As we go into the holiday weekend, it may be worth the while to reflect on how design thinking and key associated ideas — here, especially the von Neumann self-replicator — could help play a role in transforming education, industry and agriculture. Details, here . . . A happy Christmas and a prosperous new year to all! END
Look what University of Chicago’s James Shapiro is saying,
New research has shown that a novel way of looking at evolution is needed. Cells are sensitive and communicative information processing entities. Novelty in evolution comes in part from genome changes that are the result of regulated cellular activity. The next step in the understanding of evolution is emerging since the Modern Synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelism and the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in the middle of the last century. Vid also. Slides here.
He says the new way is informatics. And it’s okay for an establishment guy to just say this stuff?:
Disentangling basic issues in evolutionary debates
1. Origin of life & the first cells – still on the fringes of serious scientific discussion Read More ›
Dave Ullmer at Beyond the Information Age asks for critics for his e-book summarized here: Beyond the Information Age discusses a new way of thinking about computers, knowledge and understanding. He’d like to know if it relates to the ID controversy.
While explaining how he believes complex biochemical information just happen to arise through random processes, Brown University’s Ken Miller dismisses Mike Behe’s mousetrap, introduced in Darwin’s Black Box. To show that it is not an example of irreducible complexity that points to design, he recounts a childhood recollection of a pupil using a mousetap to fire spitballs, which showed that the mousetrap could be used for something other than killing mice (pp 54-57). That is how Miller, who has just won the Stephen Jay Gould award for promoting Darwinism, knew that ID biochemist Behe was wrong.
Ralph David Westall, an IS prof at California Polytechnic University, Pomona*, contacted Uncommon Descent to say, Read More ›
Blogger Wintery Knight, a programmer by day, comments on neo-Darwinism’s view of how information gets encoded: Imagine a materialist CIO who thought that code was written by large numbers of monkeys pounding at keyboards instead of by engineers. He would be firing all the software engineers and replacing them with monkeys in order to generate better code. And he would call this method of generating new code “science”. It’s the scientific way of generating new information, he would say, and using software engineers to generate new code isn’t “science”. It’s what he learned at UC Berkeley and UW Madison! His professors of biology swear that it is true! It seems to me that there are incentives in Read More ›
THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.
(Other news coverage continues below)
———————————————
Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.
<<<<<>>>>>
The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science
Edited by Bruce L. Gordon
and William A. Dembski
ISI Books
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Wilmington, DE 19807
Back Cover:
MathGrrl’s friends have been discussing her recent post( here), on measuring complex specified information, which garnered 324 comments and counting.*
Not being a mathie, I couldn’t follow most of the discussion here, but certain turns in the discussion reminded me of something I’d heard before: Read More ›
In a review of a very interesting-sounding book on information systems through the ages, beginning with African drumming (James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood), Freeman Dyson discusses information theory. The story of the drum language illustrates the central dogma of information theory. The central dogma says, “Meaning is irrelevant.” Information is independent of the meaning that it expresses, and of the language used to express it. Information is an abstract concept, which can be embodied equally well in human speech or in writing or in drumbeats. All that is needed to transfer information from one language to another is a coding system. A coding system may be simple or complicated. If the code is simple, as Read More ›
Tom Woodward, author of DOUBTS ABOUT DARWIN and DARWIN STRIKES BACK, interviewed Robert J. Marks about his work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. For the podcast, go here: “Darwin or Design?” (program starts at 5:08 | actual interview starts at 7:52)
I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled: “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”. While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish. In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.
The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/
Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:
http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf
The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper. A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.
Typical figures published in the scientific literature for the percentage similarities between the genomes of human beings (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) range from 95% to 99%. However, in press releases intended for popular consumption, evolutionary biologists frequently claim that human and chimpanzee genomes are 99% identical. Skeptics of neo-Darwinian evolution have repeatedly punctured this”99% myth,” but unfortunately, it seems to have gained widespread credence, due to its being continually propagated by evolutionists! For instance, one often encounters statements like these in the literature:
“Because the chimpanzee lies at such a short evolutionary distance with respect to human, nearly all of the bases are identical by descent and sequences can be readily aligned” (The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome, Vol. 437/1 September 2005/doi:10.1038/nature04072).
“The consortium [National Human Genome Research Institute] found that the chimp and human genomes are very similar and encode very similar proteins. The DNA sequence that can be directly compared between the two genomes is almost 99 percent identical.” (here.)
“The genetic codes of chimps and humans are 99 percent identical.” (here)
This is a multi-part post in response to Merlin’s paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View”. See introduction and table of contents.
Merlin spends a large part of the paper trying to establish what does and does not constitute a directed mutation. Merlin, I think, fails in her attempt to properly differentiate Darwinian and Lamarckian mutations because she has not taken into account the main purpose of Darwinism as described in Part II of this essay. To recap, the entire point of Darwinism was to frame biology as to extricate itself from final causes. Therefore, any mode of genetic adaptation which fails to do so is non-Darwinian.
Explaining Away Apparent Purposefulness
Merlin, it seems, is somewhat aware of this, as she tries to explain away any apparent purposefulness within mutational mechanisms. She says,
Read More ›
William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.14, No.5, 2010, pp. 475-486. LINK