Informatics

First of all I want to thank the Uncommon Descent moderators for allowing me to post, with a particular hat tip to StephenB.  As I indicated on a prior thread, I am not sure how often I will take the time to create a new thread, but hopefully I can occasionally post something of interest.  Kudos to gpuccio for a wonderful first thread, relating to the basic definition of “design”.

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Intelligent Design Basics – Information

In this post I want to consider a fundamental aspect of intelligent design theory: the concept of “information”. Read More ›

While most people agree that simple laws/rules per se cannot create information, some believe that algorithms are capable to do that. This seems an odd idea, because algorithms, i.e. sets of instructions, after all can be considered complex laws/rules, or set of rules, sort of generalizations of rules. The usual and simplest example some evolutionists offer to prove that algorithms can produce information is a stochastic algorithm that, by randomly choosing characters from the English alphabet, in a number of trials, finally outputs the phrase “methinks it is like a weasel” (or whatever else phrase with meaning). This way it seems to them that information is produced by randomness + laws, or even created from nothing. Let’s admit for the Read More ›

One of my favorite biologists is Gunter Wagner. He makes the claim in Genome Biology and Evolution that evolvability and modularity are highly associated. While not proof of a requirement, I think that Wagner is on the right track. In fact, this sort of research can actually bridge the gap between Intelligent Design and Evolutionary biology. The main critique ID has for evolutionary biology is that the haphazard mutation/selection paradigm does not create organisms. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t evolve in some way, but it does rule out the haphazard mechanisms. As I pointed out in 2008, there is a difference between “parameterized” evolution and “open-ended” evolution. Parameterized evolution requires information about the most likely productive ways to Read More ›

Random Brain Waves Save Free Will? The debate continues with a new publication. But the new study by Han-Gue Jo and colleagues of Freiburg makes a strong case that the “RP” is not really a ‘thing’ at all. They say that, in the two seconds before a button press, you see both negative and positive changes, in roughly equal numbers. There are slightly more negative ones, so on average, there is a small negative “RP”, but only on average. See: Exp Brain Res. 2013 Dec;231(4):495-500. doi: 10.1007/s00221-013-3713-z. Epub 2013 Oct 9. Spontaneous EEG fluctuations determine the readiness potential: is preconscious brain activation a preparation process to move? Jo HG, Hinterberger T, Wittmann M, Borghardt TL, Schmidt S.

Actually the available hardware computing power is enormous and the software technologies are very sophisticated and powerful. Given the above fortunate situation about the technological advance of informatics, many phenomena and processes in many fields are successfully computer simulated. Routinely airplane pilots and astronauts learn their job in dedicated simulators, and complex processes, as weather forecast and atomic explosions, are simulated on computers. Question: why Darwinian unguided evolution hasn’t been yet computer simulated? I wonder why evolutionists haven’t yet simulated it, so to prove us that Darwinism works. As known, experiments of evolution in vitro failed, then maybe experiments in silico would work. Why don’t evolutionists show us in a computer the development of new biological complexity by simulating random Read More ›

Industry is constantly searching for technologies to maximize profits and minimize costs. Software industry is no exception (the world software market exceeded $300 billion). Actually some computers can process quadrillions floating-point operations per second (10^15 flops). It would be technically possible to implement on such computers the paradigm of unguided evolution (random variation + selection) for obtaining new programs by randomly modifying old programs. So, why software houses pay legions of human programmers to develop ex-novo applications when an automatic process could do the job? They could save truckloads of money by automatizing, at least in large part if not in toto, the software development work flow. To have an idea, let’s perform two simplified calculations about the speed of Read More ›