. . . and blatant denial is not an appropriate response to the reality of and/or easily known facts concerning functionally specific complex organisation and /or associated information, FSCO/I:
Facts are stubborn things, but people can be more stubborn than that.
(That is, there are two types of ignorance,
I: simple ignorance because one does not know the facts and/or may not understand them, but also
II: ideological closed-mindedness due to being controlled by mind-closing agendas hostile to, selectively hyperskeptical towards and dismissive or suppressive of inconvenient facts,
. . . such as those we just saw regarding FSCO/I.)
Why am I saying this?
Poster-boy no 1, rich @ 252 in the UD no bomb thread:
[KF:] “Your comment no 248 to me is 1071 characters, at 7 bits each, wel past the 500 bit threshold.”
[rich:] very good – now you need to show how many comments could have performed the same function across multiple langues,uses of syntax, abbreviations, different audiences, etc.
And Writing messages is (mainly) spontaneous generation, which is NOTHING AT ALL LIKE LIFE.
But….but…but…BIG NUMBERS!
Rich again, at no 400 (and repeatedly thereafter),
. . . on the folly of FCSIO (and how it differs from CSI) as ‘exemplified by the internet’
*You model spontaneous generation (of text)
*You don’t account for functionally equivalent variants
*You can’t specify in anything other than English
*You wont take up design challenges
*Non of this has anything to do with life
*But..but..but..BIG NUMBERS.
“Big numbers” of course, is a dismissive way of ducking the unmet challenge of blind chance and mechanical necessity finding islands of function constrained by the need for having many well matched, correctly arranged components to achieve function. Such as:
a: the node-arcs Wicken wiring diagram network of say an ABU Cardinal . . . Swedish made! (so much for English only, please) . . . fishing reel (reducible to a structured set of y/n q’s, as is commonly done using say AutoCAD etc);
b: a functional . . . Russian I believe . . . mechanical watch (as opposed to a jumbled pile of parts):
c: sand castles (vs dirt piles, including say those built by volcanoes):
d: Lego brick castles (as opposed to haphazard piles of said bricks):
e: Brilliant cut diamonds (as opposed to diamonds in the rough):
f: And of course, the protein synthesis mechanism that is in every living cell of every biological organism, which uses the genetic code (a case of machine code) and associated algorithms plus correctly arranged execution machines:
In each of these cases, we have multiple, well matched components that must be correctly organised and coupled together to effect the requisite function.
A text string is just a special case of such a nodes-arcs wiring diagram network, a string -*-*-*-*- like pearls on a necklace. As AutoCAD etc and the exploded view of the Abu Cardinal reel above show, the general 3-D form of such a wiring diagram can be reduced to a string of structured Y/N . . . one bit info capacity . . . questions and stored as strings. So, the string case is WLOG, without loss of generality (as has been repeatedly pointed out but willfully ignored in order to sneer at text string cases).
As for the strawman tactic assertion of failing to address functionally equivalent variants, all along, the discussion has pivoted on the concept of a sea of possible configurations that has in it islands of function, which may well have peaks and valleys of better or lesser effectiveness, or variations that carry out the same specific functionality. Thus, the point of the case E from zone T in wider space W (standing in for Omega . . . hint, hint as in s = k log w etc) in this infographic which has been used quite a few times in recent months (and the underlying remarks by WmAD in his NFL as cited, and the 100+ year old concept of clusters of microstates or configs studied in statistical thermodynamics that lies aback the simple metaphor “islands of function”):
In such a situation, the paradigm case is OOL, where at best we start with some fairly simple chemicals in a Darwin warm salt-laden pond or a comet core or a gas giant moon (to get a reducing atmosphere) etc. These start with molecules scattered across the pond etc, that need to assemble in ways that yield a complex, gated, metabolising cell with a protein assembly mechanism and an additional von Neumann kinematic self replicating facility with coded tape/blueprint for the requisite components plus appropriate co-ordination and algorithms.
U/D, Oct 28: here is the challenge such has to meet at OOL:
. . . with a general model for studying how systems can explore/ “search” configurational possibility spaces and interact with the external world:
. . . and, all along the tree of life, courtesy Smithsonian (note its root, OOL):
That is, after all, the main phenomenon to be explained per evolutionary materialism on blind chance plus mechanical necessity on the gamut of the observed cosmos: the living cell.
Many diverse cells are possible, but all of them depend crucially on embedded FSCO/I. (Where, of course, on trillions of cases in point — start with the Internet and move on to screws, bolts and nuts etc . . . — there is but one empirically known, needle in haystack analysis reliable source for FSCO/I under such circumstances, intelligently directed configuration, aka design. Thus there is an inductively strong case for inferring design as best warranted causal explanation from FSCO/I as reliable sign.)
Where, too, it is appropriate to note the following exchange between Orgel and Shapiro on the major evolutionary materialistic schools of thought on OOL:
Unfortunately, neither chemists nor laboratories were present on the early Earth to produce RNA . . .
Mutual ruin, in a nutshell.
Mutual ruin, on precisely the challenge of origin of the FSCO/I in the cell in its genes and its interlocking , astonishingly complex metabolic processes that dwarf the FSCO/I in say a petroleum refinery . . . while being carried out in a tiny automaton smaller than the head of a pin:
Indeed, it is worth letting Denton’s classic comment of 1985 speak with full force:
As for the assertion that I and others will not take up and respond to challenges to design as cause of FSCO/I, the very examples of the lego pile, the sand castle and the brilliant cut diamond give the lie to such bare faced false accusations, as well as dozens of other cases over the years. (Look, mon, I had a very senior Govt officer on the phone to me already for the morning and have had to do other things also; please have the reasonableness to take me at my word when I say real life has to take priority. You owe us an apology. Not that we are holding our collective breath.)
As for the brazen assertion that none of this has anything to do with cell based life, let the OOL researchers Orgel and Wicken answer from the 1970’s.
ORGEL, 1973:
. . . In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [The Origins of Life (John Wiley, 1973), p. 189.]
WICKEN, 1979:
Backed up by Nobel equivalent prize holder, Sir Fred Hoyle, at the turn of the ’80’s:
Once we see that life is cosmic it is sensible to suppose that intelligence is cosmic. Now problems of order, such as the sequences of amino acids in the chains which constitute the enzymes and other proteins, are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed intelligence enters the picture, as was recognised long ago by James Clerk Maxwell in his invention of what is known in physics as the Maxwell demon. The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare’s plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true.” [[Evolution from Space (The Omni Lecture[ –> Jan 12th 1982]), Enslow Publishers, 1982, pg. 28.]
I suggest to you that the above three cites give the root of the descriptive terms specified complexity, complex specified information, functionally specific complex organisation and information, and intelligent design. Where INTELLIGENT is needed to stress what is meant by design given the way language tends to get twisted into pretzels in recent decades.
Rich’s selectively hyperskeptical quarrel is not with me or us, but with the highly informed views of quite significant researchers, as well as just plain ordinary readily evident but apparently ideologically inconvenient facts.
______
Okay, that should be enough to highlight that FSCO/I — actually, a commonplace phenomenon, as familiar as the files on your computer, and as routinely quantifiable as the file sizes you see routinely reported by your operating system or the genetic info in the codes for a protein — is not a dubious and ill-conceived concept fraudulently foisted on the world by “IDiots” who are “Creationists in cheap tuxedos.” And, it is most directly relevant to life, especially its origin, but also the origin of major body plans which just for genome sizes reasonably require 10 – 100+ million bases of functional genetic information, dozens of times over.
One last point there was an unjustified complaint that I locked off comments for a FYI/FTR headlined post. This cleverly omitted to note that the post was basically a headlined comment in a discussion thread, and that there was and is ample opportunity to discuss in other threads. I quite properly reserve the right to make occasional FYI/FTR comments from time to time, as general notices. My making such obviously does not block discussion of same here at UD or elsewhere. END
De Nile is a river in Egypt . . .
Excellent timing really, doing this series in Darwinian debating devices as you let the mob back through the door. It has been very interesting. Great job guys.
Perhaps we could have a link from the front page to the entire set?
DG, I think BA intends to fold DD’s into the WAC’s in some fashion. Meanwhile if you do a category search you can catch all seventeen numbered ones here:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/category/ddd/
KF
So it seems that FIASCO *is* simply large numbers, because it doesn’t address the creation narrative of life just argues against spontaneous assembly and does not account for the possibility of functional variants.
CSI would like to do this (but hasn’t yet), FIASCO doesn’t even seem aware of the problem.
Rich, why do you continue to distort the matter presented right in front of your eyes? Why do you refuse to address the issue of limited atomic and temporal resources on the scope of our observed cosmos, relative to the config space to be blindly searched from an arbitrary initial point,leading to a needle in haystack search conundrum . . . which points to a well-known sampling theory challenge, not just empty numbers. Why do you resort to playground-level taunt distortions of Acronyms? Do you not see that it shows how insubstantial, willfully strawmannish and emotion-driven your responses are? Please, do better than “De Nile is a river in Egypt . . . “. KF
PS: And in particular, as it is in a diagram that has been repeatedly presented across months, why are you ignoring the context of cases E in zones T in spaces W (which symbolisation comes directly from WmAD in NFL), i.e. deeply isolated islands of specific function driven by the constraints of multiple, well matched correctly organised parts to achieve function, sharply constraining zones T relative to W? That is you have willfully set up and knocked over the same strawman specifically corrected in the OP. That becomes a case of speaking with reckless disregard to truth or accuracy in order to play rhetorical games.
DillyGill @ 3, yes and I think the experiment to let that mob back in has shown its ineffectiveness to further meaningful discussion. Personally I am getting tired of trying to get anything meaningful of the discussions while having to cut through all the trivial smoke screens of people that have no interest in coming to an honest understanding of things.
To me the mob has only one objective and that is to shut down this website. I think it is time once again to enforce moderation otherwise this blog will end up have nothing but a lot of empty words with no substance to offer the honest reader.
Again, KF, you argue against spontaneous generation. [–> Nope, I point out the challenges that have OOL studies on evo mat axioms in deep trouble, and have had them in trouble for years and years . . . cf Orgel and Shapiro as cited] You can pound that strawman all day long [–> This is the root of the Darwinist tree of life and if blind chance and mechanical necessity canot get past the root, then that is already decisive. On the known reliable cause of FSCO/I, design sits at the table on discussions of the tree of life from the root up, and that decisively shifts our evaluation of further issues on branching etc. The turnabout tactic to project strawman accusations against me fails] , its not how evolution works [–> evolutionary materialism is about origins from hydrogen to humans and OOL is a critical issue], and
FIASCO[–> schoolyard taunting nicknaming tactic meant to ridicule the significance of FSCO/I as pointed out by Wicken c 1979, cf OP] is demonstrably inferior to CSI [–> willful refusal to address the fact that FSCO/I is in fact the relvant subset of CSI on the world of life, as WmAD stated in NFL, in the context of life, specification is cashed out as function, the wedge, deride and dismiss tactic fails] because of this.None of your math address the creation narrative of life [–> moving goalposts, and raisesw the slander that design theory is nothing but creationism in a cheap tuxedo, this is a false accusation sustained in the teeth of many, many opportunities to correct] and does not account for the possibility of functional variants [–> statement willfully in disregard to duties of care to truth and accuracy, despite what is in the OP, what is in the thread above and what has been on record for months].
FIASCO[–> schoolyard taunting nickname tactic] doesn’t rise to the (low, IMHO) standard of CSI [–> denialism and selective hyperskepticism]. You need to read this to see why your thinking is flawed: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=2592 [–> If that is the article by RTH from months back, it was answered way back. If not, I have to wait, as there are more important things on the table]F/N: recall, a BLIND search of the set W is coming from the power set 2^W of all subsets of the config space W. That is, if an allegedly blind search — driven by chance and necessity — is to be outperforming the expectation of a fairly even random search, the claimed blind search for such a golden shot search is coming from a far larger set, for 500 bits, 2^[3.27 *10^150] . . . calculator smoking territory. That a blindly chosen search would be expected to outperform a fairly “flat” . . . not perfectly flat, very roughly fairly will do, so small is sample to space size . . . random search on the config space W, is an even more astonishing performance — the search for search problem, s4s. By contrast, intelligent search is working of insightful and purposeful contrivance, and has a much, much higher prospect of getting close on the first pass, close enough that development troubleshooting and debugging can reasonably get us to the zones T well within the 10^88 possible chem level atomic events in the solar system — 10^57 atoms, 10^-14 s per fast chem rxn time event per atom, 10^17 s available on a reasonable timeline. So, we have no good reason to expect a blindly chosen search strategy from 2^W to exceed the expected performance of a direct blind search on W, which will patently be all but certain to fail, per needle in haystack challenge. That islands of function T1, T2, . . . Tn will be deeply isolated is patent from the sharp constraints on config imposed by need for well-matched, properly coupled and organised components. So, the unknown golden search strategy rebuttal attempt fails decisively. This has been pointed out many times before but it seems that it will bear repetition, to make the point plain. Back to work. KF
Rich, you are now on strike 1 for schoolyard taunting trollish behaviour, in a context of sustaining willful strawman misrepresenatations that amount to speaking with disregard to duties of care to truth, accuracy and more. Remember, right from the outset you have made false accusations with personal implications; which on being corrected you have evidently willfully not withdrawn. Kindly, clean up your act or I will ask you to leave this thread and others I own. KF
fossil RE 7
I have a different take on the subject of moderation. I do not think we ahould expel the mob rather Barry needs to add an ignore feature. That way we can do self moderation if we so choose.
Vivid
Okay KF – keep banging your drum / being a victim rather than deal with legitimate criticism. You don’t model life nor do you examine the state-space of alternatives. At least CSI would like to do that.
rich doesn’t understand what “spontaneous generation” entails. He thinks in means instantaneous and that is why he thinks it’s a strawman. That said rich cannot tell us how evolution works because he has no idea. The experts say it works via differential accumulations of genetic accidents, errors and mistakes, all the while never saying how that was determined.
As for modeling intelligent design evolution, evolutionary and genetic algorithms do that rather nicely. OTOH you still have nothing but your ignorance, lies and bloviations.
rich is also oblivious to science as he refuses to grasp the simple fact that all design inferences must first dispense with necessity and chance. As for those really big numbers, well rich, they show that necessity and chance can be ruled out mainly because of your failure to provide anything that could save them. And those really big numbers are actually in your favor because they are more than your position deserves.
Here’s Joe – Yay. I’m sure the swearing will quickly follow.
Again, KF you DON’T DO ANY MATH other than work out the probability of a *specific* instance of something being via non stepwise cumulative assembly and without thought to functional equivalents.
I’m pleased you set the bar at the UPB, though; “500 bits, 2^[3.27 *10^150]”, because that’s been crushed:
http://www.scientificamerican......le/?page=2
“Joyce’s replicators consist of a mere 50 chemical letters, but the odds of such a sequence appearing by chance are roughly one in 1030, he notes. “If it were six or even 10 letters long, then I’d say we might be in the realm of plausibility, where one could imagine them assembling spontaneously” in the primordial soup.”
Unsurprising, actual science backed by experimentation squashes ID rhetoric.
Here’s rich- Yay. I am sure the ignorance and insipidity will continue for our entertainment.
rich, your ignorance doesn’t crush anything. And as I said those probabilities are more than your position deserves. You are so clueless that you don’t even realize it is your position that is the probabilistic one and needs to provide them, yet has FAILed.
How does that article squash ID? It doesn’t come close. He admits that his designed RNAs don’t have a chance at forming spontaneously.
rich:
Your bald assertion means nothing. Try to actually make a case.
Joe: ” He admits that his designed RNAs don’t have a chance at forming spontaneously.”
Actual words:
“but the odds of such a sequence appearing by chance are roughly one in 1030, he notes”
Typical Joe honesty. Plus, that is unlikely to be the simplest viable replicator.
KF, your construct has gaping holes and is at odds with experimental evidence.
rich,
The explanation is obvious. The Designer was fiddling with Joyce’s experiment.
1 in 10^30, rich. His follow-up seals it too: “If it were six or even 10 letters long, then I’d say we might be in the realm of plausibility,”
6 to 10 gets us to the realm of plausibility- well 50 is well outside of that, duh.
keiths- the exp[eriment didn’t show anything beyond that we can design RNAs and an environment in which they can sustain replication.
Nothing new evolved. Nothing in the experiment supports evolutionism.
Joe @ 20,
Fantastic own goal! Congratulations!
LoL! @ keiths- try to make your case that I scored an own goal- I dare you
keiths thinks that 1 in 10^30 means it has a chance. Really?
LoL!
Where are you getting 10^30 from, Joe?
rich, do you really think that the odds at as low as 1 in 1030 to get 50 RNA nucleotides to align to perform that function? Really? Why didn’t he just say 1 in a thousand?
Do the math, rich, and then get back to us. I get the 1 in 10^30 from the math and the fact that exponents do not translate well into print.
BTW rich, if the odds were as low as 1 in 1030 it would be easy for a scientist to overwhelm the odds and create those RNAs.
Just sayin’…
So you’re making up a typo. Got it. That’s some quality ID research right there.
LoL! @ rich- so the math you loser. AND if the odds were as low as 1 in 1030 it would be easy for a scientist to overwhelm the odds and create those RNAs.
richie cupcake, afraid of the math…
And read the original paper…
Joe: “AND if the odds were as low as 1 in 1030 it would be easy for a scientist to overwhelm the odds and create those RNAs.”
Reality: “Scientists create tiny RNA molecule with big implications for life’s origins”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....162009.htm
Onlookers, Joe isn’t actually an evolutionist pretending to be an angry and mentally impoverished creationist. I promise.
rich, they should be able to create it with a hands-off approach you twit. Of course they can design one. The point is if getting one spontaneously is as low as 1 in 1030 they shouldn’t have to design one, idiot.
And if the odds are really as low as 1 in 1030 you should be able to easily replicate the math, yet you refuse to.
Joe, you should be able to reverse engineer experiments from their rejection of H0 for sufficient small probabilities?
This is an exciting breakthrough for the whole of science!
O_o
But as I’m feeling chartible, let’s go with 10^30. What is the UPB for the design inference, Joe? Isn’t it 10^150?
LoL! Rich is feeling charitable because he can’t do the math! He also can’t follow along.
If something has a 1 in 10^30 chance, it means it doesn’t have a chance. That was my point, rich.
And what is/ was the H0?
Joe: “If something has a 1 in 10^30 chance, it means it doesn’t have a chance”.
There’s some quality choo choo math right there.
What are the odds of any unique configuration of 2 decks of shuffled cards (one red deck and one blue deck), Joe?
rich
One deck of cards will blow right through Joke’s claimed limit. 52! = 8 x 10e67
They apparently don’t teach factorials in toaster repairman school.
rich, even the scientist of the experiment said it was out of the realm of plausibility. And by his standards it was way out.
Your desperation is cute, though.
“If it were six or even 10 letters long, then I’d say we might be in the realm of plausibility,”
6 to 10 gets us to the realm of plausibility- well 50 is well outside of that, duh.
The Great Pumpkin is well outside the realm of plausibility but that won’t prevent rich, keith and timmy from sitting and waiting in the pumpkin patch this Friday.
🙂
Rich, I will address your continued poor tone in a PS. But first, I paused a moment to look at the linked TSZ post. It seems to one one of the attempts to turn p(T|H) in Dembski’s 2005 expression into a handy red herring side track and dismissal talking point . . . and I here use standard terms regarding fallacies, for cause. At ground level it fails to understand that FSCO/I is per trillions of cases reliable as a sign of design as cause, and that because of the needle in haystack vs search resources comparable to picking one straw blindly from a cubical haystack as thick as our galactic centre. Hopes seem to be pinned on blindly picking a golden search that can vastly outperform a reasonably random search under the circumstances. But as was already pointed out and as was pointed out above, searches are subsets of a set, and searching blindly for a golden search is looking at the set of subsets of W, the power set of cardinality 2^w, with for just 500 bits, W = 3.27*10^150. Exponentially much, much, much worse than the direct search. There is no good reason to expect a blind search for a search to materially outperform a straight search. And of course, all of this points to, that the proper step is to reduce the logs, which drops out that we look at an info beyond a threshold metric as highlighted. The resulting simplified metric is also readily justifiable on its own terms, cf here. Upshot, the objections are distractive, predictably lead to selectively hyperskeptical dismissals and are fallacious. KF
PS: Playing the turnabout card and chuckin’ badness, like in, you play victim [an implicit further false accusation with serious personalities in it . . . ], when I pointed out and corrected specific false accusations shows the sort of trollish nihilist amorality and want of judicious temperament that are just what Plato warned against in The Laws Bk X 2350 years ago. Guess what, Alcibiades came to a sticky end. Strike two. Kindly, fix tone, attitude and behaviour NOW if you are interested in serious discussion rather than playing the ill-bred troll. There will be no more warnings from me, if when I come back to this thread to monitor it, there is not a drastic improvement in your tone. Posting in comment threads at UD or elsewhere is a privilege, not a right, and even with rights your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins.
PPS: Joe, I have not had time to monitor your comments. If you have joined in a mud wrestling match in a gutter, please stop now.
I was just taking out your garbage. And seeing that is done then I can abide by what you ask. And my responses were very constrained, considering…
F/N at this stage to say that I don’t do math in 15 above is to speak in willful disregard of truth in hopes that deliberate falsehoods stated or suggested will be taken as true; for which definition the correct term has three letters beginning with l, i.e, you compounded false accusations (as at first level can be seen in the infographics in the OP) — some of what lies behind the strike 2 status. On the celebratory article on Szostak, kindly note the warnings from both Orgel and Shapiro in the OP. Again, gross exaggeration of a result driven by experimenter control and utterly implausible circumstances . . . starting with RNA synthesis under reasonable OOL conditions. And, we simply have not addressed, seriously getting to gated, encapsulated metabolising cells with code based von Neumann self replication. Which, is what is to be explained. KF
Again, the necessary math that encompasses all possible pathways to function is not done. Sadly telling KF that you revert to talking points and victimhood instead of doing the requisite math or admitting you can’t do it / it can’t be done.
Lots of incredulity, though.
Joe, look up ‘plausible’. It is not the same as ‘possible’.
OT @ GEM
I was on Jersey a couple of weeks ago and visited the Durrell wildlife Centre where I was interested to learn about the efforts to save the Mountain chicken from extinction. I see from press reports that fifty frogs bred at Durrell were released back into the wild on Montserrat just recently.
I did have to smile that this involved funding from the Darwin Initiative.
rich, look up “context”. And rich if you don’t like the math then please provide those alleged added probabilities. Or admit that all you can do is whine.
Joe, what makes you think people can do math for experiments they don’t have the details of?
KF to Richard T. Hughs ” Strike two. Kindly, fix tone, attitude and behaviour NOW if you are interested in serious discussion rather than playing the ill-bred troll.”
KF to Joe Galien: “PPS: Joe, I have not had time to monitor your comments. If you have joined in a mud wrestling match in a gutter, please stop now.”
Strike two for Rich for presenting arguments and disagreeing with KF. A please stop to Joe, in the top three most abusive commenters on UD.
Isn’t the double standard one of the DDD? Or hypocrisy?
rich presented an argument? When and where?
Joe, but I notice that you didn’t deny being amongst the most abusive commenters on UD. Thank you for the honesty.
william, but I notice that you don’t have anything of substance to say- ever.
But yes, when it comes to liars I do get abusive. Everyone should.
–> Joe: we may correct,restrain or have to take action against the deceitful and harmful, but hey are still human beings. KF
Rich,
I have but little time. I note, you seem to have little or no remorse regarding abusive behaviour, your status remains.
I write below, not in forlorn hopes that you will listen and change heart and mind, but mainly to point out a few things for onlookers.
So far, I see little difference between your behaviour and that of someone looking only to shoot off trollish talking points and to push an agenda without regard to truth, accuracy or fairness.
(And those who look for “hypocrite” as a handy club to pick up, should note that that is the key difference with Joe [who has had some pretty serious discipline applied in this blog when he clearly needed it], he slips off the wagon but accepts that there is a wagon and is willing to try. I would tolerate someone who slips from time to time while struggling to do better, but someone playing the incorrigibly ruthless manipulative reprobate — and WS you are beginning to joint eh club — is not doing himself or anyone any good. BTW, that raises the issue of grounding OUGHT on the ISes from hydrogen to humans on evo mat premises, apart from might and manipulation make right. A necessary fail, cf here. If we are under moral government, as your behaviour suggests at one level, then that points to a moral governor. But if all of this is simply manipulative rhetoric to promote an amoral, nihilism enabling agenda — as Plato warned against in The Laws Bk X 2350 years ago, we who see such agendas in action should take warning. )
As to the necessary math, it seems you have paid no attention to the S4S golden search arrived at issue as again brought up above. (For a more detailed analysis cf here. You don’t get to suggest golden unobserved extraordinarily lucky searches for free. Or, are you simply putting up materialist miracles of luck by another name, reifying Lady Luck into a goddess acting into the world with astonishing power that accounts for life and life forms, mind and conscience alike? I say to such, superstitious idolatry dressed up in a lab coat.)
Do you know what a power set is, why it is relevant as a search is necessarily a subset of a config space, W (standing in for Omega . . . and what that whole world of ideas in math and physics and engineering is about — cf here on and here on in my always linked . . . to be regarded as background for EVERY comment I ever make at UD . . . with here on config or state spaces [~ cut down phase spaces] just for starters), and what it means to exponentiate 2 to the 3.27*150 power to initiate a BLIND search for a golden search in such a space?
With, resources limited to 10^88 possible elementary actions and observations at 10^-14 s each [chem rxn time] x 10^57 atoms in sol sys x 10^17 s accessible on timelines?
What EL, you and others are doing is failing to realise implications of S4S. Boiled down, we have no good reason to think that the cascade of blind S4S in ever exponentiated spaces offers any andantages on average over a very constrained tiny sample reasonably random search of the direct config space. The great evo mat hope for a golden search algorithm that pops up blindly and magically traverses the utterly dominant sea of non functional configs in a possibilities space to land on deeply isolated zones T in the space, is a wild goose chase. (Think, nanometre scale cubical cells in a 1 m^3 pond full of salts [~ 10^27 cells], and achieving functional configs in the teeth of chirality, cross-reactions of various organic compounds, simple hydrolysis, oxygen poisoning, that somehow invent smart gating and protective envelopes [notice the controlled environment of cells], metabolic cycles even much less complex than the one linked in the OP, codes, algorithms, genes, ribosome assemblers and the like.
That is, synthesise, protect products, organise to achieve function including envelope, gating, metabolism, self assembly of the FSCO/I-rich entity, code and algorithm based von Neumann self replication.
Mission implausible. (And if you doubt me, cf the linked Abel article. Another bit of willfully overlooked mathematics that backs up what I have presented.)
Notice, I am speaking in terms of a real world Monte Carlo, take that as this 1 m^3 cell multiplied by any number of ponds and the like across the surface of earth or comets and gas giant moons. All in much less than 10^57 atoms . . . 98% of the atoms in the solar system are in Sol. Feed in dynamics and stochastic processes informed by stat thermodynamics and chemistry.
The bottom line is, there would be a much simpler architecture resulting.
If something self replicating could ever be constructed, it would to practical certainty be simple molecular species, and whatever aggregations form, they would not depend on so specifically complex a functional organisation as we see.
The FSCO/I rich architecture we do see instead says, something very different happened. Namely that the best explanation of OOL is design.
From the root of the tree of life, OOL, design is at the table. Save, for ideological exclusion backed up by selective hyperskepticism and linked materialistic hypercredulity on anything, especially any lab coat clad just so story that gives a hint of backing up the utterly implausible and unwarranted.
As for branches — main body plans, the same problem of the architecture of islands of function constrained to be such by the explosion of combinatorial possibilities as complexity rises [ ~ chain of Y/N q’s to specify a state, composing a nodes-arcs Wicken wiring diagram, cf OP; this is why discussion on strings is WLOG] multiplied by functional specificity driven by need for many parts to fit and be organised correctly and coupled effectively to function.
Body plans, just genomes, run to 10 – 100+ mn bases each, whether we compose a back of envelope calc on cell types, proteins to compose tissues, and the like, or look at genomes for typical members.
Low end, that is a config space of 4^10^7 ~ 8.19*10^6,020,599 possibilities.
Yes, scoff at “big num.”
Then, realise that you have to move across a sea of non-functional configs, with realistic pops and mut rates. Fixing a few muts in reasonable pops at reasonable rates runs to dozens or more MY. As has been duly worked out and pointed out, just brushed aside and scoffed off.
Mission implausible again.
Design, again, is the only empirically reliable, needle in haystack challenge warranted source of FSCO/I.
Where the reality of FSCO/I is acknowledged, not by those IDiots lurking in cheap tuxedoes, but by Orgel, Wicken, Hoyle and others for 30 – 40 years now. In fact as the OP documents, it is a commonplace reality, raising serious questions on ideologically induced delusion on the part of recent objectors and scoffers at UD and elsewhere.
Further, the behaviour of the sol sys across time can be understood as a monte carlo exploration of possibilities as driven by blind chance and mechanical necessity, with the upper constraint on atomic scale events as seen. The result is — and it is mathematically derived, using the config space of 500 coins as a toy example to make the point, — that FSCO/I is not a practically feasible result of blind chance and mechanical necessity. But it is routinely seen to result from intelligently directed configuration, aka design. (For a 101 survey cf here on.)
Why, then is this not acceptable to many?
Johnson, responding to Lewontin and beyond him Sagan, put his finger on the heart of the issue, back in 1997:
Until and unless you and others of like ilk frankly face and address this question, the well justified conclusion will remain, that we are seeing little more than evolutionary materialist philosophy and ideology dressed up in a lab coat and sitting in control of key science and education institutions.
It is time for a serious rethink, and for amending of ways.
KF
F/N: I have updated the OP to include Mignea’s challenges on OOL with self replication, the Smithsonian tree of life diagram that shows the root in OOL, as well as a system process model, that illustrates my thought on how a cluster of Darwin’s ponds etc, and in fact the atoms of the solar system as a whole considered as an ensemble of systems, can explore a possibility space across time under influence of inflows/outflows, stochastics, world dynamics, etc. This will help us visualise the key point on what the solar system is able to do as its 10^57 atoms interact with a rate of 10^14 acts/second, with 10^17 s for the time available. This is the context of thought in which it was already pointed out that 10^88 possible acts or interaction and observation, would be as a blind sample of one straw to a cubical haystack as thick as our galaxy relative to the config space for just 500 bits. Gotta run and think about Solow and co. KF
Nice 101 on config spaces. KF
kairosfocus, thorough self-scrutiny and amending of your ways would be the right thing for you to do. Yes, Joe needs to be reprimanded and counseled for his treatment of other human beings but your behavior is worse. Joe engages in crude name calling and taunts but your behavior is appallingly self-righteous, hypocritical, dishonest, and mean. The Christian path and message should not be malicious condemnation of people who accept the scientific evolution theory. For your sake and the sake of other human beings please get the counseling that I suggested in the other thread as soon as possible. I pray to our Lord that you will do so.
JN:
I suspect (if you are not a sock puppet or an agent of a rhetorical agenda that cannot speak it’s name plainly . . . cf a typical evo mat/ modernist fellow traveller view on revivals of the past here, and contrast what was left off on assessing the historical, theological and worldviews issues and challenges here and here in context of here on) you are unaware of the rhetorical context, issues and challenges being faced.
Now, you have popped up in the past couple of days with some pretty serious and directly personal accusations, assertions and insinuations that you have not substantiated or addressed on balance of context, cf the issue of spin tactics here.
In the light of a very dirty rhetorical campaign faced by design thinkers for years, with character assassination, personalities, outing, slander, smearing, abuse of real world photos, attempts to get people dismissed or demoted or silenced, veiled threats against family, outing of uninvolved family including minor children, and activities by the evidently unhinged, that pattern on your part has to pop up warning flags.
Moreover, this happens to be at a time when I am unable to fully respond to issues, rhetorical gambits and the like, due to the press of events on the ground here. So, the quickness of response will necessarily be slowed and I have to be pretty selective on what I address; e.g. this morning I already had to spend hours on a policy matter as it has to be acted upon today, having popped up day before.
Others in and around UD, will have to carry most things, I just don’t have time.
If you are seriously concerned — and not just a tool in an agenda of red herring distractors led away to strawman caricatures soaked in ad hominems and set alight through subtle or blatant attack rhetoric in order to cloud, confuse, poison and polarise the atmosphere — then, I suggest you click on my handle, which will take you to an always linked note. In it you will find how to contact me by email. If you email me, I will respond in the context of a small, trusted circle, on the pattern long since established in the NT.
However, I will not tolerate cyberstalking, either in private or in public.
I am of course open to the concern that I too struggle towards the right, stumbling along the way but getting up and persisting per Rom 2:6 – 7.
(And, already, the very fact of reference to a biblical text is a rhetorical opening for those fairly to be termed — this is not name-calling, it is unfortunately accurate and necessary description along lines of “go tell that fox” or the like — ruthless and frankly nihilistic in the penumbra of attack sites out there. I will not allow this thread to be side-tracked into an off-topic theological-ethical etc debate, that serves no good purpose in this context.)
That said, there is a great cultural battle underway, and key institutions such as science and science education are being taken hostage to longstanding agendas like this:
As one with background in science, science education and policy, as well as worldviews analysis, I have taken a stand here at UD, because there is need for a plain-spoken, reasonably informed voice to help sustain a voice in being.
Eventually, the ideological subversion of science, education and much more will fail, but Burke has aptly reminded us all that all that is required for evil to triumph is for the fundamentally decent to stand by and do nothing.
Here, is the warning Martin Niemoller left us all, in a blood-bought lesson of history that sixty million ghosts beg to remind us of:
KF
Jagesh Nadu @58
I guess you love Selection in all forms whether in Evolution or forum threads – you seem to be selective in pointing out ID supporters alone. What about all those Evo supporters who have been spewing abuses ?
Jagesh is confused. I treat people how they treat me and others. When humans act as humans should I treat them humanely. When humans start acting like ape wannabe’s I treat them as such.
keiths:
Yes, and the designer’s name is Joyce.
Careful. If you think experiments are designed you just might become an IDiot.
F/N: I recently added to this thread’s original post a diagram of a general, dynamic-stochastic system model with lags and feedbacks, inflows, outflows and the trimmings.
This is meant to set the conceptual context for understanding what I have meant by speaking of a real world Monte Carlo “simulation.” Monte Carlo sims model dynamics and inject reasonable stochastic, random processes to provide for a range of chance driven stochastic possibilities. Thus, running a significant number of runs on the model gives a reasonable picture on the real world span of outcomes. Equivalently, running an ensemble of sims in parallel will do much the same. And if we have MC subsystems that interact, obviously that can also be modelled. By this time, things are getting complicated, but the point is, we can see how a possibilities space can be explored in a sim world.
Now, the observation of real world dynamic entities shows a similar pattern of behaviour, so the same conceptual model can be seen as a system descriptor.
Where does this point?
To, first, using the description to view what is happening in a world of 10^57 atoms treated as observers that flip trays of 500 coins each and examine them 10^14 times per second, for 10^17 s. That is, we see the toy example of making our solar system’s atoms into observers of possibilities of the config space for 500 bits. The result, relative to the search window in a config space diag (cf. # 8 in the OP above) is that we are only able to blindly sample as one straw to a cubical haystack 1,000 light years across, comparably thick as our barred spiral galaxy at its central bulge. So, blind chance and mechanical dynamical necessity would only reasonably be expected to pick up the overwhelming bulk of such a stack, straw.
Deeply isolated special zones T1, T2, . . . Tn would be effectively invisible to such a search strategy; the 10^57 search modules in an ensemble, would not reasonably be expected to catch needles — or back to our galactic metaphor, star systems — in the haystack as the vast dominant bulk is what such a blind sample will reliably pick up; some “lotteries” are not feasible, and indeed Lotteries have to be carefully designed so that they are winnable.
Nor, does the strategy need to have a flat random search. Any fairly chancy dust of samples or random walks from arbitrary initial points within the constraint will produce effectively the same result. There is no need whatsoever to assume flat randomness, just that we do not have golden searches for free. Yes, as a search is a subset of a config space, the search for a search comes form the set of all subsets, or, for finite sets like the ones in view, from a set of cardinality W, the searches are looking in the power set of cardinality 2^W. That boils down to, if yo hope to find a blind search that solves the needle in haystack problem, you are searching in an exponentially much larger space, where 2^(3.27*10^150) is calculator smoking territory. Where of course the exponent is the config space for 500 bits from 000 . . . 0 to 111 . . . 1 inclusive. So search for a golden search, S4GS, is much worse than direct fairly random blind chance and/or mechanical necessity search. The oh you have to capture all possible searches objection is revealed as a turnabout stratagem.
Nope, just set up the conceptual Monte Carlo and posit that 10^57 atoms flipping coins as fast as fast chem rxns for about as long as is typically allowed for the solar system — our effective universe for atom-atom interactions — is a good enough toy proxy for what sort of needle in haystack challenge FSCO/I poses. Any probability that is not plausible to be found on a reasonably random blind sampling of available resources on chance and mechanical necessity, is not reasonable and should not be demanded and burden of proof shifted.
Is there actual observational evidence for a successful S4GS?
Nope, what is substituted for trying to find islands of function T in the space W is stochastic hill climbing within T on already being in a config where differential function can serve as oracle, usually termed a fitness function.
Strawman substitution, in short.
As has been pointed out over and over, but as usual, brushed aside.
Instead, we need to take the needle in a haystack search analysis seriously.
In fact, this is more or less the same analysis that grounds the statistical form of the second law of thermodynamics. Relative statistical weight of clusters of microstates dominates system behaviour so we do not expect to see spontaneous migration away from the bulk clusters.
Jump up to the observed cosmos as a whole and simply use 1,000 coins to make the same point for that wider case.
Now, too, by its very nature as functionally constrained arrangements and couplings of many components to achieve relevant, config-based function, FSCO/I will naturally fall in isolated zones Tj in config spaces. So, we have a needle in haystack search challenge, as has been highlighted for years, but which is being brushed aside with fairly empty dismissive rhetoric about big numbers. The big numbers say what is not welcome, so much the worse for them it seems. (On which, it becomes a little disregarding of truth for objectors to then be found asserting no mathematics is being done. Sorry the underlying statistical thermodynamics reasoning is the driving mathematics, and the outline above is sufficient to show the significance of the challenge. Cf the always linked note, that’s where I started my thinking on this area of thought.)
Now, too, as has been pointed out (especially on the ABU Cardinal Reel diagram) a 3-d nodes arcs framework that specifies the Wicken style wiring diagram for a functionally specific organised entity can be readily represented as a structured string of Y/N Q’s, with some context indicator in a header or the like. That’s what AutoCAD et al do. So, discussion on strings, as pointed out already, repeatedly — but brushed aside with dismissive remarks on text in English — is WLOG.
That means the 500 coin per atom search model is a good toy description of the challenge being faced, and it means that the random text generation or code generation challenge is similarly relevant. So would be, take the nodes-arcs code for say a fairly complex amplifier circuit and hit the bits with random noise, then — with suitable protection if things want to let smoke out — build the circuit per the nodes-arcs plot and power up. (NOT advisable to do at home folks, that one is potentially dangerous!)
The common message is exactly what the above analysis has long pointed out: functional specificity comes in deeply isolated islands in config spaces and blind needle in haystack searches on the gamut of solar system or observed cosmos are maximally unlikely to find them.
But, FSCO/I is a commonplace, routine phenomenon.
So, how does it come about?
The same way text in this thread did, by design.
Design is the empirically reliable, trillions of cases backed source of FSCO/I, so reliably so that we are epistemically entitled to generalise inductively (bearing in mind the needle in haystack analysis above) and hold that FSCO/I is best currently explained on design and is a highly reliable sign of it.
Yes, that has momentous import for our views on OOL and origin of body plans, even origin of the physics and organisation of the cosmos.
At minimum, it means that in a reasonable world, design would sit at the table as a reasonable possibility for OOL etc.
Why then the stout (and sometimes abusive) resistance we so commonly see instead?
Ideology.
There is a culturally and institutionally dominant ideology afoot, evolutionary materialism, and of course it has its fellow travellers, who may sometimes be like the former President of Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad — doubly zealous as they need to “prove” loyalty. (Mr A was of Jewish background, his family apparently converted to Islam in the 1950’s.)
Philip Johnson’s retort to Richard Lewontin’s NYRB review of Sagan’s last book, again bears noting:
KF
KF,
May I suggest a strategy with dealing with all the irrelevant comments to a thread which quickly descend into either name calling or unrelated ideas. Create a parallel thread where everyone can call each other names or discuss OT ideas. Allow their comments to exist but in another place.
That way there might be an intelligent discussion and not mindless or immaterial or at best peripheral comments. This would be a good place to start. That way even the anti-ID people might be forced to make responsive statements instead of just negative criticism in its various forms. It would allow people to follow discussions as opposed to have to wade through gibberish.