Eric Anderson, at UD writes, to great acclaim
:
Well said. You have put your finger on the key issue.
And the evidence clearly shows that there are not self-organizing processes in nature that can account for life.
This is particularly evident when we look at an information-rich medium like DNA. As to self-organization of something like DNA, it is critical to keep in mind that the ability of a medium to store information is inversely proportional to the self-ordering tendency of the medium. By definition, therefore, you simply cannot have a self-ordering molecule like DNA that also stores large amounts of information.
The only game left, as you say, is design.
Unless, of course, we want to appeal to blind chance . . .
Can anyone make sense of this? EA describes DNA as “an information rich molecule”. Then as a “self-ordering molecule”. Is he saying that DNA is self-ordering therefore can’t store information? Or that it does store information,therefore can’t be self-ordering? Or that because it is both it must be designed? And in any case, is the premise even true? And what “definition” is he talking about? Who says that “the ability of a medium to store information is inversely proportional to the self-ordering tendency fo the medium?” By what definition of “information” and “self-ordering” might this be true? And is it supposed to be an empirical observation or a mathematical proof?
It seems to be a case of jumping to a conclusion based on wishful thinking.
A citation seems to be needed there.
If I store information (such as I do in a computer), then I want it to stay stored. If the place where I store it is self-organizing, or changing its internal structure by itself, that is likely to erase the information that I am trying to store.
This seems to be an absurdly wrong way of looking at the question.
Human society is self-organizing, and stores loads of information. Now maybe if a Martian (or other alien) wanted to store information in our social structures, we would keep messing that up, and that Martian storing of information would fail. But it doesn’t prevent us from storing information.
One has to distinguish between an external agent storing information in a self-organizing system, and a self-organizing system using information for its own purposes. EA has not made that distinction. Presumably he is presupposing an external designer, and not considering the implications of self-design
Yes, he does contradict himself. He’s also just plain wrong, but that’s never a surprise when dealing with creationists.
As an engineer and scientist, the idea of self-organisation isn’t at odds with effective information storage. at all In fact, if you replace “self-organising” with “error-correcting”, then it’s pretty ordinary. Error Correcting Codes are commonplace, and the idea is to be able to reassemble a sequence even in the face of transcription errors, which is a reasonable analogue of what DNA does. If I remember correctly, DNA polymerases actually can do some error correction. There are many good papers and articles on this.
As usual, design is not needed, and just plain daft as a suggested answer.
Neil Rickert,
I think any information stored in DNA by a designer would be erased by drift and selection. For example, a message or product number. Even functional code unless it passes the sieve of selection.
This statement by Eric Anderson is false.
On the contrary, there are self-organizing processes at every level of complexity in condensed matter. ID/creationists simply avoid looking or simply deny this common and easily observed fact.
The hexagon on Saturn is a nice example of self-organization; and that isn’t even a living system.
One doesn’t have to look very far up the chain of complexity to see stark evidence of self-organization. Even superconductivity is an example that takes place in relatively simple materials (e.g., lead, which is a condensation of a bunch of lead atoms; how “simple” can you get?) compared to the complex molecules of life.
Self-organization is a dynamic process that occurs when energy and matter flow through any system with strongly interacting parts. It occurs more readily when kinetic energies and potential energies of interaction are of comparable magnitude.
Kairosfocus offers his “explanation” and gets it dead wrong.
He is attempting to make organization something that doesn’t occur spontaneously in hundreds of thousands of systems at all levels of complexity. Despite what kairosfocus pretends to know, dynamic organization occurs in simple systems and becomes even more likely the more complex a system becomes.
Kairosfocus has no comprehension whatsoever of what goes on in most condensed matter systems. He has no clue about what phenomena like hypothermia and hyperthermia tell us about living systems. It has never occurred to him to ask why the phenomena we see in most systems, including living systems, are temperature dependent. I don’t believe anyone in the ID/creationist movement has any idea of what temperature dependence is telling us.
This all gets back to the ID/creationists misconceptions about how atoms and molecules behave. It is not all “spontaneous molecular chaos” down there; as David L. Abel asserts.
We are right in the thick of the tornado-in-a-junkyard fallacy and the “arguments” from thermodynamics again. ID/creationists know even less about the physics and chemistry of condensed matter and soft-matter systems than they do about biology; and they know essentially nothing about biology.
These are old, worn out arguments that betray the ID/creationist’s complete lack of understanding of science; and these “arguments” reveal what I have often referred to as The Fundamental Misconception of the ID/creationists.
It isn’t just about biology; their misconceptions reach down to the most fundamental notions of physics and chemistry; even at the middle school and high school level.
Above, Mike Elzinga reproduced kairosfocus’ post at UD:
Focus on the second-last sentence:
As far as I can tell, this indicates that kairosfocus believes that the nucleotide base sequence of a D/RNA chain or the amino-acid sequence of a protein is independent of the chemistry involved in creating the biochemical structure of a D/RNA or protein chain in the first place.
I do not understand what this means. Can anyone explain? Is there any evidence that kairosfocus’ claim of “independence” ever happens in nature?
The essential component of DNA is its spatial/entropic property of complementarity. When you mix random strings of bases, any complementary sequences in that mix are more likely to ‘find’ each other and bind – DNA hybridisation. It is closely analogous to crystallisation, though the nature of the molecule means that the ‘crystal’ gets no further. This is how PCR primers find the sequence they were – ahem – designed to amplify, and how by repeated cycles of ‘melting’ and repeat synthesis you can generate shedloads from an incriminating hair. The sequence [‘information’] between primers is irrelevant to the process, even though it’s what you are actually interested in.
One can call the shape and charge of a bare strand ‘information’, but it is information like a fur coat is information for a burr. The sequence matters only because the more complementarity there is, the more entropically favoured the binding.
And personally, I think this gives a glimmer of how xNA may have been ‘selected’ out of a prebiotic chemical mess. There are many different sugar conformations, with many -OH’s that can take an energetic phosphate or another moiety. But short polymers of mixed, stereospecific ATP and UTP (or those plus CTP and GTP) will bind their complement, stabilising both chains, selecting not for their ability to ‘informatically’ synthesise each other, but simply to bind.
The physicochemical thinking at UD is typically limited to short chains of cause-and-effect. Water flows downhill, that’s ‘natural law’. So when they think of a chemical system, they tend to think simply of one molecular configuration turning into another. Since the codon does not turn into the amino acid, they somehow think this is not governed by physical law – ‘necessity’. In order to get such a more complicated interaction, it must have been designed, because ‘everybody knows’ that the acids are ‘materially arbitrary’. Every step of the process flows downhill, entropically, but somehow the existence of multiple alternative possibilities, and modern complexity, means that someone must have chosen this one.
This is a beautifully concise summary of what Upright BiPed seemed to be saying when he was posting here. Multistep chemical reactions plus frozen accident equals
Godthe designer. You should publish in Bio-Complexity!Alan Miller notes:
That is as concisely put as I have ever seen. 🙂
Kairosfocus doesn’t know the mechanism at work in Saturn’s hexagon; nor does he understand self-organization.
And I noticed that he still doesn’t know how to do that high school level scaling up exercise or that entropy concept test.
Copy/paste doesn’t do it for him.
KF said:
“The sequencing is not random and it is not fixed by internal forces.”
This reinforces my belief that ID is more about delineating a gap and defending it’s boundary all without actually saying “that’s the gap the designer is in”. It’ll be strongly implied, but they know that if they stake a specific claim that sooner or later it’ll be undermined by new knowledge. It always has been before! And for their inability to learn, that is one thing that they have learnt.
For all Uprights claims Upright without exception goes silent when asked to fill in that gap. If it was not possible without intelligence Upright, then tell us about that as that’s the interesting part. As “evolution is not possible without something to evolve” is about as interesting and relevant as another of BA’s TLDR screeds.
If it’s not random, and it’s not “fixed by internal forces” when did your designer do it and how Upright? KF?
I love the statement (here):
which seems not to be saying that the evolution of a DNA genome is impossible. Instead it seems to be saying that DNA itself is impossible.
I guess the only reason we would see DNA is that leprechauns are constantly holding each DNA molecule together, because otherwise (according to UD) DNA molecules are impossible.
Joe Felsenstein,
They seem to think that by redefining (information) or creating (FSCO) words they can do without the “evidence” part of science.
And, of course, you can. Just look where it’s got all the folks at UD!
If FSCO is defined as that which only intelligence can create and life is chock-full of FSCO then “by definition” life is designed.
Round of applause for KF etc. But the odd thing is that his lot have known this since the dawn of time. Yet with all the new data modern science and technology can provide ID is not one inch closer to revealing *a single answer*.
KF has just said this:
“But then, DNA is much like ROM. It is not meant to be variable from moment to moment. The processing of templated mRNA with extrons and introns offers possibilities, that are exploited to give another level of FSCO/I: interwoven codes. That is very high art for digital design I can tell you, I just gave thanks for enough memory and never even tried.”
It’s interesting how KF knows what DNA was “meant to be”. And strange how KF does not notice he has refuted his central claim here. KF cannot see the value in “interwoven codes” from a design point of view as they are too complex for him. Yet it’s blithely assumed that they are not complex to the “designer”. On what basis?
So here we have a design that no designer we know would create. Except one, evolution. Evolution does not care about the “readability” of the code.
So here KF points to a thing that he would not himself design in (multi layered codes) as evidence that the thing he is pointing at is designed.
So when he talks about “inference to best explanation” the “best explanation” is to a designer unlike himself. Yet he uses that as evidence to support his case.
Very, very strange.
kairosfocus has yet to admit that failure to “create life by intelligent design” is a good indication that “life cannot be created by intelligent design”.
I really would like to see how badly kairosfocus’s attempt at a self-replicator would be.
OMagain,
I have log been asking ID advocated to demonstrate that biological design is possible without evolution. I’d like to see a proof of concept.
I think what Eric might mean is that if a system is highly deterministic (given state A, it must attain state B) it can’t store additional information, because A already contains all you need to get to B.
Which seems to me to be wrong for a number of reasons.
Firstly, we can have self-organising systems that are highly non-deterministic – in which State A+1 depends not only on A but on other events. The result can be a highly “organised” State B, but now State B may well encode the events that resulted in State B, and not any other of the large numbers of states (also organised) that might have resulted had those events been different.
Secondly, we can have self organising systems that result in highly ordered results, but which are non-reversable – A inevitably leads to B, but so do other initial states, and so A cannot be inferred from B – in which information is lost between A and B, but we can also have reversable systems in which A inevitably leads to B, but in which B is highly complex, and, while A can be inferred from it, can only be inferred from it by reversing the series of sequential steps that took it from A to B in the first place. Thus a simple pattern A could store a large amount of information, but that information is only revealed if A was allowed to “self-organise” itself into B.
Thirdly, a self-replicating molecule is both self-organising, or part of a self-organising system, and information-rich, and when that information is duplicated, it is transferred. Therefore it is a dense information storage system. Therefore DNA itself violates Eric’s rule.
Lastly, none of this tells you whether the thing was designed or not.
petrushka,
By the time biology is possible without evolution I suspect we’ll be well beyond “mere” biology.
OMagain,
Joe at UD has replied to this with:
“We can only answer those questions by studying the design and all relevant evidence- ie via science. We sure as heck don’t have to know those answers to determine design is present and to study it, which is what ID is about.”
If that’s what ID is about, Joe, then
A) What design have you determined is present? Be specific!
B) What have you learnt from studying it this last decade or so?
Elizabeth:
“Thirdly, a self-replicating molecule is both self-organising, or part of a self-organising system, and information-rich, and when that information is duplicated, it is transferred. Therefore it is a dense information storage system. Therefore DNA itself violates Eric’s rule.”
What is it that makes a self-replicating molecule self-organizing?
Why is it the case that if a self-replicating molecule is not self-organizing it must be part of a self-organizing system? If it may be the case that a self-replicating molecule is not self-organizing, and therefore it must be part of a self-organizing system, may it not also be the case that a self-organizing system is not self-replicating and must therefore be part of a larger more inclusive self-organizing super-system? Where does it end?
Why must a self-replicating molecule be “information-rich”? What does that even mean, “Information-rich”? What is “information-poor”?
You claim that information is duplicated and therefore information is transferred. How so?
“Therefore it is a dense information storage system.”
A non-sequitur. That does not follow.
“Therefore DNA itself violates Eric’s rule.”
Another non-sequitur.
Neil Rickert on March 24, 2013 at 12:08 am said:
“If I store information (such as I do in a computer), then I want it to stay stored.”
Smacks of teleology.
What are the material requirements for the storage and transfer of information?
Chemistry.
Why does it have to end? I’d say that the entire biosphere is a self-organising system, consisting of nested self-organising components.
It doesn’t have to be, but it necessarily contains information, in the sense that the pattern in the parent informs the pattern in the offspring. But a long molecule with a complex (e.g. a periodic pattern) is be “information rich”, at least for some definitions of “information”.
I’m really not sure how to answer this. Let me try doing so with a question: You have a bank statement in your hand. Someone wants to see evidence of your financial status. So you photocopy the bank statement. Do you not consider that the information on the original has been transferred to the copy?
I guess it could be a sparse information storage system if it were only partially duplicated.
Well, yes it does, because DNA is information rich (the sequence is complex) and it is self-organising in the sense that it is part of a self-replicating system.
But perhaps Eric doesn’t count self-replication as “self-organising”. If so, it’s hard to know what he does mean.
Oh, and welcome to TSZ Mung 🙂 Thanks for dropping by.
Oh, and Mung, I don’t lie. I am more than capable of being mistaken, but I do not intentionally post things I do not believe to be true.
How does your purported “Intelligent Designer” get information into the material world Mung?
Perhaps you should ask Upright?
How about:
Storage: any material in which a pattern can be impressed
Transfer: a system in which that pattern is replicated in the same or different material
Joe says:
There’s a third alternative, which neither kairosfocus nor Joe seem ever to consider, which is that the corrector may be wrong and the correctee correct.
But I should have asked first, Mung, what definition of “information” are you using?
Lizzie,
Ah, Lizzie, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like UD? It’s sweet of you to hand out the occasional small change of attention to the unfortunate desperate panhandlers of the blogosphere but they’re just going to spend it on the intellectual equivalent of drinking Sterno.
If that lot had anything defensible to say, they’d be parading it around the ‘net instead of hiding behind Barry’s skirts in their echo chamber.
Patrick,
This.
I have to wonder when KF et al will get bored of proclaiming victory and notice that the world moves on without a glance in their direction.
If they had something to say, they’d be saying it in any one of the ID journals which are all desperate for content. I’d love to read all about FSCO/I
Ah, if we start playing that game then everybody will be using the same words to mean the same things and who knows what’ll happen then!
Mung,
How did the designer get the “information” required for life into life? Injection was it? Or direct manipulation of atoms perhaps?
The “how” of “intelligent design” is what makes ID collapse.
If any one of them just had the courage to admit, “it was done outside of any constraints of the physical laws we accept the world is bound by”, they might survive another day by being able to fall back to the Creation card.
That would sink their “science” though!
Toronto,
Yes, I have asked Upright many times at what point his “information” is transferred into the universe, how that was done and so on.
He has yet to answer. He’s afraid I think….
OMagain: “He has yet to answer. He’s afraid I think….”
Yes, and it’s that fear that keeps ID safely confined on sites like UD.
JoeG comments:
I’m afraid if that works for you, JoeG.
However it does not change the fact that you are admitting that you also believe Upright is afraid to answer these sorts of questions also. You don’t deny that Upright has not answered these questions and now you are agreeing that it’s because Upright is afraid.
Which is exactly my point. Glad we can agree on that.
But it’s not a symmetrical situation is it Joe? My side “Darwinism” is the established accepted explanation for the observed fact of evolution. Me being afraid to answer your hard questions is not going to change that. In fact, I’ve nothing to gain by answering them anyway.
Yet the situation is very different for ID. By you not answering these questions yourself you condemn ID to a ignoble fate. Simply, it’ll be torn apart by all the people in the tent pulling in different directions.
Upright is afraid to state when/how the information required for life was placed in the universe because as soon as he does that’ll contradict somebody else’s version of ID. And while you are all happy to sit in the tent among those contradictions the last thing you want is to hand a weapon to those outside the tent that can be used to illustrate the contradictory claims of ID.
Far better for ID if ID makes no claims at all that can be examined, hence the recent move to philosophy at UD.
JoeG,
How many intelligent design intervention events does it take to get from chimps to humans Joe?
Why does the designer not just make all the changes at once instead of exactly emulating what we would expect from a process like Darwinian evolution?
etc etc etc. If these questions are a problem for Darwinian evolution then they are 100x the problem for ID. After all, Darwinism has a mechanism it can call upon. And while you might think, JoeG, that “design” is a mechanism then it’s odd how you are unable to answer your own questions using that?
For example:
Q: How many intelligent design events does it take to get a new body plan?
A: Design!
Not very useful really. Whereas using the equations of evolution you can at least make a start to determine that (differences over time/observed rate of change etc).
Toronto,
JoeG has kindly asked my question for me at UD by quoting me here:
I wonder if any UD person will give an answer. It’ll be the first time ever if so.
OMagain,
I’m going to bet Upright BiPed answers with, “Information is instantiated in matter”.
I predict nothing indicating “how” will follow that.
I also predict we will be schooled by KF on the “improbability of 500 bits”, yet again!
There will also be no answer to your question of “how”.
JoeG,
Yes I can see how:
Q: When do “intelligent design” events happen?
Q: How do “intelligent design” events happen?
Q: What have you learnt from studying the design?
Are questions that have nothing to do with ID.
Please explain how. Bonus points for not making your answer reference Darwinism.
EDIT:
JoeG,
I have to wonder what questions it is then that ID claims to answer, if it’s not the above 3 or similar.
What questions is ID asking Joe? What are your answers?
Joe,
So you don’t know when or how design happened, but you know it did happen and can study it? Is that about right?
So perhaps these questions are relevant:
Q: What is it that you have determined to be designed?
Q: How did you make that determination?
Q: Is that determination accepted by the ID community at large?
Q: What specific design have you studied to come to these conclusions?
Q: If matter and energy is insufficient, what else is required?
Q: On that “what else”, what is it? How did that happen? When did it happen?
On the question of how ID can be tested/falsified you note JoeG:
Yet it seems to me that if you don’t know when or how “intelligent design” events happen you can’t test those particular claims.
Or perhaps you can, so if you’d be so kind JoeG please explain how ID can be tested/falsified if you don’t know “the when or the how” of ID?
What is it that you are testing/falsifying that relates to ID?
Joe tends to attack the messenger and not the message and that is the most powerful weapon in the ID movement.
Critics get mocked by Joe and Mung, and then banned by the moderator which removes the need for any sort of detail for “intelligent design”.
Joe and Mung sound a lot like the creationists Mike Elzinga mentioned that would target science teachers in their own classrooms.
As kairosfocus notes, “Might makes right!”, and that definitely applies to the “mechanisms” of ID.
JoeG,
You seem to have misunderstood my question.
You claimed that you have “studied design” and come to some conclusions.
I’m asking you what design is it that you have studied? Was it a rock? Was it the human eye? What was it?
To do what? Study it? But you’ve already done that you said?
And in any case, that’s your answer is it?
Q: What was designed?
A: Living organisms.
So all life was designed, and all you’ve determined so far is that “there is more to living organisms than just matter and energy”.
Q: Which living organisms?
Q: How did you determine that? What specific data leads you to that conclusion?
Yet you don’t know when or how the design happened, so on what basis are you inferring anything at all?
When you get around to saying what it is that a designer is required for (hint – that’s one of the questions I’m asking) then I’ll be glad to look at that.
No, in fact you’ve done exactly what I hoped you would do. By quoting me then providing your “answers” you’ve shown anybody who cares to look the inconsistency of your position.
Namely, the fact that you claim that design happened but can’t quite bring yourself to say what that even involved, when it happened or how it happened.
So you’ve done my work for me JoeG, you’ve shown that ID does not have answers to the questions that it claims to answer.
So, JoeG, what “cause and effect” relationship was it that you used to work out that living organisms were designed? Did you have to use FSCO/I in that determination?
Joe,
I’m afraid you lose out on the bonus points Joe. If you cannot talk about ID without bringing in Darwinism you are not providing positive evidence for your position.
Therefore you lose.
And presumably you then study that design to come to conclusions about the designer?
Darwin’s Black Box was published 7 years ago. What have you learnt in that almost-decade about “the design”?
You’ve been studying “the design” for decades now Joe. Any news?
Joe,
Did the sea carve that bridge, or did somebody build it?
Did that flagellum evolve or did somebody design it?
We know humans made it. What other options are there?
Yet can the same be said for the flagellum?
Who made the flagellum Joe? When? How? What did they look like?
Ya, see IOW the fact that all of the Antikythera mechanism’s instructions are written in Koine Greek kinda gives us a clue to who it’s designers were.
What language are the instructions for the flagellum written in Joe?
And yet kairosfocus refuses to participate here because we’re too rude for his gentle sensibilities.
OMagain,
“Therefor to refute ID and any given design inference all one has to do is step up and demonstrate that blind and undirected processes can account for it.”
So they’ve given up on even pretending that ID is anything other than a god of the gaps argument over there?
Joe,
When you came to the conclusion that there is more to life then matter and energy, could you describe how you eliminated chance and necessity in that process?
That may well be the case, but I find it interesting that an ID supporter on an ID board cannot actually explain on what basis it is that they are an ID supporter, and doubly interesting that he thinks that questions about ID are belligerent.
As you claim that all of life is designed, that must have been some elimination round. How did you go about doing that?
Joe,
When: When the ability to cast bronze was available.
How: With human hands.
You can find out lots more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#The_Antikythera_Mechanism_Research_Project
Is there a similar page where I can find out all that ID has discovered about biology and how it was designed and when etc?
Somehow I think not.
Now, back to the flagellum:
Q: How?
Q: When?
Joe,
Given that you’ve already inferred design, then please explain what that “more then” consists of.
As you’ve done all of this already (so you claim) I’m sure all your chums at UD would be delighted to hear it.
ROFL.