I see that Denyse has taken time away from misinterpreting / misrepresenting decade old articles she found on google to visit our little home. Come on in Denyse! Would you like a cuppa? Don’t worry, there are no “Brit Toffs” here.
Listen, as you’ve stopped by, we’d like to have a quick chat about UD:
Frankly, we’re a bit disappointed. We were hoping for some design science to chew on, some CSI calculations to review. But instead we were saddened when we learned that neither Barry Arrington nor KairosFocus understand CSI. We’re going to give you a little time to get up to speed with the literature so that we can re-engage when you know the stuff. You don’t need to make up more acronyms like FIASCO: FOCUS on mainstream ID concepts. We may find fault with Dembski’s work but he was leagues ahead of where you are now.
Start here:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf
There’s an EleP(T|H)ant in the room that you need to come to terms with. Perhaps when you understand the source material we can have a better chat (and therefore more posts).
We also note that UD has expanded to more general science denialism / Republican talking points. Are you sure you want to do that? Pretending to be a science blog was more entertaining.
Well thanks for dropping by. We’ll keep our ears to the ground and report back if scientists ever isolate the specific, “selfish gene”.
Denyse:
OK, ID has rigor mortis. Seems to me that Byers has made “arguments” similar to Denyse’s, which is telling, IMO.
I won’t even bother noting the amount of “science” coming out of ID, other than to point out that the first good piece of evidence for ID remains missing after all of these years.
Glen Davidson
Activity at this site comes and goes. It has dropped significantly since most of can now post at UD.
Which is not surprising, considering the site started when most of us were banned from UD. So if the existence of this site has influenced the moderation policy at UD, it’s a success.
I have not noticed any comments from Denise. However, I’d love to see your definition of CSI, and how you explain it. On UD, I tend to argue that CSI properly defined does not contain Dembski’s conclusion that CSI cannot be produced without intelligence. Having such in the definition produces a circular argument.
However, I understand “complex” to generally mean “not a pattern”, and “specified” being that it is the specification for something. I believe that pi qualifies as CSI as it is complex, and it specifies the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle.
As it happens, I have my own favorite acronym — FSCI. FSCI is functionality specifying complex information. The latter, the fact that the patterns in DNA specify functionality is what I find compelling. If you can prove to me that the grade of FCSI that is contained in DNA is realistically achievable via individual, selectable mutational events (not just point mutations), you will have moved me a long ways in the direction of buying the neo-Darwinian model.
BTW: I am pleased that UD is being more open about who can post.
brucefast,
brucefast, will you please show your calculations for measuring the amount of “FSCI” in DNA? Who or what is the specifier of the alleged specifications? Is there anything in the universe that is not functional? If so, what? Is there anything in the universe that is not ‘designed’? If so, what?
What’s your response to this: “There’s an EleP(T|H)ant in the room that you need to come to terms with.”?
BTW, UD is still blocking and banning most ID opponents.
brucefast,
I believe I may be able to help you out there. I can demonstrate a process whereby the FSCI contained in DNA can be increased, decreased or remain the same.
However I forget which of the 3 demonstrations I’ve prepared are which! Could you help me out?
All I need is a way to measure the FSCI in each of my examples. Here is what I would like you to do:
A) Measure the FSCI in the original DNA sequence
B) Measure the FSCI in each of the 3 demonstration sequences that I have used my process on. One will have increased, one decreased and the other will stay the same (but not be an identical sequence).
Once that is complete we will be able to know which sample is which, and I will have demonstrated my process and you will have demonstrated your ability to actually calculate FSCI, which to my mind is a prerequisite for the sort of claims you are making for that metric. If you can’t actually measure it, in what way can you test any claim provided to you that the grade of FCSI that is contained in DNA is realistically achievable via individual, selectable mutational events?
Shall we start with the ‘original’ untouched sequence? What format will you require, anything in particular? Do you need a particular minimum sequence length? Will it take you long?
I’d especially appreciate it if you could show the steps you use to calculate the FSCI, then I can embody them in a computer program (perhaps!) and automate this entire process! But that is not necessary in the first instance.
I look forwards to this exciting demonstration!
I notice that people who disagree with Arrington are once again being banned, although it isn’t being announced.
For anyone interested in whether RMNS can create stuff, I recommend a relatively new book, Arrival of the Fittest. I just bought the Kindle version an haven’t finished, but it has a lot to say about how goldilocks mutations occur.
Since isolated islands of function is the principle argument of Behe (and kariosfocus) this is quite timely. It’s also responsive to Shapiro and his 21st century biology.
@ Rich,
As I’m sure you don’t want to “out” anybody, I changed “out” to “our” in the title.
@ Petrushka,
Yes, I see Learned Hand has announced elsewhere that he can no longer comment at Uncommon Descent.
@ Barry Arrington,
Come on Barry, at least have the decency to mention it when you block people from further participation.
ETA
Link to Learned Hand’s comment claiming he has joined the banned.
As a scientific theory, intelligent design is in the “not even wrong” category. I gave up on UD when it became clear to me that the entire “theory” depends on a series of evasions.
If you say that the design inference can’t be tested, they’ll point to forensic science or archeology; if you say that those are irrelevant, because the real point is the application of the design inference to biology, they’ll change the topic and talk about the implausibility of “materialism”, their favorite shibboleth. And if you point out that “materialism” is a shibboleth, you’ll be treated with endless repetition of the exact same out-of-context quotes from Lewontin and a few select others.
And of course every time science discovers something new, interesting, and exciting, the UD crowd is right there on the side-lines to say, “why didn’t they predict this? If their theory were right, they wouldn’t have been surprised by this new discovery” — an attitude on their part that suggests a deep and total incomprehension of the dialectic between theory and evidence which makes science distinctive.
Just in case anyone here is curious, I’ve been reading a lot on philosophy of cognitive science and its implications for ethical theory. Books read recently include Action in Perception (Alva Noe), Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Anthony Chemero), and The New Science of the Mind (Mark Rowlands). Right now I’m about 1/2-way through Morality For Humans: Ethical Understanding From the Perspective of Cognitive Science (Mark Johnson) and next on my docket is The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Giovanna Columbetti).
I say, steady on old chap!
After a while … it just gets silly. I can flog a dead horse with the best of them (the ‘Meyer’ thread is testament to that). But after the fifteenth go-around for Murray’s Objective Morality (gear-crunching logic while convinced he drives it like a pro!), or Biped’s ‘information instantiated in matter’, or KF’s incessant enemy at the gates diatribes … TSZ was formed by the banned at UD. If it falls silent, it is largely because people have gone back there, have become bored, or because ID itself has nothing new worthy of commentary.
You forgot to mention StephenB’s continual attempts to justify natural law based on the dictionary. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic (or the other way around).
Yes, Learned Hand has caused a mental meltdown in Barry. I strongly urge people to read the comments by LH in the thread in which he was banned. I dare you to find any name calling or offensive behaviour. Now, for contrast, read Barry’s comments.
If I ever need a lawyer to defend me in court, please remind me to stay away from Barry Arrington.
Dembski gets to define CSI, I guess, and most recently he has been saying that CSI does contain the condition that it cannot be produced by natural evolutionary processes. His earlier position is less clear.
In my 2007 article in Reports of the NCSE (here) I assumed that CSI did not contain this condition and I showed that Dembski was wrong to say that use of his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information showed that natural selection couldn’t put CSI into the genome. I also cited a 2003 paper by Elsberry and Shallit that found a different hole in Dembski’s alleged proof.
Also take a look at this post here at TSZ. I think it provides what you are calling for (perhaps with modification of the example to 1000 loci instead of only 500).
However it involves gene frequency changes at a bunch of loci. I am not sure whether that satisfies your demand for a model with “individual, selectable mutational events (not just point mutations).” Or what that demand means, or why you make it.
There are two systems that I know of that implement FSCI in the same general way. One of those systems is the computer, and the other is DNA. These two systems have a very simple pattern in common. Both have digital information stored in a medium. Both have a translator which reads the digital information to produce an output. For both, the output is determined by the configuration of the digital data. For both, the “functionality”, the desired result, is that output. So let us consider FSCI to be the product of a digital storage + translator = functionality system.
Measuring the C in FSCI is somewhat difficult*. The simplest definition of “complex” is simply a count of the bits of data stored in the data storage medium. It is reasonable, however, to disclude the “junk”. In a computer, some “junk” can be identified as the “free memory”. (There is other junk that shows up as unused portions of libraries that get linked into programs because they are part of the library.) There is clearly a lot of debate as to how much DNA is “junk”, but it would be reasonable to remove “junk” from the calculation of complexity. One could consider that in the standard “gene” there are 3 nucleotides per amino acid. As nucleotides are a base 4 system, there are 4^3, or 64 possibilities while there are only 20 amino acids, so there is some lack of tightness in this relationship. I think, however, that trying to calculate this lack of tightness in the quantity of complex info is unwise because it gets factored into the qualitative analysis.
When complexity is considered, one must realize that there is a qualitative as well as quantitative analysis. We could represent, for instance “one thousand, seven hundred ninety two”. This represents as 8 bytes per character, and 38 characters for a total of 304 bytes of complexity. However, the same could be represented as 1792, taking 8 * 4, or 32 bytes. This is the difference between low and higher quality of complexity. Data compression technologies generally convert higher volumes of lower quality complexity to lower volume of higher quality complexity. Rating, or quantifying, the quality of the data is challenging. Certainly DNA contains portions of data that are of very low quality. However, DNA also contains some extremely high quality data (humans contain about 20,000 “genes”, but over 100,000 proteins. Pulling this off involves some rather impressive compression technology — some very impressive data quality.)
Hopefully this leads to a more sane, less platitude driven conversation.
brucefast,
That is interesting. I hope you can also consider, and comment on, the issues in my comment.
Joe Felsenstein,
I presume you are referring to “CSI does contain the condition that it cannot be produced by natural evolutionary processes.”
I generally hold to the ID position, but I do not by any means worship at Dembski’s feet. Including this condition is ridiculous*. It produces a circular argument. Further, I think that duplication and co-option does create an environment where some amount of information can be created. By holding to Dembski’s view, however, ID disables itself from being able to calculate, or even gestimate, how rapidly that information can grow.
*BTW, I understand that the term Complex Specified Information preceded its use by Dembski. As such he doesn’t have the right to change its preexisting definition. Dembski argues that CSI cannot be produced by natural means. He makes a reasonable case for the latter. However, to then incorporate your case as your premise is a major logical fallacy.
brucefast, what ‘less’ sane conversation and platitudes are you referring to?
“BTW, I understand that the term Complex Specified Information preceded its use by Dembski.”
When and by whom?
“As such he doesn’t have the right to change its preexisting definition.”
What was its preexisting definition? And why do you use the acronym “FSCI” instead of CSI, dFSCI, or FSCO/I? Which one is the right one (or are they all referring to the same thing) and who has the “right” to say so?
In case you missed them, here are my previous questions again (keep in mind that there are four letters in the acronym “FSCI”, which stands for functional, specified, complex information):
Will you please show your calculations for measuring the amount of “FSCI” in DNA? Who or what is the specifier of the alleged specifications? Is there anything in the universe that is not functional? If so, what? Is there anything in the universe that is not ‘designed’? If so, what?
What’s your response to this: “There’s an EleP(T|H)ant in the room that you need to come to terms with.”?
Can you say something about how much? You seem to imply there is a limitation somewhere.
Why can’t duplications and point mutations simply accumulate in such a way that it starts generating entirely new sequences?
brucefast,
You might have overestimated the extent of functional alternative transcripts, but taking your statement at face value there is something of a contradiction between this ‘compression’ and the fact that coding genes occupy about 1-2% of the genome. Other functional regions add up to about 5%, though of course this will always be provisional. But whatever the other 95% are doing, if many times as much DNA supports the compression of a tiny fraction, it’s not that impressive! 100,000 functional proteins would (on the face of it) be better served by a 5-fold increase in coding (a fairly small increase in total DNA), which would also remove the functional constraint on an exon – if it must serve in 4 or 5 different mature proteins, it is unlikely to be optimal in any of them. This would also reduce the damage done by any one mutation.
brucefast
and
I take it you don’t see a problem with those two statements of yours?
On that basis it seems to me that if a given DNA string simply becomes longer that meets your challenge.
Agree?
brucefast,
Let me try to get down to the basic issue (leaving aside who defined what).
You seem to think that ordinary evolutionary processes cannot result in a genome containing FCSI, I linked (here) to a numerical example, using natural selection, where the amount of functional, specified information in the genome can be seen to increase.
Do you agree that natural selection can do this? If not, what stops it from doing this?
The overwhelming quantity of FSCI (giving the benefit of assuming it is proportional to the length of gene coding strings and regulatory sequences) was invented during the first three billion years of life by microbes.
So I would argue that quantity is irrelevant when discussing evolution since the Cambrian. We do have gene duplications and whole genome duplications, but I don’t think any educated ID advocates deny them.
What they seem to deny is that incremental changes, mostly in regulation, can happen without encountering dead ends. That’s why I suggested the book, arrival of the fittest. It really does address the claims of Behe, Axe and such.
I’ve been silently banned at UD, either
1) for pointing out Learned Hand’s silent banning, or
2) for making this observation:
I suspect it was the latter.
Ah, they were afraid that TSZ would disappear.
Not with those censors.
Glen Davidson
Welcome to my silently banned world Learned Hand and Keith S.
Seems we need to start another “banned” list either here or at ATBC. This one will be for those banned after the supposed general amnesty.
Welcome back, Keith. You seemed to have a charmed life for a while. At this rate we’ll be back to pre-amnesty levels of participation.
Barry Behaves like Peanuts’ Lucy, except he neglects to take the ball away until after you’ve kicked it.
They were gloating.
There seem to be similarities between the Arrington cycle and the Gallien cycle:
Arrington:
Miss read article
Post triumphantly
Get dismantled
Quibble
sulk
Misread new article
Post triumphantly
Get dismantled
Quibble
Ad hominem
Silently ban
Gallien:
So ronrey
Post at AtBC
Get dismantled
Swearing fit
Retreat to intelligent reasoning
Try to continue there,controlling dialogue
No-one gives a shit
So ronrey.
Its hard to know as our server clock is waaaay off (or GMT), but Keith did have some posts go through early Sunday morning:
Thanks all for the kind words (I post as LH at AtBC and, until recently, UD). Unfortunately I’d bet everyone who tried to share such sentiments at UD has also been banned.
Ironically I predicted exactly this in the comment I was trying to post when I realized I was banned: “Well, it’s your party. You can say whatever you want about whomever you want, ban anyone who questions your standards of conduct, and then ban anyone who questions the banning.”
An interesting side-effect of the banning and criticism is that it silences Barry for a short while. If he were to post right away, it would call attention to the fact that he killed the conversation rather than continue to lose face. Banning critics requires that he step back momentarily to try to distance himself from his own actions; he’ll roar back eventually with more hollow triumphalism. Odd duck.
Anyway, sorry Keith for being the catalyst for your own bannination. I suspect it was not long in coming regardless.
brucefast,
Potentially calculable metrics are a nice change from the usual IDCist apologetics since they are testable. I’m glad to see you here discussing this.
Could you please provide a rigorous mathematical definition of what you mean by “CSI” (since it seems to be different from Dembski’s formulation). Could you calculate the value for your CSI metric in the case of a simple gene duplication, without subsequent modification, that increases production of a particular protein?
Thanks.
Keith, I agree. During the amnesty I posted as numerous different sock puppets, getting banned under each. And I didn’t get away with nearly as much as you did.
But I did manage to be called a pathetic snivelling coward by Barry for refusing to answer a loaded question. And my pestering did manage to get Joe banned, if only for a few hours.
FSCI! Wooooooo! ID science progresses.
I seriously might go back to the flat earth forums for my lulz. As propaganda goes, UD is currently disappointing.
As predicted. The bitter taste of objective morality must be too much. Such a coward – own it if you’re gong to do it, Barry.
Alan Fox,
Alan,
At least have the decency not to comment about decency on a site which basks in its abundance of indecency .
Heck, even the sites creator here can not stand what she has created.
That is disgraceful and disgusting, Phoodoo. Go and have a world with yourself.
1. You are free to speak your misguided little mind here all you want, you wont be banned or moderated.
2. Elizabeth tried in good faith and with a smile on her face to engage UD at a technical level. The gibberish she received from Barry, Gordon Mullings and the other halfwits made it clear quite quickly there was no depth or honesty to the ID position. Recent events prove without a doubt *they don’t even understand it*
3. She can at anytime close this place down. Isn’t that what someone who ” can not stand what she has created” would do?
Here’s a hint for you, Phoodoo: It is never those in the right who look to moderate, control or censor dialogue, they don’t have to because their ideas are superior.
If you had a shred of decency you’d apologize. That would surprise me, given your behavior and history.
phoodoo,
Dembski, on the other hand, is never off UD. Kaboom! 😀
+1
🙂
http://behe.uncommondescent.com/
Very active.
And the commonality? Phoodoo posts here, and at least used to post at UD.
Coincidence?
Glen Davidson
Joe Felsenstein,
I am very confused at your link. I know I only skimmed its contents, but you seem too be speaking purely of natural selection causing a change in allele frequency. Unless the link offers much more than I read, well, natural selection certainly can do this. Some define evolution as change in allele frequency. For change in allele frequency to be meaningful, the only change that counts is the change from zero to 1.
Even simple additions of alleles is not viewed by anyone I know as a challenge for the natural model. I differ with Dembski in that I can see that duplication + co-option offers a serious tool for producing real, new information. I have not seen a case that duplication + co-option is by any means powerful enough, however, to explain the patterns found in DNA. There are two pieces of information that I have come across recently that cause me to be even more resistant to the presumption that duplication + co-option offer much power at all.
One is neutral theory as presented by Larry Moran. He strongly suggests that natural selection isn’t all that sensitive of a filter. He argues that even slightly deleterious mutations will fix. He recently argued that there is no evolutionary advantage in zebra’s stripes — that the stripe of the zebra was truly contingent. We all know the many “just so” stories that have been developed around why zebras have stripes. ‘Seems that careful study falsifies each of them.
The second is a study reported on at UD a few months back. This report said that biology has a purification tool that actively disables duplicate genes. To the extent that this is so, the duplication + co-option model is challenged.
If I understand the various acronyms (which I only lightly do) each is a subset of CSI. As for my acronym, its clear intent is to prune the tree of CSI stuff (such as pi) from the specific kind of CSI stuff that is of interest in biology. On who has the right to say so, well anyone can make up their acronym. The test of the effectiveness of the acronym is the way it plays out in the public forum.
FSCI is functionality specifying complex information, not “functional specified.” It is functionality which is caused by the specification (order of nucleotides in this case).
Discussed from a quantitative and qualitative perspective, above.
The elephant in the room is that we interpret the data based upon our philosophy of life. It is rather hard to convince a person that the data means something other than what their philosophy dictates that it should. Now for the real question, have you come to terms with it, or do you believe that you are exempt from elephantitis?
I’m rather curious why the existence of silent or nearly silent mutations (alleles) is a problem for evolution.
One of the characteristics of alleles is that when they mutate, they open up new neighborhoods. This how evolution maneuvers around Behe’s Edge.
True, empiricists have a hard time giving up the reliable method of empiricism for the unreliable means of “knowing,” like intuition and revelation.
But if anyone thinks that reliance on empiricism is as arbitrary as other “worldviews,” it is pretty clear that such a one remains unreasonably attached to unreliable methods of “knowing.”
Glen Davidson
No, you’re wrong. Changes of gene frequency count. In this case the gene frequencies are initially all 0.5. In the 100-locus case of the earlier TSZ post that I linked to, as gene frequencies change from all being 0.5 to all being 0.8937253 in generation 214, the mean fitness changes from 1.65 to 2.43.
You have decreed that this doesn’t count, but the organisms involved aren’t impressed by your decree.
Or ask a gambler whether they would like to guess right 0.8937 of the time instead of 0.5 of the time.
Joe Gallien was going to offer his review:
http://intelligentreasoning.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-arrival-of-fittest-has-arrived.html
I guess he couldn’t finish.
Took me two evenings. It’s not a long or difficult book, although it helps if you are familiar with multi-dimensional arrays. The author is apparently not a programmer, so he tries to think about such arrays visually, and notes that this isn’t possible.
But to anyone who has ever coded an array, it doesn’t matter how many dimensions you have (if the hardware and compiler support it). 5000 might tax memory, but are not conceptually more difficult than 2.
There were probably too many two and three syllable words.
Evolution News and Views posted something that was intended to pass for a review, but they blissfully neglected to post the parts that would have addressed the content of the book.