Information

A: Of course, this was long since answered in Dembski’s No Free Lunch, but many (especially those who draw their understanding of ID from what ruthlessly manipulative objectors have to say) will not be familiar with what he has long since said on record. So, let’s clip and highlight, as foundational: >>p. 148:“The great myth of contemporary evolutionary biology is that the information needed to explain complex biological structures can be purchased without intelligence. My aim throughout this book is to dispel that myth . . . . Eigen and his colleagues must have something else in mind besides information simpliciter when they describe the origin of information as the central problem of biology. I submit that what they have Read More ›

It is about understanding the role of information in nature. He  writes: If “conservation of energy” was a really big thing in the 19th century, it was because it made a non-material, yet indestructible thing, explicitly existent. Equally significant was Einstein’s claim in the 20th century that matter could be converted into energy. At this point, Democritus’ atomism that formed the basis of the Enlightenment philosophy of materialism, was finished. In the 21st century, we are now learning that another immaterial thing, which the 19th century disco vered and named “entropy”, had become the 20th century “information.” Now, in the 21st century, ID or “functional information” (or the much older word “purpose”), is even more fundamental than previously thought. It caused Read More ›

He kindly writes to say, — Some days ago I was watching a TV documentary movie where a team of archeologists were investigating the ruins of a Roman villa, unearthed in England. At one point, one of them unearthed a small, colored cubic rock. The archeologists knew that crystals would not form naturally in that soil. So he enthusiastically shouted: “Wow, here is a piece of the villa’s floor!”. In archeology, a cubic rock is sufficient to infer design, without hesitation, with no need of probabilistic calculations, rather in a somewhat direct intuitive way! Compare the archeology scenario to what happens in biology: here evolutionists — before systems far more complex, specified and organized than cubic stones — work hard Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Scientific discoveries often arise from noticing the unexpected. Such was the case when researchers, studying a tiny device that has become increasingly important in disease diagnostics and drug discovery, observed the surprising way it funneled thousands of water droplets into an orderly single file, squeezing them drop by drop, out the tip of the device. Instead of occurring randomly, the droplets followed a predictable pattern. These observations led the researchers to deduce mathematical rules and understand why such rules exist. … “Beyond the immediate relevance to microfluidics, we believe our findings could one day be applied to forming nanocrystals into precise shapes,” Tang said. Researchers do not yet have a way to exert the sort of steady Read More ›

From msmash at Slashdot: In the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of statins, Sir Rory Collins, the head of clinical trials at Oxford University, noted that If you want a career in medicine these days you’re better off studying mathematics or computing than biology. More. From Tom Feilden at BBC, a key issue is information science and cancer: So why cancer? The answer can be summed up in two words: big data. What Dr Sottoriva brings to the fight against cancer is the expertise in mathematical modelling needed to mine the vast treasure trove of data the information revolution has brought to medicine. “The exciting thing is that we can apply all the new analytical techniques Read More ›

From Joanna Masel at Big Questions Online: With the error rate in this example, that could be enough for natural selection to take notice. To see how, imagine you have a permanent, germline mutation that doesn’t affect how well your protein works in normal cases, when it’s transcribed and translated correctly. But the mutation does change the fraction of error-containing variants that work properly, say from 40 percent to 42 percent. That means slightly less work for your cells’ garbage-disposal system and more fitness for you — making you healthier and more likely to survive and reproduce. In other words, this mutation benefits you, evolutionarily speaking. Natural selection doesn’t just judge how well a gene works when its proteins are Read More ›

A friend writes to note changes atStanford Plato, a major 2016 revision from 2007: Since the 1950s, the concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in many parts of biology. This enthusiasm extends far beyond domains where the concept might seem to have an obvious application, such as the biological study of perception, cognition, and language, and now reaches into the most basic parts of biological theory. Hormones and other cellular products through which physiological systems are regulated are typically described as signals. Descriptions of how genes play their causal role in metabolic processes and development are routinely given in terms of “transcription”, “translation”, and “editing”. The most general term used for the processes by which genes exert Read More ›

The “hard problem” of life From Arxiv: Chalmer’s famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the “hard problem of consciousness”. He argued that subjective experience constitutes a “hard problem” in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding “hard problem of life” as the problem of how `information’ can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard – that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately Read More ›

From BBC: Quantum processes may occur not quite so far from our ordinary world as we once thought. Quite the opposite: they might be at work behind some very familiar processes, from the photosynthesis that powers plants – and ultimately feeds us all – to the familiar sight of birds on their seasonal migrations. Quantum physics might even play a role in our sense of smell. In fact, quantum effects could be something that nature has recruited into its battery of tools to make life work better, and to make our bodies into smoother machines. It’s even possible that we can do more with help from the strange quantum world than we could without it. More. What? “Nature has recruited Read More ›

In the recent thread “That’s gotta hurt” Bill Cole states: That thought is perfectly correct. There are, in natural history, a few fundamental transitions which scream design more that anything else. I want to be clear: I stick to my often expressed opinion that each single new complex protein is enough to infer design. But it is equally true that some crucial points in the devlopment of life on earth certainly stand out as major engineering events. So, let’s sum up a few of them: Well, to those 4 examples, I would like to add the diversification of all major clades and subphyla. Of course, another fundamental transition is the one to homo sapiens, but I will not deal with Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Early life forms on Earth are likely to have mutated and evolved at much higher rates than they do today, suggests a new analysis from researchers at the University of North Carolina. In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Richard Wolfenden, PhD, and his colleagues found that the rate of a certain chemical change in DNA — a key driver of organisms’ spontaneous mutation rates and thus of evolution’s pace — increases extremely rapidly with temperature. Combining that finding with recent evidence that life arose when our planet was much warmer than it is now, the scientists concluded that the rate of spontaneous mutation was at least 4,000 times higher Read More ›

David Kaplan explains at Quanta (scroll down for vid) how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life. More. According to our favorite physicist Rob Sheldon, the guy’s hair is way more formidable than his ideas. Okay, Sheldon didn’t put it quite that way but here is what he did say: There are a number of fallacies in this video, which unfortunately, are like zombies and keep being resurrected. In addition, there’s a rhetorical “strawman” argument used to deflect rightful critique. Let’s address the strawman, and then the fallacies. (1) life is really, really, really different from non-life. So some highly simplistic feature of life is extracted–in this case–“structure”. Then we show Read More ›

From reader Gutman Levitan: I am a computer scientists and communications engineer with “unlikely” interests in nature of information and information in the nature. The interest stems basically from my research in applied AI. That was decades ago in the Soviet Union but only recently I was able to concentrate on the issues. More. From his online publication, Information: Connecting Two Sides of Reality, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics [1] famously noted that information is information, not matter or energy. Really, the three are fundamentally different in their relationship to space. A material object cannot exist simultaneously at two or more distant places; it occupies a certain place in space and no two objects can occupy the same place Read More ›

From Atlantic: But even if quantum nonlocality is the best we can hope for, PR boxes may offer clues about why that is. The question becomes not so much why nature isn’t completely classical, but why it’s not “more” quantum. We should then seek answers not by wondering why, say, objects are described by wave functions (or what a wave function is anyway), but by looking at a more fundamental matter of how information can be shunted about—of how efficient communication in nature can possibly be. What is it that apparently limits quantum nonlocality’s ability to make information exchange more efficient? All this fits with a growing conviction among many physicists that quantum mechanics is at root a theory not Read More ›

  Over on this thread we’ve had a lively discussion, primarily about common descent.  However, one of the key side discussions has focused on the information required to build an organism. Remarkably, some have argued that essentially nothing is required except a parts list on a digital storage medium.  Yes, you heard right.  Given the right sequence of digital characters (represented by nucleotides in the DNA molecule), each part will correctly self-assemble, the various parts will make their way automatically to the correct place within the cell, they will then automatically assemble into larger protein complexes and molecular machines to perform work, the various cells will automatically assemble themselves into larger structures, such as limbs and organs, and eventually everything will Read More ›