded with the proof requested, I think I’m on the right side.

  7. Owlmirror says

    @congenital cynic:

    A nod to Fremat’s last theorem?

    It’s the translation from Fermat’s Latin on the Wikipedia page; I am not sure who the original author of the translation is.

    But that was proved

    Not by Fermat!

    /snark, obvs

  8. Pierce R. Butler says

    … Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents …

    According to my dictionary, the relevant definition of “bust” is:

    a sculpture of a person’s head, shoulders, and chest.</blockquote.

    The MR sculptures feature only faces, and portions of sides of heads. Should Marks be trying to define the information content thereof when his own is so lacking?

  9. Pierce R. Butler says

    Of course, re my # 9, he who flubs an html endtag has no business complaining of others not providing sufficient information.

  10. monad says

    Maybe more to the point than what Fermat may have proved is who he made the claim to: the margin of a book he owned. I doubt he knew his margin notes would be published after he died.

  11. congenital cynic says

    @ owlmirror #8
    I know he (Fermat) didn’t prove it. I first learned of it some 42 years ago. And… Note that I said in my earlier comment that it took 358 years for it to be proven, by which time Fermat was dust. Whether he actually had a proof we will never know, but one does tend to doubt it, given the number and quality of minds that tried to solve it over the centuries.

  12. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Whether he actually had a proof we will never know, but one does tend to doubt it, given the number and quality of minds that tried to solve it over the centuries.

    Especially since Wile’s proof used a bit of mathematics that was unknown unknown until circa 1955.

    Around 1955, Japanese mathematicians Goro Shimura and Yutaka Taniyama suspected a link might exist between elliptic curves and modular forms, two completely different areas of mathematics. Known at the time as the Taniyama–Shimura-Weil conjecture, and (eventually) as the modularity theorem,

    Sniff, love the smell of progress of with time.

  13. raven says

    This whole information thing is a red herring anyway.

    Evolution can produce new information.
    And we can see it in real time at the DNA level.

  14. leerudolph says

    owlmirror@12: “Whether he actually had a proof we will never know, but one does tend to doubt it, given the number and quality of minds that tried to solve it over the centuries.”

    I think there’s a pretty good consensus that he had in his own mind an erroneous (or, rather, incomplete) proof along the lines of several 19th century proofs, by some of those later high-quality minds, of (what upon further inspection turned out to be) special cases of “Fermat’s Last Theorem” (which even in full generality is only a special case of the Wiles—Taylor Theorem).

  15. gmcard says

    congenital cynic @ 4

    I believe you have the relationship between information and entropy inverted (though admittedly it’s been 12 years since I studied thermodynamically reversible computation and information theory). The direct relationship is between information and energy. The destruction of information results in an increase in entropy and thus we have a conservation of energy.

    In terms of computation, this means that things like a hardware NOT gate, in which the input can always be determined from the output, are thermodynamically reversible/conserve information, do not increase entropy in the system (or related products such as waste heat–though only in regards to information; issues such as resistive circuitry still apply). As opposed to things such as AND gates, where in 3/4 cases the two specific inputs cannot be determined from the one output, so information is lost, which means entropy increases and waste heat is generated.

    This would imply that the more organized, lower entropy Rushmore would represent more information that Fujimori, if considered in a vacuum.

    But of course, it’s that last IF that’s the real issue, just like all the hacks and scammers who argue that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics… we aren’t dealing with isolated systems, we’re dealing with systems that have tremendous incoming energy.

  16. unclefrogy says

    he like most creationist is just talking through his ass.
    geologically they would have the same amount of information wouldn’t they though each would have a different history. The question of human derived information supplied to each as their use as symbols themselves and the symbols applied to them by people may be equal, somewhat equal and very unequal that would be very hard to determine especially for Mt Rushmore as we do not have very good access to the pre-colombian it being entirely oral and lost to us Fuji has an extensive history of being used by people as subject and inspiration .
    he had no intention of actually giving an explanation anyway
    uncle frogy

  17. bachfiend says

    I suppose one way of quantifying the amount of information of how much information there is in a picture of Mount Rushmore compared to one of Mount Fujii would be to compare the difference in time it would take to draw a recognisable picture of the two. Mount Fujii would be simple – it’s just a perfect volcanic mountain, whereas amount Rushmore has all those fiddling heads.

    But then again, Mount Fujii would resemble any one of many other extinct volcanos, so it would need a label. To be equal, so would Mount Rushmore. And Mount Fujii has 9 letters, and Mount Rushmore has 13, so that’s the increase in information there already.

  18. keithb says

    Of course, Fuji is a red herring. The real question is which has (had) more information: Mt Rushmore or the late “Old Man in the Mountain”