Information

From Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: In the evolution debate, a key issue is the ability of natural selection to produce complex innovations. In a previous article, I explained based on engineering theories of innovation why the small-scale changes that drive microevolution should not be able to accumulate to generate the large-scale changes required for macroevolution. This observation perfectly corresponds to research in developmental biology and to the pattern of the fossil record. However, the limitations of Darwinian evolution have been demonstrated even more rigorously from the fields of evolutionary computation and mathematics. These theoretical challenges are detailed in a new book out this week, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. Authors Robert Marks, William Dembski, and Winston Ewert bring Read More ›

From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: The first mistake is the failure to distinguish between classical forms of information vs. functional information, and is described in a short 2003 Nature article by Jack Szostak.(2) In the words of Szostak, classical information theory “does not consider the meaning of a message.” Furthermore, classical approaches, such as Kolmogorov complexity,(3) “fail to account for the redundancy inherent in the fact that many related sequences are structurally and functionally equivalent.” It matters a great deal to biological life whether an amino acid sequence is functional or not. Life also depends upon the fact that numerous sequences can code for the same function, in order to increase functional survivability in the face of the inevitable steady Read More ›

Further to Luciano Floridi: Information has been the Cinderella of philosophy, reader Mario Lopez writes to mention, I gave a short review of William Dembski’s Being as Communion in Amazon where I warn the reader not to confuse his ideas with Floridi’s Informational Structural Realism. Here is a short quote to give you an idea of Floridi’s position: Informational realism (IR) is a version of SR. As a form of realism, it is committed to the existence of a mind-independent reality. Like ESR, it supports a first-order, minimal ontological commitment in favour of the structural properties of reality. Like OSR, it also supports a second-order, minimal ontological commitment in favour of objects understood informationally. For those of you not familiar Read More ›

From Luciano Floridi at New Atlantis: Information is, in a way, the Cinderella in the history of philosophy. Any philosophy of knowledge, no matter whether ordinary (epistemology) or scientific (philosophy of science) requires an understanding of information — for instance in discussions of sensory perception and knowledge acquisition. There is no ethics without choices, responsibilities, and moral evaluations, all of which need a lot of relevant and reliable information and quite a good management of it. Logic was first a matter of the study of arguments, and then of mathematical proofs, but today it is also if not mainly a question of information extraction, transmission, and dynamics, and some branches of logic are really branches of information theory. Ontology, the Read More ›

From Philosophy of Science: Abstract: We have a conundrum. The physical basis of information is clearly a highly active research area. Yet the power of information theory comes precisely from separating it from the detailed problems of building physical systems to perform information processing tasks. Developments in quantum information over the last two decades seem to have undermined this separation, leading to suggestions that information is itself a physical entity and must be part of our physical theories, with resource-cost implications. We will consider a variety of ways in which physics seems to a affect computation, but will ultimately argue to the contrary: rejecting the claims that information is physical provides a better basis for understanding the fertile relationship between Read More ›

Are they growing up over there? From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: But what is this information? Is it “ontological” – a real thing from which space, time and matter emerge, just as an atom emerges from fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks and gluons? Or is it “epistemic” – something that just represents our state of knowledge about reality? Here opinions are divided. Cosmologist Paul Davies argues in the book Information and the Nature of Reality that information “occupies the ontological basement”. In other words, it is not about something, it is itself something. Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena disagrees. Even if all of reality emerges from information, he says, this information is Read More ›

The last couple of days I have spent too much time trying to rescue a hard drive.  This drive was intended for a Windows 10 system, but it would not appear anywhere in utilities.  BIOS could recognize it was plugged in, but that was it.  Nothing in Explorer, nothing in Disk Management, not even in the command-line diskpart partitioning utility.  In fact, just plugging the drive in would cause all of these to hang until terminated. I went through the whole litany of troubleshooting procedures: BIOS check, memory diagnostics, different slots, direct plug, external connections, a special cloning hardware connection.  Nothing. Finally, after painstaking effort on multiple different machines I was able to get a Linux command-line terminal on one Read More ›

From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, at Shadow of Oz: Swamidass surprises us with a very counter-intuitive statement: “Did you know that information = entropy? This means the 2nd law of thermodynamics guarantees that information content will increase with time, unless we do something to stop it.” … Of course, he is arguing much more than just the observation that entropy = information. He’s arguing that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics guarantees an increase in information. This seems very sloppy to me. Yes, if we consider time as a variable, then the universe will develop pockets of increased information (complexity?), while still experiencing a global loss of information and complexity. The universe Read More ›

Well, there are some limitations: From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Nothing about DNA is 100 percent accurate or even as close to the accuracy we’ve come to expect from our electronic bit storage media. Simply synthesizing DNA of a desired sequence will sometimes result in an error, as will amplifying it or decoding it again. And some specific sequences are especially error prone, like long runs of a single base (like TTTTTTTTTT) or stretches that are a mix of Gs and Cs. So any encoding method has to be robust to these issues. Fortunately, we’ve already developed encoding algorithms that stand up to data loss. The authors went with Fountain codes, which allow packet-based data to be transmitted over Read More ›

Some say that it’s not clear that the term is useful. A friend writes, “Information is always “about” something. How does one quantify “aboutness. ” He considers the term too vague to be helpful.” He suggests the work of Christoph Adami, for example, this piece at Quanta: The polymath Christoph Adami is investigating life’s origins by reimagining living things as self-perpetuating information strings. … Once you start thinking about life as information, how does it change the way you think about the conditions under which life might have arisen? Life is information stored in a symbolic language. It’s self-referential, which is necessary because any piece of information is rare, and the only way you make it stop being rare is Read More ›

From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: For more than 300 years we have been asking ourselves about the true nature of reality – what, ultimately, stuff is made of. Time and again, we have found another layer beneath what we thought was the lowest. What’s more, with each new depth we plumb, our old understanding of reality is swept aside. Now we could be on the cusp of another revolution, thanks to efforts to reconcile our two most successful but incompatible theories of reality. Not particles, energy, space,time or anything else we might think of as fundamental truly is: instead, the essence of reality is a thing whose workings we’re only just beginning to grasp. (paywall) More. Ananthaswamy may not mean Read More ›

Below: Note: Mentioning an experiment: “Information isn’t just something our stupid monkey brains made up.”and “If it’s [information] not real, neither are we.” Pop science today seems to hold that is physical (perceptronium, maybe?). Or that, whatever it is, we wouldn’t understand it. anyway. See this vid before it is overwhelmed with protest and yanked. See also: New Scientist astounds: Information is physical and Data basic: An introduction to information theory Follow UD News at Twitter!  

Evo-Info: Some Things Computers Will Never Do: Nonalgorithmic Creativity and Unknowability: See also: Evolutionary Informatics Lab: A look inside Follow UD News at Twitter!

That would make it and other very ancient documents possibly decipherable. From Bruce Bower at ScienceNews: The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes.Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt, says archaeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Hebrew speakers seeking a way to communicate in writing with other Egyptian Jews simplified the pharaohs’ complex hieroglyphic writing system into 22 alphabetic letters, Petrovich proposed on November 17 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. More. Read More ›

I was sad to recently realize that Hubert Yockey passed earlier (in January) this year. Hubert Yockey, though he personally was against Intelligent Design, made many contributions to science that many of us within the ID community view as pro-ID work. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate and reflect on his contributions as they relate to ID.
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