I’ve wanted to start this discussion for several weeks, but wasn’t sure how to present Wagner’s argument. Fortunately Piotr has saved me the trouble with a post at UD.
Piotr February 24, 2015 at 1:35 pm
Gpuccio,Do you mind if I begin with a simple illustrative example? Let’s consider all five-letter alphabetic strings (AAAAA, QWERT, HGROF, etc.). By convention, a string will be “functional” if it’s a meaningful English word (BREAD, WATER, GLASS, etc.). Functionality is therefore not a formal property of the string but something dictated by the environment. There are 26^5 = 11881376 (almost 12 million) possible five-letter strings. The number of five-letter words in English (excluding proper nouns and extremely rare, dialectal or archaic words) is about 6000, so the probability that any randomly generated string is functional is about 0.0005.
Any five-letter string S can produce 5×25 = 125 “mutants” differing from S by exactly one letter. If you represent the sequence space as a five-dimensional hypercube (26x26x26x26x26), a mutation can be defined as a translation along any of the five axes.
It would appear that the odds of finding a functional mutant for a given string should be about 125×0.0005 = 1/16 on the average. In fact, however, it depends where you start. If S is functional, the existence of at least one functional mutant is almost guaranteed (close to 90%). For most English words there are more than one functional mutants. For example, from SNARE wer get {SCARE, SHARE, SPARE, STARE, SNORE, SNAKE, SNARK…}. Though some functional sequences are isolated or form small clusters in the sequence space, most of them are members of one huge, quite densely interconnected network. You can get from one to another in just a few steps (often in more than one way), which is of course what Lewis Carroll’s “word ladder” puzzle is about:
FLOUR > FLOOR > FLOOD > BLOOD > BROOD > BROAD > BREAD
You can ponder the example for a moment; I’ll return to it later.
The whole thread is worth a look.
I might add that there is a rather crude GA at http://itatsi.com that does something not entirely unlike a word ladder.
Everybody knows that the SETI community use ID methodology in spite of themselves:
SETI Whisperers Betray Their Dependence on Intelligent Design
Whoa, whoa, wait a moment… what is ID methodology?
An article so bad the author elected to remain anonymous.
And everybody else knows that ID uses equivocation.
A lot.
Glen Davidson
Of course that could explain its success rate thus far–if it were unequivocally true.
But no, it’s not like ID, terminally incapable of discovery. Could be that aliens just don’t want the evangelizing…
Glen Davidson
I am trying to understand how the English language, and its representation being drawn with certain shapes has anything whatsoever to do with evolution. Its totally baffling. Do some people here think that DNA is made up of actual letters?
Why don’t you try your replacement experiment using Chinese? Or replace some letters which pictures of leaves. It makes just as much sense. Or try it using a song, and replace some sounds with a loud shreik, or fingernails on a chalkboard, or the distorted sound of an MRI machine. When does the new construct have function? It makes just as much sense to find meaning in this.
What utter stupidity.
What does “information” have to do with biology?
IDists did make a simulation using Chinese. Why do IDists talk about information and mathematics rather than about chemistry?
All the ID arguments — especially Behe’s and Dembski’s — are mathematical rather than about chemistry or biology.
Which is not surprising, because evolution doesn’t require any process not observed in chemistry or biology.
What utter stupidity indeed!
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/06/intelligent_design_lab_is_goin007261.html
MUD
MAD
MAN
Wasn’t so hard 😉
Aw c’mon you guys, don’t you realize that the CSI-FSCI-dFSCI-FSCO/I and IC of an Abu 6500 C3 fishing reel proves beyond any doubt that yhwh-jesus-holy-ghost designed and created the universe, that everything in the bible is true, that evolution has never occurred, and that Darwin and Hitler were best friends?
:p
I came across a site that I don’t recall seeing before:
http://newscentral.exsees.com/item/a84557d21d937946b400070630e75e01-c6ea5f036242b3c9cb84042716593735
Richard, you assume this one will click a link!
Here, phoodoo, this is what you’d have seen had you bothered to click:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/06/intelligent_design_lab_is_goin007261.html
So it seems the ID people don’t even know the basics of what has been done with regard to ID. Except here there is no danger of history repeating as what Axe did was actual work and I’ve never seen anything like that from phoodoo.
At least Axe does something to advance the cause, one of the very few.
Phoodoo, why don’t you write to him and explain why he’s wrong?
phoodoo,
You might also ask what tossing coins has to do with biological strings. Can I refer you to an expert on these matters, one ‘kairosfocus’?
Allan Miller,
I didn’t read kairofocuses analogy about coins, because this thread isn’t about kairofocuses analogy about coins, so I have no idea about its relevance.
Now, about the English language being able to substitute letters for other words, what the heck does it have to do with evolution?
It’s not about biology. It’s about the ID probability argument. Why does ID make probability arguments?
Can you have life forms without information? Certainly no. And where did this information come from?
Who knows and who cares, say the unfathomably unskeptical skeptics. Just another massive leap of their faith.
petrushka,
And what the heck does it have to do with the validity of this silly analogy you are discussing on THIS thread? Is you argument, “Well, so what if it is a stupid analogy, kairofocus (maybe) made a bad analogy once too” ?
It’s only stupid to those who can’t understand it, phoodoo. IDists have pursued the same lines of reasoning. Probability is the only argument ID has, and the search metaphor is Dembski’s.
petrushka,
So you are saying you agree with Dembski?
Information is a metaphor latched upon by IDists. When you go down the information highway you are making an abstract mathematical argument. And you get abstract models. It’s what Dembski and Behe and Axe do.
Can you have anything without information? No. Because you have ‘zero’ things. You, Phoodoo, do not understand information.
petrushka,
So do you agree or disagree with the information metaphor?
Is this thread about how right you all feel Dembski is?
Information is not a useful metaphor in biology. We do not have the ability to model chemistry with sufficient detail to design genes or genome sequences.
What the word ladders model is not biology, but one critical aspect of the ID probability argument.
The word ladder is used to point out a logical error made by Behe and repeated by most IDists. Behe argues you cant go from MAN to MUD because it requires two mutations, and one by itself is fatal.
MUD
MUN
MAN
can’t happen, because MUN is fatal — not a viable word.
Wagner’s argument — pretty much standard biology for at least 50 years — is that there is more than one dimension to the space of viable sequences. So we can go:
MUD
MAD
MAN
without dying. This is the way chemistry works. You can bypass Behe’s fatal mutation by going around it. A synonymous intermediate mutation allows the otherwise unreachable sequence.
So this is the answer to your question.
Well, we know what it’s *not* about don’t we? It’s not about your problem with Axe’s work and it’s relevance to evolution.
How right do you feel Axe is with his symbol work? Do tell….
Jesus!
Praise de lard! phoodoo is here to show us the way, the way and the light!
Where did the “information” come from phoodoo, if *not* Jesus?
If you mean Dembski’s statement:
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/issue.php?id=49
Then do *you* agree with that phoodoo?
The “islands of function” argument is basically and argument from ignorance about a class of functions / mechanisms.
Dembski has been quiet recently. He painted himself into a corner with “Search for a Search.”
He wound up agreeing that evolution could work in the “right” kind of search space. One that supports small, incremental; steps.
And that’s what chemistry provides. An environment where small steps are allowed.
Dembski seems to have fallen back to something like Deism. If the search space allows evolution, then it was designed.
Word ladder is not intended to be identical to chemistry. It is a teaching tool, intended to demonstrate how an incremental search can reach those “isolated islands.”
petrushka,
Gee, you mean you can take a three letter word, and find another three letter word that has a similar spelling. Woo! Dembski must be devastated by this revelation. What if the word is 12 letters long? or 20?
Mental geniuses.
OMagain,
You have a better answer?
I do, in fact.
Oh noes! Phoodoo has defeated us because we need a biological equivalent of words getting longer!!!!111111
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication
Phoodoo, you keep failing the basics. You might want to go and learn something before you critique. You’ll save yourself from repeatedly looking like an idiot.
I am curious though, what other types of genius are there other than “mental”?
You appear to have missed the entire point. But that’s OK. There are people here and at UD that will explain over and over until you get to the point of having to either admit you are wrong, or it becomes obvious you are simply refusing to acknowledge you are wrong by dint of being unable to provide a cogent rebuttal or just are genuinely unable to understand the issue at hand.
Z does it every day at UD. If you join in and ask “what relevance does this word game have to evolution” Z will be happy, I’m quite sure, to explain in whatever level of detail you personally need to understand.
So do it. But you won’t. Jesus did it, you know, so why bother even understanding the arguments? But it is fun to parade your superiority huh? You know the way and the light, and get to laugh at the benighted ones.
You appear to be missing the fact that at UD you are attempting to make your case and change the status quo, here the reality based community can simply respond to your insult by pointing at literal libraries full of work which you and your ilk simply refuse to acknowledge exists. So that’s the product of the “geniuses” you mock.
Actually, I think longer words are more connectable in German, in which compound words are common. Germans will take and entire phrase and smush it into a word.
But phoodoo, the straight answer to your question is that you can do this with gene sequences. You can change them one character at a time.until the original is mostly replaced.
If you couldn’t do this there would be no such thing as alleles, and no such thing as genes having the same functions in different species, but with significantly different coding sequences.
Ok, but which is the value of that tool? Tere is any example of chemical incremental search? Spiegelman Monsters do not seems search anything.
phoodoo,
OK, I was too oblique. kairosfocus pens post after post about the unlikelihood of many ‘string-based things’ – ASCII characters, runs of heads, and yes, strings of English. If you think these are crap guides to the capacity of evolution, you might ask your own side why they try to draw conclusions on the circumscription of protein sequence space from them.
Damn, just realised I forgot to make my favourite Creation-Evolution joke. OK, I’ll do it anyway. Ahem – MUM to MUD to MAD to DAD – see, there are Answers in Genesis after all! Snort, guffaw, ROFLMSLHO, etc. Ah, is that my supper?
Good question. Why do IDcreationists constantly make that shitty analogy?
No, you can’t have anything at all without information. All physical structures inherently have informative qualities.
The information in biology is partially inherent in the physical structures, and then there’s the information that comes from evolution that mutates and retains functional biopolymers. In evolution the information comes from mutation and is retained against degradation by natural selection.
No the problem for you is you are in denial for religious reasons. It doesn’t take a leap of faith to actually understand where the information comes from, it simply takes understanding. On the other hand, it takes an irrational denial for various psychoemotional and sociopolitical reasons to resist it.
The problem is that when we protest the analogy, braindead IDcreationists will take this to mean we are somehow “scared” of the analogy, because in their mind the “genetic language” in DNA is analogous to the way spelling and grammar works in human languages like English.
So instead of running away from the analogy (despite how flawed it really is), it is much funnier to actually accept it at face value and then use the analogy first erected by IDcreationists and then use it to disprove their own assumptions about the impossibility of the evolution of “genetic language”.
So basically it’s a “Your analogy is flawed, but even if it was not, your argument still wouldn’t work…”- type response.
Wait, does this response mean you now suddenly think the analogy is good?
Yes, there are something like “incremental chemical searches” in biology. That’s how mane of the low-activity, promiscous ancestors of modern enzymes found and optimized their present-day functions.
Some enzymes have diverged so much in sequence and function over evolutionary time that there are only a few “letters” left in their sequence that is similar. Research has been done (explicitly using evolutionary assumptions about how mutations happen, as in their biased distributions) to resurrect ancient common ancestor enzymes and test their function, and as predicted, the ancestral versions are usually less efficient and more promiscous in their substrate acceptance.
Notice the thing about the evolutionary assumption about mutations. The fact that we can resurrect ancestral proteins using these assumptions, and show that they are functional, is thus a test of the evolutionary postulate. If evolution did not take place as theorized, there would simply not be a good reason to expect such statistically inferred “ancestral stages” to be functional, or to be functional in the way they are.
Richardthughes,
Sadly, Mr Gallien has devastatingly demonstrated that this cannot happen, by the simple expedient of denying that lengthening actually occurs, due to its universally deleterious consequences. In fact, that’s all mutations sorted. So it’s back to the drawing-board for the evolutionistas, I’m afraid.
Inherent in the structure, huh? It just is? Its inherent. The structure just knows what it needs to do and when to do it, because, well, its inherent. And then there is evolution. Amazing.
I can certainly understand why your intellectual curiosity is so easily satisfied.
phoodoo, is there information in:
A drop of water?
The planet Neptune?
A geyser?
A Higgs boson?
A rock?
A comet?
An orgasm?
A sneeze?
A permineralized log or bone?
A dead person?
And were/are any of those things designed-created by your chosen, so-called ‘God’ (or anything else)?
Creodont2,
There is information strewn throughout the entire universe, that materialists have a hard time explaining the origins of. Where does electromagnetism come from? The materialist just say, gee, I don’t know, just lucky. Or, well, its the multi-verse you see, all versions of chaos exist, this one just so happens to be one that has enough order to allow us to realize it.
But clearly the level of organized information in just one simple cell is so overwhelmingly complex that just dismissing it as “inherent” is denial in the extreme. “Um, the information, is like, there, you know, its like part of it, I mean, its emergent, so really its not so hard to explain. Its fundamental, and totally naturalistic, see? Its like the things that are here, are here, and if they weren’t there would be something else. Get it?” Its the Lawrence Krauss defense. Ignorance is bliss.
Religion does that to people, I guess.
Yes. All physical structures have inherent informative properties. They have information. Not information for “doing something it needs to do”, but information about itself.
This information doesn’t need to be “put into” the structure, it doesn’t have to “come from somewhere”. It is just a property of the structure, like, mass, position, momentum and so on, these are all informative properties of physical structures, they tell us something about them and those very same properties determine how these structures interact with each other. So information isn’t some mysterious immaterial property that needs to be “put into” something through a process (whether it’s through design by evolution or design by an intelligence ). It can be, but it is not necessary for something to have informational properties.
This information is some times multi-layered and can even be “read”, so to speak. For example, In addition to their simple informational properties like mass and shape, snow flakes have informative properties that tell us about the conditions under which they formed.
Snowflake formation.
Where did you get this nonsense? What does the structure “need to do”, and why does it need to “know” something?
Take the snow flake. What does it need to do, what does it “know”? Nothing at all. But nevertheless it still has inerent informational properties. It has information, both about itself, and the environment in which it formed.
You don’t seem to understand what information is. You seem to think it means instructions for doing something. Or that some particular structure, in addition to it’s mere constituents, also has some kind of immaterial property containing “instructions” that tell it what to do.
That’s not what information is.
It is clear now why you have so many difficulties with information theory, you think it’s tied to some kind of function, or purpose. You don’t understand that information is a universal property of all physical systems, whether evolved, designed, or any other process, whether it’s inanimate matter or living cells.
But the particular information you insist on remaining flabbergasted about, is genetic information. Right? Genetic sequences that do something through their function, that make up and sustain the function of a living cell. That’s what you fail to see how could have “got there” through anything but intelligent design.
It “got there” through evolution. Mutations “wrote” the sequences, natural selection (environmental factors) retained the ones that kept the organism functioning and reproducing. This really isn’t mysterious at all, it is so basic it’s bordering on miraculous that you can so consistently fail to understand it.
This is what goes on in IDcreationist brains, they almost deify information as if it is something super-special that is in conflict with nature or physics. That, because we can understand it, because it is informative by it’s very nature, it cannot just be a natural property of things.
It’s the “creations have a creator” argument all over again. Paintings have painters, buildings have builders, information has informers. Except that information isn’t due to design, it is inherent in everything in nature.
Hey Phoodoo, how many walruses in your car? Zero? How many elephants in your fridge? Zero? Wow – I bet I can make the case for infinite information everywhere, because I can exponentiate the dimensionally of information. Have you ever thought about or studied information ?
No they don’t. There cannot BE a physical structure without it having informative properties. It is not there because it has to be put there, it cannot be avoided. You’ve made information into a separate thing, as if material entities could exist without having informative properties. They cannot, it is intrinsic. In so far as any physical structure exists, it is by necessity informative about itself. It cannot be any other way.
Like 3Dimensional shapes, they cannot exist without having a surface area, or a volume. It is intrinsic to their nature in the same way.
Nobody knows. It’s not just that we don’t know, you don’t either. Made up answers aren’t a point in your favor.
Or just “I don’t know, let’s see if we can find out”.
The religionist says “Uhh you see, there’s this magic man outside of time and space”. How’d that get there? Oh, the magic man just is, because he just is, for no reason? Glad we got it settled that you going down that rabbit hole would lead you to shoot your own foot there phoodoo.
Now you’re talking about “levels of organized information”, whatever you mean by this. You’re not making any effort to define your terms, so it’s hard to know what you think it is that cannot be explained. In one post you’re talking about protein sequences, in another you’re talking about words, and here you’re talking about the complexity of the cell as having “levels of organized information”. What do you even mean by that?
If you merely mean the spatial distribution of the constituents of the cell(it’s structures, their locations, their interactions), then the organization of the cell is an emergent property of the lower-order interactions of it’s constituents(lipids, proteins, genes and so on).
That organization evolved, though not directly. The mutations again wrote the lower order gene-sequences, and the interactions between them gives rise to the higher order organization of the cells structures. Natural selection again retained the successful mutations.
But the organization of the cell also has inherent informative properties.
I agree it would be silly if people responded with a confused and incoherent mess like that. Luckily no one has done that.
Which is why I’m happy to report I gave up religion a long time ago.