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Author | Topic: 10 Categories of Evidence For ID | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
No worries - I know the feeling :-)
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clpMINI Member (Idle past 5193 days) Posts: 116 From: Richmond, VA, USA Joined: |
Hello Jerry,
You wrote:
1) Function found in nature. Function is an attribute assigned by intelligence to cause something to cause 'something else' to do something. I design a hammer and cause it to do something else: drive a nail. My body causes my brain to function and the brain then causes me to think (sometimes). My car is a designed mechanism that allows me to drive it to get something else from point A to point B (could be my body, mail or groceries). In fact, just looking up the word at dictionary.com and considering the first two definitions we can see the intelligence inherent in the word function: 1) The action for which a person or thing is particularly fitted or employed. 2) Assigned duty or activity. FACT: We see much function in nature. This is evidence that intelligence operated to design and assign function in order that in each case, one something (often quite different) causes something else. From Wikipedia:
Teleology is the position that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose. Seem similar? Is ID just a re-hashed version of the teleological argument? If so, it would be purely a subjective excercise of assigning percieved purposes (functions). clpMINI It's not selling out if nobody's buying.
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Mammuthus Member (Idle past 6503 days) Posts: 3085 From: Munich, Germany Joined: |
Hi WK,
Yes, I meant that thread...I was in a rush so did not link it. I know it was not specifically about Jerry but since he was exhibiting behavior that was the inspiration for that thread I brought it up. In any case, it seems that since Jerry cannot defend his assertions with evidence he is resorting to taunting theAdmins in the hopes that he will be banned and go home feeling that he is a martyr a la John Davison.
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zyncod Inactive Member |
Really. Well did you look under math? Your math on this pretty much blows buttermilk along with big ned-nose's moderating (sheeze..... I wonder where that nose has been). Be honest. You didn't do much research. Had you, you would have uncovered this, Boltzmann: "Gain in information is loss in entropy" Ok, I understand what the problem is now. The term "information" that you are using, applied to thermodynamic or informational entropy, implies the amount of information you CAN know about a particular system, not the actual amount of information. In a crystal at absolute zero, there is no entropy and maximum "information," since you can know where every atom is. In a dissolved crystal at room temperature, there is much more entropy and much less information that you can know about the position/relationships between the atoms. However, the ACTUAL information content has increased. Like I said before, the position of atoms in a crystal is an easily compressible function. The random positions of dissolved ions is an uncompressable function, since random numbers, by definition, cannot be compressed. There is nothing wrong with my math, and in fact, this would seem to be common sense.serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/ scisoc/emergence/Boltzmann_Shannon.ppt But I'm not actually all that interested in entropy (I detested the general/organic chemistry that I had to take). I am much more interested in ID's response to the fact that it makes no useful predictions about biology. Whether ID is true is irrelevant to this discussion. Since the evolutionary synthesis makes predictions that, for the vast majority of the time, hold true, it would seem that, regardless of the truth content, ID should be relegated to philisophical discussion. This would, again, be analogous to the fact that Newtonian (wrong) physics holds sway in the macroscopic world, while quantum (right) physics holds sway in the microscopic world.I would be perfectly happy to say to the IDists "Yes, fine. We don't know enough about the bacterial flagellum to state with absolute certainty whether it was designed. If you want, you can say it was designed. Now go away." This message has been edited by zyncod, 05-13-2005 02:53 PM
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Percy Member Posts: 22502 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Jazzns writes: Take the two strings: "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" and "#!/usr/bin/perlprint 'Hello World';" Both occupy the exact same amount of space in the universe but the second most certainly contains more information than the first. In Shannon's seminal 1948 paper that began the science of information theory he says, "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." In other words, you're mistaking meaning for information. Meaning is independent from information. Your example actually consists of two possible messages from the set of messages of a channel of information 36 characters wide. The difference in meaning between the two messages is merely a human superimposed one. The number of distinct possible messages in the set, assuming each character is 8 bits wide and all characters are legal and each message in the set is equally likely, is 28*36 = 2288. With all possible messages equally likely, the amount of information produced when one message is chosen from the set is the same regardless of which message it is. Since the probability of any particular message being chosen is 1/2288, the amount of information represented by one message from the set is:
-log2(1/2288) = 288 bits In other words, it will take 288 bits to send one message from the set. If the probabilities of the messages weren't equal the equation is more complicated and it tells you that you can represent the message in fewer bits. But whether you send all a's or a shell script, the information content is the same. Only the meaning differs. And the meanings could be dramatically different than the obvious ones. For instance, your code could be a cipher where you tell the person who will be receiving the message that if he receives a message consisting of all the same letter that he should turn to the ordinal page in his cipher book corresponding to that letter and carry out the instructions therein. Any other message has no meaning. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22502 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Jerry Don Bauer writes: quote: Not really because in most situations information is matter. Information is conceptual. You're confusing the means of representing and transmitting information with information itself. Possibly you arrived at this conclusion because you've confused informational entropy with thermodynamic entropy. This is a common mistake, so common Wikipedia even addresses it in its article on Information Theory:
Relation with thermodynamic entropy Entropy as defined by Shannon is not related to entropy as defined by physicists. K. G. Denbigh succinctly summarizes the case against identifying changes in position in one macro object or in a group with physical entropy change (1): If one wishes to substantiate a claim or a guess that some particular process involves a change of thermodynamic or statistical entropy, one should ask oneself whether there exists a reversible heat effect, or a change in the number of accessible energy eigenstates, pertaining to the process in question. If not, there has been no change of physical entropy (even though there may have been some change in our "information"). Boltzmann and Gibbs did considerable work on statistical thermodynamics. This work was the inspiration for adopting the term entropy in information theory. There are no relationships between entropy in the thermodynamic and informational senses. In other words, obvious but superficial analogies between the two caused the adoption of the term "entropy" by the science of information theory, but the two apply to distinctly different realms and have completely different rules of application.
I'm not dissing genetic algorithms as I can see that they have their place in research (I tried to make that clear). But we cannot go so far as to think that the results actually translate into anything we see happening in nature. I didn't think you were dissing genetic algorithms. I was addressing the point that was the reason genetic algorithms were originally introduced into the discussion. ID claims that only intelligence can create information. Genetic algorithms are applications of evolutionary principles to design problems. Genetic algorithms create original designs, i.e., new information. Genetic algorithms are not intelligent. ID's claims about intelligence and information are not only unsupported, they're contradicted by the mere existence of genetic algorithms. And as I said earlier, this is self evident anyway. All natural processes generate information. People don't create information just by writing down observations.
All of this is well and good, but you seem to be missing my point. This is intelligence. This resembles NOTHING that can be found in nature. Have fun with the programs but don't confuse this with real life. I'm not confusing it with real life. Someday we can discuss evolution simulation programs, but right now we're addressing genetic algoriths. Have fun with your glib comments, but don't confuse computer simulations of evolution with design tools that use genetic algorithms. The simple word guessing program I described illustrates how a genetic algorithm can solve a problem ("What word am I thinking of?") without having any way it could know that word. I invented the example to address your claim that the programmers were giving the design to the program rather than the program developing the design on its own. This should have been obvious to you anyway, since one of the examples was of a genetic algorithm that designed an oscillator using an AM radio circuit as one of the subcircuits, an approach no human designer would ever have thought of.
If you do, the next time you get lost in the woods, start playing the hot and cold game with the trees and see how quickly you find your car. This addresses the analogy itself rather than the principle it was intended to convey. I was trying to help you understand that genetic algorithms are a specialized subclass of problem solving techniques known as successive approximation. While it is based upon evolutionary principles, it is not a simulation of biological evolution, though there are programs that do this. The analogy was an example of a simple successive approximation. I'll skip the discussion of evolution. This thread is already having trouble staying on topic. We can pick up those issues in another thread if they come up again.
Why could this intelligence not have come from another universe? We don't have to get into metaphysics if one ponders how this could occur through a singularity in a black hole. It may not be so painfully obvious if you discard norms of mundane thinking and go a bit deeper. I don't really see much difference between a made up god and a made up alien from another universe.
quote: Not simple information. But it certainly does with complex specified information as in the type found in organisms. The latter is simply mathematically impossible. "Mathematically impossible" is just an unsupported assertion, and genetic algorithms make clear this isn't the case. --Percy
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Parasomnium Member Posts: 2224 Joined: |
Everybody,
May I suggest we do not post in this thread until Jerry is back? Otherwise he will never be able to catch up with everything that's said here, a lot of which is addressed to him. Just a suggestion. This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 13-May-2005 08:28 PM We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins |
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 3939 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
In what case? Where there is no intelligence, I would think if selection occurs we might rule out intelligence. But I don't know that there's a universal rule. Are you suggesting that natural selection was also intelligent selection? If you are a theistic evolutionist, I have no problem with this, but other than this, I would have to ask you where the intelligence came from. I am not making any claim. All I am asking is how would one tell the difference? You came to the conclusion that the coin example was a case of intelligent selection. What objective test did you do in order to reach that conclusion that would apply to any instance of selection?
I don't know that it does. Shouldn't we be trying to confirm or falsify common ancestry? I was under the impression that you considered this ridiculous when you said in Message 153:
Darwinian magic: Elephants magically 'poof' out of amoebas; ape-like critters start giving birth to men in violation of the species definitions in science Which first off is not what modern science considers common decent or the definition of species to be. If any was really advocating a literal adherance to the parody you described in that post then I agree that this would not be science. There are many definitions of species some of which cover not extant species so there is no violation of any definitions. Species - Wikipedia See in particular the definition of morphological species. Certainly where it is possible the stronger definition of biological species can be used but by no means is it an exhaustive definition or the only one used in science.
First, please clarify yourself and come to use these terms more precisely. When you speak of evolution of the inner ear, this just means a change over time in the inner ear not how it originated. Second, I don't even recall discussing the inner ear. Can you link me back?? Also you wrote in Message 153:
reptiloid therapsids supernaturally shove their jaw-bones up into their ears and shoot etherally into mammals. We have fossils of creatures who's jawbone has a function as a jaw bone and a sound wave receptor. Before them we have similar looking creatures with just a jaw bone. After them we have similar looking creatures that have the same jaw bone primarily as a sound receptor. Last we have similar looking creatures that have the same bone exclusivly as a sound receptor. How is this not scientific to tentativily conclude that this is a transitional sequence as a result of decent with modification? How would the mechanism for this sequence change its meaning if it was performed by Intelligent vs Natural Selection? What test could I do to tell if this sequence of evolution was intelligently prescribed or a "devolution" as you would call it? FOX has a pretty good system they have cooked up. 10 mil people watch the show on the network, FOX. Then 5 mil, different people, tune into FOX News to get outraged by it. I just hope that those good, God fearing people at FOX continue to battle those morally bankrupt people at FOX. -- Lewis Black, The Daily Show
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Jerry Don Bauer Inactive Member |
quote: You are no longer arguing science just throwing out some provocative posts. Here's about the only thing I can answer in this one:
quote: I had ask you to stay on topic. But since you refuse to, I'll point out how silly this is for the readers. I have thrown out several testable hypotheses since I've been in here: 1) When loose information is diffused, entropy will tend to rise. 2) Specificity is inversely proportional to the probability of an event occurring. And I cannot believe you are missing this one since we've been yammering about it for 50 posts: 3) DNA must be designed by an intelligent agent or by code pre-programmed by an intelligent agent. Design Dynamics
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Jerry Don Bauer Inactive Member |
quote: You can't just throw out 500 coins and reason that whatever pattern you get has the odds of 1/2^500 of occurring. This is not true because the odds you are going to get a pattern are 100%--every time you throw the coins you will get a pattern. You are out of probability math altogether at this point. You have to pre-conceive the pattern as I did with 500 heads. Only THEN do the odds become 1/2^500 it will occur. This then becomes mathematically impossible to do. Statistically, you would have to toss the coins 10^150 times as this is the 10 base figure when converted from 2 base. But even you got superman to help you toss them once per second, you could only toss them 10^17 times because that's all the seconds that have elapsed since the big bang. Design Dynamics
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Jerry Don Bauer Inactive Member |
quote: You don't recognize this lecture series on time's arrow from one of the greatest physicists that ever lived, Author Eddington? Speaks volumes. Design Dynamics
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jar Member (Idle past 422 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
You have to pre-conceive the pattern as I did with 500 heads. Only THEN do the odds become 1/2^500 it will occur. Ahah. So to find design you must first pre-conceive design. Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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Jerry Don Bauer Inactive Member |
quote: Do I detect you getting snippy again? Let's hope not. Lower life forms would have to be designed first as this is the only way the circle of life would work. Can you imagine what would happen when an elephant dropped dead and if there were no bacteria that could compost the corpus? Just would't be a good design scenario. Design Dynamics
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Jerry Don Bauer Inactive Member |
quote: Now did you see me write anything about thermodynamic entropy in that post? No. Thermo means heat in Greek. When you see Joules per Kelvin you will know it i thermodynamic entropy. When you do not, it ain't. Design Dynamics
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Jerry Don Bauer Inactive Member |
quote: Yes, it should seem similar because, philosphically speaking, ID is based on teleology. Design Dynamics
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