Information

Jeremy England’s origin of life claims have been in the news lately. A friend points us to a paper by Sara Walker: Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics Abstract: The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the Read More ›

From Lee Spetner, author of The Evolution Revolution at True Origin: Many years ago I published a paper that pointed out that the evolutionary process can be characterized as a transmission of information from the environment to the genome (Spetner 1964). Somewhat later I wrote that there is no known random mutation that adds information to the genome (Spetner 1997). This statement in one form or another has found its way into the debate on evolution versus creation. Evolutionists have distorted the statement to attack it, as in Claim CB102, where Isaak has written his target for attack as, ‘Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information.’ Perhaps something like this statement Read More ›

Don Johnson is the author of Programming of Life and Programming of Life 2: the Earth These vids introduce the ideas.   See also: Don Johnson’s lecture on “Bioinformatics: The Information in Life”

Missed this earlier: From Phys.org: Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA. In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable. DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from Read More ›

But will it really lead to a hack-free internet? From Lee Billings at Scientific American: In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite has tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China—each separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory, and firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning “quantum space race” to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network—that is, a potentially unhackable “quantum internet” that would be of immense geopolitical importance. The findings were published Thursday in Science. More. We do not live in the world we think we do. That said, probably, any Read More ›

A friend writes to raise the question of Basener’s ceiling: From Robert Marks II at ENV: We show that no meaningful information can arise from an evolutionary process unless that process is guided. Even when guided, the degree of evolution’s accomplishment is limited by the expertise of the guiding information source — a limit we call Basener’s ceiling. An evolutionary program whose goal is to master chess will never evolve further and offer investment advice. More. William Basener is an artificial intelligence expert. Our friend writes “Complexity in evolutionary algorithms always stops at a certain point and never gets any better, which is predicted by Basener’s ceiling. He also notes that biological evolution seems to have no problem continuously generating Read More ›

What difference does evidence make, as opposed to piety, political correctness, or court judgments? Find out here: Bob’s interview with Julian Charles’s on “The Mind Renewed” about “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics”- Youtube: https://youtu.be/y3f-h08PGak , Podcast: http://themindrenewed.com/mp3/TMR_173_DrRobertJMarksII_Evolutionary_Informatics_128kbps.mp3 Bob’s essay at EN  “Top Ten Questions and Objections to Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics’” https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/top-ten-questions-and-objections-to-introduction-to-evolutionary-informatics/ Winston’s “ID the Future” podcast #1 on “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics”  titled “Author of New Book Tells Why Evolution Simulations … Don’t” http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2017/05/author-of-new-book-tells-why-evolution-simulations-dont/ Winston’s “ID the Future” podcast #2 on “Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics” titled “Why Digital Cambrian Explosions Fizzle … Or Fake It” … http://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2017/06/why-digital-cambrian-explosions-fizzle-or-fake-it/ Granville’s EN “Intelligent Design Goes International — A Report from Istanbul” https://evolutionnews.org/2017/05/intelligent-design-goes-international-a-report-from-istanbul/ Bob’s essay in CNS News “Sorry Darwin: New Video Game Proves Adaptation Is Ubiquitous – Not Read More ›

IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, (developed Reversible Computation and Quantum Teleportation), on how weird physical phenomena discovered in the early 20th century have taught us the true nature of information, and how to process it: 39:30 minute mark: “Entanglement is ubiquitous: Almost every interaction between two systems creates entanglement between them… Most systems in nature… interact so strongly with the environment as to become entangled with it almost immediately.”… 44:00 minute mark: “A classical communications channel is a quantum communication channel with an eavesdropper (maybe only the environment)… A classical computer is a quantum computer handicapped by having eavesdroppers on all its wires.” See also: Data basic: An introduction to information theory

Note to Readers: The past few days on this thread there has been tremendous activity and much discussion about the concept of probability.  I had intended to post this OP months ago, but found it still in my drafts folder yesterday mostly, but not quite fully, complete.  In the interest of highlighting a couple of the issues hinted at in the recent thread, I decided to quickly dust off this post and publish it right away.  This is not intended to be a response to everything in the other thread.  In addition, I have dusted this off rather hastily (hopefully not too hastily), so please let me know if you find any errors in the math or otherwise, and I will be happy Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This is true for all types of probabilities! So the next time something unlikely happens, or you realize that something very unlikely must have already occurred, remember that no matter how unlikely it is, the odds of it happening weren’t infinitely small. Its existence, just like our existence, already disproves that possibility! More. Siegel attempt to marshall Bayesianism to make his case that vanishingly small odds make no difference. But, of course, it isn’t the odds of single events that we must consider, but the odds of complex patterns, not always dependent on each other. Nice try, of the kind that traditional media robotically sponsor. Can readers imagine the uproar if someone argued for the Read More ›

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: What Is Intelligence? 20 Years After Deep Blue, AI Still Can’t Think Like Humans “Good as they are, [computers] are quite poor at other kinds of decision making,” said Murray Campbell, a research scientist at IBM Research. “Some doubted that a computer would ever play as well as a top human. “The more interesting thing we showed was that there’s more than one way to look at a complex problem,” Campbell told Live Science. “You can look at it the human way, using experience and intuition, or in a more computer-like way.” Those methods complement each other, he said. Although Deep Blue’s win proved that humans could build a machine that’s a great chess player, Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. … “Many exciting things Read More ›

Nylon has only been around for about 40 years. Did the bacteria just happen to evolve their eating habits during that period or is the story more complex? Is design a better explanation? You can comment on the story here at UD (though not at ENV). From Ann Gauger of the BioLogic Institute at Evolution News & Views: A significant problem for the neo-Darwinian story is the origin of new biological information. Clearly, information has increased over the course of life’s history — new life forms appeared, requiring new genes, proteins, and other functional information. The question is — how did it happen? This is the central question concerning the origin of living things. Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe have Read More ›

He writes, “Information is Physical (but not how Rolf Landauer meant)” and offers the documentary evidence supporting the embedded vid below here. Comments are disabled there, so you will have to comment here. See also: Information: New light on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox? Researchers: If we treat these two particles as described by a single quantum state, we learn that the original uncertainty principle ceases to apply, especially if these particles are entangled. and Book: Computer simulations yield very minor results for Darwinian evolution

From Phys.org: A group of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has shed new light on the famous paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen after 80 years. They created a multidimensional entangled state of a single photon and a trillion hot rubidium atoms, and stored this hybrid entanglement in the laboratory for several microseconds. The research has been published in Optica. In their famous Physical Review article, published in 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen considered the decay of a particle into two products. In their thought experiment, two products of decay were projected in exactly opposite directions—or more scientifically speaking, their momenta were anti-correlated. Though not be a mystery within the framework of classical physics, Read More ›