Or “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.”
Recently a personal letter written apparently by Albert Einstein has been sold for close to 3 million dollars here. In it, Einstein supposedly claims that belief in God is a representation of human weakness… If that is true, why so many other statements by Einstein seem to support his belief in at least a god?
In February 2018, I wrote a comment at amazon for Dr. Robert J. Marks II’s, Dr. Dr. William A. Dembski’s, and Dr. Winston Ewert’s book Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics (1st Edition):
We are all waiting for the ultimate book on Intelligent Design, written by R. Marks and W. Dembski. Instead we get a “textbook”, another attempt to explain the concepts to laymen. I got the impression that the authors used this setting to avoid the necessary rigour: they just do not define terms like “search” which they use hundreds of times. This allows for a lot of hand-waving, like the following sentence on p. 174:
“We note, however, the choice of an algorithm along with its parameters and initialization imposes a probability distribution over the search space”
That unsubstantiated claim is essential for their following proofs on “The Search for a Search”!
And then there are details like this one:
p. 130: “For the Cracker Barrel puzzle [we got] an endogenous information of I = 7.15 bits”
p. 138: “We return now to the Cracker Barrel puzzle. We showed that the endogenous information […] is I = 7.4 bits”I tried to solve this conundrum, but I came up with I = 7.8 bits. I contacted the authors, but got no reply.
(Details about the Cracker Barrel puzzle – if you are interested)
I gave it a generous two stars. By chance, I looked up my link to my comment today, but I could not find my review – though it was up there for at least a couple of months. Does anyone know what has happened? Surely, The Three Doctores would not steep so low to eliminate unwanted critique!
This thread is meant to be a resource for people to express their hopefully sincere & proper skepticism about Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass’ so-called ‘Peaceful Science’ project on an on-going basis as issues & challenges arise. The purpose for starting this thread now is the announcement of a grant to Peaceful Science (PS) by the mutual fund wealth-based John Templeton Foundation. http://peacefulscience.org/new-voice/
I will express some of my skepticism about PS in a few words: Joshua is strangely aiming by ‘inviting all positions as equal’ to relativise the names ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve,’ while at the same time trying himself to become a ‘genealogist’. The woman in the pair he apparently has some kind of a gender bias against, since he hasn’t laid out why he sometimes omits her & only sometimes brings Eve into the conversation. I predicted here a few months ago that Joshua would eventually change his almost exclusively ‘Genealogical Adam’ talk to finally start being more inclusive with ‘Genealogical Adam & Eve.’ Joshua hasn’t taken the hint by adapting his language & thinking yet, though he has been known to change his mind about things in the past.
As I have already mentioned it many times before at TSZ quantum mechanics (or quantum physics) has become an inescapable part of many sciences today. Ever since Erwin Schrödinger wrote his book entitled: “What is life?”, it became clear to many scientists that quantum aspects of life would have to make their way to biology.
But, just as it was the case with epigenetics, Darwinists have been resistant to anything that would contradict their preconceived dogma of evolution.
Today, most of evolutionist, though still reluctantly, accept the well established epigenetic influence in the changes of life systems, and some, including few regulars at TSZ, act as if epigenetics has always been predicted by evolution…
Will quantum aspects of life be resisted by Darwinists the same way epigenetics or the ever dwindling so-called junk-DNA in human genome was and still is?
My bet would be that it would be very foolish but Darwinists are capable of that in order to protect their holy grail-Darwinian evolution…However, in some papers, Darwinists have begun to mention the quantum processes as “not well understood”; i.e. why evolution would prefer quantum processes over classical ones… It’s a lot of fun reading those papers with the biased Darwinist scrambling to explain why classical Darwinian evolution was bumped by quantum mechanics …
Continue readingDue to popular demand I will take a quick stab at explaining the applicability of mutual algorithmic information and the information non-growth law to an allele frequency scenario.
First, I’ll outline the allele frequency scenario.
The alleles are 1s and 0s, and the gene G a bitstring of N bits. A gene’s fitness is based on how many 1s it has, so fitness(G) = sum(G). The population consists of a single gene, and evolution proceeds by randomly flipping one bit, and if fitness is improved, it keeps that gene, otherwise it keeps the original. Once fitness(G) = N, the evolutionary algorithm stops and outputs G, which consists of N 1s. The bitstring that is N 1s will be denoted Y. We will denote the evolutionary algorithm E, and it is prefixed on an input bitstring X of length N that will be turned into the bitstring of N 1s, so executing the pair on a universal Turing machine outputs the bitstring of 1s: U(E,X) = Y.
Second, I’ll briefly state the required background knowledge on algorithmic mutual information.
Over at Evolution News, Dr. Douglas Axe argues that merely by using very simple math, we can be absolutely certain that life was designed: it’s an inescapable conclusion. To illustrate his case, he uses the example of a rugged block of marble being transformed by natural weather processes into a statue of a human being. Everyone would agree that this simply can’t happen. And our conclusion wouldn’t change, even if we (i) generously allowed lots and lots of time for the statue to form; (ii) let each body part have a (discrete or continuous) range of permitted forms, or shapes, instead of just one permitted shape; (iii) relaxed the requirement that all body parts have to form simultaneously or in sync, and allowed the different parts of the statue to form at their own different rates; and (iv) removed the requirement that the different parts have to each form independently of one another, and allowed the formation of one part of the statue to influence that of another part.
In his post, Axe rhetorically asks: if we’re so sure that a rugged block of marble could never be transformed by the weather into a human statue, then aren’t we equally entitled to conclude that “blind natural causes” could never have “converted primitive bacterial life into oaks and ostriches and orangutans”? In each case, argues Axe, the underlying logic is the same: when calculating the probability of a scenario which requires many unlikely things to happen, small fractions multiplied by the dozens always result in exceedingly small fractions, and an event which is fantastically improbable can safely be regarded as physically impossible.
In an attempt to persuade Dr. Axe that his logic is faulty on several grounds, I’d like to put eight questions to Dr. Axe, and I sincerely hope that he will be gracious enough to reply.
Continue readingAs a Christmas gift for creationists and all truth enquiring mankind i offer the intellectual foundation of opposing claims by a acclaimed authority.
Creationists/anyone are often enough told they must submit to scientists on conclusions about origins. to reject same conclusions is to reject science or reasonable claims of scientists to being experts in their subject as opposed to anyone else.
Does the free and thoughtful enquirer of truth owe such a deference? I say NO!
It is the intellectual right of all men to not submit to a expert in conclusions but listen to their evidence they have gathered. Then weigh it. In dealing with experts we owe a respect , a presumption, that they have studied uniquely some subject and have gathered knowledge about it. known or new insights.
As most readers at TSZ may already know, I disagree with Michael Behe on several issues (that I’m aware of) the one being common descent… I have expressed my doubts as to why Behe views common descent as a no problem for ID… To state my opinion again, I find that Behe is ‘publicly neutral’ on issues he can’t currently scientifically defend. He simply focuses on the empirical evidence that supports his views, such as the inabilities of mutations and natural selection to evolve complex structures, such as a bacterial flagellum, in small, gradual steps of Darwinian Evolution… Too me, his philosophy is cost effective (very smart) as it probably saves him a lot of unnecessary ‘beatings’ that he taken from Darwinists over the years…
Continue readingProbabilistic thinking is pervasive in evolutionary theory. It’s not a bad thing, just something that needs to be acknowledged and appropriately handled.
At Uncommon Descent, poster gpuccio has expressed interest in what I think of his example of a safecracker trying to open a safe with a 150-digit combination, or open 150 safes, each with its own 1-digit combination. It’s actually a cute teaching example, which helps explain why natural selection cannot find a region of “function” in a sequence space in such a case. The implication is that there is some point of contention that I failed to address, in my post which led to the nearly 2,000-comment-long thread on his argument here at TSZ. He asks:
By the way, has Joe Felsestein answered my argument about the thief? Has he shown how complex functional information can increase gradually in a genome?
Gpuccio has repeated his call for me to comment on his ‘thief’ scenario a number of times, including here, and UD reader “jawa” taken up the torch (here and here), asking whether I have yet answered the thief argument), at first dramatically asking
Does anybody else wonder why these professors ran away when the discussions got deep into real evidence territory?
Any thoughts?
and then supplying the “thoughts” definitively (here)
we all know why those distinguished professors ran away from the heat of a serious discussion with gpuccio, it’s obvious: lack of solid arguments.
I’ll re-explain gpuccio’s example below the fold, and then point out that I never contested gpuccio’s safe example, but I certainly do contest gpuccio’s method of showing that “Complex Functional Information” cannot be achieved by natural selection. gpuccio manages to do that by defining “complex functional information” differently from Szostak and Hazen’s definition of functional information, in a way that makes his rule true. But gpuccio never manages to show that when Functional Information is defined as Hazen and Szostak defined it, that 500 bits of it cannot be accumulated by natural selection.
Paul Davies, cosmologists, physicist and agnostic, with Sara Imari Walker, proposed a theory that information, and not chemicals, is at the very foundation of life…Here
Why? Continue reading
My interest was recently piqued by an article in The Atlantic (October 23, 2018) claiming that “Americans over 50 are worse than younger people at telling facts from opinions, according to a new study by Pew Research Center.” Author Alexis Madrigal summarizes the results of the study: “Given 10 statements, five each of fact and opinion, younger Americans correctly identified both the facts and the opinions at higher rates than older Americans did.” But is the fact vs. opinion dichotomy a viable one? Philosopher John Corvino thinks not. In a hard-hitting article titled, The Fact/Opinion Distinction (The Philosophers’ Magazine, 4 March 2015), he surveys several attempts to elucidate the distinction, and concludes that they all fail.
In my research, I have recently come across the self-assembling proteins and molecular machines called nano-machines one of them being the bacterial flagellum…
Have you ever wondered what mechanism is involved in the self-assembly process?
I’m not even going to ask the question how the self-assembly process has supposedly evolved, because it would be offensive to engineers who struggle to design assembly lines that require the assembly, operation and supervision of intelligence… So far engineers can’t even dream of designing self-assembling machines…But when they do accomplish that one day, it will be used as proof that random, natural processes could have done too…in life systems.. lol
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just watch this video:
TSZ Moderator Mung wrote over at PS about why he is a design proponent (https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/why-i-am-an-id-proponent/2955):
“[I] believe that design is obvious.”
Let’s be clearer and more accurate with our words than are most IDists at the Discovery Institute (DI) based in Seattle. I as well as most, if not all ‘skeptics’ here believe ‘human design’ is obvious. More importantly, however, so do most actual ‘design theorists’ around the world. Do you agree with us about the obvious reality of ‘human design’, Mung, or not?
IDists based at the epicentre of IDism at the DI in Seattle, as well as those who associate themselves with ‘Intelligent Design’ pretty much everywhere else globally, generally refuse to identify & discuss those ‘design theories’ as legitimate scholarship. Why? Is it an unspoken rule their followers are required to obey? Is it just a more than significant oversight on their part which they are innocent for making? Why otherwise would the DI studiously avoid, except for little nibbles of exposure here or there, a rather significant & well-attended field of study already in existence, using the same exact term as theirs: ‘design’?
Is it fathomable that this is because the DI knows that if they were to expose legitimate ‘design theorists’ who reject IDism as voices in their media echo chambers, those scholars & scientists, philosophers & even sometimes theologians, might outshine their own reactionary politically-oriented ‘intelligent design theories’ (acknowledging it the way they always officially write it now, in lowercase form, according to DI hidden policy) and thus upset the Founders & Donors of the IDM?
Historian Jon Meacham: “To some extent what’s happening is as particularly mainline Protestantism begins to fade from the center of the country, to some extent political strife and political loyalties have replaced religious belief and religious practice.”
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.
Part of my broader point that Dembski’s argument is support by standard information theory.
The article is pretty technical, though not as technical as the paper by Leonid Levin I got the ideas from. If you skim it, you can get the basic idea.
https://am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/
First, I prove that randomness and computation cannot create mutual information with an independent target, essentially a dumbed down version of Levin’s proof. Dembski’s CSI is a form of mutual information, and this proof is a more limited version of Dembski’s conservation of information.
Next, I prove that a halting oracle (intelligent agent) can violate the conservation of information and create information.
Finally, I show that there is a great deal of mutual information between the universe and mathematics. Since mathematics is an independent target, then by the conservation of information there should be zero mutual information. Therefore, the universe must have been created by something like a halting oracle.
I cannot promise a response to everyone’s comments, but the more technical and focussed, the more likely I will respond.
It’s not every day you discover a new (supra) kingdom, but a Facebook friend has done just that. Based on phylogenetic analysis (that thing that doesn’t tell us anything, heh heh), they differ genetically from known protists more than we do from fungi (which are more closely related to us than to plants).
As most readers at TSZ already know Dr. Swamidass is, or at least attempts to appear, as a new-age prophet with a noble idea of the unifying evolutionary science with Intelligent Design. Not bad a idea…huh? Peaceful relations between two world views… So what could be wrong with that? Right?