Category: Information
Winston Ewert on his dependency graph model of the relationship of life forms
| September 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Informatics, Information, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
Programmer Winston Ewert has developed a dependency graph, as an alternative to the Darwinian “tree of life,” to understand relationships among life forms. Here he discusses it with Jonathan McLatchie: Dr. Winston Ewert … proposes an alternative model to common descent to explain the hierarchical classification of life. Based on his paper published in Bio-Complexity, […]
Can machines really learn? Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a parable
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind |
At Mind Matters Today: “Machine learning” is a hot field, and tremendous strides are being made in programming machines to improve as they work. Such machines work toward a goal, in a way that appears autonomous and seems eerily like human learning. But can machines really learn? What happens during machine learning, and is it […]
Gaia is back, and she has discovered Darwinism
| August 19, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Information, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
The old Gaia asserts that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of Earth’s surface. Some scientists believe that this “Gaian system” self-regulates global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors in an “automatic” manner. Earth’s living system appears to […]
Researchers: Genetic “information” is a key to trees surviving deadly beetle
| August 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Information, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: A University of Montana researcher has discovered that mountain pine beetles may avoid certain trees within a population they normally would kill due to genetics in the trees. UM Professor Diana Six made the discovery after studying mature whitebark and lodgepole trees that were the age and size that mountain pine beetle prefer, […]
Could one single machine invent everything?
| August 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind |
The king was pleased with Schmedrik’s proposal. But just as he was about to hand over the requested amount, his wise advisor Previsio pulled him aside and whispered, “Dear king, before we pay Schmedrik his fee, do you not think it prudent to first determine if the Innovator works?”
Feuding Wikipedia editors headed to their private top court
| May 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Information, Intelligent Design, Media |
From msmash at Slashdot: Wikipedia, the vast online crowdsourced encyclopedia, has a high court. It is a panel called the Arbitration Committee, largely unknown to anyone other than Wiki aficionados, which hears disputes that arise after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee — […]
Henry Kissinger: The End of the Enlightenment dawns, due to artificial intelligence
| May 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Readers may remember Henry Kissinger, a 70s-era American diplomat (“U.S. secretary of state under Richard Nixon, winning the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for the Vietnam War accords”). From Kissinger at The Atlantic: How the Enlightenment Ends: Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence. As the internet and increased computing […]
Quantum entanglement nears visibility
| April 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Information, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Emily Conover at Science News: Quantum entanglement has left the realm of the utterly minuscule, and crossed over to the just plain small. Two teams of researchers report that they have generated ethereal quantum linkages, or entanglement, between pairs of jiggling objects visible with a magnifying glass or even the naked eye — if […]
What makes citing problems with Darwinism heresy?
| April 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Information, Intelligent Design |
From Cornelius Hunter at ENST: Who is the author of the following statement? In contrast [to trait loss], the gain of genetically complex traits appears harder, in that it requires the deployment of multiple gene products in a coordinated spatial and temporal manner. Obviously, this is unlikely to happen in a single step, because it […]
RNA molecules recognize each other
| April 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Information, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: In the past decade, scientists have watched protein and RNA molecules condensing into droplets, or membrane-free condensates, in many kinds of cells, from bacterial to human. They have also noted that the same proteins that form liquid droplets in healthy cells can “solidfy” in the context of disease, such as neurodegenerative disorders. But […]
Law of Conservation of Information vs Darwinism
| April 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Information, Intelligent Design |
From Andrew Jones at ENST: One of the most fundamental and useful ideas that has come out of the intelligent design movement is the insight expressed by Bill Dembski as the Law of Conservation of Information. Put simply, the idea is that information does not appear out of nowhere, but can always be traced to […]
The memtransistor as brainlike computing – with what outcome?
| February 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
From ScienceDaily: In recent years, researchers have searched for ways to make computers more neuromorphic, or brain-like, in order to perform increasingly complicated tasks with high efficiency. Now Hersam, a Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, and his team are bringing the world closer to realizing […]
New book: Life is “a flowing stream” and “order does not entail design”
| February 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Complex Specified Information, Darwinism, Design inference, Evolution, Information, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
From Oxford University Press, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, edited by Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupre, – A radical new conception of biology and the metaphysics of the living world – Offers a new kind of process philosophy with a naturalistic grounding – The Introduction provides a state-of-the-art survey to orient […]
The weirdness of entangled time
| February 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Information, Intelligent Design, Physics |
From Elise Crull at Aeon: The problem is that entanglement violates how the world ought to work. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, for one. But in a 1935 paper, Einstein and his co-authors showed how entanglement leads to what’s now called quantum nonlocality, the eerie link that appears to exist between […]
The Edge, a science thinksite, asks “The Last Question”
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Computing, AI, Cybernetics and Mechatronics, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind, Neuroscience |
as in “your last question, the question for which you will be remembered.” Some interesting answers (in the form of questions) emerge: Can we program a computer to find a 10,000-bit string that encodes more actionable wisdom than any human has ever expressed? – Scott Aronson Are complex biological neural systems fundamentally unpredictable? – Anthony […]
Origin of life challenge: The information challenge is the only one that counts
| December 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Information, Origin Of Life |
From Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: The first issue relates to the comparison of the sequencing of amino acids in proteins to the letters in a sentence. This analogy is generally disliked by design critics since it so clearly reveals the powerful evidence for intelligence from the information contained in life. It also […]
Can the rot of naturalism be stopped? Relating information to matter and energy might help
| December 21, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Information, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
From O’Leary for News at Evolution News & Views: Philosopher of consciousness John Searle identified this underlying theme of post-modernism in Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (2008): “[I]t satisfies a basic urge to power. It just seems too disgusting, somehow, that we should have to be at the mercy of the […]
Plant studies: Intelligence does not require a brain or nervous system
| December 16, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind, Minds, Plants |
From philosopher Laura Ruggles at Aeon: What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some […]
Guest Post — Template-Assisted Ligation: A New OOL Model
| December 15, 2017 | Posted by kairosfocus under biosemiotics, Cell biology, Chemistry, Food for thought, Functionally Specified Complex Information & Organization, ID Foundations, Information, Origin Of Life, Self-Org. Theory |
Dr E. Selensky occasionally requests that UD posts an article on his behalf. What follows is his latest: ______________ Arguably, the RNA world model is excessively complex: it operates too complex structures and involves too complex interactions. The origin of life, some researchers believe, must have been simpler.In an attempt to close the gap between […]
What is “information”?
Information, of course, is notoriously a concept that has many senses of meaning. As it is central to the design inference, let us look (again) at defining it. We can dispose of one sense right off, Shannon was not directly interested in information but in information-carrying capacity; that is why his metric will peak for […]
