What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison? (edited)

And you somehow know this without a copy of the program?Genetic algorithms work in the same way as evolution. They're simply computational models of evolution. The reason you deny the possibility of random mutations is because they create new information, and the random mutations generated by genetic algorithms create new information in the same way. But GA's are not the topic of this thread. You should probably propose a new thread if that's what you want to talk about. What you describe has never been observed to happen. When under antibiotic stress the bacteria that survive experience a wide variety of different mutations. The bacteria that happened to receive resistance-conferring mutations survive and pass these mutations on to the next generation. It's the familiar process of descent with modification followed by selection of the organisms that will contribute to the next generation. No, I had it right, but I was insufficiently clear. The article "it" referred to the genetic repair mechanism, not the LexA.--Percy

And what two algorithms are you comparing in the bacteria? But creating new information is precisely what random chance does. Here's an example.Consider a specific gene in a population of bacteria that has three alleles we'll call A, B and C. For lurkers not familiar with the term, alleles are variants of a single gene. One familiar example is eye color. The eye color gene has several alleles: brown, blue, green, etc. Human eye color depends upon which one you happen to inherit. Eye color isn't really this simple of course, but this hopefully gets the idea of alleles across.So every bacteria in the population has either the A allele, the B allele or the C allele. We can calculate how much information is required to represent three alleles in this bacterial population. It's very simple: Now a random mutation occurs in this gene during replication and the D allele appears. Through the following generations it gradually spreads throughout the population and becomes relatively common. There are now four alleles for this gene, A, B, C and D. The amount of information necessary to represent four alleles is: The amount of information required to represent this gene in the bacterial population has gone from 1.585 to 2 bits, an increase of .415 bits, and an example of random chance increasing information.--Percy

I made a little post on the subject, it also,links to the video I got that from, check it out here: Message 35(thanks Admin, works like a charm!)

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I hunt for the truth

traderdrew writes:

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According to information I got from Michael Behe

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Um, you do realize that every single example of "irreducible complexity" that Behe has ever come up with has been shown to be not only reducible but actually evolved?Every single one.Behe simply refuses to examine the literature when it comes to finding evidence that goes against his claims. In the recent Dover trial, he made the claim that nobody has ever done a study on biochemical evolution.So the prosecution started pulling out papers and stacking them up in front of him on the witness stand until they rose so high that Behe had to stop the proceedings because he could no longer see over the stack of papers in front of him that he had claimed did not exist.

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Just binding two proteins together would be around one chance in 10 to the 20th power.

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Assuming an all-in-one-go scheme, perhaps.Biochemistry doesn't work that way.Suppose I have a standard deck of 52 cards and I draw one.What is the probability of me having drawn the Ace of Spades?
What if we knew that I had drawn a black card?
What if we knew that I had drawn a Spade?
What if we knew that I had draw an Ace?Too, chemical reactions do not just result in random chemicals. When I take a mole of oxygen gas and two moles of hydrogen gas, mix them together at STP, and spark the mixture, why is it I never get a flask full of hydrogen peroxide with trace amounts of water? Why do I always get a flask full of water with trace amounts of hydronium? Why is that when I want to produce hydrogen peroxide, I need to follow another chemical reaction and not just assume that hydrogen and oxygen will combine any old way I want?

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Sure there are Darwinian models but do those models conceal any problems along the way?

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Well, then I wouldn't get on board a Boeing 777 if I were you. It was created by a computer using evolutionary methods, not by humans designing it. By your logic, these planes should be falling out of the sky.Why is it they manage to fly despite having been evolved, not designed?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Smooth Operator writes:

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The information is already in the genome. The mechanisms that the cell has helps the cell adapt.

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But the E. coli experiment I have often described here proves that to be false. If what you say is true, then the entire lawn should act as one: Either the entire lawn survives or the entire lawn dies. Because the entire lawn is descended from a single ancestor. Any genetic "information" in the lawn is present in all of them for the only source of "information" was from that single ancestor.Therefore, either the entire lawn is immune to T4 phage or the entire lawn is susceptible and dies.Instead, what we see is that while much of the lawn dies, some colonies remain alive.Therefore, new information must be in the colonies that survived.Your claim of no information necessarily means that if one can do it, then all of them can do it. But instead, we see that some can and some can't.Therefore, new information must be present.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Look at my post #299 in the link below.EvC Forum: EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed - Science Under AttackNow that I gave a link to a of mine in another thread,,, attack, attack, attack it. These forces may the result of some sort of chaotic order but, the problem with your thinking is that a cave or a waterfall do not transmit or produce information, much less CSI (complex specified information). You'reeee really the Devil's advocate aren't you? I just looked for the definition in a book of mine "Chaos" by James Gleick. I cannot find a good definition inside so far and I don't remember seeing one. I found the book hard to follow because I think I would learn some of the information better if I saw real life illustrations. I do see chaos everytime I step outside or even when cigarette smoke mixes with the air. How would you measure the precise dimensions of smoke (assuming you could flash freeze it) with Euclidean geometry?

Ummmm, I have heard it but I haven't seen any good ones. I have seen the pilus model for evolving a flagellum but it conceals at least one "major" problem plus other problems described by Michael Dembski. So you expect me to go through the transcripts of the Dover trial in order to refute or agree with you? Maybe I will just take your word for it. So what you are saying from your chemistry lesson is that biochemistry works with what it is there. But you see with protein bonding, oil and hydrogen bonds have to arranged in sequence with their counterparts in the other proteins as well as having the correct shapes. Of course there have been test planes that have fallen out of the sky or even blew up....and those evolutionary methods??? Dammit... Now I have to go and really study up on evolutionary computer programs and not rely on what Smooth Operator posted. I have to go because I have some serious studying to do on the Dover trial too. See you all around.Edited by traderdrew, : No reason given.Edited by Admin, : Fix dBCodes.

You know Dembski? The guy who created this unsubstantiated claim? He disagrees with you.

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chance can produce complex unspecified information, or unspecified complex information, but not CSI
  —Dembski through Wikipedia

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WikiHe claims that CSI can't be created, but CI and SI can. He proposes no mechanism that stops CI from becoming specified, and thus CSI or the other way, SI becoming complex and thus CSI.He claims that natural laws can't create information (but chance can) they can only shuffle around or lose information, but again, he asserts this without proposing a reason that a natural law can't create information, since the sun burns via natural laws and creates information all the time.

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But you know what? Improbable things happen all the time, and the probability often depends on how one looks at it. Until you can provide a mathematical formula for this probability, then apply the formula to something specific, then show why the probability becomes zero (which it must, otherwise you're admitting it is possible for the thing to happen) you have nothing.

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Yes that's true. It will happen, but most of the time it won't. And on the average it won't either. That's what the NFL says too.

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Yes it can. In fact, it often does. Show me how it can't. If you see that no keys are found on your celing, why would you look on the ceiling in another house? After looking at many houses, and finding that no keys are ever found on the celings in any house, doesn't that make it less probable that keys will be found on the celings of the next house? Doesn't this information ceom from the random first process, refined through subsequent iterations?

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Maybe because they could be there? But again, that's not the point. What you are doinf is using prior information. I said, that you should use the exact same process, not modified. That's what NFL is about.So let's say you have a house with 9 rooms, and all rooms are the same size. You don't know where the keys are. You maek al algorithm that searches the rooms in this order:7, 6, 4, 2, 1, 8, 5, 9, 3.And after you find the keys, you go to another 10 room house. No the question is, will this exact same path give you better results than random chance averaged ovar all houses? The answer is no it won't. Neither will any other path. They ahve on average the same chance. Because in soem houses the keys will be in the room 4, and in soem houses they will be in the room 3. So in soem houses you will get there sooner, and in soem houses you will get to the keys later. And on teh average it will be the same as a random search.

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Yes, so the first random search generated information you could apply to the second house. How can you say you wouldn't do any better? You can eliminate search options because of the first search, thus making it take less time to exhaust all possibilities in the second.

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I said you can't use that info.

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It doesn't have to always work, it only has to work more often than not. And then when I find a new situation for which it doesn't work, the final solution gets factored into my new "search information."

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But it won't work more times. It will be average.

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Why do you think it has to be better in all cases? It only has to be better in most for it to be a worthwhile algorithm to use. There may be a better way in one instance, and in fact, we can often come up with better ways to design things in nature than the way they turned out because the process isn't perfect. That's my point.

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Exactly, but for to design them, you have to have prior information.

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Yes, but that prior information was generated by the first random search, and then gets incorporated. Thus, information can arise out of a random process. Once you get information, all you have to do is add to it.

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It can't arise from a random process, because you are doing that process and checking the rooms. You are creating information.

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No, but they're similar enough for a process created in one to be a benefit in another.

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But again, that is prior assumption about other houses.

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All car models are slightly different, but I don't have to learn how to drive each type of car individually. I can learn on one, and apply the knowledge from that to the others.

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True but you can't apply that knowledge on all transportation methods like flight. You can on cars because they are similar. But that again means that you made prior assumption on which kind of transport will you take.

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No, in that case, it won't help in that one instance, but after that one instance, you've learned something more, and expanded the circumstances under which your process will now work. It adapts to a new environment you might say.

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But that is than prior knowledge for the third search.

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Right, so he starts at square one again, and starts with nothing, then builds a process for all experiences that are similar to this new one. Given enough time, you'll experience enough different sets of circumstances to have a process in your repertoire to deal with just about any subsequent experiences.

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Yes, but for that it takes time and trials. And on every trial you build new information. So what the NFL says is that you can't make an algorithm and apply it without any trials to all sequence spaces with better than average results.

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Think this through. I'm saying that the search creates the information - clearly it does, because we know something at the end we didn't at the beginning. This meets the Shannon definition of information (decrease in uncertainty of a receiver). The same information is created no matter how we get there. You almost acknowledge that in your paragraph above - see last sentence.

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But you are the one searching. You made the search. You put in the information of where you are going to search.

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And you somehow know this without a copy of the program?

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Because ALL algorithms work like that. Even the simple calculators. Can they give you a number that was not programmed into them? No, obviously not.

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Genetic algorithms work in the same way as evolution. They're simply computational models of evolution. The reason you deny the possibility of random mutations is because they create new information, and the random mutations generated by genetic algorithms create new information in the same way. But GA's are not the topic of this thread. You should probably propose a new thread if that's what you want to talk about.

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But genetic algortihms in a simulation were designed to find the specified target. Evolution in real life has no knowledge about what it is looking for? And what kind of information are you talking about? Are you saying that random mutations are able to produce Shannon information? Yes that is true. But not CSI.

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What you describe has never been observed to happen. When under antibiotic stress the bacteria that survive experience a wide variety of different mutations. The bacteria that happened to receive resistance-conferring mutations survive and pass these mutations on to the next generation. It's the familiar process of descent with modification followed by selection of the organisms that will contribute to the next generation.

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Actually we are talking about the same thing, only in different terminology.

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No, I had it right, but I was insufficiently clear. The article "it" referred to the genetic repair mechanism, not the LexA.

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Than why doesn my article say that LexA has to be turned on for resistance to be acquired?

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And what two algorithms are you comparing in the bacteria?

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A random search and an evolutionary algorithm.

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But creating new information is precisely what random chance does. Here's an example.

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Consider a specific gene in a population of bacteria that has three alleles we'll call A, B and C. For lurkers not familiar with the term, alleles are variants of a single gene. One familiar example is eye color. The eye color gene has several alleles: brown, blue, green, etc. Human eye color depends upon which one you happen to inherit. Eye color isn't really this simple of course, but this hopefully gets the idea of alleles across.

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So every bacteria in the population has either the A allele, the B allele or the C allele. We can calculate how much information is required to represent three alleles in this bacterial population. It's very simple:

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log23 = 1.585 bits
Now a random mutation occurs in this gene during replication and the D allele appears. Through the following generations it gradually spreads throughout the population and becomes relatively common. There are now four alleles for this gene, A, B, C and D. The amount of information necessary to represent four alleles is:

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log24 = 2 bits
The amount of information required to represent this gene in the bacterial population has gone from 1.585 to 2 bits, an increase of .415 bits, and an example of random chance increasing information.

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You are wrong because youa re using the wrong definition of information. All of the necessary information was already there. Natural selection just selected it and copied it on the expense of others. But the information for the specific genes was already there, evolution didn't create them. It just spread them.And again, that is what Shannon would call information. The sheere number, does not represent biological information. You have to represent biological functions. If you just multiply the number of genes, you still have the same biological functions, only more genes, which don't give you no new functions.

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Shannon information theory measures the relative degrees of RSC and OSC. Shannon information theory cannot measure FSC. FSC is invariably associated with all forms of complex biofunction, including biochemical pathways, cycles, positive and negative feedback regulation, and homeostatic metabolism.

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You can't use Shannon's information and apply it to biological information because it only concerns itslef with statistical aspect of information. It still has to take into account syntax and semantics.

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But the E. coli experiment I have often described here proves that to be false. If what you say is true, then the entire lawn should act as one: Either the entire lawn survives or the entire lawn dies. Because the entire lawn is descended from a single ancestor. Any genetic "information" in the lawn is present in all of them for the only source of "information" was from that single ancestor.

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No, becasue that information was copied. A copied information is not new semantic information.

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Therefore, either the entire lawn is immune to T4 phage or the entire lawn is susceptible and dies.

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Instead, what we see is that while much of the lawn dies, some colonies remain alive.

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Therefore, new information must be in the colonies that survived.

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Your claim of no information necessarily means that if one can do it, then all of them can do it. But instead, we see that some can and some can't.

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Therefore, new information must be present.

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Resistance is acquired by loss of information.

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You know Dembski? The guy who created this unsubstantiated claim? He disagrees with you.

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No he doesn't. When I say information I mean CSI, unless stated otherwise. Because we are here talking about biological information, and Shannon's information can not be applied to biological functions.

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He claims that CSI can't be created, but CI and SI can. He proposes no mechanism that stops CI from becoming specified, and thus CSI or the other way, SI becoming complex and thus CSI.

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Yes he does and it's called the NFL theorem.

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He claims that natural laws can't create information (but chance can) they can only shuffle around or lose information, but again, he asserts this without proposing a reason that a natural law can't create information, since the sun burns via natural laws and creates information all the time.

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What the hell are you talking about? Sun is not creating any new information! That is a meaningless statement.

Almsot everything of a complex nature is improbable from the view of the end result. The fact of the matter is, any end result would have been equally improbable, so relying purely on probability is a losing game. Ok, but then you're not modelling anything in reality, so I'm not sure what your model is trying to prove. Everything retains elements from previous iterations, and so will generate information based on those previous iterations that can be used in subsequent ones. I may have missed this, but can you please lay out the math that let's you determine this? I don't mean an explanation, I want the actual mathematical formula you used to conclude this. Yeah, ok, so the fact that I have prior information and can come up with better solutions than nature shows that nature didn't have that prior informatrion, right? So, either the designer of nature lacked the information, didn't use the information, or nature happened on it's own. So, nature is either natural or the designer is inept. Why do you say this. As I've said before, this is an assertion. And even Dembski disagrees with you. He agrees that chance can create Specified information, or complex information. He only, for some inexplicable reason, stops at it creating CSI. Not really. It's merely using everything I have at my disposal, whihc includes and is limited to, the information I learned in the first house. The fact that the next house is similar, just means the information I learned in one is at least partially applicable to the next one. I can apply some information from cars to flight. I was just in a plane on Saturday. The wheel in front of me turned the same way to make the plane turn the same way. The pedals in front of my feet were similar to the pedals in a car. The things they controlled were different, but I already knew how to use the pedals, if not what they were controlling, so yes, you can apply some information. The amount of information you can apply is directly proportional to the similarity of the situation. The more similar, the more information you can use. Yes, but that prior knowledge (or information) was generated through the initial random process and refined through the next, less random, process. It's how we build information in real life. But in eveolution, we have many, many trials. Each time a new organism is created (born, divided, etc) we have a trial because the next generation is never the same as the previous one. There is always something different.