I’ve added a menu item called “Old but Active” where you can find threads that are still creating discussion but which have dropped off the front page.
I’ve also added two new categories, one for Upright Biped’s Semiotic Argument for ID and one for Granville Sewell’s (or anyone else’s) ideas about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
I hope this will make things easier to find. The search engine actually works fairly well, though.
To a post a made back in October 2011, here. He posted his response shortly after mine, at UD, and I copied into that earlier thread on November 14th, and promised to respond later. I never did, so here is his response again, in full.
I will make my responses in installments, in the comments, as it is rather long.
Upright BiPed’s UD post is below the fold:
UD has featured a post by James Barham on the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard. I shall be questioning Barham’s conclusions.
Unlike the subject of my previous column in this series, James A. Shapiro, she does not present her ideas as revolutionary or as a mortal threat to the Darwinian worldview.
In my opinion (as a non-biologist), she is entirely correct about that.
And yet, I shall argue that West-Eberhard—who is a researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, as well as a professor of biology at the University of Costa Rica—has made a foudational contribution to a new and revolutionary approach to evolutionary theorizing that bids fair (whatever her expressed intentions) to turn mainstream Darwinism on its head.
Perhaps it challenges the strawman version of Darwinism that creationists and ID proponents love to criticize. But I don’t see it as any challenge at all to Darwinism. Continue reading
There was apparently an October 2010 conference at Biola U., under the title “God & Evolution.” Videos for some of the talks are now available, and I have listened to three of them. The ones that I listened to were talks by Denyse O’Leary, John G. West and Jay W. Richards.
The talk by Denyse O’Leary was the first that I listened to, and it is startling. The other two are mild by comparison. Early in her talk, O’Leary says:
The problem with Darwinism is that it is a cultural mood. It is not really a theory in science. If you look at the actual science literature, what’s available to show Darwinism is negligible, piddling; the major claims are not met. Continue reading
As much as I hate to drive any traffic to Uncommon Descent, Granville Sewell has clarified his misunderstanding of the Second Law there recently.
Of particular note is his response to the argument that “The second law only applies to thermal entropy, and what is happening in this video does not result in a net decrease in thermal entropy, so there’s no conflict with the second law.”
In fact, it is universally recognized that the second law of thermodynamics applies to more than thermal entropy, it applies to other types of entropy, for example, the “X-entropy” associated with any other diffusing component X: as pointed out in my AML paper, these types of entropy are defined by the same equations as thermal entropy, and are equally quantifiable. And it is widely applied in physics texts to less quantifiable types of “entropy.”
I would be interested in references to the physics texts in which his concept of entropy is “widely applied” but he seems to have inadvertently disabled comments on his post. Perhaps it will provoke discussion here instead.
I’m off to Barcelona for a few days – be good 🙂
Yesterday, I upgraded some plug-ins, and one of them contained an error. As a result, yesterday member contact details were visible on the members page. I have temporarily deleted everything on that page, and will restore it to how it was later, now that they have corrected the error. I have now installed the correct update, and restored the page.
In future I will immediately check all visible pages after an update to prevent this happening again. Apologies to all for not being quicker off the mark, and thanks to Rich for the tip-off.
I have added another rule to the site rules:
This rule applies to all areas of the site.
ETA: On reflection, policy amended as below and here.
Definition of God: First cause, prime mover, objective source of human purpose (final cause) and resulting morality, source of free will; omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent inasmuch as principles of logic allow. I am not talking in particular about any specifically defined religious interpretation of god, such as the christian or islamic god.
Definition: Intellectual dishonesty occurs when (1)one deliberately mischaracterizes their position or view in order to avoid having to logically defend their actual views; and/or (2) when someone is arguing, or making statements against a position while remaining willfully ignorant about that position, and/or (3) when someone categorically and/or pejoratively dismisses all existent and/or potential evidence in favor of a conclusion they claim to be neutral about, whether they are familiar with that evidence or not.
In a recent UD post, Gil has been more specific than he often is, so I thought I would respond here:
The resolution of the debate about the creative powers of natural selection is dead simple and utterly trivial to figure out.
- Natural selection throws stuff out. Throwing stuff out has no creative power.
- Existing biological information, mixed and matched, can be filtered by natural selection, as in sexual reproduction, but nothing inherently new is created.
- Random errors can produce survivability quotients, but only in circumstances in which overall functional degradation supports survival in a pathological environment (e.g., bacterial antibiotic resistance), and only given massive probabilistic resources and a few trivial mutational events capable of producing the survival advantage.
- Random errors are inherently entropic, and the more complex a functionally-integrated system becomes, the more destructive random errors become. Anyone with any experience in even the most elementary engineering enterprise knows this.
To his first, I cite this:
Cornelius Hunter has posted an odd argument:
Is there evidence for evolution? Sure, there is plenty of evidence for evolution. But there are significant problems with evolution. There is plenty of evidence for evolution just as there is plenty of evidence for geocentrism. But the science does not bode well for either theory.
So the evidence for evolution follows this general pattern: Even at its best, it does not prove evolution to be a fact. And furthermore, the evidence reveals substantial problems with evolution.
So how can evolutionists proclaim evolution to be a fact with such fervor? There seems to be a glaring mismatch between the evidence and the truth claims of evolutionists. The answer is that evolutionists use contrastive reasoning. Evolution is not claimed to be a fact based on how well it fits the evidence, but rather on how poorly the alternative fits the evidence. Evolution is proved by the process of elimination.
In other words, Hunter is arguing directly against Dembski:.
In eliminating chance and inferring design, specified complexity is not party to an argument from ignorance. Rather, it is underwriting an eliminative induction. Eliminative inductions argue for the truth of a proposition by actively refuting its competitors (and not, as in arguments from ignorance, by noting that the proposition has yet to be refuted)
As Upright BiPed is only here occasionally, I’ve unstickied the Semiotic theory of ID thread, and I’m posting this one as a breadcrumb trail (i.e. click on the link to find it). Please continue to comment on the other thread (comments are closed on this placeholder, but open on the old thread).
I like this.
For purposes of this discussion.
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Chance = non-teleological causes that happen to result in particular effects via regularities referred to as “lawful” and stochastic in nature.
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Purpose = teleological causes that are intended to result in particular effects; the organization of causes towards a pre-defined future goal.
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My question is: can chance causes generate all of the effects normally associated with purpose,but without purpose? IOW, is purpose necessary to produce all, most, or some apparently purposeful effects, or is purpose, in effect, only an associated sensation by-product or side-effect that isn’t necessary to the generation of any particular effect normally associated with it?
Tom English has recommended that we read Dembski and Marks’ paper on their Law of Conservation of Information (not to be confused with the Dembski’s previous LCI from his book No Free Lunch). Dembski also has touted the paper several times, and I too recommend it as a stark display of the the authors’ thinking.
Most people won’t take the time to carefully read a 34-page paper, but I submit that the authors’ core concept of “conservation of information” is very easily understood if we avoid equivocal and misleading terms such as information, search, and target. I’ll illustrate it with a setup borrowed from Joseph Bertrand.
The “Bertrand’s box” scenario is as follows: We’re presented with three small outwardly identical boxes, each containing two coins. One has a two silver coins, one has two gold coins, and one has a silver coin and a gold coin. We’ll call the boxes SS, GG, and SG. We are to randomly choose a box, and then randomly pull a coin from the chosen box.
Bob Lloyd, professor emeritus of chemistry at Trinity College Dublin, wrote an opinion article in Mathematical Intelligencer (MI) commenting on Sewell’s not-quite-published AML article. This was mentioned in a previous thread, where Bob briefly commented. Granville was invited to participate but never showed up.
In response to Lloyd, Sewell submitted a letter to the editor. On advice of a referee, his letter was rejected. (Rightly so, in my view. More on that later.) Sewell has now written a post on Discovery Institute’s blog describing his latest misfortune. The post contains Sewell’s unpublished letter and some of the referee’s comments. I invite you to continue the technical discussion of Sewell’s points started earlier.
Tom English has a great post at his blog, Bounded Science, which I have his permission to cross post here:
And so does Bill Dembski. But it is Marks who, in a “Darwin or Design?” interview, reveals plainly the fallacy at the core of his and Dembski’s notion of “active information.” (He gets going at 7:50. To select a time, it’s best to put the player in full-screen mode. I’ve corrected slips of the tongue in my transcript.)
[The “no free lunch” theorem of Wolpert and Macready] said that with a lack of any knowledge about anything, that one search was as good as any other search. [14:15]And what Wolpert and Macready said was, my goodness, none of these [“search”] algorithms work as well as [better than] any other one, on the average, if you have no idea what you’re doing. And so the question is… and what we’ve done here is, if indeed that is true, and an algorithm works, then that means information has been added to the search. And what we’ve been able to do is take this baseline, that all searches are the same, and we’ve been able to, in cases where searches work, measure the information that is placed into the algorithm in bits. And we have looked at some of the evolutionary algorithms, and we found out that, strikingly, they are not responsible for any creation of information. [14:40]
And according to “no free lunch” theorems, astonishingly, any search, without information about the problem that you’re looking for, will operate at the same level as blind search.” And that’s… It’s a mind-boggling result. [28:10]
Bob has read into the “no free lunch” (NFL) theorem what he believed in the first place, namely that if something works, it must have been designed to do so. Although he gets off to a good start by referring to the subjective state of the practitioner (“with a lack of knowledge,” “if you have no idea what you’re doing”), he errs catastrophically by making a claim about the objective state of affairs (“one search is as good as any other search,” “all searches are the same”).
I’ll follow Patrick’s lead and offer a few comments on another paper from the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. The paper analyzes Tom Schneider’s ev program, and while there are several problems with the analysis, I’ll focus on the first two sentences of the conclusions:
The success of ev is largely due to active information introduced by the Hamming oracle and from the perceptron structure. It is not due to the evolutionary algorithm used to perform the search.
To explain the authors’ terminology, active information is defined quantitatively as a measure of relative search performance — to say that something provides N bits of active information is to say that it increases the probability of success by a factor of 2N. The Hamming oracle is a function that reports the Hamming distance between the its input and a fixed target. The perceptron structure is another function whose details aren’t important to this post. Figure 1 shows how these three components are connected in an iterative feedback loop.
Well let’s look at what natural selection is-
“Natural selection is the result of differences in survival and reproduction among individuals of a population that vary in one or more heritable traits.” Page 11 “Biology: Concepts and Applications” Starr fifth edition
“Natural selection is the simple result of variation, differential reproduction, and heredity—it is mindless and mechanistic.” UBerkley
“Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.” Dawkins in “The Blind Watchmaker”?
“Natural selection is therefore a result of three processes, as first described by Darwin:
Variation
Inheritance
Fecunditywhich together result in non-random, unequal survival and reproduction of individuals, which results in changes in the phenotypes present in populations of organisms over time.”- Allen McNeill prof. introductory biology and evolution at Cornell University
OK so it is a result of three processes- ie an output. But is it really non-random as Allen said? Nope, whatever survives to reproduce survives to reproduce. And that can be any number of variations taht exist in a population.
Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II have made available a paper titled Climbing the Steiner Tree — Sources of Active Information in a Genetic Algorithm for Solving the Euclidean Steiner Tree Problem wherein they claim to have identified sources of “active information” in a genetic algorithm used to find solutions to a Steiner problem. The problem referenced in this paper was originally described by Dave Thomas on the Panda’s Thumb almost six years ago. I developed a GA to solve the problem that Dave posed as a challenge a few weeks later, as did a number of other people.
This paper suffers from numerous flaws, starting with a fundamental mischaracterization of the purpose of Thomas’s solution and including general misunderstanding of genetic algorithms, misapplication of the No Free Lunch theorems, spurious claims about “active information”, and incorrect and unsupported assertions regarding the impact of certain GA implementation details.
Continue reading