Has Dawkins lost credibility?
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VonNeumann
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That there exists a coding system using CGAT and at some time a billion years preceding it, there did not exist a coding system... would it be safe to say that THAT is added information?
articulett
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I would say a coding system evolved. But information can have too many different meanings when it comes to genomes. It's more about which genes are turned on and off and when and how an organism is "programmed" to respond to it's environment that delineates "complex" organisms from simpler ones. It isn't number of base pairs... yet the implication of the question is that it can be answered via a quantity--an amount... just like your suggestion.
Nobody who knew what they were talking about would ask the question that way. What is it do you think they wanted to know? Remember, this was a "sound bite" question with the presumption there'd be a quick answer.
But how can you even begin to answer a question that is on par with "how far is it to the end of the earth?" or "how do ingredients get added to a cake recipe?" or "how do how does technology add more efficiency to machines?" "How does information get added to a city-- once there was no city...now there is --would it be safe to say that THAT is added information?" "How does value get added to our system of currency... once we used clams now we use digital data... how did clams morph into digital transfer?"
See? It's a lame question for anyone who understand evolution. It's lame like all the above questions. It's lame like your assertion.
How would you answer it, Von, "it's all part of some mysterious intelligent designer that sprinkles information granules into genomes?
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VonNeumann
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"The Infinite"... you say?
Like.... "The Infinite" says something? The word "Infinite" is an adjective or an adverb. As a noun, it is vague at best. What is, to you, THE INFINITE, 'borg?
You ask "why do we think to design something?"
Taken one way, that is as deep a question as to ask "what is 'thinking' or what is 'design'?". Taken another way, it appears you don't think we think to design.
But you see no point? The point is that thinking and designing are things with which we have personal experience, so we know they are processes that exist. We all believe in "design". On this forum, people even say that evolution "designs". The distinction is that they mean that "evolution projects an illusory appearance of doing something like design". So there exists teleological design that we humans do and there exists design that caused the emergence of life and all its variety. There are two schools of thought on the latter: it is design that has no purpose; or, to some (to me for example) it is design that we might have no reason to suppose that it is any less complex than the process of design that goes on in our own heads.
The point is I am clarifying the definition of words. ...Particularly the word "creation" and the word "design". We all believe in a creative mechanism at work in the universe. Some believe that a very simple mechanism, usually described so simply as random mutation and natural selection (RM/NS), is that creative mechanism; others believe that the creative mechanism is more complex than that. To me, that is the crux of the argument. That is the summation of the argument. And for being in the second group, as I've just described, I'm labeled here with a term that is not used in a flattering way, around here. I'm labeled "creationist" --but we all believe there to exist creative mechanisms -- we observe it in ourselves. The distinction lies in that I believe that having faith that RM/NS is sufficient is like believing in the tooth fairy and I'm skeptical that creation of everything we see can be based on something so inanely simple. I am in keeping with the scientific spirit of "tentativeness".
....or.....'borg, do you believe humans do not utilize "thinking" in order to "design"? Is that what you infer? Surely not.
VonNeumann
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Yes. Well there exists no scientific theory on how it could have evolved.
Yes, the word information can have different meanings even when it comes to DNA vs an arbitrary set of atoms. In communications theory, meaningless messages generally require more information to encode than useful messages of equal size. So, to clarify, a DNA strand may take less information to describe than an equal molecular weight of random atoms and molecules. I should say that a coding scheme (DNA) appeared over some course of maybe a billion years of time (lucky for us). The DNA represents an increase in organization in comparison to a random assortment of atoms and molecules that may otherwise exist in the non-living environment.
I don't know. Are you talking about the accident of A to T and then T back to A? No, he didn't want a quick answer -- he thought he'd said it all, and he said with explicit sarcasm. So that's why I segued to the source of A and T in the first place. I asked about what is the difference between a universe without CGAT and one with CGAT?
In scope of what is "accident" and what is "added information", it gets down to whether the information has any "use"... or any "function". But, what does that mean? Any "use" or any "function" to who or to what?
Surely CGAT has use and function for biological life. There would be no life (that we know of) without it. You make a good point that the word "information" in the Claude Shannon case, is not a clear term for what we are talking about. We are really talking about "meaning". And the word "meaning" has no meaning except to those entities to whom/which it has meaning. Gadzooks how can we even converse about this???
Does CGAT have "meaning" to a cell? DNA transcribes to RNA: does CGAT have meaning to RNA? RNA transcribes to protein...etc etc.
We cannot use language to talk about this stuff without anthropomorphisms because the only interpreter of "meaning" is us. But before there was the coding system CGAT there could be none of the life that we know about. The fact that something changed in the timeframe before DNA to after DNA, is a change in something. Organization? Do you want to call it an increase in organization?
Easy:
1. Ingredients get added to a recipe BY DESIGN.
2. Technology adds efficiency to machines BY DESIGN.
3. Cities get built BY DESIGN.
4. Currency reserve systems are created BY DESIGN.
So I answered those.... or, do you ask the question I ask "how do WE design?"?
I don't know HOW we design. And I don't know how nature designed life but it surely is not so flipping inanely stupidly simple as RM/NS! You believe in Santy Claus!
There is nothing to understand about the basic mechanism of evolution that a child cannot understand. No, Art'. Not a lame question. It is a challenging question. It is a deeper question than you will allow yourself to contemplate. You are satisfied. You are satiated with a witch doctor's 'origin for dummies' explanation of where it all comes from. You immerse yourself within the stamp collecting (Google what Lord Rutherford said about stamp collecting if you don't get it) of biology and think you've got some deep understanding. I'm not being personal -- nobody knows the answers to the questions a posed but I think that my assertion is about as deep as we can go with it.
It is not "lame" to ask the question "what is design" -- it is one of the most profound questions we can ask. Many a bright computer scientist, electrical engineer, information theorist, linguist, philosopher, psychologist, etc, have asked the question and very very little has come of it, in form of an answer. That is not a characteristic of a lame question. At the bottom (as in your favorite "bottom up" nomenclature) we have to know whether randomness and a selection landscape bootstrapped up through some kind of emergence of complexity that we do not understand, can be the mechanism of 'natural design'. On that, we have no theory and we do not have any significant conjecture.
The question is not lame.... only the answers we've come up with so far are lame. You don't accept that my assertion being that RM/NS is insufficient is all the answer I can come up with -- I've been telling you that for almost two years.
sol invictus
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That's not accurate. The correct statement is that sequences which are close to thermal can carry the most information - which is why they are harder to encode.
The best way to think about it is to ask how best to design a code made of some number of symbols (CGAT for example). If in your code C appears more or less than 25% of the time, it's not the most efficient code - because when you could have been using a single C, you're using GA or something instead.
The problem with the most efficient codes is that they are very susceptible to errors. There is no redundancy at all, so a single wrong symbol can totally change the message and make it unrecoverable. For this reason communications systems that have evolved, such as human language or DNA, are not maximally efficient - they contain redundancies to help deal with errors.
articulett
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The majority think RM/NS is sufficient.
Ingredients get added to a recipe by design?
You answered all the questions with a non-answer-- "by design". What does that mean? And is this "design" way the only method? Does design mean "planned" in advance? What is the nature of this designer and when and how does he insert this influence into our physical world. When and what did it design? Ugh. I just had this discussion on another thread... and I already know that it won't mean squat.
Yes... with a Universe such as our, RM/NS is sufficient... adding extra forces or entities is a violation of Occam's razor) You think it's insufficient, because you don't really understand natural selection... but it's to the benefit of what you want to believe to make sure you DON'T understand. What intelligent design proponent does understand natural selection in a way that could convey understanding to others? None that I know. What they say is as useless as your answers to my imitation questions. They don't clarify any understanding at all. Who is the designer adding ingredients to recipes and what the hell does that mean? Does one big designer have a plan for all recipes and scribble her directions into cookbooks to fulfill the "plan"? One time there was no recipes... now there are millions. Was that part of a grand plan?
Most of the great minds alive at this time seem to think RM/NS is sufficient--it explains what we observe magnificently. Most think a designed world would look a lot less like a world that evolve via RM/NS--that a designer would be detectable by methods other than incredulity and gap-filling. Most who really understand the power of Natural Selection understand the appearance of design from systems evolving and honing each other over time. Sure, we could be some garden planet for a more advanced civilization elsewhere... but like Matrix scenarios and God scenarios, these are fake answers... useless until or unless they are shown to have a basis in our reality. They may be a fun way to explain that which you don't understand.
Your answering of the questions showed exactly why it was a loaded question that was not meant to be answered, but, rather, infer an answer.
What, if anything could possibly convince you that random mutation and natural selection IS enough? Why is it increasingly a very satisfying and useful explanation for most scientists that increasingly yields more knowledge? It's also a great tool telling us what we can expect to find and where... why some feature evolved and how...how closely related two creatures are and why they diverged... why humans notice "design" and meaning in certain patterns and not others. We can understand what patterns or sounds or visual cues are meaningful in other species and solve the puzzle of how they evolved. With natural selection, time, and a method of replicating and recombining information with high but not absolute fidelity-- you cannot but help to have increasingly evolving information systems honing and spurring each other's information further--or killing it out. Things fall apart-- but information that has evolved a method of getting passed on can thrive long after it's replicators and the things that it "codes for" have died. Information itself has no "intent" or "desire"-- but it still can influence it's replicators and thus ensure it's replication or demise.
What is your opinion of Francis Collins and Michael Behe's designer-- a Christian god who tweaks things on occasion (altering the laws of physics momentarily and the like) and finely tuned this planet for his plan--but goes out of his way to be undetectable, immeasurable and "outside of science and nature"? Why are they mistaken (or are they) and how why is your conceived "design plan" more likely to be true than theirs?
How could such an entity just come into being without "evolving" from the bottom up? Via what mechanism? And could this thing have chosen not to exist? Is your only reason for belief in this "designer" the fact that you see too many things that you can't understand, or is there more.
And you acknowledge, don't you, that Crick's version of panspermia had nothing to do with a designer. It was about bottom up "design"-- rm/ns plus time.
And von we live in a world with replication and recombination of information going on all the time in trillions of ways-- who cares if most are failures-- you build on the successes.... they are bound to happen. They can't not happen. And once they exist, there is nowhere to go but forward. Information units are either replicated (perfectly or imperfectly) or they die out. With those odds... you can't not hit a "jackpot" on occasion--or something that looks like a jackpot in a human mind that evolved to notice such "coincidences" and wonder about their "meaning".
Ingredients get added to a recipe by design?
You answered all the questions with a non-answer-- "by design". What does that mean? And is this "design" way the only method? Does design mean "planned" in advance? What is the nature of this designer and when and how does he insert this influence into our physical world. When and what did it design? Ugh. I just had this discussion on another thread... and I already know that it won't mean squat.
Yes... with a Universe such as our, RM/NS is sufficient... adding extra forces or entities is a violation of Occam's razor) You think it's insufficient, because you don't really understand natural selection... but it's to the benefit of what you want to believe to make sure you DON'T understand. What intelligent design proponent does understand natural selection in a way that could convey understanding to others? None that I know. What they say is as useless as your answers to my imitation questions. They don't clarify any understanding at all. Who is the designer adding ingredients to recipes and what the hell does that mean? Does one big designer have a plan for all recipes and scribble her directions into cookbooks to fulfill the "plan"? One time there was no recipes... now there are millions. Was that part of a grand plan?
Most of the great minds alive at this time seem to think RM/NS is sufficient--it explains what we observe magnificently. Most think a designed world would look a lot less like a world that evolve via RM/NS--that a designer would be detectable by methods other than incredulity and gap-filling. Most who really understand the power of Natural Selection understand the appearance of design from systems evolving and honing each other over time. Sure, we could be some garden planet for a more advanced civilization elsewhere... but like Matrix scenarios and God scenarios, these are fake answers... useless until or unless they are shown to have a basis in our reality. They may be a fun way to explain that which you don't understand.
Your answering of the questions showed exactly why it was a loaded question that was not meant to be answered, but, rather, infer an answer.
What, if anything could possibly convince you that random mutation and natural selection IS enough? Why is it increasingly a very satisfying and useful explanation for most scientists that increasingly yields more knowledge? It's also a great tool telling us what we can expect to find and where... why some feature evolved and how...how closely related two creatures are and why they diverged... why humans notice "design" and meaning in certain patterns and not others. We can understand what patterns or sounds or visual cues are meaningful in other species and solve the puzzle of how they evolved. With natural selection, time, and a method of replicating and recombining information with high but not absolute fidelity-- you cannot but help to have increasingly evolving information systems honing and spurring each other's information further--or killing it out. Things fall apart-- but information that has evolved a method of getting passed on can thrive long after it's replicators and the things that it "codes for" have died. Information itself has no "intent" or "desire"-- but it still can influence it's replicators and thus ensure it's replication or demise.
What is your opinion of Francis Collins and Michael Behe's designer-- a Christian god who tweaks things on occasion (altering the laws of physics momentarily and the like) and finely tuned this planet for his plan--but goes out of his way to be undetectable, immeasurable and "outside of science and nature"? Why are they mistaken (or are they) and how why is your conceived "design plan" more likely to be true than theirs?
How could such an entity just come into being without "evolving" from the bottom up? Via what mechanism? And could this thing have chosen not to exist? Is your only reason for belief in this "designer" the fact that you see too many things that you can't understand, or is there more.
And you acknowledge, don't you, that Crick's version of panspermia had nothing to do with a designer. It was about bottom up "design"-- rm/ns plus time.
And von we live in a world with replication and recombination of information going on all the time in trillions of ways-- who cares if most are failures-- you build on the successes.... they are bound to happen. They can't not happen. And once they exist, there is nowhere to go but forward. Information units are either replicated (perfectly or imperfectly) or they die out. With those odds... you can't not hit a "jackpot" on occasion--or something that looks like a jackpot in a human mind that evolved to notice such "coincidences" and wonder about their "meaning".
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VonNeumann
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Yes, that's all well said. I still stand by the purpose of my comment where I said: "In communications theory, meaningless messages generally require more information to encode than useful messages of equal size."
While you said it better, you also got off of the point I was trying to make, which was not about how efficient is DNA coding. I was trying to establish terms that qualified that something increased when molecules started to be arranged (self-organized?) such that they could provide the function of coding. Art' took issue with "added information". I agreed, since pure randomness takes the maximum amount of bits to encode (see algorithmic complexity). Art' says coding evolved and to me the word 'evolved' says nothing more than 'appeared' -- it doesn't say how. But definitely, something that represents increased organization appeared somehow. Is that increase in organization a decrease in information?
VonNeumann
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1. Science by democratic vote is not science. One person can make a revolution.
2. I very well understand the fundamentals of natural selection. It is not complex--it is embarrassingly simple. Your assertion would be correct if you said I do not believe in the power you assign to natural selection.
3. What would convince me RM/NS is enough? Easy. I used to be thoroughly convinced of it since I was 8 years old on through much of my adulthood. What convinced me then? The same things that convince you. I was a young guy who believed most of what I read. It seemed reasonable to me at the time. I wanted to believe that creation of new great stuff could be based on something so simple -- I was basically a full-fledged reductionist-materialist. So I guess what would re-convince me that RM/NS is enough would have to be something along the lines of brain damage or a stroke so I could dumb myself down to believe in the tooth fairy again. But for now, I'm skeptical and I don't see any AI emerging from the computer labs. If someone started bootstrapping self-aware AI using RM/NS techniques, then I'd have to consider that I had given up on the alleged power of RM/NS too soon.
4. You ask me for my opinion on someone else's religion? As I've said many times before, belief in theories of origin come down to faith. You have faith in RM/NS -- I don't -- except as a means to stabilize but not as a means to invent new stuff. That's your religion, Art'. RM/NS is what you have faith in.
5. I acknowledge what you say about Crick. However, he surmised something called "directed panspermia". That means the "spores" were aimed. Who did the aiming? Ask Crick. I think he thought that evolution happened somewhere else first, the presumably evolved intelligent beings spread their spores throughout the universe. What does that mean to me? He was so certain that evidence is lacking here for evolution of life from non-life, that he had to get "creative".
So my point is you can't claim scientific reasons (evidence!) for believing that DNA evolved here on Earth with any credibility. Crick was smart enough to realize that.6. Building on the successes is only possible if there is something to sustain the successes and multiply it. In the context of molecules that are pre-metabolic and pre-reproduction, what is the definition of "success"? Where is the "success" vs "failure" of physical laws that allow there to be "just so" stellar systems where the "just so" elements can be forged? Outside this universe? Near infinitely numbered baby universes? Where's the science? Where's the evidence? Waive your hands a lot and burn your incense -- looks like religion more than science, to me.
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cyborg
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That which does not repeat.
Really?
And you tell them apart how?
Oh right, one has "intent".
Please demonstrate that "intent" isn't in fact a lack of "unintent".
Having faith in the correctness of your model is not the same as lacking faith in the correctness of all other models.
That is only true above certain levels.
sol invictus
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Compared to what?
Compared to a random sequence of DNA of the same length, with information defined a la Shannon, yes, it does represent a decrease. Of course before life evolved there were no sequences of DNA, so I'm not sure the question really pertains to anything.
Given a real DNA strand, some mutations will increase the information, and some will decrease it. That's the problem with the original question - it's simply not well defined, and if you make it well defined the answers are uninteresting and uninformative.
It's the wrong question.
VonNeumann
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You say: it's the wrong question. You say it is not well defined -- so you don't understand the question? ...but you know the question you don't understand is the wrong question...and yet, you say if it were well defined, the answers are uninteresting and uninformative.
I never ever said anything about "mutation". Of what use is such a term as "mutation" before you have the first DNA strand? Have you ever thought about how many base pairs there may have been in the very first DNA strand or in the very first RNA strand? You should be asking yourself a myriad of such questions as this.
sol invictus
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You say: it's the wrong question. You say it is not well defined -- so you don't understand the question? ...but you know the question you don't understand is the wrong question...and yet, you say if it were well defined, the answers are uninteresting and uninformative.
Yes, and your point is?
The question can be taken to mean various things - hence, it's not well defined - and none of them have interesting answers - hence, it's the wrong question.
Dunno about you, but that was the question in the video.
I should? Why?
Elind
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Question is, without reading any of the following comments; how does it affect YOUR credibility?
VonNeumann
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My fault. I diverted from the thread.
godless dave
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Some stuff that happened.
godless dave
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No, he postulated that biological life might not have evolved here on Earth.
And Crick, at least, postulated that it came from some other place in the universe, where it evolved by entirely natural means. He also postulated that it came to earth by entirely natural means. He said nothing about the "information content" of DNA casting any doubt on evolution.
Look, you tedious person. COMMENTS on Brayton's blog about that incident indicate that the matter is NOT as settled and 'dead obvious' as you claim. This one especially:
Is there some reason you failed to note this in any of your posts about this supposedly shocking incident?
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jjramsey
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It goes part of the way to explaining Dawkins' answer, but it doesn't get him off the hook for making a bad one. Matzke is being kind.
Now, the trickiest point is the matter of Brayton's own memory. I'll admit that. However, somewhat surprisingly, that was not the issue that articulett had brought up. Instead, he/she kept responding as if he/she hadn't really understood what Brayton wrote, or was practically refusing to understand it, which was the reason for the my "V-E-R-Y S-L-O-O-O-W-L-Y" remark to articulett.
sol invictus
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How can you still be talking about this? Do you realize how utterly ridiculous is is to spend so much time analyzing one man pausing once, years ago, in answering one badly-posed question?
If I were a creationist I'd be ashamed if I were so stupid as to be unable to come up with a better argument against evolution than that one.
If I were a creationist I'd be ashamed if I were so stupid as to be unable to come up with a better argument against evolution than that one.