Subjects: Evolutionary computation. Information technology–Mathematics.
The greatest story ever told by activists in the intelligent design (ID) socio-political movement was that William Dembski had proved the Law of Conservation of Information, where the information was of a kind called specified complexity. The fact of the matter is that Dembski did not supply a proof, but instead sketched an ostensible proof, in No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (2002). He did not go on to publish the proof elsewhere, and the reason is obvious in hindsight: he never had a proof. In “Specification: The Pattern that Signifies Intelligence” (2005), Dembski instead radically altered his definition of specified complexity, and said nothing about conservation. In “Life’s Conservation Law: Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information” (2010; preprint 2008), Dembski and Marks attached the term Law of Conservation of Information to claims about a newly defined quantity, active information, and gave no indication that Dembski had used the term previously. In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, Marks, Dembski, and Ewert address specified complexity only in an isolated chapter, “Measuring Meaning: Algorithmic Specified Complexity,” and do not claim that it is conserved. From the vantage of 2018, it is plain to see that Dembski erred in his claims about conservation of specified complexity, and later neglected to explain that he had abandoned them.
Algorithmic specified complexity is a special form of specified complexity as Dembski defined it in 2005, not as he defined it in earlier years. Yet Marks et al. have cited only Dembski’s earlier publications. They perhaps do not care to draw attention to the fact that Dembski developed his “new and improved” specified complexity as a test statistic, for use in rejecting a null hypothesis of natural causation in favor of an alternative hypothesis of intelligent, nonnatural intervention in nature. That’s obviously quite different from their current presentation of algorithmic specified complexity as a measure of meaning. Ironically, their one and only theorem for algorithmic specified complexity, “The probability of obtaining an object exhibiting bits of ASC is less then [sic] or equal to ” is a special case of a more general result for hypothesis testing, Theorem 1 in A. Milosavljević’s “Discovering Dependencies via Algorithmic Mutual Information: A Case Study in DNA Sequence Comparisons” (1995). It is odd that Marks et al. have not discovered this result in a literature search, given that they have emphasized the formal similarity of algorithmic specified complexity to algorithmic mutual information.
Lately, a third-wave ID proponent by the name of Eric Holloway has spewed mathematicalistic nonsense about the relationship of specified complexity to algorithmic mutual information. [Note: Eric has since joined us in The Skeptical Zone, and I sincerely hope to see that he responds to challenges by making better sense than he has previously.] In particular, he has claimed that a conservation law for the latter applies to the former. Given his confidence in himself, and the arcaneness of the subject matter, most people will find it hard to rule out the possibility that he has found a conservation law for specified complexity. My response, recorded in the next section of this post, is to do some mathematical investigation of how algorithmic specified complexity relates to algorithmic mutual information. It turns out that a demonstration of non-conservation serves also as an illustration of the senselessness of regarding algorithmic specified complexity as a measure of meaning.
Let’s begin by relating some of the main ideas to pictures. The most basic notion of nongrowth of algorithmic information is that if you input data to computer program then the amount of algorithmic information in the output data is no greater than the amounts of algorithmic information in input data and program added together. That is, the increase of algorithmic information in data processing is limited by the amount of algorithmic information in the processor itself. The following images do not illustrate the sort of conservation just described, but instead show massive increase of algorithmic specified complexity in the processing of a digital image by a program that is very low in algorithmic information. At left is the input and at right is the output of the program, which cumulatively sums of the RGB values in the input. Loosely speaking, the -th RGB value of Signature of the Id is the sum of the first RGB values of Fuji Affects the Weather.
What is most remarkable about the increase in “meaning,” i.e., algorithmic specified complexity, is that there actually is loss of information in the data processing. The loss is easy to recognize if you understand that RGB values are 8-bit quantities, and that the sum of two of them is generally a 9-bit quantity, e.g.,
The program discards the leftmost carry (either 1, as above, or 0) in each addition that it performs, and thus produces a valid RGB value. The discarding of bits is loss of information in the clearest of operational terms: to reconstruct the input image from the output image you would have to know the bits that were discarded. Yet the cumulative summation of RGB values produces an 11-megabit increase in algorithmic specified complexity. In short, I have provided a case in which methodical corruption of data produces a huge gain in what Marks et al. regard as meaningful information.
An important detail, which I cannot suppress any longer, is that the algorithmic specified complexity is calculated with respect to binary data called the context. In the calculations above, I have taken the context to be the digital image Fuji. That is, a copy of Fuji has 13 megabits of algorithmic specified complexity in the context of Fuji, and an algorithmically simple corruption of Fuji has 24 megabits of algorithmic specified complexity in the context of Fuji. As in Evo-Info 2, I have used the methods of Ewert, Dembski, and Marks, “Measuring Meaningful Information in Images: Algorithmic Specified Complexity” (2015). My work is recorded in a computational notebook that I will share with you in Evo-Info 5. In the meantime, any programmer who knows how to use an image-processing library can easily replicate my results. (Steps: Convert fuji.png to RGB format; save the cumulative sum of the RGB values, taken in row-major order, as signature.png; then subtract 0.5 Mb from the sizes of fuji.png and signature.png.)
As for the definition of algorithmic specified complexity, it is easiest to understand when expressed as a log-ratio of probabilities,
where and are binary strings (finite sequences of 0s and 1s), and and are distributions of probability over the set of all binary strings. All of the formal details are given in the next section. Speaking loosely, and in terms of the example above, is the probability that a randomly selected computer program converts the context into the image and is the probability that image is the outcome of a default image-generating process. The ratio of probabilities is the relative likelihood of arising by an algorithmic process that depends on the context, and of arising by a process that does not depend on the context. If, proceeding as in statistical hypothesis testing, we take as the null hypothesis the proposition that is the outcome of a process with distribution and as an alternative hypothesis the proposition that is the outcome of a process with distribution then our level of confidence in rejecting the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis depends on the value of The one and only theorem that Marks et al. have given for algorithmic specified complexity tells us to reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis at confidence level when
What we should make of the high algorithmic specified complexity of the images above is that they both are more likely to derive from the context than to arise in the default image-generating process. Again, Fuji is just a copy of the context, and Signature is an algorithmically simple corruption of the context. The probability of randomly selecting a program that cumulatively sums the RGB values of the context is much greater than the probability of generating the image Signature directly, i.e., without use of the context. So we confidently reject the null hypothesis that Signature arose directly in favor of the alternative hypothesis that Signature derives from the context.
This embarrassment of Marks et al. is ultimately their own doing, not mine. It is they who buried the true story of Dembski’s (2005) redevelopment of specified complexity in terms of statistical hypothesis testing, and replaced it with a fanciful account of specified complexity as a measure of meaningful information. It is they who neglected to report that their theorem has nothing to do with meaning, and everything to do with hypothesis testing. It is they who sought out examples to support, rather than to refute, their claims about meaningful information.
Algorithmic specified complexity versus algorithmic mutual information
This section assumes familiarity with the basics of algorithmic information theory.
Objective. Reduce the difference in the expressions of algorithmic specified complexity and algorithmic mutual information, and provide some insight into the relation of the former, which is unfamiliar, to the latter, which is well understood.
Here are the definitions of algorithmic specified complexity (ASC) and algorithmic mutual information (AMI):
where is a distribution of probability over the set of binary strings, and are binary strings, and binary string is a shortest program, for the universal prefix machine in terms of which the algorithmic complexity and the conditional algorithmic complexity are defined, outputting The base of the logarithm is 2. Marks et al. regard algorithmic specified complexity as a measure of the meaningful information of in the context of
The law of conservation (nongrowth) of algorithmic mutual information is:
for all binary strings and and for all computable [ETA 12/12/2019: total] functions on the binary strings. The analogous relation for algorithmic specified complexity does not hold. For example, let the probability where is the empty string, and let be positive for all nonempty binary strings Also let for all binary strings Then for all nonempty binary strings and for all binary strings
because
is infinite and is finite. [Edit: The one bit of algorithmic information theory you need to know, in order to check the proof, is that is finite for all binary strings and I have added a line at the end of the equation to indicate that is not only finite, but also constant.] Note that this argument can be modified by setting to an arbitrarily small positive number instead of to zero. Then the growth of ASC due to data processing can be made arbitrarily large, though not infinite.
There’s a simple way to deal with the different subexpressions and in the definitions of ASC and AMI, and that is to restrict our attention to the case of in which the context is a shortest program outputting
This is not an onerous restriction, because there is for every string a shortest program that outputs In fact, there would be no practical difference for Marks et al. if they were to require that the context be given as We might have gone a different way, replacing the contemporary definition of algorithmic mutual information with an older one,
However, the older definition comes with some disadvantages, and I don’t see a significant advantage in using it. Perhaps you will see something that I have not.
The difference in algorithmic mutual information and algorithmic specified complexity,
has no lower bound, because is non-negative for all and is negatively infinite for all such that is zero. It is helpful, in the following, to keep in mind the possibility that for a string with very high algorithmic complexity, and that for all strings Then the absolute difference in and [added 11/11/2019: the latter expression should be ] is infinite for all and very large, though finite, for There is no limit on the difference for Were Marks et al. to add a requirement that be positive for all we still would be able, with an appropriate definition of to make the absolute difference of AMI and ASC arbitrarily large, though finite, for all
The remaining difference in the expressions of ASC and AMI is in the terms and The easy way to reduce the difference is to convert the algorithmic complexity into an expression of log-improbability, where
for all binary strings An elementary result of algorithmic information theory is that the probability function satisfies the definition of a semimeasure, meaning that In fact, is called the universal semimeasure. A semimeasure with probabilities summing to unity is called a measure. We need to be clear, when writing
that is a measure, and that is a semimeasure, not a measure. (However, in at least one of the applications of algorithmic specified complexity, Marks et al. have made a semimeasure, not a measure.) This brings us to a simple characterization of ASC:
This does nothing but to establish clearly a sense in which algorithmic specified complexity is formally similar to algorithmic mutual information. As explained above, there can be arbitrarily large differences in the two quantities. However, if we consider averages of the quantities over all strings holding constant, then we obtain an interesting result. Let random variable take values in with probability distribution Then the expected difference of AMI and ASC is
Introducing a requirement that function be computable, we get lower and upper bounds on the expected difference from Theorem 10 of Grünwald and Vitányi, “Algorithmic Information Theory“:
Note that the algorithmic complexity of computable probability distribution is the length of the shortest program that, on input of binary string and number (i.e., a binary string interpreted as a non-negative integer), outputs with bits of precision (see Example 7 of Grünwald and Vitányi, “Algorithmic Information Theory“).
How much the expected value of the AMI may exceed the expected value of the ASC depends on the length of the shortest program for computing
[Edit 10/30/2019: In the preceding box, there were three instances of that should have been ] Next we derive a similar result, but for individual strings instead of expectations, applying a fundamental result in algorithmic information theory, the MDL bound. If is computable, then for all binary strings and
(MDL)
Replacing string in this inequality with a string-valued random variable as we did previously, and taking the expected value, we obtain one of the inequalities in the box above. (The cross check increases my confidence, but does not guarantee, that I’ve gotten the derivations right.)
Finally, we express in terms of the universal conditional semimeasure,
Now and we can express algorithmic specified complexity as a log-ratio of probabilities, with the caveat that
where is a distribution of probability over the binary strings and is the universal conditional semimeasure.
An old proof that high ASC is rare
Marks et al. have fostered a great deal of confusion, citing Dembski’s earlier writings containing the term specified complexity — most notably, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (2002) — as though algorithmic specified complexity originated in them. The fact of the matter is that Dembski radically changed his approach, but not the term specified complexity, in “Specification: The Pattern that Signifies Intelligence” (2005). Algorithmic specified complexity derives from the 2005 paper, not Dembski’s earlier work. As it happens, the paper has received quite a bit of attention in The Skeptical Zone. See, especially, Elizabeth Liddle’s “The eleP(T|H)ant in the room” (2013).
Marks et al. furthermore have neglected to mention that Dembski developed the 2005 precursor (more general form) of algorithmic specified complexity as a test statistic, for use in rejecting a null hypothesis of natural causation in favor of an alternative hypothesis of intelligent, nonnatural intervention in nature. Amusingly, their one and only theorem for algorithmic specified complexity, “The probability of obtaining an object exhibiting bits of ASC is less then or equal to ” is a special case of a more general result for hypothesis testing. The result is Theorem 1 in A. Milosavljević’s “Discovering Dependencies via Algorithmic Mutual Information: A Case Study in DNA Sequence Comparisons” (1995), which Marks et al. do not cite, though they have pointed out that algorithmic specified complexity is formally similar to algorithmic mutual information.
According to the abstract of Milosavljević’s article:
We explore applicability of algorithmic mutual information as a tool for discovering dependencies in biology. In order to determine significance of discovered dependencies, we extend the newly proposed algorithmic significance method. The main theorem of the extended method states that bits of algorithmic mutual information imply dependency at the significance level
However, most of the argument — particularly, Lemma 1 and Theorem 1 — applies more generally. It in fact applies to algorithmic specified complexity, which, as we have seen, is defined quite similarly to algorithmic mutual information.
Let and be probability distributions over sequences (or any other kinds of objects from a countable domain) that correspond to the null and alternative hypotheses respectively; by and we denote the probabilities assigned to a sequence by the respective distributions.
[…]
We now define the alternative hypothesis in terms of encoding length. Let denote a decoding algorithm [our universal prefix machine] that can reconstruct the target [our ] based on its encoding relative to the source [our context ]. By [our ] we denote the length of the encoding [for us, this is the length of a shortest program that outputs on input of ]. We make the standard assumption that encodings are prefix-free, i.e., that none of the encodings represented in binary is a prefix of another (for a detailed discussion of the prefix-free property, see Cover & Thomas, 1991; Li & Vitányi, 1993). We expect that the targets that are similar to the source will have short encodings. The following theorem states that a target is unlikely to have an encoding much shorter than
THEOREM 1 For any distribution of probabilities decoding algorithm and source
Here is a specialization of Theorem 1 within the framework of this post: Let be a random variable with distribution of probability over the set of binary strings. Let context be a binary string. Then the probability of algorithmic specified complexity is at most i.e.,
For a simpler formulation and derivation, along with a snarky translation of the result into IDdish, see my post “Deobfuscating a Theorem of Ewert, Marks, and Dembski” at Bounded Science.
I emphasize that Milosavljević does not narrow his focus to algorithmic mutual information until Theorem 2. The reason that Theorem 1 applies to algorithmic specified complexity is not that ASC is essentially the same as algorithm mutual information — we established above that it is not — but instead that the theorem is quite general. Indeed, Theorem 1 does not apply directly to the algorithmic mutual information
because is a semimeasure, not a measure like Theorem 2 tacitly normalizes the probabilities of the semimeasure producing probabilities that sum to unity, before applying Theorem 1. It is this special handling of algorithmic mutual information that leads to the probability bound of stated in the abstract, which is different from the bound of for algorithmic specified complexity. Thus we have another clear indication that algorithmic specified complexity is not essentially the same as algorithmic mutual information, though the two are formally similar in definition.
Conclusion
In 2005, William Dembski made a radical change in what he called specified complexity, and developed the precursor of algorithmic specified complexity. He presented the “new and improved” specified complexity in terms of statistical hypothesis testing. That much of what he did made good sense. There are no formally established properties of algorithmic specified complexity that justify regarding it as a measure of meaningful information. The one theorem that Marks et al. have published is actually a special case of a 1995 result applied to hypothesis testing. In my own exploration of the properties of algorithmic specified complexity, I’ve seen nothing at all to suggest that it is reasonably regarded as a measure of meaning. Marks et al. have attached “meaning” rhetoric to some example applications of algorithmic specific complexity, but have said nothing about counterexamples, which are quite easy to find. In Evo-Info 5, I will explain how to use the methods of “Measuring Meaningful Information in Images: Algorithmic Specified Complexity” to measure large quantities of “meaningful information” in nonsense images derived from the context.
The Series
Evo-Info review: Do not buy the book until…
Evo-Info 1: Engineering analysis construed as metaphysics
Evo-Info 2: Teaser for algorithmic specified complexity
Evo-Info sidebar: Conservation of performance in search
Evo-Info 3: Evolution is not search
Evo-Info 4: Non-conservation of algorithmic specified complexity
Evo-Info 4 addendum
[Some minor typographical errors in the original post have been corrected.]
I took mine from Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes (4th Ed.).
Mung,
You obscurantist! 😉
Can’t wait to meet you in person and buy you a drink!
Thanks. I ought to take a look at Cover and Thomas.
I note that as you state it, it starts with a probabilistic random variable (strings) and only drags in K complexity after that. K complexity does not itself involve any random variables.
Actually, Dembski talked about it as one of the ways you could “cash out” specified information, in No Free Lunch. He also allowed other ways including viability. Occasionally after that one would find Dembski talking about K complexity as the way one could cash out SI. But not invariably. So it was a little confusing.
Thanks. Conway’s Game of Life is something familiar at least, so will help me wrapping my head around this stuff.
But without any populations, genomes and heritable characters it’s pretty hard to see what relevance ASC has for criticisms of natural selection as a source of biological complex information. I am really curious how Eric is going to translate this argument to Joe’s toy example.
Actually, Dembski talked about it as one of the ways you could “cash out” specified information, in No Free Lunch. He also allowed other ways including viability. Occasionally after that one would find Dembski talking about K complexity as the way one could cash out SI. But not invariably. So it was a little confusing.
It is unfortunate that Eric Holloway intends to absent himself from TSZ — I thought that the discussion of his mutual information argument was gradually moving toward a real explanation of it, so that we can understand and evaluate it. I look forward to Holloway’s return(s).
I hope in the near future, when other tasks are less pressing, to put up a post asking specifically how one applies Holloway’s mutual information criterion to the simple model of natural selection at multiple loci that I talked about earlier in this thread. Because that is a model that seems to show that selection can result in CSI. And I don’t see how Holloway’s argument applies there. I hope that Holloway will return for that discussion.
No, Joe does not. One of the posts I intend to make in the near future will raise exactly that issue in a separate thread. I can’t for the life of me see why defining a target region by algorithmic (non-)complexity is a sensible thing to do. I hope to say that again in a separate post, and maybe that will lead to somebody explaining why it makes sense. Till then, it makes about as much sense to me as defining the target region by blueness instead of some fitness-related adaptation.
🙂
If neither Tom nor you can tell me what variables feed into the formulas or how the argument is supposed to go in principle, then I feel a bit less stupid about not understanding it.
It seems Tom has neither answered this adequately, nor this:
Seems strange to remove this post from being featured and Tom just allowing these to go unanswered.
Well, isn’t it up to Eric, not Tom, to make that connection clear?
I won’t pretend to understand what Eric is saying here, so I don’t know whether he is voicing a legitimate concern. It annoys me no end that I can’t even make that basic distinction, so I am working my way through the “Game of Life” paper now.
phoodoo,
Here’s a summary of the conversation in simpler terms.
Unclear to me what sort of response you expect from Tom, since Eric has made no effort to contest Tom’s demonstration that ASC is NOT conserved, merely waffled about random variables being labels.
Right, but we also can’t pretend to know what Tom is saying, and since this is Tom’s post I guess it is up to him to make it clear what he is saying, because he seems to be the only one who knows.
I think Tom did a splendid job visualising a major shortcoming of the ASC metric as a measure of meaning, by demonstrating that ASC can increase enormously when an image gets corrupted. I agree that the mathematical treatment is hard to digest, but to be honest, Eric’s OP hasn’t been light reading either, and wasn’t very illuminating to boot.
Anyway, if you are unsure about specific details of the OP; Tom has clearly stated that he is anxious to answer our questions, even dumb ones. 🙂
I see it as a large time investment to discuss matters here, so I want to make sure all my ducks are in a row before further discussion. As I said, I found discussions here more worthwhile than over at PS, so will continue to participate.
Yes, I originally got it from Papoulis’ book (chapter 4 on random variables), but found Wikipedia’s definition serviceable for my purpose, so referred to that instead of requiring people to have access to Papoulis’ book.
Dr. English’s demonstration does not address my OP, since that purely concerns algorithmic mutual information, which he accepts is conserved in this OP.
As for addressing his argument, it is obvious ASC is conserved if we are talking about a random variable.
Consider rolling a die. Relabeling the sides doesn’t decrease the probability of a certain side showing up.
EricMH,
But are you talking about reality, Eric?
Imagine a roulette wheel where the slots are not equal in size. Events in reality are not necessarily
improbableequiprobable*.ETA to correct autocorrect!!!
EricMH,
Eric,
A word of advice for a sincere guy like you: “You can’t convince people who do not want to be convinced”- Michael Behe
EricMH, I can accept that your OP purely concerns algorithmic mutual information, and has absolutely nothing to do with Algorithmic Specified Complexity, hence my original question
To put it another way: why should we care?
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2018.4
Why aren’t the slots the same size, who made some bigger? What are they biased towards, life? Improvement? Increases in function?
How did they get that way?
Wait, let me guess, the niche did it?
First of all, you’re going to have to be more specific about what particular entities the roulette wheel slots refer to for us to have any hope of even attempting an answer to that question.
But in any case, what makes you think it was a “who”?
If the roulette wheel slots refer to the kind of chemistry that can take place on planets, they could be biased such that life is more likely than not, in the observable universe.
They could be biased such that “improvement” and “increases in function” are also more likely than not, under particular circumstances.
You’re going to have to be more specific about what particular entities the roulette wheel slots refer to for us to have any hope of even attempting an answer to that question.
The niche did what specifically?
Its Alan analogy, did you not get that part?
My guess is he purposely made his analogy vague enough to allow whatever utility he felt he needed to get out of the analogy at any particular time
You know, just sort of throw it out there and hope it glosses over a lot of the problems of unlikelihood.
Even if the die is unequally weighted, changing the labels on the sides does not affect the probability of which side is face up after a roll.
Be interesting to see Dr. English’s response to Dr. Montañez’s paper.
Yes and I know what he meant by the analogy, and that it could fit many conceivable situations. That was his whole point yes, there’s nothing wrong with that.
When we speak about what is likely to happen “just by chance”, we need to know what the probabilities are. This is a generalized statement, and “what is likely to happen” can mean many different things. But in all cases it is entirely correct that “what is likely to happen” depends on the probability distribution. If the dice are loaded, or the coin’s are highly biased, or the rock isn’t round, that has implications for what is likely to happen when you toss them.
But you’re asking how the “roulette slots”, which are just a placeholder for “that which can occupy many different states” came to be the way they are, which is like asking “how did the probability distribution come to be like that?” so now we need specifics. The probability distribution of what in particular? There might actually be situations where we know the answer. Which ones were you thinking of?
We know how dice are loaded, and how it is that many rocks aren’t round and came to have a tendency to land more on one side than the other. For some of them the dice were designed to be that way, for the rocks it was usually erosion and other geological processes.
As long as the target of interest is independent from the evolutionary process, then evolution is not expected to hit the target. What this means in more concrete terms I’m still thinking through.
Rumraket,
This is an Omagain level response (I am not sure if that is a compliment for you or not).
Alan says life might not be improbable if some slots are more likely than others. Its completely up to him to say which slots and why, so I asked him to explain why.
Now you are asking me to explain why. Have you met Omagain? I think you two might get along.
It is not at all clear that Alan was talking about the origin of life. He was making a response to EricMH:
How do you figure this exchange is about the origin of life phoodoo? It is seems to me it is a general discussion about probability distributions and conservation of of ASC.
Presumably you believe the designer did it, whatever it might be.
Does it never strike you as odd that you can ask questions and get answers, however unsatisfactory you find them, but you cannot yourself even give unsatisfactory answers to the same questions from your perspective?
If you ask how did the designer do anything at all, phoodoo is mute. But phoodoo can sure easily point in what ways you are wrong. I guess phoodoo has discovered that you can’t be wrong if you never say anything, much like Mung.
I guess the confidence level you have in your position is illustrated by your level of detail in that position that you have shared with us all.
A great compliment.
Rumraket,
Maybe he was talking about greyhound races. Or the prospects of finding the right hooker. Who can say for sure?
Phoodoo is still performing “Lord of Misrule”.
Indeed. There seems a tendency, among some coin tossers, to forget that in reality, outcomes are not equiprobable.
I can, as it was a comment by me that is being queried. I was indeed mentioning equiprobability as a simplification that, while useful, does not represent real life.
Then what represents real life? Presumably you mean some things are MORE probable than others in real life, just like some slots being bigger than others suggests.
So isn’t that exactly what I said your analogy meant?
So now we are back to my original question. How? Why? Who made it that way? Which events are more probable?
Or were you just obfuscating, and you didn’t mean your analogy actually applies to anything?
Models are attempts at understanding aspects of reality. Reality is the territory and models are maps – simplifications that are useful in understanding aspects of reality.
I was thinking of bias in selection, the adaptive aspect to evolution.
Perhaps I missed that in your comment. Which comment, BTW?
which was?
How what? Why what? (I’m on record as saying “why” questions are pretty much impossible to answer.)
Leaving out “what way”, I’m sceptical of “supernatural” causes. For me, the unexplained is not answered by such conjecture.
Surely you don’t dismiss the idea of observation and experiment completely? It is possible to test ideas.
No.
Oh brother.
Selection doesn’t create anything. When are you evolutionists going to finally understand this.
Who disagrees?
Do you have examples of “evolutionists” claiming selection is a creative process?
I, for instance, think that processes that result in novel genomes (such as mutation) are the creative aspect to evolution. Selection is the process that results in certain genomes proliferating and others disappearing.
Of course, you are perfectly free to dismiss the idea of evolution. I just wonder what alternative process you think is a better fit for observed reality. So far, you haven’t mentioned it.
This is why it is interesting to connect the math up to the biology. The “target of interest” is simply the collection phenotypes of higher fitness than the current one. Since natural selection depends on fitness variation, I don’t see how the target can possibly be independent from the evolutionary process.
If there is a target!
Hat-tip to Dan Eastwood at Peaceful Science for linking to this article;
Computing the origin of life which seems to address some of phoodoo’s concerns.
If there are no varieties to select from selection does not and cannot happen. Now that everyone seems to have finally understood that, will you fill us in on what the actual explanation is? So far, you haven’t mentioned the real way things are created. Just wondering if now will be the time? Or has your whole thing really just been concern over the emphasis of selection over what creates that which is selected? And now that’s all sorted you’ll be praising Darwin’s name along with the rest of us again?
Isn’t it obvious?
And we need to see them actually calculated. What in evolution does not happen “just by chance”?
LoL!
Sure it can. If B is the collection of high fitness, and there is no evolutionary pathway from our starting point A to B, then B is independent from the evolutionary process.
Just because B is fitter than A does not therefore imply that evolution can get us from A to B.
On the other hand, if B exists, then evolutionary processes will preserve it at the expense of A.
I think this is where the misunderstanding creeps in. It is a fallacy of reverse implication. The fact that evolution favors B over A does not imply that evolution produces B from A.
Many things.
Another argument about islands of function, heh.
If you can provide evidence for that, you don’t need the math to debunk evolution.
All the math is just a red herring. It adds nothing to the argument. If you think there’s no evolutionary path from A to highly optimized B, show us the evidence that B was poofed into existence fully formed. And if you believe in common descent, that implies impossibly stupid saltationism. Laughable
So you didn’t understand that Eric was talking about CREATING information, when he was discussing rolling the dice?
You thought perhaps he was talking about which information that IS ALREADY CREATED dies?
Are you playing Lord of Misrule?
Here, looks Eric even repeats it for you if that helps:
Keep does not=create.
You guys need a poster so you can stop trying to conflate it.