John Crace, at the Guardian, has a nice series of “digesteds“. I’m no John Crace, but I’m going have a go at digest of Dembski’s article at ENV, Conservation of Information Made Simple, because it seems to me that Dembski could use an editor with a big blue pencil.
Conservation of Information Made Simple by William A. Dembski – digested read:
The structure and laws of the physical world permit intelligent multicellular life. Therefore the universe itself, can be viewed as the solution to the problem of making life possible.
When we talk of searching for solutions, we are talking about the probability finding one of a small relatively small set of solutions at the end of one of many different possible searches. Clearly, the probability of finding a solution will increase if we have information as to where to look. But finding the information as to where to look may be as difficult as finding the solution.
Bacteria sometimes evolve to be capable of utilizing a new food source, for example, nylon-digesting bacteria. So we can say they have gained information. But it is not new information, it has come from the environment – in this case, nylon-filled pools.
You can think about probabilities as information costs. A high probability has low information, but a low probability has high information. Information is expensive – we pay fees to agencies that will increase the probability that we will get what we want. Or you could buy all the lottery tickets, and increase the probability of winning to 1, but it would have cost more than the price of the jackpot.
We call this “conservation” of information because that the best we can do is break even. But sometimes we do worse, and the cost of making the search easier is higher than the cost of the original hard search. After all, some search strategies may that steer us away from solutions. So information can only be lost, not gained, when we try to improve our search strategy.
The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems say that no search is better than blind search, when the target is unspecified. Conservation of information says that some searches are better than others, but only because of the additional information that the search is employing to boost its performance.
It also suggests that an object and the search for an object are not separate. We only become aware of an object when aspects of it become salient: “to be perceived is to be an object of search.” It therefore follows that to be is to be an object of search. Also, search can itself be an object of search.
This is why I regard the multiverse as incoherent: the known physical universe is knowable because it is searchable. The multiverse is unsearchable, therefore unreal.
Conservation of information can be formulated as: raising the probability of success of a search does nothing to make attaining the target easier, and may in fact make it more difficult, once the informational costs involved in raising the probability of success are taken into account.
When Dawkins wrote WEASEL, he included the solution to the search into the his fitness function, so there was no net increase in information when the search found the solution. AVIDA, Tierra and ev do the same thing.
Ken Miller says that to increase in biological information over the course of evolution you only need selection, replication, and mutation. But computer simulations that use selection, replication, and mutation don’t solve interesting problems, or produce interesting patterns, unless we add information about what we want to achieve.
The fitness landscape provides an evolutionary process with information. Solutions will only be found if the fitness landscapes is smooth, doesn’t isolate local optima, and rewards complexity. So where do such fitness landscapes come from? The only answer, apart from an Intelligent Designer, would seem to be the environment.
But where did the environment get that information? Evolution is supposed to explain subsequent complexity in terms of prior simplicity, but conservation of information says that there never was a state of primordial simplicity — the information had to be there from the start. In the absence of intelligent input, the complex biological information we observe now must have been present in the universe in some form or fashion, since the Big Bang. But the heat and density of Big Bang rules out any life form so where was the information needed for the emergence and development of life on planet Earth?
Evolutionists say that the way the environment inputs information into biological systems is by a gradual accumulation of information as natural selection locks in on small advantages, each of which can arise by chance without intelligent input. But Intelligent Design presents a Two-Pronged Challenge. On the one hand the evidence for common ancestry is weak. On the other hand, even if common ancestry is true, conservation of information is compelling evidence for intelligence design.
It would actually be quite a remarkable property of nature if fitness across biological configuration space were so distributed that advantages could be accumulated gradually by a Darwinian process. Frankly, I don’t see the evidence for this.
If biological evolution proceeds by a gradual accrual of functional advantages, instead of finding itself deadlocked on isolated islands of function surrounded by vast seas of non-function, then the fitness landscape over biological configuration space has to be very special indeed.
If evolution is so tightly constrained, then the conditions that allow evolution to act effectively in producing the complexity and diversity of life is but a tiny subset of all possible configuration spaces, and therefore itself a small-probability target.
Evolution can certainly make improbable outcomes probable, but it requires a very special kind of fitness landscape that is itself improbable. Yes, you can reach the top of Mount Improbable, but the tools that enable you to find a gradual ascent up the mountain are as improbably acquired as simply scaling it in one fell swoop. This is the lesson of conservation of information.
So what is the source of information in nature that allows targets to be successfully searched? The answer will by now be obvious: from intelligence. If intelligence is real and has real causal powers, it can do more than merely redistribute information — it can also create it. That is the defining property of intelligence.
Also, Descartes.
The digested digested:
I was wrong about organisms being improbable, given a fitness landscape searchable by evolutionary processes. I should have said that a fitness landscape searchable by evolutionary processes was improbable. I’d still be wrong.
Suppose a can opener.
I am most certainly not, William. I want to know what you are trying to say. If your words are ambiguous (and words like “information” are very ambiguous in this context) then I need to know what definition you are using.
Dembski defines Information as, essentially, improbability (negative log of). Is that the definition you are using?
And, if so, how are you computing the debt?
This is not about “semantics” William – this is about clarity.
I agreed that if we define Information as the negative log of the probability of a pattern emerging by random shuffling, and a Target as a specified subset of possible patterns, that an evolutionary algorithm can find a high Information-bearing Target, with high reliability. I did not “attempt” to show this – I showed it. Dembski agrees that evolutionary algorithms can do this, if the fitness landscape is smooth and high-dimensioned.
I said that it might be (and probably is) the case that the conditions on early earth were such that self-replicating entities (possibly semipermeable lipid bubbles enclosing self-replicating polymers in a convection vortex) emerged without tinkering by any Designer, and were this to be the case, we’d have a explanation for the emergence of an evolutionary scenario. I’m not sure what you thought I said was “impossible”. I may have mistyped something, I guess.
Not at all. While the Information possessed by the Target (i.e. Specified Information, because Targetted Information) might be high, because improbable in the absence of the self-replicators, it is not self-evident to me that the Information possessed by the Self-replicating Population is High. Dembski claims it is, but his calculation is based on the assumption that alternative chemical scenarios are vast in number and all equally likely. But we do not know this, and cannot calculate it – Dembski just assumes it is the case.
But if, for example, there is only one possible universe, then the probability of life-generating chemistry, is unity, not infinitessimal, and so the Information it contains (Information, by Dembski’s definition, being the negative log of probability) is zero. If there are two possible universes, and one won’t produce self-replicators, the Information contained in chemistry is slightly greater. But as we don’t know how many possible universes there are, we can’t compute how much information there is in the one we live in (not by Dembski’s definition anyway).
So we don’t know that there’s an unpaid debt at all. It could be fully paid up by the simple fact of terrrestrial chemistry.
I didn’t. I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. Dembski mentioned multiverses in passing (that he didn’t like them) but I’m not using them to explain anything. The only reason I mention other universes at all is that if there is only one possible universe, then there is no information debt (because probability = 1).
If there are lots of possible universes, then the information debt is higher and possibly paid for by multiverses, but I’m not paying a penny until you or Dembski show me there’s a debt.
No. I think whether there is a debt at all depends (in Dembski’s terms) on how probable the observed universe is.
Dembski doesn’t say, because he doesn’t know. Nor do I. Ergo, we do not know whether there is a debt.
Dembski would first have to show that other universes are possible. Otherwise, he has no basis for his probability i.e. information calc.
OK, you are not seeing the problem here. I hope you have seen it by now. My point is not that the “debt” can be paid by multiuniverses et all. My point is that we can’t know whether here is a debt, at all, or how big it is, unless we know how improbable this universe is, under the null of unselected, i.e. unchosen, i.e. undesigned universe. And to know that, we need to know, inter alia, how many other universes would have been/are possible, and, of those, how many are life-permitting.
To take a toy example: I give you a bag. You withdraw from it a blue ball.
How likely was it that you would withdraw a blue ball? If bag contained 100 balls, and 50 of them were red, then there was a 50% probability that the ball you withdrew would be red. Therefore, that blue ball represents 1 bit (-log2 .5) bits of information, a lot less than in a cell of your body.
But if only one was blue and the rest red, and you drew out a blue ball, then that ball would represent -log2 .01 bits of information – nearly 7. If there are gazillions of red balls, and only one blue ball, drawing that blue ball will represent -log2 1/gaziillions of bits of information.
So if a blue ball represents a life-generating universe (constants such that life is inevitable) and red balls universes that do not allow life to emerge), then we can see that the more red balls there are to blue balls, the more improbable, and therefore representing more information to be accounted for, the observed life-permitting universe is. But the point is that unless we know how many balls there are in the bag, and how many of them are blue, we can’t compute the Information, and can’t therefore know whether there is an “Information Debt”.
OK, thanks.
Although I’d add that far from “obfuscating” terms, I’m doing the exact opposite – trying to make sure that we both know what the other is talking about when we use them.
William J. Murray said: “You (Lizze) brought in the multiverse as an explanation for a convenient fitness landscape – another concession that something must pay the search information debt. ”
Elizabeth Little said: “No. I think whether there is a debt at all depends (in Dembski’s terms) on how probable the observed universe is.”
Do you really not see just how inane your response here is?
High and low probability cannot be assigned in a dynamic system unless you consider the dynamics. I believe you refer to this as “priors.”
I haven’t seen a statistics text since 1970, so the term priors doesn’t speak to me.
But obviously a ball rolling down a plane cannot be compared to a ball rolling on a roulette wheel.
The probability of a genome sequence is determined by the dynamics of the system and how you determine downhill.
One objection to evolution — that it doesn’t predict the direction of change — is the result of emergence and the inability to know in advance the properties of novel sequences.
Of course this makes things tough for any putative designer also.
Elizabeth,
You have stated that “whether or not there is debt at all” depends on how probable the observed universe is. That is not the case Dembski made; the case Dembski made is that within our known universe, and the way we know things to behave and act, and with our knowledge of chance and lawful forces, the acquisition of a self-replicating biological machine and the creation of novel functional complexity in biology cannot be plausibly expected from any non-teleological search; such searches – in our universe, as we know it – must have information about the target to succeed beyond the expectancy of a blind search.
From the hypothetical, unproven perspective of a fitness landscape convenient to biological novelty, one has merely transferred the necessary teleological information to the landscape, as if it being in the landscape changes its necessarily teleological nature. The only way to escape the need for teleological information, from the materialist perspective, is to go outside the universe and start talking about “how probable” such a universe (with the necessary information in the landscape) is.
Which brings us to Elizabeth’s point above: ““No. I think whether there is a debt at all depends (in Dembski’s terms) on how probable the observed universe is.”
From the perspective of one universe – ours – what then is Elizabeth talking about? What debt is she referring to that “wouldn’t exist” “depending on how probable the universe is”? This is the tacit agreement that the debt exists within our universe or else there would be no need to examine the probability of our universe existing in order to decide “if the debt exists or not”.
If we hold our view to one universe, INSIDE our universe, the debt exists, which is why Elizabeth brings up the potential probability of our universe in order to retroactively dismiss the search debt. Otherwise, there’s no reason whatsoever to bring up “the probability of the universe” to address whether or not a non-existent debt exists.
Please yourself, but you are importing a phenomenon based upon observation of what it can do, then offer a dismissive waft of the hand when someone mentions that it appears NOT to have the capacity to do what you need it to do – fine tune the parameters of the universe, indeed!
If you are talking of a phenomenon, it helps if everybody is talking about the SAME phenomenon. If by ‘Intelligence’, you mean absolutely anything an omnipotent, omniscient God might cook up, you aren’t talking about the common quality at all, and have no warrant for puffing your viewpoint up as “inference to best explanation”. We can’t think our way to a hidden target; ‘intelligence’ in your terms is something else entirely.
Do you think the Designer of the universe is human? Does he rely on natural processes? Or is He outside of the universe and able to will anything (non-contradictory) to happen, in other words a user of magic?
Btw, I think it capital if the ID movement is going to move away from evolution and focus on cosmology. That should be very entertaining. Importantly, cosmology isn’t something children have to learn in school.
I think a little wouldn’t do them any harm, but that’s by the by.
I don’t know what he’s grasping at, but the universe started in a low entropy state, which means stuff can happen. If it had started in a high entropy state, not much could happen.
Physical information is related to entropy. If Dembski wants to go on about information, someone should set a physicist on him.
I’m no physicist, but I attempted to address this issue in reply to WJM, here:
Allan Miller,
Dembski (and WJM) appear to wish to talk about an abstract universe rather than a physical one.
I’m trying to learn from Mike, but it appears to me that condensing or clumping is downhill. The inevitable direction is toward greater structural complexity.
It seems possible that one could have physical constants that prevent life from forming, but it seems silly, a priori, to declare our universe to have constants incompatible with OOL and evolution..
I don’t see the utility in computing the odds against something that has already happened.
More to the point, you can’t, unless you know how many alternate possibilities there were.
I don’t think the number of possibilities is as important as knowing what is downhill, That seems to be an actual issue among theoretical physicists.
Of course I tend to think that there could be multiple instances of existence as well as multiple universes. Just to be perverse.
petruska says: “I don’t see the utility in computing the odds against something that has already happened.”
Do you see any utility in computing the odds against particular ways that something may have happened in order to discern which hypothesized way is more likely to have produced the outcome in question?
“Downhill” means toward lower potential energy; and that requires the dissipation and spreading around of energy as matter clumps (falls into mutual potential wells that form when matter comes into close proximity with other matter); i.e., the second law.
Multiverse hypotheses are just part of a number of other hypotheses. Some of those others include the possibility that our universe is a part of a higher dimensional universe.
Multiverse doesn’t mean that all possible universes that could fall out actually did; and it is an open question whether or not there are observable effects in our universe that would give us any hints of the existence of other universes.
Trying to build theories about the early universe that have measurable consequences is extremely difficult; that is why it takes so long to do it. But it is certainly possible to extrapolate what we currently know about particle physics and astrophysics to build cosmological models that are “self-creating” out of the “vacuum.” But the “vacuum” is something that may or may not have “always” existed.
The difficulty in trying to put in layman’s terms what “always existed” means lies in the fact that time and matter are intricately intertwined. The passage of time requires the existence of “clocks” which are periodic phenomena that occur within some kind of material system. If matter doesn’t exist, neither does time. It is also the case that matter and energy are interchangeable, so the existence of energy might already imply the existence of time.
All this kind of thinking has to be folded into models of the universe; and that involves using what we know about quantum mechanics and general relativity. The joining of quantum mechanics and general relativity is a challenging problem; but there are some theories being explored that are aimed at that goal. Some theories have gravity falling out of the model quite naturally.
So there is a lot happening on the theoretical front; and some of it is being tested at the LHC right now. It will be a number of years before some of these tests are able to produce results.
I think the designer of the universe could be human consciousness, as per John Wheeler’s theories.
One computes probabilities based on known QUANTITATIVE properties of, say, interacting objects and the known QUANTITATIVE behaviors of the interactions.
One should NEVER compute probabilities of things based on different objects that have NONE of the same properties and NONE of the same interactions as the things for which one is purporting to calculate probabilities.
For example, letters, junkyard parts, and marbles are not stand-ins for atoms and molecules. Tornados are not stand-ins for electromagnetic interactions. You learn absolutely nothing about atoms and molecules and their interactions by using letters or tornados ripping through junkyards as a model.
My answer is no, for the reason that any significant event, such as your conception, could have had a different outcome. Everythin can be made to be improbable if analyzed this way.
The question is which way is downhill.
William, do you understand how Dembski defines Information?
Yes, that response is “inane” – but the inanity is all Dembski’s (and, unless you can provide a better case for there being and “information debt”, yours too). It is he who defines Information as the negative log of probability, and insists that Information must be Conserved, and that if a system results in a something that would be improbable without such a system, that somehow the system itself must be at least as improbable. And my response is: we can’t calculate the improbability of the system that we observe, because we only have one exemplar.
ETA: my surname is Liddle, btw.
Well, I’m sticking with Dembski’s math. He seems to think that a fine-tuned universe is improbable. I’m saying that he has no data on which to make that calculation. And if he is claiming that if a system can produce a result that would be improbable without such a system, then the system itself must be at least as improbable, I say he has no way of computing that value.
What makes you think so?
Lost your faith since February?
Maybe your January article led to some reflection.
Or are you just trying to distance ID from cdesignproponentists?
Do you not understand what “could be” means?
In any event, I consider human consciousness to be localized, individualized aspects of god consciousness, and I don’t think any part of god resides “outside” the universe. I don’t think there is an “outside” to the universe.
I am referring to Dembski’s paper, written with Robert Marks, called A Search for a Search. Here is the abstract:
In this paper, Dembski agrees that an “assisted search” (such as an evolutionary search) will find a target better than “blind chance”. He defines the information possessed by a “target” as the negative log of the probability of finding the target by blind search, which is the same thing, mathematically, as the the number of targets divided by the total number of searchable locations.
However, he claims that while the probability of finding such a rare target by an assisted search might be really very high, even equal to one, the probability of finding such a search must be at least as small as the probability of finding the target by blind search.
To demonstrate this (the “information cost”, or, to use your word, “debt”), he has to compute the probability of finding the assisted search. This means, as with finding the probability of the target, dividing the number of searches that will reliably find the target by the total number of possible searches.
Now, that works find in the closed mathematical world that Dembski presents. But it doesn’t work so well if we apply it to the real world, which Dembski must do if he wants to present his Law of Conservation of Information as a Law of Nature, not just a mathematical truism. And unfortunately, for Dembski, in the real world we don’t have a neat bounded population of possible search strategies from which we can compute the proportion (and thus the probability of finding by some blind draw method, and this the Information, as defined by Dembski) that reliably result in the Target being found. We only have what we observe, which happens to be a world in which chemistry and physics exist, and which would appear, on the basis of a great deal of empirical evidence, to be one in which something like an evolutionary scenario is quite likely to be found. We can argue about that separately, but it is irrelevant to either Dembski’s or my point here: in order for Dembski to show that his Law of Conservation of Information holds in the world we observe, he needs to be able to compute the number of possible worlds of which the one that we know of is an examplar. If such worlds are a rare subset of a large number of possible worlds (i.e. improbable under his null, and therefore with a high negative log p) then indeed, it may be that there is an Information Debt – finding a world in which evolution works may be less probable than organisms emerging from some blind random draw. However, if such worlds are common, or, indeed, there is only one possible world, then this world is probable, and its negative log is small. There will therefore be no net Information Cost; his law does not hold, and there is no debt to pay.
And my point is that we can’t know how many possible worlds there are, and what proportion of them would embody a search strategy for finding complex biological life.
.
I know you are not a mathematician, William, but are you following the math here?
Yes. Dembski argues there is an “information cost” to evolutionary searches (which he agrees can find targets that would be vastly improbable without), and that cost is borne by the cost of finding the evolutionary search itself, which he argues, mathematically, must be at least as improbable (hard to find) as the target is by unassisted search.
But both Dembski, and you, have yet to demonstrate that finding an evolutionary search is improbable. If the chemistry of this universe is such that self-replicators are pretty likely somewhere, sometime, then Dembski’s Law only holds if he can show that this universe’s chemistry is extrememly improbable. Which he can’t. No-one can.
I’m referring to Dembski’s claim, in the paper linked above, that while an assisted search may render finding a rare target problable, finding the assisted search at least as improbable. Let’s do it in actual math, with toy numbers:
Let’s say that a Target, T, is one of 10 specified patterns out of 1,000,000 possible patterns. The probability of finding one of the T patterns, by “blind search” is the same as the proportion of T patterns in the whole thing, i.e. 10/1,000,000., which is .0001. And the negative base 2 log of .0001 is 5 bits. So we say that T has five bits of information.
Now lets say we have a search strategy that reliably finds a T pattern, every time. The probability of finding T is now 1, and the negative base 2 log of 1 is zero bits. In other words, a certainty has zero bits of information.
But, Dembski says, this doesn’t actually make finding T more likely, because now we have to factor in how hard it will be to find a search strategy that will find T with certainty. And for this, we have to do the same thing – count the number of possible assisted searches, including the useless ones, as well as the worse-than useless ones that reward the searcher for getting further away. And let’s suppose there are 1,000,000,000 of these, of which 10 actually work.
Now our Target is “Free” (certain i.e . costs no Bits) but we have occured an Information Cost in having to find the search itself, which was on of 10 in a billion, i.e. .00000001, the negative log of which is 8 bits. So we’ve saved ourselves 5 bits, but to save ourselves those 5 bits we now have to spend 8 bits on the search.
That’s what I understand by Dembki’s “information cost” of the search, and which I think you referring to as the “information debt”.
What I am saying is that we have no way, in the actual world, of calculating how many possible “assisted searches” there are, i.e. how many possible universes there are, and of those, how many will lead to pattern T (in this case, life).
So Dembski’s Law is unproven. It may work for finite systems with known frequencies, but it doesn’t work for worlds, because we do not know the frequency distribution of worlds. We just know we live in one in which such systems seem pretty common, and in particular, in a section of one of them in which conditions seem to have been such that self-replicators, and thus evolutionary searches, actually occurred.
No. It is not. And this is absurd. Would you trust a loan shark who said: you must be in debt, because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t being trying to figure out whether you were in debt”? William, the math is such that you need to know the probability that a world like us would arise in order to find out whether there is a debt or not, just as you need to know how many assisted searches you’d have to trawl through before you came up with one that found T, in order to figure out the cost of those searches.
Are you confusing “number of possible universes” with “multiverses”? Have you got the impression that I am mentioning “number of possible universes” because I think that “multiverse” is the way out of my debt? I think perhaps you have. Well, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying there are multiverses. I’m not saying there need to be multiverses to pay the debt. I’m not saying that if there were multiverses there wouldn’t be a debt.
“Number of possible universes” is not the same as “number of actual universes”.
The first is what I need to know, together with the proportion of those of universes that include an assisted life-search, in order to compute how difficult a life-producing universe is to find (i.e. negative log of the proportion/probability). If that value is greater than the negative log of the probability of getting life without an assisted search, then I have a debt to pay. The second is what I need to know if in order to work out whether I can pay the debt.
But unfortunately for both you and Dembski, neither is knowable.
No, see above. You have radically misunderstood my point. I’m sorry if I was unclear. I hope I’ve been clear now.
Yes, that was more or less my position. I think it works quite well 🙂
It breaks down a bit (or did for me) when I had to tackle how it interacted with matter. How do you deal with that aspect?
It took me a while, but I think I have twigged why William thinks I am being inane, and why I couldn’t understand why he didn’t seem to be responding to my point.
William – feel free to read the last part of my post before you read the first. It wasn’t till I got to the end that I realised what you must have thought I’d been saying.
Sure. It means you entertain the possibility. For a Christian it would be to deny their God.
“It breaks down a bit (or did for me) when I had to tackle how it interacted with matter. How do you deal with that aspect?”
I like nightlight’s description of planckian networks over at UD:
So? What difference does that make?
In other words, by magic.
By magic for which you have zero evidence that it’s even hypothetically possible, much less that it actually is occurring or ever did occur.
No doubt it feels good to you. Hooray for you!
If you are one of the few ID proponents who is not a religious Jew, Christian, or Muslim, then perhaps it makes no difference. For a Christian, Matthew 10:33 is pretty clear on the seriousness of disowning God.
That’s a nice piece. I might post a thread on it.
I certainly don’t. Can you explain ?
Nightlight is definitely a new kind of poster at UD. Unfortunately he seems to have disappeared. He seems to have read James A Shapiro and has a more sophisticated view of what “internal” intelligence might mean.
I read Shapiro’s recent book, and it seems to be about evolvability. He argues that mutations at scales larger than point mutations are in some sense “deliberate.” Which is to say they have a much higher chance of producing good results than point mutations.
What’s missing is any claim that they are the result of foresight or knowledge of what’s needed or how to achieve it. In other words, moving or duplicating chunks of working code is a more effective guess than twiddling with bases.
OK.
To me the issue has never been about the dichotomy of intelligence vs mindless. It’s always been about the ability to know, without trial and error, what the effect of code changes will be. At the molecular level and at the phenotype level and at the ecosystem level.
Knowing those things seems to be equivalent to time travel or faster than light travel. It seems to violate known physical laws, or at least long established rules of thumb.
It makes no difference to me.
All we have to work with is this universe. If you start talking about “how probable” this universe is, you are necessarily either referring to imaginary potential universes that do not really exist (and so, would lie outside of our actual universe), or actual alternate universe that do exist. Either way, you are bringing in a multiverse scenario (real or imagined) to account for the debt that is apparent in this universe. If the debt was not apparent in this universe, there would be no reason to say that the “existence” of such a debt depends upon how probable the existence of this universe is (IOW, bringing up a multiverse scenario).
Real or imagined, Lizzie brought up the multiverse scenario in order to avoid (pay) the debt Dembski shows must exist in any search that is better than a blind one.
I am inclined to agree with Shapiro on that. Of course, we have to understand “deliberate” as not implying anything at all like conscious deliberation. It’s just a convenient term to describe the process.
They way that I look at it, the most important part of evolution is the process whereby a population maintains as much variation as it can bear. It is the existence of that variation that allows adapting to changes in the environment. Natural selection should be reducing that variation, so there must be something going on that maintains a level of variation.
As I look at it, natural selection is more the problem than the solution. Natural selection would tend to reduce variation so that extinction is more likely. So a population is best likely to survive environmental change if it can fight natural selection by finding a way of maintain variation within the population.
And I wonder whether junk DNA is part of that maintaining of variation. The junk DNA allows a population to maintain genetic variants that have proved useful in the past, and to protect them from natural selection pressures.
Oh, and even on classical neo-Darwinian thinking, the abilities of a population suggested in the two preceding paragraphs ought to have been selected if they ever happened to arise by accidental mutation.
I don’t see any conceptual differences between evolving a new protein or evolving a flagellum or evolving an eye or evolving evolvability.
Certainly we must look for evidence that such steps are possible and evidence that they happened, but a system that “deliberately” makes certain kinds of mutations is no more complex than a eye. It’s just an evolved behavior.
But I return to my point, which is that systematized trial and error is still trial and error. ID proponents want to believe there is something magical in “intelligence” that can bypass trial and error.
William, you seem to have missed my post on the previous page. I have copied it the last part of it below. Please read the that part first.
Now read the rest of the post. It explains the math.
Liz,
I read and understand your post. I stand by my prior assessment of it.
Well. then, you’re just plain wrong. Your understanding is wrong. Your prior – and now reaffirmed – assessment is wrong. Too bad for you.
If even a non-math oriented hick from the sticks like me can grasp the simple probability concepts that Lizzie has just explained, then anyone can. There’s no excuse for your repeated failure.
If you stand by your prior assessment of it, then you haven’t understood it. You may, when you have understood it, still disagree with it, but right now, your arguments against it are incoherent, unless I assume that you have misunderstood it. Then they make some kind so sense – but don’t address the argument I actually made. I will attempt shortly to rephrase it so unambiguously that you will be able to address the argument I am actually making, instead of an argument I am not making.
Elizabeth said:“If you stand by your prior assessment of it, then you haven’t understood it.
False dichotomy. Another possibility is that you are – for whatever reason, but I consider it to be ideological blindness – failing to grasp basic concepts that contradict your view.
The fundamental concepts you are failing to grasp is:
1) ID does not require that chemistry- on its own – can plausibly produce the highly contingent, coordinated information required to spontaneously produce a self-replicating organism. Materialists require this. For materialists, chemistry must be so coordinated by chance.
2) ID does not require that a smooth fitness landscape exist in order for the self-replicating organism to produce novel, complex functionality. Materialists require this. For materialists, the landscape must be so coordinated by chance.
3) ID does not require chance to explain the highly contingent, coordinated information necessary to (1) create a self-replicating machine, or (2) generate novel, complex, biological functionality. Materialists require chance be their high-contingency generator.
4) Therefore, to explain this supposed informational coordination of chemistry and the fitness landscape to produce such things, the materialist must depend on chance – i.e., probabilities – to account for the high-contingency information that must be “in the chemistry” and “in the landscape” and which occurs “by chance”, which ID doesn’t require.
5. The only way that “chance” is a meaningful categorical explanation of the presence of such coordinated, functional, high-contingency information in chemistry and the landscape is if one can draw from what Elizabeth says is not available – i.e., a “probability of the universe”.
6. If we have no “probability of the universe” to draw a statistical sample from, there is no way to plausibly claim that such information is present “by chance”, but chance is all a materialist has available to explain the highly contingent, coordinated, functional information they claim is in chemistry and the fitness landscape.
7. Dembski is pointing out that only the materialist must go “outside of the universe” to provide a reasonable statistical example to explain why chemistry and the fitness landscape contain highly contingent, coordinated, functional information. If it is there by chance, as the materialist holds, then it is they that have issued the claim that there is a statistical probability to draw from that would support such a view. There is no such available statistical probability to support the view that such information could exist by chance, which is the only way – other than choice – that this kind of search information could be generated.
By saying it is there by chance, and not choice, the materialist has made a statistical claim that can only be satisfied by appealing to a “probability of the universe” that doesn’t exist.
Dembski goes on to point out that even if we were to go outside of the universe to satisfy the “chance” needs of the materialist perspective, given our current knowledge of information searches, no “chance” search of universes makes the presence of such information in chemistry and the landscape more likely.
Not only must materialists appeal to a non-existent statistical sample of possible universes, but in order to make it more likely that such information be present in our chemistry and fitness landscape, materialists must assume that what we understand in our universe about chance searches doesn’t apply outside of the universe to whatever is the source of “possible universes”.
And, William, this comment again reveals that you have entirely missed the content of my critique of Dembski’s argument.
If it were the case, and it is not, that I took the view that the life-promoting universe we observe was extremely unlikely unless Designed, and wanted to avoid that spine-tingling conclusion by saying: but very unlikely things can happen as long as you have enough opportunities, and therefore posited an infinity of universes, so that this one was bound to turn up eventually, with no designer required, you would have a point.
BUT IT IS NOT THE CASE THAT THAT IS MY VIEW!
Therefore you do NOT have a point.
I am not saying that this universe is highly improbable without either a Designer or an infinity of multiverses; I am saying that we CANNOT COMPUTE THE PROBABILITY OF THIS UNIVERSE.
Ergo, we don’t know whether we need to infer either a Designer OR multiverses.
Do you now understand what I am saying? When you do, let me know, and I will try to explain, AGAIN, why we Cannot Compute The Probability Of This Universe (hint: to compute a probability you need a frequency distribution, and to a frequency distribution requires a sample of observations, where the size of the sample is substantially greater than unity).
Nope. On the contrary, to claim that the universe we observe is improbable without a Designer, IDists must appeal to a non-existent statistical sample of possible universes.
Do you really not see this?
How else are you going to compute the probability of this universe?
Elizabeth says: “I am saying that we CANNOT COMPUTE THE PROBABILITY OF THIS UNIVERSE.”
Yes, I know. Therefore, you have no plausible means by which to assert that the information is present by chance. Sans any plausible appeal to chance for such high-contingency, coordinated information, you are left with no viable explanation other than choice. You are left with choice not because “the universe as it is is improbable”; you are left with choice because you have no means by which to assert chance, and we already know choice is capable of generating the necessary information.
However, since we are apparently at an impasse here, I suggest moving on to some other topic where we might have common ground. Planckian networks, for example.
WJM, you make Lizzie’s point for her, viz:
Now do you see?
Yes, that is a third possibility, I grant.
No, for “materialists” chemistry is coordinated by the laws of physics, which are the laws of this specific universe.
No, for materialists, the landscape is coordinated by the laws of chemistry and physics, which are the laws of this universe.
No, materialists would claim that these high-contingencies are generated by the laws of physics, which are the laws of this universe.
No, the materialist relies on the laws of physics, which are the laws of this universe.
“Chance” is not a distal explanation at all. Chance is merely what we call chains of causality that are so complex as to be unpredictable (by us), for example the results of non-linear processes – or, possibly, quantum effects, but those are highly predictable, macroscopically.
Actually this sentence literally makes no sense, but I assume you meant to write something like:
“If we have no other observed universes from which to draw a sample, and thus estimate the probability of this universe, there is no way to plausibly claim that such information is present “by chance”.
And you would be on the right lines until your last clause. What would be true would be to say:
“If we have no other observed universes from which to draw a sample, and thus estimate the probability of this universe, there is no way to claim that this universe is improbably, and therefore no way to calculate its information content by Dembski’s definition (-log2p), which is equivalent to defining the information content of the universe as the log of its probability of occurring by chance.
But if we do not know the value of p (and you agree that a sample of universes is impossible, ergo we can’t know p) then we can’t compute how much information the universe possesses, and therefore how much information we materialists have to account for. If p is 1, Information is zero. if p is 1/gazillion, then Information is log 1/gazillion, which is large.
Here is your mathematical mistake, William: You are trying to compute Information, and then account for it “by chance”. And that is why (far from trying to “obfuscate” the issue or make a semantic quibble) I have been trying to pin you down to a definition of Information. As this post is about Dembski, I am using Dembski’s.
Dembki’s definition of Information is, in words, the log of the the probability that the observed pattern would have occurred by chance. Do you agree that this is how he is defining Information (if not, check the paper).
So, using Dembski’s definition of Information, it makes no sense to say: “there is no way to plausibly claim that such information is present “by chance”‘, . It would be saying: “There is no way to plausibly claim that such a probability of occurring by chance would have occurred by chance”.
What would be more sensible would be to say” there is no way to plausibly claim that such a low probability event would occur by chance” (just as it is implausible to claim that throwing 100 consecutive heads is likely to be a “chance” occurrence)
But please note that we do not have to posit actual, existing, other universes to posit (as Dembski implicitly does) that this university is improbable (i.e. has high Information). All Dembski needs to do is to posit a large number of POSSIBLE other universes (not actualised universes), from which either (unlikely) this one happened to turn up by chance, or (likely) this one was specially picked as the one to go for, by an Intelligent Creator who wanted a life-generating (or at least life-permitting) one.
But he, and you, are still stick with the supposition that many other, non-life-permitting universes are POSSIBLE, other ways he can’t do the Information calc.
And, as you seem to agree, that is not a supposition that we can take for granted.
No, the laws of physics which are the laws of this universe.
You are not using Dembski’s definition of information, because using Dembski’s the information IS the probability that the pattern in question (in this case, a life-permitting universe) could come about by chance, or rather the negative log of it, so the less probable by chance, the more information.
If you are using a different definition, please give it.
It doesn’t exist indeed 🙂 Do read Dembski’s paper.
It’s really good that you agree with this, William. I’m not 100% it’s true, but I’m happy that you are confident that it is 🙂
Information, according to Dembski, is the negative log of the probabiliity of a pattern turning up in a single chance draw. Therefore, if we don’t have that probability, we don’t know how much Information is associated with that pattern. And if we don’t know how much information there is (negative log of the probability by single chance draw), the question of how it got there doesn’t even arise.
No, because you are still missing the point that the Information, as per Dembski, IS the probability-by-chance (i.e. of turning up the item on a single chance draw). To help, let’s suppose that we DO have the data on which to make the probability estimate, and it turns out that there are gazillion possible universes, of which only one – this one – is life-permitting.
Now we can say that the InformationDembski is very high, and must be accounted for, either by Chance or by Design.
Well, the only way such a low probability universe could have come about by Chance, is if there were actually a gazillion universes – because if you play the Lottery enough times, you might just win (Chance, but gazillions of draws). So the materialist would have to “resort” to “multiverses” to explain our High Information universe, i.e. our Low Probability (on one chance draw) universe.
At which point the IDists say, as they do: but this is a Just So story – we have no evidence for multiverses, we must infer a Designer, to account for this High Information i.e. Low Probability (by one chance draw).
But the whole issue is moot, because, as you and I agree :
WE CANNOT COMPUTE THE PROBABILITY OF THIS UNIVERSE
Therefore we cannot compute its Information, therefore we cannot know whether there is even a question to address.
Good idea, but the impasse would be easily resolved if you would answer these questions:
Do you agree that Dembski is defining Information as the negative log of the probability of the observed pattern (e.g. a life-permitting universe) turning up by Chance (i.e. a single random “blind” draw?)
If yes,
Do you agree that we therefore cannot compute the InformationDembski of a life-permitting universe?
If not, why not?
And if you don’t agree that Dembski is defining Information at the negative log of the probability of turning the Target up on a single chance draw, can you tell me how you think he IS definining Information?
Elizabeth said: “Good idea, but the impasse would be easily resolved if you would answer these questions:”
Not if one or both of us is suffering from ideological blindness.
Do you agree that Dembski is defining Information as the negative log of the probability of the observed pattern (e.g. a life-permitting universe) turning up by Chance (i.e. a single random “blind” draw?)
Yes.
If yes,
Do you agree that we therefore cannot compute the InformationDembski of a life-permitting universe?
If by this you mean we cannot compute the chance that the required information will be present in the chemistry and landscape in our universe, then yes.
These points are assumed in my responses to you.