You can tell when you’ve encountered some gullible twit of a creationist who has swallowed the Discovery Institute line whole. Whenever they recite Stephen Meyer’s favorite line, that only intelligence can create information, you know you’re debating a fool.
It’s simply not true. Anyone who has studied genetics knows there are many natural processes that generate information, making the claim obviously false. It’s good to have Dr Dan present a short sweet refutation.
I’ve confronted people with this kind of explanation many times in the past. Just search PubMed for “random nucleotide sequences” (or amino acid sequences) and it’ll come back with page after page of articles on the subject — they’re fairly common tools for exploring the functional space. Notice that the first one on this list is from 1983.
The standard response I’ve gotten from creationists is that’s not complex information
, and if you ask them to define “complex” they will waffle around, and eventually declare something about complex specified information
, which just means information that was defined by a prior source, by which they mean “God”, because they sure as heck don’t have a primordial volume that dictates the modern sequences.
It’s really just a rabbit hole that they can lead you into. They don’t even have a grasp on the meaning of “information” — it just sounds sciencey to their ears.
I remember getting into long arguments with creationists about the meaning of information. My argument was it means, simply, “that which informs” which presupposes an intelligent agent capable of being informed. On that understanding, the universe is filled with masses of stuff by which we can be informed but there is nothing which requires us to posit a Creator. It might be the case nut there is no reason to think it must be the case. We simply don’t know, Meyer’s faith notwithstanding.
Yeah, this is the biggest issue I think. There is massive amounts of “data” out there. And, “intelligent agents” can produce idiotic amounts of “data” that is utter bullshit, very complex, and utterly useless. This doesn’t make its complexity “informative”. On the contrary, its often generated to misinform. So, by my definition of “information”, it doesn’t matter if its complex, what generated it, etc., it just has to be accurate and useful – i.e., it has to inform me, or someone else, in some useful way. Sadly, nearly 100% of all “intelligence sourced information” from creationists only tell me the exact same thing, over and over again, “There people have no clue what they are talking about, and are only worth any effort to deal with because of the fact that they misinform others constantly.” They are like a recurring rash – the only information you get from it is, “Huh.. Still there. Needs more medication to fix.” And, they can’t even manage the “complex” part, since they keep coming up with stupid BS, involving “levels of complexity that require a god!”, which is undefinable, unquantifiable, and thus untestable.
Still waiting on you twits, my dear creations, to provide “any” information, complex or otherwise.
ask the creationists to define “information.”
also have them discuss the entropy of information.
i assume they will have no idea, and prevaricate ignorantly.
information theory was started back in the 40’s with Claude Shannon.
quoted from wikipedia article on Information Theory:
“Information theory was initially formed in the context of telecommunication but soon found a wide range of other applications. It is now at the intersection of mathematics, statistics and computer science, and has applications in diverse fields ranging from electrical engineering and physics to neurobiology.”
If you want to analyze the strengths and forces of leaves in a pile, you need some information about how they are laying. The leaves fell off from the tree. What intelligence created this information?
To analyze the forces of stacked round objects, we might study a pike of grains of sand. What intelligence made the sand grains find their optimal organizational structure?
It is obvious that random junk still needs information to describe it. Thus, the existence of such information does not necessarily establish any intelligence beyond random chance.
Do theists now define god as the outcome of random chance. Differential survival in evolution is obviously not the random thing here.
At this point, there are few or no things a creationist can say that won’t make me roll my eyes. But that’s what 15 years of hanging out on (the late lamented) talk.origins will do to you.
Also, try asking a cdesign proponentsist which has more “information” — an acorn or an adult oak tree? If he guesses the latter, ask where all that “information” came from.
Robbo @ #3 — I suspect you would find lots of people who don’t know how to define “information”, not just creationists. In fact, I’m a little fuzzy on the idea particularly if you include “natural processes that generate information” and I’ve called myself an “information architect” for the last 30 years. Many people would think of “information” as something created by an intelligent (hopefully) person, usually written or verbal human communication. The way PZ is using “information” here seems somewhat different than the everyday use of the term.
Data are unprocessed facts or measurements; information is data that has been processed or interpreted so that it becomes meaningful. Thus IT is the processing and use of data.
How about some information please
I too do not understand what information as used in this way actually means. If it requires that data needs to be processed or interpreted to be information then what happens when a star collapsed into a black hole in some far off galaxy 100 million light years ago when there was no one here to process any data? Is it only information if someone processes it. It appears to be an another abstraction trying to describe an abstraction trying to describe I have no idea what.
Does it imply that existence of the universe is “just” information?
unclefrogy,
Yes. Precisely.
“When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound.”
@Raging Bee — excellent example
[can’t resist]
No. But it’s been proposed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler#It_from_bit
“specified” = unspecified with dramatic assertion
“When you say ‘information’, are you measuring by Shannon, Gibbs, von Neumann, or Kolmogorov?”
The guy is right, and I agree with him. Even from a naive non-biologist point of view it is trivially obvious.
Buuuuut…
His tactics are wrong and will not work on anyone who is a creationist and are unlikely to work on anyone who is wavering. Because the creationist is not based in reality, but wants to be. Doggedly trying to be, while ignoring their central God thing in the middle. And using words like information (not nonsense), complex (vs simple), specified (vs non specified). But because they are in fact based on a fictional premise and because they are invincibly convinced they are right, they can just keep adding qualifiers to the 2 they have. No matter how many times ya whack that mole, a new one can appear. I’m gonna go with ‘yeah, but what about biological complex specified information huh? Definitionally you can’t get that in a lab so there!’. But I’d only be right in the specific by accident. The general idea though? I’d bet my London against your brick on it.
I think an example of similar thinking exists with the usage of Guantanamo Bay prison after 9/11. Specifically the ‘who’. To my understanding, I am not a lawyer either, it was stuffed with people whom the Geneva Convention didn’t apply too. Never mind the title with something about Universal Human Rights in it, when you got to legal nitty gritty, there was a loop hole. See these people were clearly (allegedly, but we’ll never test it so who cares?) not civilians, but neither did they fit the legal definition of soldiers. Therefore a new class of people were created called ‘illegal combatants’. And because the Geneva Convention et al didn’t mention them, they didn’t apply. Et voila, cya in a few decades (often literally) kiddo.
Or so the legal thinking went approximately. When you want something to be true, just make up a new qualifier for your meaningless term, or just make up a new class of people. Same logic applies, same invincibility against wrongness deployed.
John Morales
then it looks like information is a kind of construct made out of some part of existence in this case words, by a “part” of existence, humans, that gives some meaning for that part of existence that uses symbols, humans, to try and describe existence for “it’s” on needs.
reminds me of ” The Treachery of Images”
unclefrogy,
Yes, but it depends on the level of abstraction.
You could say the same thing about ‘meaning’, no?
#18
yes because meaning it is not the thing
This Is Not a Pipe, Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Jeez, we are back to divine clockmakers again. Are there no original BS arguments we can sharpen our teeth on?
A primer on the topic, thanks to the invaluable TalkOrigins Archive: https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/infotheory.html.
I think the general strategy of creationist “information” arguments is to gesture at folk ideas about information e.g. information-as-blueprint to construct something (whether an artificial machine or an organism), and claim that this can’t arise from nowhere; it must have a source that already contains the “information” i.e. an intelligent mind (in the case of the machine, a human one; in the case of an organism, the mind of God [or maybe space aliens — IDists can be strategically vague about that]). Of course, hand-waving won’t get you the kind of conservation law you need to make claims like that; you have to make the definition rigorous and do the math. Unfortunately for the creationists, standard rigorous concepts of information (Shannon, Kolmogorov, etc.) don’t seem to correspond very well with folk notions, or else don’t yield the desired conservation law. Thus Dembski, Nelson et al have invented their own concepts which….have failed to impress actual mathematicians.
I say that the information is conveyed by natural selection. Variation is the question posed by the organism, namely, which of these is best fit; selection is the answer.