Thinking about Thinking

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Metacognition as a ladder to enlightenment?

We humans are sentient beings. By some means or other, our species has ended up with, at least in our own opinion, with cognitive abilities that separate sharply from our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, with whom we share 99% of our genes. We have made huge advances in knowledge which we can store, share and use in scientific research, cultural development, building infrastructure, exploration, travel, transport. This huge explosion in cultural evolution needed and may be driven by that exceptional intelligence. Is there any limit to what we can achieve? I say there is.

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Is Behe’s acceptance of common descent confusing?

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In his recent video Michael Behe explains the reasons for his acceptance of common descent.

Do you find it confusing?

Most members of the Discovery Institute find the idea of common descent lacking. Behe, ‘for the sake of the argument’ , is willing to accept it and, instead, focus on the mechanism of Darwinian evolution, natural selection and random mutations, as insufficient to explain evolution.

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Definitions involving “Intelligent Design”: DI Fellows’ language vs. Everyone Else’s

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Not long ago in a comment here, I posted a short version of definitions involving the Discovery Institute’s “Intelligent Design” (ID) paradigm, hypothesis, movement, theory, inference, policy, heuristic, or whatever one wants to call it, depending on which person they’re speaking with. This was done because the person in the conversation I was responding to appeared to be, to me at least, quite obviously conflating two meanings into one term (thing & theory). And he didn’t seem to realize that he was doing it. (Aside: there appear to be multiple reasons why people tempted by ideological Intelligent Designism [IDism] or repelled by it, may feel they need to intentionally conflate definitions of ID.) I wondered what might be the issue with what was merely an attempt to lay out simple definitions, for mutual benefit towards clearer communications, or ‘operations’ as some people here like to call it.

Within days, to my surprise, I discovered the exact same thing in a long exchange with a Discovery Institute () Fellow on a social media platform. This person too conflated two meanings into one. Why also is that? And this person wanted to equivocate over whether or not there even is a “movement” at play, before finally conceding that yes, indeed, there is = the IDM based at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, USA. The conversation reminded me of previous ones at Uncommon Descent & BioLogos with Eddie, now of Peaceful Science and Potiphar, who only begrudgingly, after listing off a number of ways that this “Movement” could only properly or ‘officially’ be spoken about, according to his somewhat “philosophistic” definition of “Intelligent Design theory” (IDT), conceded the point of there being a “Movement”, with all of DI-CSC’s Fellows admitted as members.

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A nontechnical recap

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David Nemati and Eric Holloway, “Expected Algorithmic Specified Complexity.” Bio-Complexity 2019 (2):1-10. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2019.2. Editor: William Basener. Editor-in-Chief: Robert J. Marks II.

I recommend that you read “Recap Redux” instead of this post.

In Section 4 of their article, Nemati and Holloway claim to have identified an error in a post of mine. They do not cite the post, but instead name me, and link to the homepage of The Skeptical Zone. Thus there can be no question as to whether the authors regard technical material that I post here as worthy of a response in Bio-Complexity. (A year earlier, George Montañez modified a Bio-Complexity article, adding information that I supplied in precisely the post that Nemati and Holloway address.) Interacting with me at TSZ, a month ago, Eric Holloway acknowledged error in an equation that I had told him was wrong, expressed interest in seeing the next part of my review, and said, “If there is a fundamental flaw in the second half, as you claim, then I’ll retract it if it is unfixable.” I subsequently put a great deal of work into “The Old Switcheroo,” trying to anticipate all of the ways in which Holloway might wiggle out of acknowledging his errors. Evidently I left him no avenue of escape, given that he now refuses to engage at all, and insists that I submit my criticisms to Bio-Complexity.
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If ID is false, why can we detect human engineered virii?

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There is a strong suspicion the coronavirus is an escaped specimen from a Chinese lab.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf

An Indian scientist has purportedly discovered HIV inserted into the coronavirus. If true, this is pretty conclusive evidence the virus is humanly engineered, i.e. intelligently designed.

So, herein lies the conundrum. According to popular imagination, ID is both bad science and false (remember, good science is the falsifiable sort ;). If true, then it should not be possible to detect intelligent intervention in the genetic code.

Yet, this recent news item purports to be exactly that: identification of intelligent intervention in the genetic code.

Please explain this to me like I am 5: how can ID be both bad science and false, yet at the same time it is possible to identify intelligent intervention in the genetic code? If we can do so for the recent past, why can’t we do the same for the distant past?

Thanks!

The old switcheroo

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David Nemati and Eric Holloway, “Expected Algorithmic Specified Complexity.” Bio-Complexity 2019 (2):1-10. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2019.2. Editor: William Basener. Editor-in-Chief: Robert J. Marks II.

Eric Holloway has littered cyberspace with claims, arrived at by faulty reasoning, that the “laws of information conservation (nongrowth)” in data processing hold for algorithmic specified complexity as for algorithmic mutual information. It is essential to understand that there are infinitely many measures of algorithmic specified complexity. Nemati and Holloway would have us believe that each of them is a quantification of the meaningful information in binary strings, i.e., finite sequences of 0s and 1s. If Holloway’s claims were correct, then there would be a limit on the increase in algorithmic specified complexity resulting from execution of a computer program (itself a string). Whichever one of the measures were applied, the difference in algorithmic specified complexity of the string output by the process and the string input to the process would be at most the program length plus a constant. It would follow, more generally, that an approximate upper bound on the difference in algorithmic specified complexity of strings y and x is the length of the shortest program that outputs y on input of x. Of course, the measure must be the same for both strings. Otherwise it would be absurd to speak of (non-)​conservation of a quantity of algorithmic specified complexity.
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Walking sharks evolving fast. Don’t miss out!

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It boggles my mind when I read Darwinian propaganda like this:

“These sharks have evolved to walk on land—and they did it quickly” here

Or this Science Alert:

“Rapid Evolution Made These Paper Wasps Capable of Recognising Each Other’s Faces” here

Or

“Profound’ evolution: Wasps learn to recognize faces” here

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Evolution (“accident & luck”) vs. Careful Advanced Planning, according to whom?

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A psychiatrist in Toronto, Canada, in defense of swamidass’ fellow secular methodological naturalist and atheist partner in provocation over at PS, Nathan Lents (Human Errors), just said something I find quite curious, in case he is serious in his claim. It had appeared to me that this person who said it promotes ideological evolutionism. Yet this claim establishes at least some kind of important knowledge ‘boundary’ or ‘limit’ that ‘evolutionary’ thinking does not and cannot cross by definition. Perhaps he will come here to try to explain his terms in an effort to help clarify this difficulty.

Dr. Faizal Ali says,

“The truth is that evolution largely proceeds by accident and luck, both good and bad, and rarely if ever arrives at a solution of the sort that would be found by careful advanced planning.” https://betterrightthanhappy.com/nathan-lents-on-our-imperfect-body/

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Is anything in biology , man, beast, plant, in millions etc of species evolving as we speak?

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I say no but why do evolutionists?

This is a sly way to demonstrate how unlikely evolutionism is on a probability curve.when on thinks of the millions (billions?) of segregated populations in biology(species) then it should be a high, or respectable percentage, are evolving as we speak to create new populations with new bodyplans to survive in some niche. By high I mean millions, with a allowance for mere hundreds of thousands. YET I am confident there is none evolving today. further i suspect evolutionists would say there is none evolving today. WHY? If not today what about yesterday or 300 years ago? Why couldn’t creationists say its not happening today because it never happened? Its accurate sampling of todays non evolution for predicting none in the past!

i think the only hope (hope?) is if evolutionism said , under pE influence, that all biology today is in the stasis stage and just waiting for a sudden need to change, qickly done, then stasis again. Yet why would it be that stasis has been reached so perfectly today relative to the enormous claim of the need in the past for evolutionism?

Anyways i think creationists have a good point here but willing to be corrected.

15.5 hours.

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Over two working days.

In this comment colewd says: “Let’s start with this overview.”

An “overview” that according to this tool contains 187153 words.

Where those words according to this tool will take over 15 hours to read.

15 hours for an “overview”. 15 hours.

If only there was some way to take a sprawling set of claims and refine them down into a core that could then be reviewed by others and feedback given until it is a reasonable size (typically 3,000 to 10,000 words on the average scientific paper) where all claims have been tested by other experts and errors removed.

It seems to be it’s a strategy. Never get pinned down on anything too specific and you never have to be wrong. Hence the sprawl.

colewd, do you seriously expect people to spend 15 hours reading an “overview”? How long is the main argument? A million or two words?

’Divergence of Character’ Myth

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As shown repeatedly, “Nothing in Evolution Makes Sense. Period.” Not natural selection, gradualism, human evolution, UCD, tree of life, etc. And just to confirm, let’s look at another one of the nonsensical concepts of “evolution”.

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Does Swamidass’ new “genealogical adams and eves” hypothesis unknowingly serve to “make God a monster”?

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As 2020 both cools down in temperature and heats up in rhetoric, here is a response to S. Joshua Swamidass’ recent book that deserves more air time given how a few evangelical Protestant theologians and apologists are expressing surprised praise at it, calling it a ‘game changer’ because of ‘genealogy’ vs. ‘genetics’. I would consider it a ‘game changer’ only in a borrowed or catch-up sense of that term, given Swamidass’ YECist+ audience. Any thoughts here on this critical review of the book by a fellow evangelical active at BioLogos?

From what I’ve read so far, I do not see that Swamidass “makes God a monster” in the book. That rather appears to be what comes from Johnson’s hermeneutics, rather than Swamidass’ intentions or expressions. BioLogos was similarly confused, and hadn’t read Kemp, much like Swamidass (that is, until he finally did). Swamidass has previously written about dungeons & suffering, which perhaps by some people may be mistaken as ‘monstrous’. It would be more appropriate and charitable to say, ‘he knows not what he does’ by opening this rift. Thus, he speaks about “what it means to be human?” as a distant (methodological) naturalist, with an important background personal concern involving local fellow YECists and activistic sociology behind the book’s publication (e.g. choice of publishing house).

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Happy New Year

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To all TSZ Members and Readers!

The end of the year and the imminent arrival of the new decade made me wonder when exactly Dr Liddle set this blog up. I see it was in (or at least prior to) August, 2011. Lizzie put up her first opening post Where does information come from? here. You can tell it’s the first because the link is to “hello_world”, the example post that comes with the WordPress package. UD addicts may like to follow this link to exchanges between Lizzie and the charming Upright Biped that may have had some part in the birth of TSZ. So TSZ is well on the way to it’s first decade – a remarkable achievement considering Lizzie has not actively participated here for some years.

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Quantum jitters behind DNA mutations

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It was just a matter of time before quantum mechanics were to be identified as the driving force behind DNA mutations…

“In the past, we knew DNA polymerases make mistakes during DNA replication but did not know how they do it,” said Zucai Suo, Ph.D., Ohio State professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “Now, our study provides a mechanistic sense for how the mistakes arise.”

The results provide “convincing validation for the chemical origins of mutations proposed by Watson and Crick in 1953,” said Myron Goodman, Ph.D., a professor of molecular biology and chemistry at the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study. “It is significant scientifically, and even though it took about 65 years to prove, it also demonstrates the folly of ever betting against Watson and Crick.”

One of the surprising discoveries made by the team was that the frequency at which bases shifted their shapes varied with DNA sequence. In one of their experiments, Ohio State biochemists Zucai Suo and Walter Zahurancik essentially counted the number of times that polymerases incorporated the wrong base into the DNA. They found that mistakes were indeed not uniform: they appeared more frequently in some sequences than others. For example, a region with more Gs and Cs might form more quantum jitters, and subsequently more mutations, than an area that was rich in As and Ts.

But, it doesn’t end there…

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