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

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That you keep saying this makes no sense. If the only information about the number of rocks were inside you then you would know it with your eyes closed. But you don't. You have to open your eyes and look at the rocks before you know how many there are. Without information flowing to you from your environment it isn't possible for you to know anything about it.

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That's true, but the rocks do not represent information, they represent themselves.

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I already know you think that information can only be created by an intelligence. In response to examples illustrating that this is not so you're just repeating this baseless assertion over and over again.

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The point remains that you do not understand what information is. Bunch of rocks in not information. Bunch of rocks in not knowledge. If you want to use those rocks to create some knowledge about them than fine. But the rocks did not create knowledge about them. They are simply there.

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Let me try again, and hopefully this time you'll respond with an explanation rather than another unsupported declaration.

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If I record the number of rocks in the clearing on a piece of paper and hand it to you, then you can read that piece of paper and now information is being communicated from the paper to you. If I instead record the information by dragging three rocks into your yard to indicate the number, these rocks communicate information to you about the number of rocks in the clearing.

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But what if the rocks were in *my* yard and you don't know how they got there. You'll see the three rocks and know that therefore there were three rocks in the clearing, and it doesn't matter whether I put them there or they were always there.

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But than the last case is no information at all. We did not agree on any syntax. We did not agree that you are going to give me information about the rocks, therefore they do not represent anything.

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You're again breaking up longer explanations into little unrelated pixels and thereby failing to grasp what is being said. That statement you just replied to was part of a longer explanation about how we're actually using two different definitions of information. I say you're wrong about meaning being part of information, and I'm talking about Shannon information. You say I'm wrong to exclude meaning from information, and you're talking about Gitt information.

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There is no such thing as "Gitt Information". He just explained what information is in general.

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The real issue is whether there's any validity to Gitt information, and I explained that there is not. Your response basically comes down to, "Is too!"

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You didn't explain anything. You just said that he was a nobody in scientific community. Is that an explanation?

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You keep issuing this bald statement but never supporting it. If information theory can't be applied to DNA (and a broad range of other areas, including physics and chemistry) then explain how this is wrong (you might recognize this example, I keep repeating it along with requests for you to address it beyond saying, "No, you're wrong."):

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I never said that. Information theory can be applied to biology. It's just the particular model from that theory that it can't. And that's Shannon model.And why do you keep quoting that part about the alleles? Pure number of genes tell you nothing about how many biological functions they code for.

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You're your own worst enemy. This is a general definition of information, and it attempts to cover its meaning in a number of different contexts. One of the meanings it covers is Shannon information. Gitt information and apobetics and all that is nowhere to be found in that article. Gee, now why would that be?

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I knwo it's in general for God's sake! I have been telling you that for the last 20 pages.And yes, it covers a lot of aspects of information, including Shannon, knowledge, and meaning. And those last two you said had nothing to do with information. You were clearly wrong. It also doesn't have to mention Gitt. He is not well known as Shannon.

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Keeping in mind that I was contrasting Shannon and Gitt information, of the two, Shannon information is the only one with any scientific legitimacy. Yes, that's a fact. As I said before, Gitt has never even submitted his ideas to scientific journals. All his work is published by Christian and creationist organizations.

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Again, there is not such thing as "Gitt Information".

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I *have* refuted Gitt's positions. You're response to the refutations has in effect been, "No, you're wrong."

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Saying that he is nobody and doesn't publish in PR articles is not a refutation.

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First, no, we're not talking about general definitions of information.

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Well I am talking about what information is in general when I'm talking about Gitt.

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We're talking about Gitt information versus Shannon information.

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For teh third time. There is not such thing as "Gitt Information".

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Here's another refutation to Gitt information: Gitt information states that the information in DNA that codes for proteins has meaning. He further states that only an intelligence can create new information because only an intelligence can create meaning. However, he can't quantify meaning, so he cannot compare the amount of meaning before and after a mutation, and so has no way to know whether the meaning has increased or decreased. Therefore he can't demonstrate that only an intelligence can create information.

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He doesn't have to, he is talking in general. To quantify the first three levels of information we can use Dembski's model of CSI. Using this model we can clearly see that mutations do not generate CSI.

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Yes, really. Evolution is far superior to random. Here's why.

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Let's say our population of bacteria numbers 109, and that its DNA has 106 base pairs. With a mutation rate of 10-8 per base pair per generation, one out of a hundred bacteria will experience a mutation each generation, which means that if the population remains level that 107 bacteria in each generation will have a single mutation (this is only approximate, I'm not going to go through the actual precise math).

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If we assume that it only takes a single point mutation to evolve the ability to metabolize the alternative and abundant nutrient, then once in every hundred generations one of the bacteria will experience the necessary mutation. If the time it takes for a generation is 20 minutes, then the necessary mutation will appear every 33 hours.

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In order for the population to remain constant, half the bacteria in each generation must die. In your random algorithm the bacterium with the necessary mutation has only a 50% chance of being selected. If it survives then in the next generation the two bacteria have a 25% chance of both not making it to the next generation. The math gets more complicated after that because of the number of permutations.

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In the evolution algorithm with the mutated bacterium's advantage of being able to metabolize the abundant nutrient it has a nearly 100% chance of being selected.

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Well you are obviously wrong. This is only a theoretical model that does not work that good. The problem is in the noise. There is to much of those who are not as fit as others, so on average the have more chance than the fit ones to reproduce. Therefore effectively shutting down natural selection for beneficial mutations. Some may pass if the pressure is really hard, but not if it is relaxed.Just a moment...The Crow paper talks about human fitness deteriorating 1-2% in one generation. If natural selection was so great than we would not have this problem. Crow collected data on mutation rates an accumulation of them in the genome. He came to the conclusion that the human genome is deteriorating.The other problem are near neutral mutations (NNM). They are deleterious, and by definition so weak that natural selection does not select against them. Therefore they keep accumulating in the genome. Over time they cause genetic meltdown and the species dies.NCBIThis is discussed in the Kimura paper. See the graph? Notice the darker part of the graph. It's the NNMs. They keep accumulating in the genome.

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In other words, there's no such thing as new biological functions. There's only functions that are very slightly changed.

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And those slight changes do not lead over time to totally new functions. If evolution was true single celled organisms evolved to people. Over vast amounts of time they gained a lot of information. They gained new functions. The only problem is those slight changes are accumulating, but not in a way to get you such a change that you see between a single celled organims and a human.

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Yes, this is correct. Evolution is undirected. It selects what is best for survival in the current generation under the current environmental conditions. Evolution has no idea where it is going, it has no goal beyond survival in the present, but it has to end up somewhere. Each possible somewhere is incredibly unlikely, but no particular somewhere was preselected. The odds of arriving at one of the possible somewheres is 100%.

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Here's another way to look at the odds. Given all the possibilities and options and choices in your life, what are the chances that you'd be where you are right now reading this message? Pretty tiny, right? But you have to be somewhere, and this is where you ended up, no matter how unlikely it might be. The odds of you ending up at one of the possible outcomes in your life is again 100%.

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And this is where you are painfully wrong again. Evoluton has got to get you new biological functions if you are going to evolve from a bacteria to a man. Yes, the odds that something is going to happen is 1:1. But in this case, you are not looking for anything. You are looking for something. Even though evolution isn't. That's why I said fitness and new functions are not correlated.There is only so much of biological functions you can have. Some sequences of nucleotides do not code for any meaningful biological functions. That is, a vast majority does not, from the vast amount of all possible sequences. Only a tiny minority does. So you see, you need to get to those relevant biologically meaningful sequences, with an evolutionary algorithm that does not search for them!The 3 billion base pairs of human genome go something like this:"GATCGACGACGATTATGCATCTAGCCGCGATTACTAGCTACG..."This is biologically relevat sequence. Let's say it codes for an eye. Just an example.Now imagine that you had this kind of genome:"TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT..."You do understand that 3 billion Ts is not going to code for anything. It has absolutly no biological function. If the whole genome was just 3 billion Ts, there would be no people. Because in the genetic code nothing is represented with just Ts. It's the same thing if you wrote 30 Ts in English language. It's meningles, it represents nothing.So again, the conclusion is, that evolution is as good from searching the new biological functions as random chance.

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That a change in information need not be a net loss of information as you assume.

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I never said that. I said it can be fine tuning.

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Which is totally irrelevant to this specific case. If a mutation causes no change in function then please tell me how you measure the change in information involved and determine it to be a net loss?

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They do in vast majority of cases. Even if they don't. Even if they just damage the structure slightly, next few mutations will damage it enough to destroy the function.

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Only if you assume the 'original' structure, which is in fact just the structure as we first assayed it or what we have determined to be ancestral, is some sort of functional ideal. But if a change causes no net loss of information or function how can you characterise it as deterioration.

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No, it doesn't have to be an ideal. A new house is an ideal. If you throw a rock at it and damage it, it lost some of it structure. It's not an ideal anymore. But a further rock throw, and damage to the house is still more of a net loss.

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Unlike semantic information, CSI submits to mathematical and logical analysis; yet like semantic information, CSI is associated with intelligent agency. To define CSI requires only mereological and statistical aspects of information. No syntax and no theory of meaning is required.

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...

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Semantic information and complex specified information are distinct categories of information.

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...

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That is not to say that semantic content is necessarily lacking from CSI. But it is not required.

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William Dembski - No Free Lunch p. 147

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This is a correction I would like to make. CSI does not take into account semantic information. But it does not exclude it either.

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You keep saying this, but it obviously isn't true. If I express the number 3 using pencil and paper, then that's information. If I instead express the number 3 by dragging rocks into position, then that's information, too. And if the rocks already happen to be in position by luck, then that, too, is information.

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Now I understand you think this is wrong, but you need to explain why. So far all you're doing is repeating simple declarations like "That's not information" or "Rocks just represent themselves." Restating your position several different ways is not an explanation.

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You could that say that their color is also information about them. Clearly you could pick anything about those rocks and call it information. But the point is that for a number "3" to be recognized as "three" we need an agreement. This agreement is the syntax. Rocks by themself do not produce syntax.

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I think what you actually need to do here is address my explanation about why Gitt's views have not found any acceptance within the scientific community. You can find that explanation in Message 287.

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He is talking about what information is in general. There is nobody who does not accept his view and has any understanding about information. That doesn't mean that his model is supposed to remove Shannon's model. Only those who thing that Gitt is trying to remove Shannon's model think that.

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Have you thought this through? How can views never presented to the scientific community become accepted by the scientific community? Gitt's views have no legitimacy within the scientific community. That's not why he's wrong, but that's why you shouldn't be touting Gitt as if his views were widely accepted. They're not.

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You misunderstood what Gitt did. He didn't actually build a new model froms cratch. He just used various well known aspects of information and explained them. He gave them context. He is talking about what information is in general.

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The reason why Gitt is wrong is because he makes claims he can't support. He claims that meaning is part of information, and that information cannot be created without an intelligence, but he can't quantify his information with meaning, so how would he know? He doesn't. He simply declares that it is so.

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He isn't suppoesd to quantify it. We know from observations that matter by itself has no teleology, and we never saw matter by itself create any meaning. Therefore he concluded that matter can't create inforamtion. This is called an inference to the best explanation.

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Dembski's supposed CSI is just the probability of a protein forming at random from constituent molecules. How is this a measure of information that includes meaning? How is it a measure of information at all?

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As you saw, I made a correction to what CSI is. Dembski said he is not using the semantic aspect while calculationg CSI. But that doesn't mean that semantics are lacking. What the specific protein represent is it's semantic part.

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You're somehow looking at this backwards. Deleterious mutations is where natural selection really shines versus random selection. According to random selection, a bacterium with a deleterious mutation, even a deadly one, would be as likely to be selected for survival to the next generation as any other bacterium. With random selection, deleterious mutations would quickly accumulate and overwhelm the population, probably wiping it out in short order.

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But the type of selection provided by evolution, natural selection, allows bacteria to contribute to the next generation according to fitness. The more beneficial the mutation, the more likely the bacteria is to contribute to the next generation. The less beneficial, the less likely. Because it is much more likely for a mutation to be deleterious than beneficial, it is deleterious mutations that allow natural selection to outperform random selection by so manner orders of magnitude.

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Like I said, yes, in theory. But not in real life. Deleterious mutations keep accumulating is spite of natural selection.

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You've managed to completely misinterpret the Crow paper. His concern isn't that natural selection is allowing the accumulation of deleterious mutations. His concern is that modern technologies and medicine have insulated human beings, particular those in western style societies, from the normal effects of natural selection, and so deleterious mutations that in more primitive times would have been removed from the population are now propagating freely. Were we once again exposed to nature in the wild instead of life in environmentally controlled homes with access to modern medical care, those mutations would be again exposed to the forces of natural selection. As Crow himself says:

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What he said is that if we had such a society we would be safe from such mutations, but we are not. Even in drosophila, mutations are accumulationg, and drosophila have no advanced technology.

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Neutral mutations both accumulate and are removed. The paper is about how what he calls "selective constraint" allows the neutral mutation model to better describe what is actually observed in nature. "Selective constraint" is his term for natural selection selecting against mutations that cause a decline in fitness, however slight.

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They are not neutral, they are slighty neutral. Big difference. It means that they are slightly deleterious, but are not removed by natural selection. And yes, they are accumulating. Yes, slightly, but given enough time, they will cause a mutational meltdown. And that is the extinction of a population.

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Regardless why you keep saying that fitness and new functions are not correlated, you've got to stop saying it because it makes no sense. It's like saying that any changes in a car's performance is uncorrelated to any changes you make to its engine, transmission, suspension, brakes or aerodynamics.

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You keep missing the point.Imagine that you had 10 cars. All were the same. You removed a part on 5 of your cars that made it go only under 200 km/h. Without this blockage, it can go up to 250 km/h. And you decided to test all cars and select only those that go over 200 km/h. It is obvious that you will end up with only 5 cars, because of their increase in fitness. But they will not be having any new functions. Becasue they fitness in speed was not correlated with new parts.The same thing would be if you modified a device in your car to give the motor of your car more gas than usual. That would make it go faster. And now you perform the same selection as before, and tell me, in what time is this process going to give your car a rocket engine? Never obviously. Becasue giving your car's engine more gas through a modified pipe, and increasing it's fitnes, is not correlated with building a new part, like a rocked engine.Or consider this example:Imagine that you had a lot of blocks with letters. And you had all the letters from A to Z + the space character. Not only that but you had 100 blocks for each character. Now imagine that all the blocks were red. The characters on the blocks have a tint of white. The tint ranging in steps of 1 and it's going from 0 to 100.The amount of "0" tint meaning you can't actually see the letter since there is no tint of white, the whole block is red. And the amount of "100" means the letter is fully white, and you can read it with no problem.Now, imagine that you tried to make a sentence with those blocks. You are to pick randomly letters from that bunch of blocks. Now, you decide that since you can't really read anything below the tint of "10" you will remove those blocks, and not put them in your sentence. This is the selection part of your process.Now my question is, what kind of sentence will you get?Will it look something like this: "LOIS, BRING ME ANOTHER BEER".
Or something likE this: "EDJD FJUDUDDDD DEPM FUDEJF ZE E".I think that it is obvious that it will look like the lower one. Why is that? It's obivous. Even though you used an evolutionary algorithm, you still wound up with a meaningless sentence. That is becasue the tint of the color on the block was not correlated with any meaninglful sentence. It had no correlation with new sentences.Yes, you removed the bad blcks under the tint of 10, that you could not read, but your selection was not going toward any meaningful text. The same thin applies to biological evolution. Mutations are random. Some mutations will optimize the function a bit more, some will degrade it. Those that degrade it, will be selected out. Those that make the function work more optimally, will get selected form. But this will not get you any new biological functions, because natural selection is not celecting for them. And fitness is not correlated with new biological functions in this way.

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And that's precisely what evolution does, one little step at a time.

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No, it doesn't. It increases fitness.

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A phrase with no meaning in biology or informatics. What you seem to be doing is actually conceding the point but insisting we change the words to hide the fact.

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There are mutations with beneficial effects which do not cause a net loss in information/functional information, we can call this fine tuning if you like, it doesn't change what it is and it doesn't stop the website you directed us to from being wrong to use such an instance as an example of a loss of information.

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But I never said that ALL mutations are loss of information. Is switching your light swithc to OFF a loss of information? No, it's not. It's tuning it to a position you want. If you want to turn of the lights you could also cut the wires from the switch and get the same result. Only this time this would be a reduction in information.

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You aren't answering the question, the question wasn't, 'Do you think most mutations are detrimental?' It was "If a mutation causes no change in function then please tell me how you measure the change in information involved and determine it to be a net loss?".

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Most of them are deleterious. But not all of them. The amount of information stays the same if the structure was not damaged.

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When your answer doesn't even make grammatical sense in the context of the question, as yours fails to, then you probably aren't answering the right question.

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If you just don't know how you would measure it then why not just say so?

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Again, biological functions are calculated by CSI.

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Is this a house you are buying furnished? Let me tell you, my house was a show house when I bought it, an ideal home as it were, and it distinctly benefited from my changing some of the light shades and curtains, yet it is as structurally sound and has all the same lighting and window blocking functionality of before the changes.

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You improved your house. You didn't try to do all thet work by throwing rocks, now did you?

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But you can keep repeating this experiment and never stop. By your logic, eventually you'd run out of information. But since we can keep going indefinitely, how does that affect your argument?

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But we can't. Human genome is degrading, together with all other living genomes.

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You did not just say that, did you?

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Didn't we establish that AB has more information than A? Therefore, how does going from A to AA to AB not equate to "new information"?

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I meant new CSI. Not Shannon information.

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So why is it we can keep repeating the process indefinitely? How can these bacteria possibly survive when all of their information has been lost?

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Who says we can? We can't. Not all information is gone. Is their whole genome destroyed? Obviously not.

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Huh? A mutation that doesn't affect reproductive success isn't neutral?

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Just what is your definition of "neutral"?

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A mutation that has no effect at all would be neutral.

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Huh? If they have transposons, then they haven't lost anything. And the evolution of lactose tolerance after deletion doesn't involve transposons.

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Yes they did. They lost's the ability they had.

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How can there be a mechanism when there is no gene to digest lactose to be found anywhere in the genome? It was deliberately removed. So are you saying god came down and consciously, deliberately, and purposefully put in a new lactose operon? It was a miracle?

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No, it is a modifed version of a previous gene. Modified by transposons.

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Chemistry is a miracle? Because that's how mutations happen: No chemical reaction is ever perfect every single time. Are you saying that this was "designed" by god?

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What are you talking about?

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Huh? Do you not understand how gene cascades form? Duplication and mutation such that the duplicated gene becomes a promotor for the original gene. By your own definition, that is an increase in information because we started with A and we ended with AB.

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Only in Shannon's model, not in CSI. And you can't use Shannon's model since it only uses statistical approach to information.

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Huh? First, why not? Frame shift mutations happen. Second, who was talking about a nucleotide? I was talking about genes.

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Because to gain CSI you need 400 bits. Second, Frame shifts are modifications in already existing information. They are either fine-tuning or deleterious changes.

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Then why did you bring it up? If you're going to use a definition of "information" that you are simply going to reject as inappropriate, why did you mention it?

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I used it becasue it explains what information is in general.

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Then why did you bring it up? If you're going to use a definition of "information" that you are simply going to reject as inappropriate, why did you mention it?

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Becasue it explains how to define information in telecommunications.

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Do you even know what a transposon is?

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Do you?

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No.

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How do you know?

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No.

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How do you know?

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But he's pretending that what he's doing is information theory.

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Because it is. It's explaining what information is in general.

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Incorrect. Because it only works when the two genes are present at the same time. Since one is a duplication and subsequent mutation of another gene, this means that they didn't have it all along. It was only after a gene was duplicated and mutated that the new information came along.

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There is no information. They had the first version of the gene.

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But the genetic clock shows that it did evolve.

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Genetic clocks are based on an assumption that the organism actually did evolve. They are wrong.

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Foote's team chose to analyse placental mammals (the group of mammals that produce live young nurtured through a placenta in the mothers womb - including humans, bats, whales, elephants and mice). Fossil evidence suggests placental mammals first appeared on Earth some 65 million years ago while the biochemical data suggests a date of 130 million years. The team asked the question: "Is the fossil record so poor that the group could have been undetected for 65 million years?

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Molecular clocks do not correlate with fossil records.

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In and of itself, yes. But to think that it is only "similarity" that is the basis for the conclusion of duplication and mutation, then you really don't know anything about genetics.

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What else is used as evidence?

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Incorrect. First, it wasn't there. Then, a gene was duplicated. Then, the gene mutated. Thus, new information appeared.

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Again, it's not new CSI.

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Incorrect, because there are two enzymes where there used to be only one.

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So what? The new enzyome doesn't perform a new function.http://www.thedesignoflife.net/...ce-a-day/View/Default.aspx

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Because I've read Gitt's nonsense.

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Fine. Explain what exactly did you not like about it.

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Look, information theory is a field of mathematics.

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I know it is. I never said it wasn't. Gitt wasn't making any new model of information. He was taking all the existing concepts of information, and explaining how they work in general.

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A creationist lying about information is not doing information theory any more than a creationist lying about triangles is doing Euclidian geometry. OK?

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Where exactly did Gitt lie?

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If Werner Gitt tried to redefine a triangle as a shape with four curved sides, he wouldn't be doing geometry, he wouldn't be improving geometry, he wouldn't have made a discovery in geometry --- he'd just be twisting words for the purposes of talking crap --- and if he pretended that what he was doing was goemetry, that would be the biggest load of crap of all.

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That's true. But he wasn't doing that, now was he? If you think he was, than explain how.

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But you have provided no evidence to show that this is the case. Repeated claims do not constitute evidence and... (well, see tagline).

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I did, several times. Read this.EvC Forum: Message Peek

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And those folks who are most familiar with the scientific evidence on this issue (biologists) don't agree with you by an overwhelming number.

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Who doesn't agree with me? Show me those biologists that do not agree with me.

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Curious: only biblical literalists follow and promote your "degrading" argument.

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You may try to claim that you are pursuing science, but when 99.9% of scientists disagree with you that is a specious claim.

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If you really, really are pursuing science you are so far out on the fringe you couldn't see the mainstream with the Hubble.

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But I still think you are pushing religion, adhering to the bible as accurate on this point in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

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I don't care what you think! Are you stupid or something? And no, I'm not insulting you, I'm just honestly asking if you are a stupid person, and you have trouble understanding written words. Becasue you keep talking about religion and I keep talking about science. And I also keep telling you I'm not interested in religion. I don't give a damn if you belive me or not. Maybe you're a satanist? Are you? Are you working for Satan? Are you rpomoting evolution because you worship Satan? How do I know you're not? Prove to me you're not worshiping Satan!Do you see how stupid this sounds? Well that's how you sound for the past month.

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He's pretending that he's doing "information theory", which he isn't. Instead, he's just writing down a bunch of dumb creationist daydreams and calling them "information theory".

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I might as well write:

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Theorems of information theory:
Theorem 1: All the information in DNA was produced by evolution.
Theorem 2: Everything creationists say about information is rubbish.
Theorem 3: I win.

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In fact, this would be better than Gitt's maunderings, because it would have the benefit of being true. But it still wouldn't be "information theory".

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You are acting stupid. I asked you to tell me what exactly did you consider wrong with Gitt's work. Answer my question.

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No. In particular, his concept of information is entirely opposed to Shannon's.

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In which part? Explain why.

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For one thing, he's pretending that what he's doing is "information theory". For another thing, he claims to have proved the creationist nonsense he's reciting.

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Explain why he is not "doing" information theory. Cite me where he said that the proved anything.

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He's redefining "information" in order to bullshit people such as yourself.

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How is he redefining information? Explain in detail.