At last?
Back in 2007, I predicted that the idea of “Intelligent Design” would soon fade into obscurity. I wrote:
My initial assessment of ID in my earliest encounter with an ID proponent* was that ID would be forgotten within five years, and that now looks to me an over-generous estimate.
*August, 2005
I was wrong. Whilst the interest in “Intelligent Design” (ID) as a fruitful line of scientific enquiry has declined from the heady days of 2005 (or perhaps was never really there) there remain diehard enthusiasts who maintain the claim that ID has merit and is simply being held back by the dark forces of scientism. William Dembski; the “high priest” of ID has largely withdrawn from the fray but his ideas have been promoted and developed by Robert Marks and Winston Ewert. In 2017 (with Dembski as a co-author) they published Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, which was heralded as a new development in the ID blogosphere. However, the claim that this represents progress has been met with scepticism.
But the issue of whether ID was ever really scientific has remained as the major complaint of those who dismiss it. Even ID proponents have admitted this to be a problem. Paul Nelson, a prominent (among ID proponents) advocate of ID famously declared in 2004:
Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’ – but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.
Whilst some ID proponents – Ann Gauger, Douglas Axe are perhaps most prominent among them – have tried to develop ID as science, the general scientific community and the wider world have remained unimpressed.
Then a new young vigorous player appears on the field. Step forward, Eric Holloway! Dr Holloway has produced a number of articles published at Mind Matters – a blog sponsored by the Discovery Institute (the paymasters of ID) on artificial and “natural” intelligence. He has also been quite active here and elsewhere defending ID and I have had to admire his persistence in arguing his case for ID, especially as the whole concept is, in my view, indefensible.
But! Do I see cracks appearing? I happened to glance at the blog site formerly run by William Dembski, Uncommon Descent, and noticed an exchange of comments on a thread entitled Once More from the Top on “Mechanism” The post author is Barry Arrington, current owner of UD and a lawyer by trade, usually too busy to produce a thoughtful or incisive piece (and this is no different). However, the comments get interesting when Dr Holloway joins in at comment 48. He writes:
If we can never be sure we account for all chance hypotheses, then how can we be sure we do not err when making the design inference? And even if absolute certainty is not our goal, but only probability, how can we be confident in the probability we derive?
Eric continues with a few more remarks that seem to raise concern among the remaining regulars. ( ” Geeze you are one confused little pup EricMH.” “Has a troll taken over Eric’s account?) and later comments:
But since then, ID has lost its way and become enamored of creationism vs evolution, apologetics and the culture wars, and lost the actual scientific aspect it originally had. So, ID has failed to follow through, and is riding on the cultural momentum of the original claims without making progress.
Dr Holloway continues to deliver home truths:
I would most like to be wrong, and believe that I am, but the ID movement, with one or two notable exceptions, has not generated much positive science. It seems to have turned into an anti-Darwin and culture war/apologetics movement. If that’s what the Discovery Institute wants to be, that is fine, but they should not promote themselves as providing a new scientific paradigm.
I invite those still following the fortunes of ID to read on, though I recommend scrolling past comments by ET and BA77. Has Dr Holloway had a road-to-Damascus moment? Is the jig finally up for ID? I report – you decide!
ETA link
Why don’t you ask Ewert? It was his claim.
[spit-take]
It’s right there on page 7 of his paper. Did you not understand it?
Again, WTF?
Hint: Winston did not align any sequences.
I seriously doubt the share gene claim is false. I am surprised you would make this claim without evidence.
You made the original claim without evidence. Given your track record of being wrong 100% of the time you regurgitate stupid Creationist claims I’m going with the odds.
Heh. Do you think Bill actually read the paper?
Looks like TUBA 1A is more highly preserved across the board then TUBA 3E.
Well, at least you finally figured out what the chicken wisecrack was about. I guess I should be thankful for small mercies.
Ironically, your statement (despite being based on a complete misunderstanding of nomenclature) is correct.
Human TUBA3E is less ‘preserved’ across taxa than TUBA1A — 98.9% aa identity with mice and rats, only 94% with frogs, and (thankfully) the chickens are behaving themselves this time, and clock in at 98% identity for this homolog, which has the exciting name “LOC425049”. I guess the name TUB3AE was already taken.
🙂
The thing I would like you to ponder is this. Despite choosing the genes that YOU wanted to highlight, or picking genes at random (much the same thing, heh), we keep coming up with distances that match the Tree of Life. And (amazingly) if you run the alignment using multiple genes, what noise there is cancels out, leaving the same bloody phylogenetic signal, again and again and again.
Only by cherry-picking attributes that you know are anomalous can you come up with anomalous results. This is what Paul Nelson does. Say no more.
Adapa,
No. I’m pretty confident even Bill would have picked up on the answer to his question if he had actually read the paper. Very safe to say that Bill did not understand the paper.
I am wondering where he got the goofy “100 genes” claim. You can extract it from Fig 9, but …I don’t think he read the paper. I suspect Winston or some other IDist (Cornelius, perhaps?) fed him that ‘factoid’.
I highly doubt that there are 10 gene families with that particular anomalous distribution, but, hey, that which is asserted without evidence…
DNA_Jock,
Phylogenetic signal tells you genetic distances. Genes not following the tree is another fact which is less fun. You are the best spin master but the facts may get in your way here. Thanks for your reference at table 7. I had only skimmed the paper perviously. I visited the data base where these genes are but no luck finding what he claims on the chart. I have no reason to doubt his claim at this point.
keiths:
colewd:
There’s nothing subtle about it. Paul is trying to leave his audience with a false impression of Weiss.
Don’t play dumb, Paul.
You’re a grown man with a PhD. You know perfectly well what Weiss meant when he wrote:
That didn’t fit your desired narrative — “Desperate Darwinist looks to space to rescue theory” — so you misrepresented Weiss.
keiths,
This has very little to do with the substance of the argument even if I agreed with you. I think if read his arguments in total even if he convinced everyone Weiss has converted due to orphan genes it would make very little difference to the overall argument. Everyone spins including you.
So you see nothing wrong with Nelson lying to his lay audience and giving them the false impression Weiss and other scientists think orphan genes are a serious problem for UCD?
Any lie told for Jesus is a good lie, is that what you think?
I’m still waiting for your retraction and apology for the lie you told about me regarding what I said Nelson claimed.
Neil Rickert,
That article is indeed some impressive word salad.
“Simply, why assume that a fixed probability must be assigned to everything in reality? There is no reason why that must be true. Furthermore, we can, to some degree, empirically distinguish between the two scenarios.
If a fixed probability is assigned to everything, then everything we observe will eventually converge to a fixed probability. This concept of convergence is called the “law of large numbers.”
Nobody in their right mind would assign fixed probabilities to all natural phenomena.
You would hope that EricMH has heard of chaotic systems.
Let’s take the probability of rain today in location X. Surely we can’t assign a ‘fixed probability’ to that. The chance of rain depends on a great many variables at many scales, most of which vary from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. It is not possible to extrapolate blindly from past probabilities to future ones, because the weather system is chaotic and non-stationary (something even global warming deniers will hopefully agree with). In the absence of stationarity there is no ‘convergence’.
Past performance is no guarantee for the future, neither in the stock markets, nor in weather forecasts. The human mind isn’t unique in this aspect.
I don’t know much biology (but I do know what a slide rule is for)
So I’ll leave it to the biologists to explain the things we understand much better than Darwin did.
I am confident that among them is how biochemical and evolutionary stochastic/deterministic processes created the biological entities we observe, including minds.
No, that’s the excuse you tell yourself for why it is you keep posting yet every one makes you look like a fool.
This post substitutes scare quotes, bald assertions, and invective for reasoned argument. Plus it is O/T. So I will leave you to it.
That’s Eric’s ID work in a nutshell, as far as I can tell.
You have become incoherent.
“No reason” that is, apart from the fact that you tried to confirm it yourself, and were unable to? Why the suddenly low opinion of your own abilities? Not that I disagree, mind you.
I can help you out here:
In [Ewert W (2018) The dependency graph of life. BIO-Complexity 2018 (3):1-27], the legend to Figure 9 states
In Figure 9, quite the smallest (and weirdest, taxonomically speaking) orange circle is the {Chimp and Rat} and NOT {human or mouse} module. The existence of this orange circle is the only basis I can find for anyone to claim, as Bill did on multiple occasions
Well, let’s have a look at the details of the data, shall we?
I searched HomoloGene for
“Pan troglodytes”[Organism] AND “rattus norvegicus”[Organism] NOT “Homo sapiens”[Organism] NOT “mus musculus” [Organism]
(That is, chimp and rat but not humans or mice. Pan is the genus that covers chimps and bonobos, Bill.)
108 Hits
That’s over 100; sufficient to be included in Winston’s Figure 9: this is promising!
Let’s take a look at the hits:
First hit:
I ran blastp using the Pan seq (XP_508706.5) => oh shit! 80.91% identity with human lysine-specific demethylase 4E (NP_001155102).
Well, that’s awkward. When you use sequence alignment, there’s a human hit that scores better than the rat. In fact, the human alignment is the 22nd best alignment and the preceding 21 alignments are ALL PRIMATES. That’s really awkward.
Second hit:
I tried to retrieve the Pan sequence (XP_527558.2), only to discover: This record was removed as a result of standard genome annotation processing. So there was an annotation error.
Just to be thorough, I ran blastp anyway:
It’s “Quaking isoform” and it is identical in Pan, Rattus, Mus and humans. And platypi, FFS!
Third hit:
LOC459382 RANBP2-like and GRIP domain-containing protein 1 [ Pan troglodytes (chimpanzee) ]
I tried to retrieve the Pan sequence (XP_515602.3), only to discover: This record was removed as a result of standard genome annotation processing.
What, again? Another annotation error? Gonna run blastp anyway:
WTF? The first 46 hits are all human – 92% – 94% identity.
Fourth hit:
Tried to retrieve the Pan sequence (XP_518676.3) This record was removed as a result of standard genome annotation processing.
It’s a coverup! A cover-up, I tell you!
This does seem to confirm my initial prejudice that Winston Ewert has found an overly complicated way of spotting annotation errors, but you are welcome to keep going through the remaining 104 hits. There’s probably a sequence in there somewhere that looks closer in chimps and rats than chimps and humans. That would be ‘noise’.
DNA_Jock,
Good work so far. Are you going to complete your homework?
Rumraket,
Nice spin Rum. You have quite a mentor in Jock right here 🙂
BruceS,
Have you been on his website?
It’s not spin. Your inablity to admit certain concepts even exist is a wonder to behold.
And anyway, what better word is there for someone who has hitched their wagon to a horse that is demonstrably dead. As demonstrated by this very thread.
Nothing apart from, say, all of our knowledge about how ID supporters behave.
Soon it’ll be 2020 and I’ll be asking what the most significant Intelligent Design related development of 2019 was. Given that you’ve already used Winston’s paper last time round colewd, better get your thinking cap on for the next one eh?
Actually, I can see how that might be a problem. Forget I said anything.
OMagain,
The interesting thing is you guys are spinning and you are doing it unconsciously. Jock, Joe and Keiths at least know what they are doing. The rest of you guys are group think sheep.
The concepts you guys sell are spin. The grand claims of evolution are all spin. The amazing part is how many of you don’t realize the maze you live in.
The grand claims of natural selection building complex adaptions rest on Darwins original burden shift.
If some one could demonstrate that a complex feature like an EYE COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE FORMED BY SMALL INCREMENTAL STEPS.
He defined the theory to be empirically unfalsifiable.
Yes, if you mind the mind matters blog.
I studied his exchanges here and at PS. I’ve conducted detailed exchanges with him here and at PS. He says I have an understanding of his ideas upthread. But as I said to him upthread, he has yet to deal with three categories of concerns that I have expressed with his ideas. Among those is the concern that Neil also expressed.
One problem is that Eric gets inundated with criticism at TSZ. I agree with him that many here (but not as much at PS) do not understand his ideas. So I admire him for showing up. But I also agree with Joe that he often disengages from conversations without dealing substantively with criticism and feedback.
One thing I like about PS is that it will establish threads which limit the participants. This makes it possible for someone like Eric to participate at PS without having to reply to everyone on the forum with an opinion. It also makes it easier to draw conclusions about the debate when the discussion closes.
DNA_Jock,
If you could do some more work here I would appreciate it. Just scanned the data you cited I see 15% of the results are ribosomal proteins. I will stratify the data this way.
Thanks again for initiating this search.
Atoms are designed.
BruceS,
I agree. You also can have private conversations there. I have one going on there now with a competent statistician helping look over gpuccio’s work.
OMagain,
Interestingly enough the latest work on gravity.incorporates computational capability in atoms.
BruceS,
Right, it’s time for BruceS to tuck tail in Toronto & run safely into philosophistry as a substitute for putting in effort on non-naturalistic approaches to reality. Sad, but true. Apparently, ‘off-topic’ for BruceS, means anything ‘seeking inspiration’ & higher meaning than ideological naturalism allows.
Regular opposition to such intellectual posturing is actually one of the good results of IDism; they don’t often let such naturalistic posturing as ‘merely scientific’ go unchecked, like atheists/agnostics seem to prefer & expect. Neither do I, which is usually when BruceS, a ‘religiously’ numb Canadian, uninspiring naturalist & promoter of philosophistry, departs frustrated with the change of focus from what he is used to being pointed to. Clear pattern.
Wow, that’s ignorant., Bill,
Darwin offered up a way to falsify his theory.
Knock yourself out.
ID, on the other hand, cannot be falsified, in precisely the same way that Last Thursdayism cannot.
I did do a little more of YOUR homework for you — sufficient to destroy the (meagre) support for YOUR claim that Ewert found 100 genes that are shared by Pan troglodytes and Rattus norvegicus but not found in humans or mice.
Of the first 16 hits on HomoloGene, all 16 are bogus. All 16 chimp sequences have closer homologs in man, and all 16 entries have been updated or removed as annotation errors. Thus, at most 108 – 16 = 92 genes have the claimed distribution. You’re batting zero for 16, mate.
But why should I be to one doing the heavy lifting here? What is stopping you from finding the genes that have this claimed distribution? Is it that, in your heart, you already know what the outcome will be, or is it merely incompetence?
Either way, blathering on about “Spin” when confronted by data is not a sympathetic look, Bill.
Separately, I am entertained that Joshua explained to you the other two possible explanations for this weird result, but it did not sink in enough for you to be able to regurgitate them.
In August of 2018, you appeared to know what incomplete lineage sorting was.
Perhaps not. </Claire Foy>
Results pasted below:
Fourth hit Pan v Rattus = 72.9%
Pan vs human 82.9%
Pan vs mus = 69.4%
Fifth hit
Pan v Rattus = 59.6%
This record was removed as a result of standard genome annotation processing.
Top hit = human EAW79974
95.12%
Sixth hit
60S ribosomal protein L10-like
Pan v Rattus = 96%
Annotation error
Nah: blastp reveals that there is Pan v Rattus is 98%
Pan vs human is 99%
Hit # 7
Pan v Rattus = 79.2%
Annotation error
Blastp top hit = human at 99.26%
Hit# 8
Pan v Rattus = 92.9
Annotation error
quick blastp human at 98.57%
Hit#9
Pan v Rattus = 90.8
Annotation error
quickBlast human at 98.7%
Hit# 10 – same family as hit #6
Hit #11
Pan v Rattus = 58.3%
Updated, quick blastp human at 95.44%
Hit #12
Pan v Rattus = 49.7%
Annotation error
quick blastp human at 64.74%
Hit #13 – same family as hit #6
Hit #14
Pan v Rattus = 83.3%
Annotation error (and it is only 92aa’s)
quick blastp human at 97.83%
Hit #15
Pan v Rattus = 87.3%
Updated,
quick blastp human at 99.57%
Hit #16
Pan v Rattus = 61.3%
Annotation error
quick blastp human at 98.06%
Among those here who expressed an opinion, the consensus is that I misrepresented Kenneth Weiss in my 2015 talk about the Tree of Life and orphan genes (posted at YouTube). Bill Cole says it was “spin,” which I can only read as “you misrepresented Weiss, Paul.”
In light of this, I will ask the organization which posted the video either to remove it, to edit out the material about Weiss, or to add a note to the YouTube page saying that I misrepresented Weiss.
I will also send a written apology to Professor Weiss himself. (Actually, apologizing gives me an opportunity to ask Weiss about his current thinking on orphans. He seems not to have addressed the topic since 2013.)
I could continue to assert my innocence, but when even Bill Cole says it was “spin” — I’m busted, and need to make serious amends.
One final comment about the significance of orphans (I have more work travel coming up and need to focus on that, rather than posting more here). TSZ participants should realize that, while they may regard me as a Known Bad Guy and Nasty Person, my views on orphans are actually fairly mundane and mainstream, if you consider a leading European microbiologist such as Didier Raoult, or the NCBI geneticist / bioinformatician and National Academy of Sciences member Eugene Koonin, as mainstream. Raoult, in an article I linked above, argued:
From here https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2012.00113/full, pp. 9, 12.
Koonin is equally skeptical of the real existence of LUCA. An important phenomenon closely related to the discovery of the ubiquity of orphans is “non-orthologous gene displacement” (NOGD), where key (i.e., central cell biology) functions in diverse groups are performed by non-homologous proteins. NOGD was not predicted throughout most of the 20th c., under the guidance of the monophyletic geometry (Tree of Life, TOL) of standard theory. As Koonin (2016, p. 417) explains,
By contrast, and in terms of sheer numbers, Koonin continues (in the same paper, p. 419), “the comparatively huge cloud” of orphans represents the vast majority of the genomic universe. Combine this orphans pattern with omnipresent horizontal gene transfer, he concludes, and “there is no chance to revive the TOL as a single tree that would describe organismal evolution (species tree)” (p. 433). Koonin argues for a Forest of Life (FOL), in which anything resembling a “tree” would be a statistical trend in FOL, not an actual lineage extending from a real LUCA.
See E.V. Koonin, 2016, “Evolution of the Genomic Universe,” from here:
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319488370
Both Raoult and Koonin are evolutionists, of course. They simply doubt that LUCA existed, or that the best geometry to represent the history of life on Earth is a single tree, rooted in LUCA.
Bottom line: don’t let your dislike for me interfere with taking these scientific developments seriously. LUCA was doomed when the first whole genomes were sequenced.
Armchair mathematics is about what I can manage in my free time, hence why I privilege it. I try some bioinformatics here and there. Anything requiring field work is entirely beyond my reach. But, history of science shows armchair mathematics has lead to significant breakthroughs, like relativity and Bell’s theorem. And much of my discipline, computer science, can evolve through armchair mathematics, and computer science is what makes much of our modern world hum along.
To be clearer about my article, I am talking about a specific, isolated entity. If it operates entirely by stochastic processes, then the events we observe from the entity will converge to a probability distribution. On the other hand, if it is non-stochastic, then we will not see convergence occur.
I think another commentator mentioned how chaotic systems do not converge, which is only true if they are unbounded. If the chaotic system is bounded, e.g. only has a finite memory, then it will eventually repeat itself, and events will converge to a probability distribution.
Thus, for every stochastic, finite entity, we will observe the events it produces eventually converge to some probability distribution.
Furthermore, I propose that all purely physical entities are stochastic and finite.
And finally, this is a bit more speculative, it seems we can characterize convergence rate in terms of information content. Slower convergence rate requires more information, thus requires more matter.
An entity cannot store more information than its matter allows for, so we can establish a very generous information bound on the entity’s information capacity using Planck lengths.
Whether all of this is actually feasible to test is an entirely separate matter. But, it at least is a logically coherent and mathematical way to talk about something that could be an intelligent agency, as well as a host of other potential causes that are outside the domain of methodological naturalism. So, it meets the bare minimum of not being a mere ‘woo’ concept that is all emotion and has no logical content.
And that is about all I can manage for now. Hopefully it is clear enough.
I still prefer TSZ to PS, mostly due to the quality of discussion being higher. We can easily do focused threads through standalone OPs. If I get loads of comments, I just respond to whatever seems most relevant to me, assuming that if I miss a significant point that someone care about it’ll come back again, with a bunch of insults to highlight.
I’m quite sure nothing you could quote would support any relaltionship between anything you think and anything said by an actual scientist doing actual work.
Could you name a few such potential causes?
Was it ever different?
It’s not his job to show you that Ewert’s crap is all wrong. It’s your job to check Ewert’s shit before you start to believe it with a psychotic level of conviction. It’s the other way around in science. Someone publishes a (putatively) interesting result, but then everyone looks at it with a skeptical eye and witholds acceptance until it has been corroborated by multiple independent investigations.
But what is actually occurring is that Winston published his paper, it purports to be an alternative to nesting hierarchies in a particular type of data (shared genes), and before this paper’s results have been scrutinized and replicated by peers in the relevant fields, you decide to believe Winston is right without having done the must cursory analysis yourself.
Turns out, however, that under even cursory, the most armchair, sit-in-your-home-and-hobby-it-out-of-boredom analysis, Winston’s work COMPLETELY FUCKING COLLAPSES.
You put so much stake and trust in what these propagandists say, but have they ever really earned it? What have they accomplished to make you take them so seriously and at their mere words? Nothing, they have accomplished nothing. You believe and defend and agree with them, seemingly on nothing more than the fact that you agree with the conclusions they seek to defend. Is that really all it takes to gain your trust? One merely has to agree with what you already believe, and then one has your undying loyalty?
Wow, nice Paul. Now if only you & the IDM could do the same about the double-talking & intentional equivocation between design theory, design thinking, design thinkers, & someone reminded here, there’s also ‘design studies,’ and Thaxton’s -> CRSC->CSC’s ‘intelligent design theory.’ This double-talking runs rampant in the IDM for many years. Will you own up to it or deny it exists?
You are continuing to assert your innocence, by furthering the equivocation & not clarifying it in your work. The reason for this is clear: it would destroy the IDM to admit that ‘design theory’ does just fine without ideological IDism and that likewise, many fields of study are now faced with the IDM’s attempts to high-jack ‘design’ for their own ideological purposes.
Paul’s recent response seemed to indicate he’s heard of the term ‘ideology’, but doesn’t know how it’s used, why it’s used, and how everyone has ideologies, even Paul Nelson, Meyer, Behe, Wells, West, et al. That they deny holding *ANY* ideologies whatsoever just makes a laughing stock of them & lowers their trustworthiness. This could easily be rectified, but the DI resists doing so.
To claim that ‘Intelligent Design’ theory is non-ideological is simply not believable, no matter a person’s worldview. Why not tell the truth, Paul, instead of outsourcing your views about this to weak, repetitive, superficial philosophers like Meyer at the DI?
EricMH,
People like EricMH butcher the topic of “intelligent agency” with their impersonal, objectivistic distance from the topic. Indeed, EricMH’s words often sound dehumanizing the way they speak about ‘intelligent agency’.
The ‘woo’ is the ideology of IDism, which EricMH didn’t learn anything about at the DI’s Summer Program. When I was at the DI’s Summer Program, in contrast, I asked difficult questions that exposed the vacuity of claims made by many IDists, that, following Behe, “intelligent design has implications for all humane studies.” What a maroon! Yet the graduates of the DI’s Summer Program are being brainwashed to not even notice “alternatives”. Thus, EricMH writes here, as if the only anti-MNism worth considering is by IDists, whereas since I looked closely at it & found their informationism wanting, I moved forward beyond the IDM & it’s narrow strategy. EricMH does not appear ready, willing or reflexive enough to do that yet. Maybe some day.
Rumraket,
Keep spinning Irish yarn Rum. Paul showed he is a stand up guy. It’s time for you to look yourself in the mirror.
Y
How come Intelligent Design is dying then?
Also interestingly, a non sequitur is a conclusion or reply that doesn’t follow logically from the previous statement.
DNA_Jock,
Are you going to continue with this charade or are you going to repeat your Texas sharp shooter spin game. At the end of the day trust wins. All that being said thanks for the work. Are those genes in mice too?
Rumraket,
The grand claims of this theory are nonsense. It’s time for you to face reality and look at the data objectively. Winstons paper is early work. He claimed it was early work. Jock demonstrated that a single node on his paper may be suspect. Jock did a great job to help us all move toward reality. You think you are an objective thinker. You are not. You are emotionally tied to materialism.
You haven’t defined your terms. However, Einstein’s work on relativity is very far from what I would describe as “armchair mathematics”.
I am having difficulty making sense of this, and of what follows it.
If this is an example of what you are calling “armchair mathematics”, then I think your armchair is far too soft and squishy.
I’ll give it one more shot:
If we isolate a program so it has only a limited amount of memory, then we will eventually notice a pattern in its output (assuming it never halts). At the very least, the output will have to repeat at some point. If we additionally give the program access to a random number generator, we won’t see a specific pattern repeat, but we will see the output converge to some specific probability distribution.
I am making the additional claim that the time to converge is upper bounded by some function of the size of the program and memory, which I think can be hashed out in information theory terms such as cross entropy.
Thus, if we know the program size and memory, then we can infer from the output whether there is some external source of information feeding the program, because the output will violate the convergence limit imposed by size and memory.
Very closely related to what I proved in one paper from my PhD dissertation:
https://robertmarks.org/REPRINTS/2018_Observation-of-Unbounded-Novelty.pdf
Story version:
One final addition, ASC is actually an implementation of this idea, since its derivation from the Markov inequality assumes convergence to the mean. ASC measures how far the empirical result is from the mean. My coauthor and I go into this in a bit more detail with some empirical results in a yet to be published Bio-C paper.
I’m curious, what exactly is the problem? I didn’t notice anything obviously wrong with it. Plus, it seems a result that could be put to use, e.g. improving the BLAST nucleotide substitution matrix. I plan to use Ewert’s result to improve bioinformatics algorithms once I get the time and know how.
EricMH,
In it’s current, published incarnation Ewert’s analysis relies on the assumption that the annotations in HomoloGene (for instance) are 100% accurate.
They are not.
Nucleotide substitution matrices don’t enter into it.
Let us know how that goes.
But that field is just mathematics. Where do you think the science is, besides in the name? It’s the hardware engineering based on QM and other science that makes the world hum along. Software too, of course, but software without hardware is just more mathematics.
I don’t see how that would work in practice. You’d need to
– select something to measure
– specify a repeatable protocol for measuring.
– understand what variables could affect your measurement and control for them or argue that they can be treated as unbiasing error.
– specify a distribution to test against, statistical methods for testing it, and the number of trials to be conducted (all in advance to prevent p-value hacking).
Plus other things I am sure I missed. Even if your distribution failed to fit, you’d still have to consider that one of your assumptions was wrong. The basic issue is that you are not starting with existing science and building on it, so you have to justify from scratch everything you do and conclude.
For SR: Einstein started with empirical science, namely Maxwell’s equations which did not align with Galilean relativity. Lorentz and others also used the failure of Michelson-Morley to detect aether movement, but Einstein says he did not. So these authors started with empirical science and formulated theories which used existing quantities in physics (time, velocity, etc) with existing measurement tools. Predictions were hence empirically testable. Theory were submitted to the scientific community for review and feedback. As described in Wiki, the theory was not accepted initially because testing seemed to contradict it. Later improved experiments confirmed it. In addition, Einstein’s philosophical approach was accepted as less ad hoc and more fruitful. than Lorentz’s. (There is a similar story for GR).
Bell started with confirmed quantum equations and some conditions regarding the nature of locality and scientific experimentation (eg counterfactual definiteness). He then derived an inequality which showed how non-locality of QM could be tested. That, not the mathematical derivation alone, made it scientific.
Your work claims to disprove evolutionary theory. But as stated its concepts of information do not make contact with biology, nor does it make empirical, testable predictions. Nor is it grounded in existing biology to ensure it does not contradict existing observations.
Your OP describing a possible way to model population genetics failed to model populations and the environment, so it could not be used as an argument against that aspect of evolutionary theory.
Those are some of the reasons I see it as math, not science.
At least that is clearer, this time. But I’m not sure what conclusions you hope to draw.