Intelligent Design in Universities

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I'm not sure I understand the question. Functional genes are those genes that continue to translate proteins that fulfill a need in the organism. I've never heard them expressed as extropy, but since extropy is the opposite of entropy, perhaps they could be if we don't take it too far.

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I'm not asking about extropy, since the concept isn't as complete as entropy. From your previous posts, you were trying to show that as more functional genes lost there functions, the entropy went up, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. You were trying to equate loss of information with entropy, isn't this correct?

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Hmmm....I'm getting rather suspicious that you are trying to set me up with something or another, Justin. What do you think would happen entropically if suddenly every protein in an organism no longer worked?

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Yes, the organism wouldn't function. I'm not arguing that. I'm using your equations to show an absurdity, and therefore your calculation must be invalid. I know what would happen, but according to your equations the entropy would decrease, as I showed in my previous post.

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No, you keep saying this but I certainly never have. I know exactly what you are attempting here and I'm enjoying see you set it up.

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The entropy increases and the further we get to mutational meltdown, it begins to increase even more, arithmetically. The population then goes extinct. Remember the graph I posted?

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I know, I saw the graph. But that is besides the point. We are talking about the information in the genome, and what it tends to do. You say it tends to decrease as more deleterious mutations arise, and the entropy increases. This is in accordance to the second law of thermodynamics.What I am trying to show you, along with other posters using the coin analogy, is that the second law of thermodynamics doesn't apply to information theory. There is a disconnect.I am using your equations to do this calcuation, not mine. According to your equation, as I increase the deleterious mutations past a certain point, the entropy actually decreases. I know this isn't what you are trying to say happens, so I dont' think the equations, or your calculation, are useful in this scenerio.According to your equations, if I have a fully functional genome, use PCR to amplify it and introduce random point mutations every generation, take a sample, PCR it again, repeat; the information would decrease and the entropy would go up. This is what you want to say happens, correct?But you can start the other way to, and according to your equations, if I start with a genome full of deleterious mutations and manually replicate them and introduce random point mutations, information would increase.I know you are not trying to say this, but the equations you used to calculate the entropy do say this. I showed it in my previous post. I think this calls into the question previous calculation, and calls into question the equating of Shannon entropy and thermodynamic entropy.

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Additionally, You have completely left the second law of thermodynamics at this point and we are no longer on the same subject. The second law dictates that with spontaneous events, entropy will tend to increase. There is nothing spontaneous about your purposeful interference in the system by adding energy in the form of your actions (work) into it.

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Not really. I'm would merely be taking the place of the replication machinery of the cell. So I would be adding no more energy than the cell would itself. I'm wouldn't be introducing the information, just replicating it and introducing random point mutations (via UV radiation or some mutagens), just as happens in nature.You are saying the entropy tends to increase in such a system. Well, if I start with every gene mutated deleteriously, the only way for entropy to increase, according to your equations, is for some of them to become functional again.To summarize, according to your equations, if I have a bunch of deleteriously mutated genes, I have a low entropy compared to a genome that have half there genes mutated deleteriously and half of them functional. Don't you see a problem with this?

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Water heaters don't come to equilibrium either if we supply them a source of energy with intelligence in the form of a thermostat to reheat the water every time it starts cooling off.

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Again, an organism isn't a closed system either. All I would be doing is taking the place of the replication machinery to ensure replication occurs. The intelligence is not introducing information into the system, merely acting as the replication machinery. According to your equations, if I introduce random, spontaneous, mutations throughout a genome that has every gene deleteriously mutated, and entropy must increase, then half will become functional.Your calcuations assumed a far from equilibrium state in the opposite direction, I'm just assuming a far from equilibrium state in the opposite direction and seeing were your equations take us.I'll address the rest of the post later.This message has been edited by JustinC, 05-07-2005 06:27 PM

Are you finally admitting that there is no equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics for configurational entropy ?And you are right that I haven't calculated the entropy. Because - as I have already explained - my argument does not require that calculation.Finally the study does not appear to anywhere assert that evolutionary theory expects beneficial mutatiosn to occur more frequently than detrimental ones. If you beleive that it does then I suggest that you quote the relevant section.

Jerry, play nicely! You can't do that too often, you know!Following up on jar's comment... Actually I would be interested to hear what your view is on whether it's possible to have an empirical test to decide whether a biological system shows intelligent design, or not. I agree with you that one needs to know what a pattern is meant to look like, before you can attempt to identify its existence.I understand that ID (in its biological incarnation) has a theory of specified complexity, which I've never understood completely. What is your view of that theory?Could such a theory be used to set up a biological version of SETI, searching the biological world for intelligent signal? What would a biological version of SETI look like, and what would its data source be? Would it be possible to come up with a theory of "nucleotide design", and devote huge amounts of computing power to detect intelligent patterns in genbank data (National Center for Biotechnology Information) for example?Best wishes,mick

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I learned something non-reflectively in this thread but the answer was that Fisher's fudamental theorem needs to be altered definitionally before I could order the various series nongenerally. I will propose a new thread to discuss this once I get enough written and %out% of my own mind. This solution however does not "sell" ID as a political movement but an improvement on the failed details of evo theory as it contingently exists.

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I need to gauge preliminarily how Wright's, Haldane's, and Kimura's contributions would be affected before I release such whim as I could incidentally today. I would be using three formal cateorgies biologically rather than the two (genotype and phenotype).

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Ok. Good luck and sounds like a good route. You might want to read up on some of Walter Remine's stuff. He's posting at ARN right now.

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Design Dynamics

No.Group 4 can be specified as:
1. The first coin is heads;
2. The next coin is the opposite of the previous.
3. Repeat 2 until you run out of coins.This description is shorter than that of group 2 or 3, but still longer than that of group 1. So the order of information content, from least to most is: group 1, group 4, group 2/3.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 07-May-2005 11:42 PM

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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

Ok, ok
BSM on Crow and Remine @EVC
but genetic deaths are likely to have more than one effect in the causality (that's why Nosy didnt understand Jianyi Zhang).
yes yes,
I am trying to get more out of the the TWO asthetic ideas (line between Earth and Sun and the loss of the equant) Gingerich pens (in THE BOOK NOBODY READ)to the letter, as I gave my first presentation of the way I thought my Grandfather meant by "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (interpreted by me with quotes from the Bible on the relation of parent and child 'phylogeny recapitulates ontongey') at a LENTEN service in the Presby Church in high school with reflexions on experience's of my younder younger years . I have to get beyond my own attempts with a "bicycle chain". I am fully convinced that what I understood from Croizat falls into the line from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton...to Croizat(with Cantor in the motion) but still I dont know that a propability space is required(for macrostates) if the physics itself suffices. You did not say if I was correct historically
http://EvC Forum: Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory -->EvC Forum: Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory
about the spaces used by evolutionary theoreists that JAD called in the ARN thread an affect of Ernst Mayr and which situates the words due to "organization"s.In any effect it would be a unification without the geodesic(as Einstein perhaps enabled his earlier Kant reading to eclpise into Godel conversations etc) no matter Haldane's dillema. The closest depiction of said chain on EVC is @http://EvC Forum: Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory -->EvC Forum: Current status/developments in Intelligent Design Theory
But I did not attempt to make the drawing from the perspective of Mars parrallels. That seems to be required to get out of Ptolemic Biogeography that which is post Darlington and Matthews as required biologically(panbiogeographically). The geometry of such is way beyond my present ability. I dont doubt that it doesnt exist but it might only exist statistically, in which case I can not be as confident ontologically as I presently am.

Well, it looks like I've been written out of the conversation as unworthy.But can I ask you a question anyway?Based on what you've outlined would it be possible to make a statement that the information content of a series of yes-no or on-off or binary incidents is inversely proportional to the amount of order and directly proportional to the amount of disorder?Does information content increase as order decreases and disorder increases?Can all of the examples of coin flips etc be reduced to that?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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Seems to me that they would be equally entitled to accept evidence for ID. If they were to do so, would it mean that ID is creationism in disguise?

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But there is no positive evidence for ID.It is only philosophy at this point.Can you show me an ID hypothesis that has been tested on a biological system.Something like:"If ID were true, we would expect observed biological system X to display certain characteristics; A, B, C, and D."What Biological system has been tested this way, and what positive evidence for ID has been obtained?As I said in a previous message to you, there are people of many, many religions, and also of no religion at all, who accept evolution.What is the common denominator of the people who reject evolution?

Unworthy? I don't think so: "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers." - Francois Marie Arouet (a.k.a. Voltaire) I'd say yes, yes and yes.The more randomness in the series, the longer your description of it becomes. Repeating subseries reduce the amount of information needed to recreate the series. So you'd think no repetition would maximize the information content. But no repetition at the smallest scale actually creates repetition on a larger scale, as your group 4 illustrates.

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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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There simply has not been any science in your posts that I can address.

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You are entitled to hold opinions as we are all and I grant you that right. But I cannot scientifically refute opinions as those are subjective. So you win. Your opinions stand as your opinions!

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Are you sure we are talking about the same post, in which I asked the following questions and made the following requests for information? I was actually looking for actual information and answers to these questions, you know.Why won't you answer them?Why or why not?This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-07-2005 08:13 PM

The next thing I wonder, based on all of the Creationist and Idists attempts to use the 2^nd. Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy as some criteria, if the results you find are true, is it possible to apply them to biology with any hope of achieving understanding?It looks like the results say that as disorder increases, information increases.What could be used to bridge the gap between absolute information content and information that can be used?As you can see, I'm struggling to try to come up with a working definition of information that might apply to their examples.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

i think you'll be waiting a long time for an answer to this question...Coming up with scientific hypotheses for ID is a bit difficult, because, as Jerry has noted, ID doesn't have hypotheses.But we can certainly test some creationist claims directly, using the scientific method. For example, if all "kinds" of species were created at the same time, a few thousand years ago, then we should be able to use the molecular clock and coalescence theory to prove this hypothesis right or wrong.The onus is on young earth creationists to carry out the coalescent analysis and show that clocklike nuclear markers coalesce identically at a few thousand years ago, for each major clade.Coming up with testable creationist hypotheses is actually quite straightforward. And quite fun!Mickadded in edit: actually this would be a great way for creationists to define baramins, or whatever it is they call them. Carry out a molecular clock analysis for each clade of animals; any clade that coalesces around 6000 years ago is a baramin. Any clade that coalesces less than 6000 years ago arose through microevolution. any clade that coalesces over 6000 years ago is an experimental artifact, and consists of multiple baramins.added in edit, again: Now I think of it, you could use the coalescent to test whether there was a major evolutionary bottleneck around the time of the flood. Why aren't creationists carrying out this research?This message has been edited by mick, 05-07-2005 08:33 PMThis message has been edited by mick, 05-07-2005 08:37 PMThis message has been edited by mick, 05-07-2005 08:40 PM

2LOT applies to closed systems only, and earth's biosphere isn't a closed system, there's a continuous input of energy from the sun. As some of the more knowledgeable physicists here have pointed out, if I understand them well, thermodynamics is not applicable to evolution. I am not a physicist, so I will have to go by what they say. That's what I think too. Yet, creationists/ID-ists consistently claim that mutation means loss of information. What do you mean by "information that can be used" as opposed to "absolute information content"?I am sorry, but I am going to bed now. Hope to see you tomorrow.

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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

For ID to be true we need to be able to look at the groups of coins and say "That group is the result of design". For that to have meaning, would we not also have to be able to say "The information in that group means (does, is, will) XYZ.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Oh, and you were doing so well! Some formulations of the 2LoT appear at first glance to apply only to closed systems, but any correct formulation of the 2LoT applies to all systems of sufficient size and over long enough periods of time (the 2LoT being at heart a statistical law), be those systems closed or open.It is only in closed systems that overall entropy must increase (or stay the same, but in practice that never happens). Even in closed systems entropy can be rearranged to decrease in one part and increase (more) in the rest. In open systems, of course, entropy within the system may increase or decrease (the latter being at the expense of a greater increase in entropy outside the system).