RVB8 and the refusal to mark the difference between description and invention
| March 3, 2017 | Posted by kairosfocus under Back to Basics of ID, Darwinist rhetorical tactics, Functionally Specified Complex Information & Organization, Selective Hyperskepticism |
. . . (of the concept, functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information, FSCO/I)
Sometimes, a longstanding objector here at UD — such as RVB8 — inadvertently reveals just how weak the objections to the design inference are by persistently clinging to long since cogently answered objections. This phenomenon of ideology triumphing over evident reality is worth highlighting as a headlined post illustrating darwinist rhetorical stratagems and habits.
Here is RVB8 in a comment in the current Steve Fuller thread:
RVB8, 36: >> for ID or Creationism, I can get the information direct from the creators of the terminology. Dembski for Specified Complexity, Kairos for his invention of FSCO/I, and Behe for Irreducible Complexity.>>
As it seems necessary to set a pronunciation, the acronym FSCO/I shall henceforth be pronounced “fish-koi” (where happily, koi are produced by artificial selection, a form of ID too often misused as a proxy for the alleged powers of culling out by differential reproductive success in the wild)
For a long time, he and others of like ilk have tried to suggest that as I have championed the acrostic summary FSCO/I, the concept I am pointing to is a dubious novelty that has not been tested through peer review or the like and can be safely set aside. In fact, it is simply acknowledging that specified complexity is both organisational and informational, and that in many contexts it is specified in the context of requisites of function through multiple coupled parts. Text such as in this post shows a simple form of such a structure, S-T-R-I-N-G-S.
Where of course, memorably, Crick classically pointed out to his son Michael on March 19, 1953 as follows, regarding DNA as text:
Crick’s letter
Subsequently, that code was elucidated (here in the mRNA, transcribed form):
The Genetic code uses three-letter codons to specify the sequence of AA’s in proteins and specifying start/stop, and using six bits per AA
Likewise a process flow network is an expression of FSCO/I, e.g. an oil refinery:
Petroleum refinery block diagram illustrating FSCO/I in a process-flow system
This case is much simpler than the elucidated biochemistry process flow metabolic reaction network of the living cell:
I have also often illustrated FSCO/I in the form of functional organisation through a drawing of an ABU 6500 C3 reel (which I safely presume came about through using AutoCAD or the like):
All of this is of course very directly similar to something like protein synthesis [top left in the cell’s biochem outline], which involves both text strings and functionally specific highly complex organisation:
Protein Synthesis (HT: Wiki Media)
In short, FSCO/I is real, relevant and patently descriptive, both of the technological world and the biological world. This demands an adequate causal explanation, and the only serious explanation on the table that is empirically warranted is, design.
As the text of this post illustrates, and as the text of objector comments to come will further inadvertently illustrate.
Now, I responded at no 37, as follows:
KF, 37: >>Unfortunately, your choice of speaking in terms of “invention” of FSCO/I speaks volumes on your now regrettably habitual refusal to acknowledge phenomena that are right in front of you. As in, a descriptive label acknowledges a phenomenon, it does not invent it.
Doubtless [and on long track record], you think that is a clever way to dismiss something you don’t wish to consider.
This pattern makes your rhetoric into a case in point of the sociological, ideological reaction to the design inference on tested sign. So, I now respond, by way of addressing a case of a problem of sustained unresponsiveness to evidence.
However, it only reveals that you are being selectively hyperskeptical and dismissive through the fallacy of the closed, ideologised, indoctrinated, hostile mind.
I suggest you need to think again.
As a start, look at your own comment, which is text. To wit, a s-t-r-i-n-g of 1943 ASCII characters, at 7 bits per character, indicating a config space of 2^[7 * 1943) possibilities. That is, a space with 2.037*10^4094 cells.
The atomic and temporal resources of our whole observed cosmos, running at 1 search per each of 10^80 atoms, at 10^12 – 10^14 searches per s [a fast chem reaction rate] for 10^17 s [time since big bang, approx.] could not search more than 10^111 cells, a negligibly small fraction. That is, the config space search challenge is real, there is not enough resource to search more than a negligibly small fraction of the haystack blindly. (and the notion sometimes put, of somehow having a golden search runs into the fact that searches are subsets, so search for a golden search comes from the power set of the direct config space, of order here 2^[10^4094]. That is, it is exponentially harder.)
How then did your text string come to be? By a much more powerful means: you as an intelligent and knowledgeable agent exerted intelligently directed configuration to compose a text in English.
That is why, routinely, when you see or I see text of significant size in English, we confidently and rightly infer to design.
As a simple extension, a 3-d object such as an Abu 6500 C3 fishing reel is describable, in terms of bit strings in a description language, so functional organisation is reducible to an informational equivalent. Discussion on strings is WLOG.
In terms of the living cell, we can simply point to the copious algorithmic TEXT in DNA, which directly fits with the textual search challenge issue. There is no empirically warranted blind chance and mechanical necessity mechanism that can plausibly account for it. We have every epistemic and inductive reasoning right to see that the FSCO/I in the cell is best explained as a result of design.
That twerdun, which comes before whodunit.
As for, oh it’s some readily scorned IDiot on a blog, I suggest you would do better to ponder this from Stephen Meyer:
The central argument of my book [= Signature in the Cell] is that intelligent design—the activity of a conscious and rational deliberative agent—best explains the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell. I argue this because of two things that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which following Charles Darwin I take to be the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question . . . . In order to [[scientifically refute this inductive conclusion] Falk would need to show that some undirected material cause has [[empirically] demonstrated the power to produce functional biological information apart from the guidance or activity a designing mind. Neither Falk, nor anyone working in origin-of-life biology, has succeeded in doing this . . . .
The central problem facing origin-of-life researchers is neither the synthesis of pre-biotic building blocks (which Sutherland’s work addresses) or even the synthesis of a self-replicating RNA molecule (the plausibility of which Joyce and Tracey’s work seeks to establish, albeit unsuccessfully . . . [[Meyer gives details in the linked page]). Instead, the fundamental problem is getting the chemical building blocks to arrange themselves into the large information-bearing molecules (whether DNA or RNA) . . . .
For nearly sixty years origin-of-life researchers have attempted to use pre-biotic simulation experiments to find a plausible pathway by which life might have arisen from simpler non-living chemicals, thereby providing support for chemical evolutionary theory. While these experiments have occasionally yielded interesting insights about the conditions under which certain reactions will or won’t produce the various small molecule constituents of larger bio-macromolecules, they have shed no light on how the information in these larger macromolecules (particularly in DNA and RNA) could have arisen. Nor should this be surprising in light of what we have long known about the chemical structure of DNA and RNA. As I show in Signature in the Cell, the chemical structures of DNA and RNA allow them to store information precisely because chemical affinities between their smaller molecular subunits do not determine the specific arrangements of the bases in the DNA and RNA molecules. Instead, the same type of chemical bond (an N-glycosidic bond) forms between the backbone and each one of the four bases, allowing any one of the bases to attach at any site along the backbone, in turn allowing an innumerable variety of different sequences. This chemical indeterminacy is precisely what permits DNA and RNA to function as information carriers. It also dooms attempts to account for the origin of the information—the precise sequencing of the bases—in these molecules as the result of deterministic chemical interactions . . . .
[[W]e now have a wealth of experience showing that what I call specified or functional information (especially if encoded in digital form) does not arise from purely physical or chemical antecedents [[–> i.e. by blind, undirected forces of chance and necessity]. Indeed, the ribozyme engineering and pre-biotic simulation experiments that Professor Falk commends to my attention actually lend additional inductive support to this generalization. On the other hand, we do know of a cause—a type of cause—that has demonstrated the power to produce functionally-specified information. That cause is intelligence or conscious rational deliberation. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler once observed, “the creation of information is habitually associated with conscious activity.” And, of course, he was right. Whenever we find information—whether embedded in a radio signal, carved in a stone monument, written in a book or etched on a magnetic disc—and we trace it back to its source, invariably we come to mind, not merely a material process. Thus, the discovery of functionally specified, digitally encoded information along the spine of DNA, provides compelling positive evidence of the activity of a prior designing intelligence. This conclusion is not based upon what we don’t know. It is based upon what we do know from our uniform experience about the cause and effect structure of the world—specifically, what we know about what does, and does not, have the power to produce large amounts of specified information . . . .
[[In conclusion,] it needs to be noted that the [[now commonly asserted and imposed limiting rule on scientific knowledge, the] principle of methodological naturalism [[ that scientific explanations may only infer to “natural[[istic] causes”] is an arbitrary philosophical assumption, not a principle that can be established or justified by scientific observation itself. Others of us, having long ago seen the pattern in pre-biotic simulation experiments, to say nothing of the clear testimony of thousands of years of human experience, have decided to move on. We see in the information-rich structure of life a clear indicator of intelligent activity and have begun to investigate living systems accordingly. If, by Professor Falk’s definition, that makes us philosophers rather than scientists, then so be it. But I suspect that the shoe is now, instead, firmly on the other foot. [[Meyer, Stephen C: Response to Darrel Falk’s Review of Signature in the Cell, SITC web site, 2009. (Emphases and parentheses added.)]
Let me focus attention on the highlighted:
First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals.
The only difference between this and what I have highlighted through the acronym FSCO/I, is that functionally specific organisation is similarly reducible to an informational string and is in this sense equivalent to it. Where, that is hardly news, AutoCAD has reigned supreme as an engineers design tool for decades now. Going back to 1973, Orgel in his early work on specified complexity, wrote:
. . . In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity . . . .
[HT, Mung, fr. p. 190 & 196:] These vague idea can be made more precise by introducing the idea of information. Roughly speaking, the information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure. [–> this is of course equivalent to the string of yes/no questions required to specify the relevant “wiring diagram” for the set of functional states, T, in the much larger space of possible clumped or scattered configurations, W, as Dembski would go on to define in NFL in 2002, also cf here, here and here (with here on self-moved agents as designing causes).] One can see intuitively that many instructions are needed to specify a complex structure. [–> so if the q’s to be answered are Y/N, the chain length is an information measure that indicates complexity in bits . . . ] On the other hand a simple repeating structure can be specified in rather few instructions. [–> do once and repeat over and over in a loop . . . ] Complex but random structures, by definition, need hardly be specified at all . . . . Paley was right to emphasize the need for special explanations of the existence of objects with high information content, for they cannot be formed in nonevolutionary, inorganic processes. [The Origins of Life (John Wiley, 1973), p. 189, p. 190, p. 196.]
So, the concept of reducing functional organisation to a description on a string of y/n structured questions — a bit string in some description language — is hardly news, nor is it something I came up with. Where obviously Orgel is speaking to FUNCTIONAL specificity, so that is not new either.
Likewise, search spaces or config spaces is a simple reflection of the phase space concept of statistical thermodynamics.
Dembski’s remarks are also significant, here from NFL:
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 in mind is specified complexity, or what equivalently we have been calling in this Chapter Complex Specified information or CSI . . . .
Biological specification always refers to function. An organism is a functional system comprising many functional subsystems. . . . In virtue of their function [[a living organism’s subsystems] embody patterns that are objectively given and can be identified independently of the systems that embody them. Hence these systems are specified in the sense required by the complexity-specificity criterion . . . the specification can be cashed out in any number of ways [[through observing the requisites of functional organisation within the cell, or in organs and tissues or at the level of the organism as a whole. Dembski cites:
Wouters, p. 148: “globally in terms of the viability of whole organisms,”
Behe, p. 148: “minimal function of biochemical systems,”
Dawkins, pp. 148 – 9: “Complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by ran-| dom chance alone. In the case of living things, the quality that is specified in advance is . . . the ability to propagate genes in reproduction.”
On p. 149, he roughly cites Orgel’s famous remark from 1973, which exactly cited reads:
In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity . . .
And, p. 149, he highlights Paul Davis in The Fifth Miracle: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”] . . .”
p. 144: [[Specified complexity can be more formally defined:] “. . . since a universal probability bound of 1 [[chance] in 10^150 corresponds to a universal complexity bound of 500 bits of information, [[the cluster] (T, E) constitutes CSI because T [[ effectively the target hot zone in the field of possibilities] subsumes E [[ effectively the observed event from that field], T is detachable from E, and and T measures at least 500 bits of information . . . ”
So, the problem of refusal to attend to readily available, evidence or even evidence put in front of objectors to design theory is significant and clear.
What it in the end reflects as a case of clinging to fallacies and myths in the teeth of correction for years on end, is the weakness of the case being made against design by its persistent objectors.
Which is itself highly significant.>>
Now, let us discuss, duly noting the highlighted and emphasised. END
232 Responses to RVB8 and the refusal to mark the difference between description and invention
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Is FSCO/I an invention or a description?
I know this is utterly pedantic, but is “acrostic” the correct description of FCSI/O? I’ve read it as an initialism (F-C-S-I-O), but I know some wags have unkindly suggested it is an acronym (“Fiasco”).
Bob, Strike two — playground rhetoric. Respond substantially, please i/l/o OP or leave the thread. KF
PS: I clip Wiki from top of a Google, by way of pointing out:
–> The issue would be pronouncing FSCO/I, and “fish-koi” would readily work. (Koi are beautiful fish and are produced by — intelligent design, through targetted breeding.)
–> Note, Merriam Webster:
PPS: I have updated the OP to illustrate FSCO/I as fish-koi.
Excellent work, KF. Impressive!
That said, don’t expect much from rvb8 and his ilk. Bad soil.
KF quotes Meyer:
“First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals.” [Bolden for emphasis]
Here is an interesting article about novel minerals:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201.....ls/8319026
On the face of it, these appear to be cases of undirected chemical processes generating additional complexity. The minerals are functional, specified, certainly have more complex organisation than their substrate materials, and could presumably be represented in digital form.
Do these minerals represent more FSCO/I in the world, or less, or no change? Show your work.
TA, the formation of minerals is not the writing of text that functions in an algorithmic information system. Which is what we find with DNA. Chemical reactions forming minerals such as “an Egyptian statue at the bottom of a museum drawer . . . [with] a blue coating on the statue; . . . [which] turned out to be a new mineral called Chalconatronite” are expressions of chemical reaction and crystallisation. Back in 1973 Leslie Orgel, noted OOL researcher highlighted the material difference between such and what we find in the living cell. As was already cited in the OP. For one aspect, crystallisation is a process of mechanical necessity, it is not going to exhibit the freedom required to store significant information, as say we see with protein synthesis, where the connexion from DNA codon to AA is set by loading enzymes for tRNA that load a particular AA to a particular CCA tip based on the conformation of the tRNA and the code, not mechanical necessity. Indeed, dialects exist and codons have been reprogrammed. Indeed, additional codon-AA pairings have been created. Information storage needs high contingency and protocols that set up codes, which cannot be mechanically forced. In short, a distraction not a cogent response on your part. You inadvertently underscore the force of the point. You cannot show FSCO/I by blind chance and mechanical necessity, you know there are trillions of cases of FSCO/I by design, so you tried to make up a puzzle and distractively shift the burden of warrant. Fail. KF
Your non-answer is noted. Since biological processes are fundamentally chemical and physical, then it is reasonable to assume that their representation in FSCO/I form can also be applied to inorganic systems. Hence the question. What is your answer?
By the way, mineralogical processes most certainly can be represented algorithmically – in fact that is pretty much a description of what mineralogy is.
Forget it ‘t’,
the best way I can describe this kind of post is only by using outdated Freudian language. Which amazingly enough, in the case of Kairos and to a large extent BA77, doesn’t seem to be so much outdated, as damn revealing; if it’s bigger and longer, it’s better.
Filling the post with a rebuttal of a short point I made is hubrous in the extreme, and also points to very thin skin. I have been mocked and called an idiot here, and worse, but I don’t care, honestly go ahead and insult me. The reason I don’t care is exactly the same reason I don’t care if a five year old mocks me; they’re five!
I said, the acronyms produced by Kairos (FSCO/I), Behe (ID), and Dembski (SC), are the best evidence for the thinking of IDers, and their fellow travellers. Is that wrong? Where should I go? Talkorigins? Though I must admit the description of these acronyms at ‘Talk’ is much easier to understand than Kairos’s efforts, or BA’s efforts.
They produce yards of words but refuse to do the fieldwork, (Tiktalik and umpteen others), or the Laboratory work, (Richard Lenski and his patient brilliance), or just plain good peer reviewed writing, (I suppose if you publish in the ICR Journal, or AIG Journal it does give a warm glow of seeing your name in print in a sciency sounding rag.)
I suggest Kairos take his groundsqueeking work to an open forum, ‘theskepticalzone’ perhaps, where his ilk have always been allowed to rant.
timothya @6:
Undirected processes can result in complexity. It happens all the time. That is not even the issue on the table.
Yes, chemicals (reagants) react with each other and form products of the chemical reaction. So? That has absolutely nothing to do with specified complexity, with information-rich systems, with the requirements for the origin and maintenance of living systems.
Functional in what sense? In that they will react with something? Again, so what? Every chemical does that.
They certainly aren’t specified.
Anything can be described in a symbolic language, including in digital form. There is a world of difference between something that contains information and the fact that we can describe every physical object using information.
I should add that it isn’t even clear the minerals you refer to are complex to the extent we are interested in for design purposes. Certainly as individual minerals they are not. Even if we wanted to argue that a large group of them constitutes some kind of complex structure, then see #10 above.
TA & RVB8:
You have both been objectors to design theory in and about UD for quite some time, years I believe.
Your reactions above are therefore astonishingly revealing as to the way in which the very concept of functionally specific complex organisation and associated information is being resisted. Resisted in ways that are so intellectually irresponsible and so dismissive of duties of care to truth and simple fairness that they have to be explained in terms of the fallacy of the closed, indoctrinated, hostile mind.
Sad, surely you can do a lot better than this.
FYI, the distinction between crystallisation, random tars etc and formation of the functionally specific, organised molecules of life is not some dubious novelty brought up by IDiots on some blog. Instead, it is a foundational fact.
D/RNA and proteins (including enzymes) — key molecules of the cell familiar to anyone who has done just one year of High School biology since what, the 1960’s or 70’s [which would be just about any person of at least average intelligence in our civilisation] — are polymers. But they are not like the brute-force polymers found in our common plastics. They are assembled monomer by monomer in a profoundly informational manner through cellular processes that are of algorithmic character.
D/RNA uses a templating process that uses a prong-height complementarity in side branches to chain strings that in many cases store information . . . comparable to the prongs on keys for a Yale type lock. Messenger RNA is often subjected to editing.
When it comes to protein synthesis, there is code-based, step by step assembly as is highlighted in the OP. This involves starting, elongation in functionally organised order (function being effected through onward folding, agglomeration and activation), termination, in the ribosome. That is, we are discussing an automated numerically controlled machine process carried out using molecular nanotech. (That fact alone should give you sobering pause; that it does not speaks sad volumes.)
These facts are the background for famed OOL researcher Leslie Orgel’s remarks cited in the OP. But first, let me roll forward about six years to Wicken’s related remarks:
Crystals, whether the many types long known or those that have come about through say corrosion of ancient Egyptian statues in museum drawers, simply are not assembled like proteins or templated, transcribed and edited like D/RNA.
That someone would imagine it scores rhetorical points to try to push the two together and demand showing “working” on the difference speaks volumes about the underlying ignorance and hostile closed mindedness at work.
Let me clip the first part from Orgel in 1973, as appears in the OP, that is, right in front of you both:
At this point, I have to assume that if you insist on conflating crystal formation with the creation and use of organised informational polymers such as we see in the cell, it is because your position is so weak that it demands that sort of rhetoric.
The crude reference to bigger is better and appeal to Freud is even worse. It reveals that you, RVB8, are utterly ignorant of and contemptuous about the very basics of digital — discrete state — technology and the linked logic of structure and quantity [i.e. mathematics].
Let me go back to binary [= two-state digital] logic 001. Something like a switch or a voltage in a computer chip can be in two distinct states. When we chain such elements in clusters or strings, it allows us to represent information because we can set up a protocol, a code that assigns meaningful values to particular configurations of elements. Typically, we use On/Off, North/South, Hi/Lo, 1/0.
One binary digit element [= bit] can take up two values, 1, or 0.
Two, can take up four, as for each state of the first digit, say A, there are two possibilities for the second, B: AB = 00, 01, 10, 11.
For three, there are eight states: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111. Four, give sixteen, and so forth, in general for n binary digits, there are 2^n states. For things that have 3 states, that would by the same logic be 3^n; for 4-state elements such as in D/RNA, 4^n; for ten -state elements, 10^n; for 27-state elements [one mor5e for the space between words], 27^n; for the ASCII code used in digital computers [even when embedded in UNICODE], 128^n.
This means that there is a definable abstract space for possibilities, such as we see in the table for the genetic code in the OP. Distinct states can be assigned meaningful values in accord with a code, as the Genetic code shows, cf. said table in the OP.
In a digital age, we commonly see information measured in bits, which in effect says that this file uses XX number of two-state elements. We do not hear RVB8 and ilk trying to ridicule that usage. I suspect, they lack awareness of the under-pinnings.
This then rapidly leads to the point made by Orgel, as further cited in the OP but obviously brushed aside in the attempt to make cheap, inappropriately suggestive rhetorical points [I will come back to this]:
In short, we see that the scope of a search space grows exponentially with the number of relevant discrete state elements used. Within such spaces, we observe that there are clusters of functional forms, such as the text of comments in this thread. Can such be arrived at by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity in a search type process? For simple cases involving only a few elements in the cluster, that is plausible. But for functionally organised entities such as proteins, D/RNA, fishing reels, oil refineries and living cells, no. As, the space of possibilities grows exponentially with number of elements in the cluster.
Consequently, search challenge grows, equally exponentially.
For bits, at 500 bits there are 3.27*10^150 possibilities. For 1,000 bits, that rises to 1.07*10^301. These are large numbers, the atomic and temporal resources of our sol system and our observed cosmos — the only actually observed cosmos — would be exhausted before we were to get to as much as searching one straw in an impossibly large haystack. In short, such numbers render blind chance and/or mechanical necessity irrelevant as means of accessing such islands of organised function of the types seen with D/RNA, proteins, fishing reels and oil refineries. No significant portion of the space of possibilities can be searched to make it even reasonable to suggest that blind search can hit on a happy result. Search for a golden search goes to the next level of exponentiation, and that is even worse.
RVB8, that is the reality you obviously cannot face, even after years in which it has been pointed out to you again and again.
Instead of responsibly re-thinking, that something may be wrong with the scheme of thought you prefer, you resorted to crude suggestiveness.
That utter irresponsibility simply discredits you further.
I suggest to you that it is also borderline in terms of appropriate behaviour in a forum like this one.
I must ask you to cease and desist from such crudities in future.
All you have managed to do is to inadvertently underscore how weak your objections tot he design inference on FSCO/I are.
The koi fish are looking at you and with their oh so dignified poise, they shake their heads sadly.
KF
EA, thanks. KF
Tim,
The minerals you speak of contain no information in the first place, and that obviously answers your question. Information requires a material substrate (i.e. a medium of information) operating within a system that can interpret the arrangement of the medium. Such systems are identifiable by their physical characteristics. Your example demonstrates precisely none of the necessary material conditions of information. I would encourage you to do some reading and acquaint yourself with the physical properties required. Setting the ID issue completely aside, there’s no reason for you to fundamentally misunderstand the topic you are asking about.
Here’s a good place to start, it’s dedicated to this specific question: Biosemiosis: Bibliography
Upright Biped:
“The minerals you speak of contain no information in the first place”.
In a backhanded way you have hit the nail on the head. Since organic chemicals are fundamentally the same as inorganic ones (being made of atoms), the same must be true of them.
Now explain to your confrères why physical systems of any kind contain no information in the first place.
Eric Anderson:
“Functional in what sense?”
Functional in the mathematical sense. Any function applied to a set of inputs will have a single, determinate output. In this case, chalconatronite.
Eric Anderson:
“I should add that it isn’t even clear the minerals you refer to are complex to the extent we are interested in for design purposes. Certainly as individual minerals they are not.”
This is interesting.
Are you saying that the design inference only works above a certain level of “complexity”. I have noticed that KF, Stephen Meyer et al., when pushed, resort to qualifiers on complexity such as “significant” or “large”. These are quantitative arguments, as is yours. So would you like to put a number on what “to an extent” is? Or significant? Or large?
timothya said:
Surely I’m misunderstanding you. Are you saying that an encyclopedia or a computer hard drive contains no information?
You are asking the wrong person. Talk to Upright Biped, he is the one who claims that minerals contain no information. My rather light-hearted comment simply pointed to the fact that he doesn’t understand what a mineral actually is.
tim and rv, it would seem, based on your view, quite easy to create life in the lab, so where is it? You have made it “crystal” clear, that all that’s required are a few minerals and some common chemical reactions, and “poof.” So where is it? Why are you two keeping the secret to yourselves?
Here we are 150 years removed from Darwin and 60 years removed from Miller/Urey, and 50 years from landing on the moon, and we’re still waiting for the headline for something that’s as easy as growing a Donald Trump chia pet. Just pour a little water on it, right? When you tell the world, can I come to your Nobel acceptance party?
Of course, you know (I think) that there’s complexity and then there’s complexity. Isn’t there a bit of difference between, throwing a deck of cards on the floor and throwing a deck of cards on the floor and getting four Royal Flushes? One is complex but non-informational (mineralization, pot holes, chemical reactions) the other represents a high degree of understandable, readable, meaningful information (the parts diagram of a fishing reel) AND an impossible probability to repeat via random chance.
The point is not a complicated one, but it’s one you two, either out of ignorance or willful obtuseness (I vote for willful obtuseness) refuse to acknowledge, but that is absolutely typical of those with a religious commitment to materialism. It makes you dishonest, and that is frustrating.
What is seen in the code of R/DNA and the machinery of the cell is both impossible from a chance probability standpoint and represents understandable, readable, meaningful, SPECIFIED information. You don’t have to become an evangelical Christian to acknowledge this fact, but you do have to acknowledge it or be transparently dishonest and forever brand yourself as someone for whom the science really doesn’t matter.
The specified complexity of the machinery of the cell, is overwhelming evidence for the design of life, and yet you dismiss it without the slightest acknowledgment of the monumental problem this represents for your worldview, and without the first substantial rebuttal except to point to trivial, non-informational chemical reactions and crystallization which is like saying that since you can jump two feet, you can jump to Jupiter.
Ironically, your worldview is being obliterated by the science you claim to hold in the highest regard. The Designer does have a sense of humor.
#15
Tim, the organization of the living cell establishes DNA as a genuine medium of information (i.e. heritable memory), which it then translates in order to specify how the proteins of the living system are to be individually constructed (so that they function inside the cell).
This type of organization has a very specific set of physical characteristics that uniquely identify it among all other physical systems. Your mineral example demonstrates none of those characteristics.
There are two general options at this point: One option is for me to explain these physical characteristics to you in this comment section, and perhaps give you some of the history behind the observations. This would require your engagement. (I unfortunately hold out little hope for that scenario).
The other option is to give you a link to papers within the literature where scientists have described these systems. Judging by your response, you apparently have no interest in that option, which is your choice.
If you intend to hold your position at all costs, there is nothing to stop you — (that is, after all, what “at all costs” means).
timothya:
Well this is pretty remarkable for someone who has been around the debate for years. I am surprised that you still don’t understand the design inference or how it works. Whether you agree that design can be reliably inferred is a separate matter. But you should at least understand the issues.
Let’s start back at square 1: Do you or do you not acknowledge that there is a difference between the information contained in the molecules making up your genome and the molecules making up a pile of inanimate dirt?
Answer that question and then maybe there will be some basis for taking the next step in a rational discussion.
—–
BTW, the fact that particles around the universe do not contain information by their mere existence has already been the topic of a detailed post in these pages. I can refer you to the post if you have a sincere interest, but it would be better for you to think through it yourself. Start with the above question and then we can go from there.
Florabama @ 20
If life came about through naturalistic or materialistic processes – and, as an unreconstructed old atheist/materialist, I still say “if” – then it took the Universe over 10 billion years to get to the earliest life on Earth. So the fact that we haven’t been able to do it in the last hundred or so is hardly surprising. And the fact we haven’t done it so far doesn’t necessarily mean we never will.
The reality is that no one – not materialists, not creationists – know how the laws or regularities or information that make this Universe the way it is came about. It’s one of the most profound mysteries. Unfortunately, positing a Creator doesn’t really help. That’s just proposing a ‘who’ not a ‘how’. Of course, for those who believe they have a direct line to a Creator who will listen to – and even respond to – prayers for a particular football team to win, you could also put in a request for information on how the Creation was actually done. If you got something back, that really would be the answer to a prayer.
Seversky,
no one is positing a creator here; this is not a matter of postulating. (We would appreciate it if you would stop trotting out this long mummified, moldy strawman caricature.)
The issue as you know from many years of objecting to it, is that functionally specific organisation of high information content and high complexity exists as a commonplace phenomenon. In the literally trillions of cases where we directly know the source of such FSCO/I, it is design as process — intelligently directed configuration. Further to this a simple application of phase/state space thinking soon tells us that for cases reducible to 500 – 1,000 or more bits of information, blind chance and mechanical necessity processes on the gamut of the sol system or the observed cosmos across 10^17s could only sample a negligibly small fraction of the config spaces; ten billion years makes no difference to this, it is ALREADY factored into the analysis as part of the search resources, which are patently inadequate.
Thus, it is maximally implausible that a blind, undirected, non purposive, non designed process could arrive at cases of FSCO/I.
So, observation, analysis and inductive reasoning all align: FSCO/I is currently best explained as a reliable sign of intelligent design as key causal input.
This is prior to identifying any particular “suspects, ” big-C or small-c creators.
So long as designers are possible, inferring design on FSCO/I is reasonable.
In this context, the many obfuscations, strawman caricatures, side-tracks etc made by objectors to this inference over many years now plainly point to the weakness of the objection case.
If your side had a strong case, it should be readily apparent that blind chance and mechanical necessity get us to FSCO/I. You don’t have this, there are trillions of known cases and they all point to design. The config space, search challenge analysis backs this up.
Indeed at the upper end threshold of 1,000 bits, using 10^25 s as time to “heat death” makes little difference on the cosmic scale, we are still talking about taking a few straws worth of sample so to speak, from a haystack that would dwarf the observed cosmos.
You are inadvertently underscoring the strength of the design inference as to type of cause. And, an intelligent explanation is not like a mechanical one. Insight, skill, knowledge, creativity and purpose, not mere motions and figures of cogs grinding away in Leibniz’s mill.
I ask you, HOW exactly did you compose your comment, show the mechanical steps. That is almost irrelevant and absurd. You chose as a rational being knowledgeable of English and able to use a PC or phablet or whatever. Fingers moved to hit keys here and there are immaterial, it is which keys you — a who — CHOSE to type in what successive pattern that shaped the post.
For all we know, a molecular nanotech lab several generations beyond Venter would work. Means we do not yet imagine could be possible. That matters not, from the TEXT in D/RNA we can see that algorithms were coded to carry out extremely sophisticated processes, using molecular nanotech devices.
That points to high art, not brute blind chance and mechanical necessity.
KF
Seversky @23:
Quite right.
And if we are ever able to create life, you’d better believe it will be the result of detailed, purposeful planning and engineering, not a bunch of particles accidentally bumping into each other . . .
EA, my guess is, across this century, building on Venter et al. KF
kairosfocus @ 24
If life cannot arise from inanimate matter through some sort of naturalistic process then the only rational alternative is intelligent agency. Now, while it is possible to discuss intelligent agency without specifying the agent, there is a huge amount of content in the comments on this blog which make it quite clear who most here believe that agent to be and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
You also know that I reject the notion that information – at least in the commonly understood meaning of the word – is a property of the natural world rather than the mental models we use to describe that world.
Yes, depending on your assumptions, you can calculate that some event is so improbable as to be impossible for all practical purposes, yet highly improbable events happen all the time. You and I are both astronomically improbable events, yet we are just two of over seven billion equally improbable events that populate this planet.
As I’ve written many times, do I know how the Universe began or how life emerged? No, I don’t and neither does anyone else. They are still profound mysteries. I can’t rule out intelligent agency but unless it is an agent functionally indistinguishable from a god then it doesn’t help with those most fundamental questions.
Eric Anderson @ 25
Yes, it will. But it will also prove that it is possible for life to be coaxed from inanimate matter. If it isn’t, then all the abiogeneticists are wasting their time.
Seversky @28:
I agree with you there are some interesting open questions about the nature of life — certainly if we are willing to consider the hard questions, such as consciousness, awareness and the like.
I may be at odds with some of my colleagues, but my personal assessment is that it is still an open scientific question whether life — certainly sentient life — can arise from just a specific arrangement of matter. We will have to see how that plays out in the coming decades — probably going far beyond creating a bacterium or other single-celled organism before we have an inkling of an answer.
In either case, for purposes of the debate over materialistic evolution and intelligent design, the primary issue is not whether there is something else above and beyond the specific arrangement of matter found in living organisms. It is sufficient to look at this specific arrangement of matter to draw a conclusion of design.
So the initial inquiry is not whether “life can be coaxed from inanimate matter”. Intelligent design doesn’t argue against that possibility. It may well be possible, and many design proponents might adopt such a position. Indeed, as a working assumption it is perfectly compatible with intelligent design.
The real point for present purposes is not whether “life can be coaxed from inanimate matter”. Let’s assume that it can for a moment. The real point is that this “coaxing” will be done through detailed, purposeful planning and engineering. It will not occur through mere dint of physical/chemical processes on their own.
Thus, the conclusion of design stands firmly grounded, regardless of whether living organisms are just particular arrangements of matter or whether there is something to their nature beyond the material and the physical.
And if it turns out that there is indeed something else required for life — something above and beyond the particular arrangement of matter, some consciousness or intelligence or soul or spirit (or whatever we want to call it) — if something above and beyond physical matter is required, that fact will certainly cut further against the materialist narrative not in favor of it.
Seversky @ 27,
“If life cannot arise from inanimate matter through some sort of naturalistic process then the only rational alternative is intelligent agency.”
Correct! So far so good — except that while the materialist holds to a religious hope against hope that the impossible naturalistic path to life from non-life will be revealed, the path becomes more difficult with every revelation of a new layer of complexity that tops the already multiple layers of complexity in a working cell.
Here’s Crick 40 years ago:
“To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) IN THE CORRECT ORDER [emphasis in original]. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of nucleic acid tape (the so called messenger RNA) which will be described in outline in Chapter 5. Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would that be?
“This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less that the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written as 10^260, that is a one, followed by 260 zeros!
“This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, CONSIDER THE NUMBER OF FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLES (ATOMS, SPEAKING LOOSELY) IN THE ENTIRE VISIBLE UNIVERSE, NOT JUST IN OUR OWN GALAXY WITH ITS 10^11 STARS, BUT IN ALL THE BILLIONS OF GALAXIES, OUT TO THE LIMITS OF THE OBSERVABLE SPACE. THIS NUMBER WHICH IS ESTIMATED TO BE 10^80 IS QUITE PALTRY BY COMPARISON TO 10^260 [emphasis mine]. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well the figure would have been even more immense. It is possible to show that even since life started on earth, the number of different polypeptide chains which could have been synthesized during all this long time is only a minute fraction of the number of imaginable ones. The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time. “ Francis Crick, Life Itself — Its Origin and Nature (Simon and Schuster, 1981), 51-52.
Life is more complex than even Crick knew back in ’81 making the, “rational alternative,” that much more plausible, and dismissing overwhelming evidence is not a paean to science, it is the exact opposite — it is anti-science.
“Now, while it is possible to discuss intelligent agency without specifying the agent, there is a huge amount of content in the comments on this blog which make it quite clear who most here believe that agent to be and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.”
Wrong! Patently wrong! Crick saw the impossible complexity and came to the same exact conclusion — intelligence — but Crick’s intelligent designer was alien (and not the illegal type).
“From this point on we must leave behind quantitative considerations, however approximate, and allow our imagination a somewhat freer hand. We shall postulate that on some distant planet, some four billion or so years ago, there had evolved a form of higher creature who, like ourselves, had discovered science and technology, developing them far beyond anything we have accomplished, since they would have had plenty of time and it is most unlikely that their society would have stopped at exactly the stage at which we are now.”
Crick saw that the machine like, specified, coded, programed, impossible, complexity of life pointed toward an intelligent designer. In that regard, he was at least honest, which is far more than can be said for most materialists today who simply ignore the science when it flies in the face of their religion. As Crick demonstrates, who or what the designer might be, is irrelevant to the science that points toward design. Was Crick wrong about the complexity of the cell because he accepted the straight forward implication that it required a designer even though his designer was a space alien? No, of course not. Who or what the designer is and what our relationship is to him/her/it, is a separate question that has nothing much to do with the unmistakable implication that the utter impossible complexity of life must require a designer. To believe anything else is to hold to an irrational faith that rejects straight forward science.
Seversky, we are all familiar with string data structures and no informed person would deny that such are informational. Such are everywhere in our digital age. Such text, notoriously, is sensitive to corruption, i.e. it reflects functional specificity and organisation that is informational. The point then is, since 1953, with more and more detail across the years, we have known DNA is also a string data structure. One that is informational, null state being two bits per base in the chain, as it can take up A/C/G/T as states. We know such tapes are transcribed and edited to form mRNA, which is threaded into ribosomes and used, step by step, to create proteins, the workhorse molecules of the cell. All of this is commonplace now. Your attempt to dismiss the impressing of information into the organisation of DNA based on codes as tabulated in the OP, simply shows us that the point is strong and runs against where you wish to go ideologically. By in effect trying to deflect a major fact, you show that your ideology of evolutionary materialist scientism does not sit well with the facts of DNA. Thanks for confirming the strength of the design inference on seeing DNA etc in the heart of the cell. Which, I think we can safely take, is long prior to issues of consciousness in a certain multicellular upright non-feathered bipedal species that loves to pretend to wisdom and brilliance. KF
PS: The motive mongering rhetoric doubly fails. First, as too many objectors to design have adherence to ideologies, including self-refuting evolutionary materialism, which is thus inherently and irretrievably irrational. Second, you are committing an error of projection. Just because evolutionism was used to make it seem that God was out of a job does not mean that the motivation of design thinkers looking at the world of life runs more or less like: the cell is designed, therefore God is its designer. On the contrary ever since Thaxton et al in the 1980’s, the explicit point has repeatedly been made that an inference to design of observed cell based life on earth does not instantly lead to a conclusion as to who such a designer is, much less whether that designer is within or beyond the cosmos. The insistence of objectors on pretending otherwise strongly implies that they are desperate to appeal to anti-religious sentiment to taint the atmosphere. If you want to look at a design inference that DOES point beyond the observed cosmos, fine tuning of the physics and circumstances of the cosmos that sets up a world in which C-chemistry, aqueous medium, terrestrial planet cell based life is possible is a much better candidate, That’s why there are nervous jokes about the First Church of God, big bang sponsoring faculty talks from its base in astrophysics departments, with guest lecturer the lifelong agnostic Sir Fred Hoyle. The 1980-81 remarks by Sir Fred give sharp point to the jokes. And the fine tuning challenge has only grown since.
PPS: If I ponder my own case, I have to start from the fact that by rights I should have died from out of control asthma 46 years ago. It is desperate prayer of surrender of my mother that led to a miracle of guidance THAT VERY MORNING, which saved my life. This incident is foundational to my family. Next, I am deeply struck by the force of the historic witness of the C1 Christians, starting with the 500 who stod unflinchingly for what they directly knew to be true, regardless of dungeon, fire, sword and worse. Then I see the positive transformation in my life, in that of millions, and in the course of civilisation, and I know delusions are ruinous, not integrative. Then, I see the metaphysical implications of being a rationally and responsibly free, morally governed thinking being, including on logic. That points to the only serious candidate world root level IS capable of grounding OUGHT: the inherently good creator God, a necessary and maximally great being, worthy of loyalty [I owe him my LIFE!] and the reasonable, responsible service of doing the good in accord with our manifestly evident nature. (If you doubt this, simply put up another serious candidate that is not prone to spectacular collapse. For sure, evo mat scientism fails the coherence test and is necessarily false.)
OK, kf @ 3 – a more substantive question. If FSCO/I is an acrostic (as you still state, what are the other lines, that include FSCOI? I’m genuinely interested to know what it means (assuming it is genuinely an acrostic).
Bob O’H, unresponsive to the focal issue, which is pivotal. That speaks volumes; esp as I cited dictionary authority that backs up my usage and provided a pronunciation if that was desired. Again, you are underscoring the want of serious response on the part of too many longstanding design inference objectors. KF
kf – sorry, where did you post the definition of ‘acrostic’. I can’t find it!
Behold the great strength of Intelligent Design: it can gracefully grant materialism all its assumptions. Sure, dear materialist, everything biological may very well be entirely physical, but you cannot deny the existence of design and intelligent designers. And, sure, also these intelligent designers may very well be entities who are entirely physical, but you cannot deny that the relationship between intelligent designers and design is a clear distinct class of causation. And most surely, dear materialist, you must admit that intelligent design is the best explanation for all the fancy stuff in life.
Bob, did you read no 3 above on acronyms? Looks like no, link: http://www.uncommondescent.com.....ent-626274 KF
Origines, yes. That is one power of inductive reasoning and inference on tested, reliable sign. KF
KF,
Come on, it’s just a mixup of two similar words. No one will think worse of you if you acknowledge the error.
DS, please read the Merriam-Webster definition clipped at no 3: ” also : an abbreviation (such as FBI) formed from initial letters : initialism.” And, we don’t need to be off on a tangent. KF
@KF:
you wrote in your article:
Please don’t harass DS, Bob OH and others just because you don’t remember what you have been writing….
kf @ 36 – yes, I did. But it didn’t help, but you called FCSI/O an acrostic, and I’m intrigued about that, not about the acronym.
KF,
Somewhat tangential, although not wholly, given the original point of the OP.
You used the word acrostic.
You cited a definition of acronym
These words have different meanings.
Please, just acknowledge that you made a rather trivial error in the OP.
timothya @17:
Welcome to the debate! Of course a certain level of complexity is required. We can’t call any two-bit relationship “complex”. Right from the outset Dembski proposed his universal probability bound as a specific number. There are many, many designed things that exist below that level of complexity, but the bound is proposed in order to eliminate false positives. It is a rational and rigorous approach to the complexity side of the equation.
Even if we required a higher level of complexity, a vast number of biological systems qualify for that level of complexity.
Again, this is exceedingly basic and foundational to the design inference, so worth spending some time on if you are still unclear about what “complex” means in the context of intelligent design.
DS, BO’H and Orlog: It seems you are insistent on tangents. In reply to the latest, I simply point out that an acronym is a type of acrostic, an acrostic name; that’s why it tends to be made up from initial letters. Obviously, there are also acrostic poems and inscriptions etc in which initial letters are cleverly arranged to spell out a message or word (and yes there are complexities beyond this first level). The willingness to expend so much on trying to find me in the wrong on a minor point while studiously avoiding the substantial matter speaks for itself on the actual force of the design inference on FSCO/I — “fish-koi” — as empirically reliable sign. KF
RVB8 and the refusal to mark the difference between description and invention
I’m a bit perplexed about the expectation coming from the convinced materialist…
Which way the author of this post expected RVB* to respond?
According to his beliefs or yours?
KF,
That’s quite a flexible definition of acrostic you are using, where the initial letters can “spell” something as arbitrary as FSCO/I.
DS,
sigh.
I first note on how studiously the focal matter is side-stepped; which itself speaks volumes. On the insisted upon tangent I have been quite puzzled; as I am simply reporting what I learned long ago in grade school from my teachers (admittedly, notoriously of the old school), and which accords with the pattern in my name, that of my brother and my father.
Acro- is a Gk-origin prefix used e.g. in acro-polis [a high-point citadel — fortification — in a city such as . . . per historical significance . . . Athens, Corinth and Jerusalem, and some key ports have borne the same], which per Dictionary.com means “a combining form with the meanings “height,” “tip end,” “extremities of the body” . . . . [fr.] Greek, combining form of ákros topmost, highest; akin to Latin acer sharp. [–> I wonder on connexion to names for steel here] Cf. acme, ear2.” Patently, the initial letter of a word is an extremity; readily pointing to its use, including possibly independently as there has been a longstanding literary habit of going to Gk or Lat to create new words in English.
Thus ACRO + . . . is a framework, for prefixes speaking to an extremity or dominant high point or extremity comparable to a citadel or a key port.
So, too, we readily see how the suffix -ic can be used to create adjectival forms and/or nouns.
Acrostic poems, inscriptions and names would then be closely related forms, with the further influence that this interacts with the memory-aiding power of the mnemonic and may interact with rhetorical forms such as the chiasm, which criss-crosses a descending and ascending sequence of points. Often, creating a natural focal point at the pivot where the sequence turns back: ask not what country can do for you but instead what you can do for country: C–> Y, Y –> C, focus, Y.
Acrostics, then are a significant cluster that are a literary and/or rhetorical high-point that then dominates a lot of conceptual ground even as the Acra in Jerusalem dominated its history at a crucial time as the Maccabees took so long to break it.
So, no I do not believe I am speaking loosely, save insofar as I have been led to understand that being able to readily pronounce has yielded to the ubiquity of such abbreviations.
Note, again, Merriam-Webster from no 3 above (which should have settled the side-track at the outset): “also : an abbreviation (such as FBI) formed from initial letters : initialism” — where the exemplar given has no ready pronunciation save the sounding of the letters; likewise for HTML (hit-mal tempts me . . .), etc.
That is the context in which I have given a way to sound FSCO/I, fish-koi in part as an answer to the puerile schoolyard taunt that has been inflicted by way of irresponsible, sneering dismissal of a rather inconvenient phenomenon for ideological evolutionary materialism.
Namely, FSCO/I is ubiquitous in language and in technology as well as the world of cell based life, where for every independently observable case it reliably comes about by design, with a base of trillions of examples. This, being backed up by the needle in haystack blind search challenge.
Now, let us return to focal concerns.
KF
KF, if you hadn’t just looked up acro-, but acrostic, you would have found that acrostic isn’t just acro + ic (acroic?), but acro- + stikhos, the latter meaning “line of verse”.
So, an acrostic is literally:
The acrostic is the whole poem, not just the letters at the beginning – though, obviously, it can be used as a pars-pro-toto….
is no poetry, regardless what your teachers have taught you.
If you had looked up the definition of acrostic after you read Bob’s comment, you could have avoided the whole tangent! That would have been a pity, as it would have deprived us from wortgeklingel like :
“Acrostic poems, inscriptions and names would then be closely related forms, with the further influence that this interacts with the memory-aiding power of the mnemonic and may interact with rhetorical forms such as the chiasm, which criss-crosses a descending and ascending sequence of points.”
Orloog, All you have done is point to acrostic poetry, for which the no 1 exemplar is Psalm 119, which lays out the Heb Alphabet . . . just possibly, the original one (per those Sinai turquoise mine inscriptions of what may be Manasseh and co. Ltd) . . . to teach the significance of Scripture. I simply point out that the core concept is in the prefix, Acro, extremity. As a result, structurally, an acronym is an acrostic name and what I see in dictionaries as “acrostic” seems to be a contracted phrase: acrostic poem. (By which adjective becomes noun as is common in English.) Poetry is secondary, these days — FBI, NSA, CIA, KGB/NKVD, USSR, USA, HTML, SQL etc — show how acronyms have become dominant. Likewise, being able to call the letters in sequence conveniently as a word (such as laser, radar and sonar or asdic) has taken a back seat — as the M-W example directly implies. So, no, the whole side tracking has been needless if you and others had simply taken Merriam Webster in no 3 above seriously: “also : an abbreviation (such as FBI) formed from initial letters : initialism” — notice, how “initialism” is here synonymous. I spoke further for record, in order to show that there is method to madness as perceived. And, given what was there from 3 above per Merriam-Webster, all of this majoring on minors is patently eloquent testimony by evasive silence that the key point of FSCO/I has force to be reckoned with. Not, what does acro mean, but the empirically reliable inference to design as key causal process, on seeing FSCO/I as sign. KF
PS: I expanded and put into paras. I find, too, you seem to miss the significance of chiasm as a rhetorical structure [descending then re-ascending the steps], of mnemonics and of how acronyms interact with both. Acronyms are the high ground citadel here.
KF, acrostic has always been a noun (well, since the 1580s), you abuse it as an adjective !
An “acrostic poem” is a tautology, as acrostic itself is a kind of poem….
I repeat – as you obviously haven’t read it:
Question:
“How did the first cell become specified before the organization required to specify something?”
…
Answer:
Verbiage Foul !!
Wortgeklingel !!
Tautology !!
@UBP,KF:
At the beginning, this was just a tangent (as Bob said) – I, too, became interested whether there was a kind of merkvers which KF used.
KF could have answered Bob’s question just by saying: “Well, I use acrostic as an adjective of acronym” Some of us onlookers would have shaken our heads, but the general reaction would have been “meh, if he wishes to…”
The problem starts when KF made up a new etymology for acrostic
, thereby claiming that the word has been used in KF’S sense all the time by everyone.
How can you discuss with someone who suddenly uses words so unconventionally, but isn’t aware of it?
PS: I see “wortgeklingel” and raise “motive mongering rhetoric”…
KF,
Not that I don’t trust your morphological analysis, but Orloog quotes:
I’m guessing that if I wrote a poem where the first letters/characters of the lines were F, S, C, O, /, I, and then claimed it was an acrostic, I would (rightly) be accused of stretching the meaning of “acrostic” far beyond what is reasonable.
Orloog,
At the beginning this was taking a pot shot at a particular opponent who happens to have empirical facts as his resource. It was the same thing in the middle, and the same at the end.
UB, dead right. And the continued side-tracking speaks glaringly of that which must not be named. -onym of course is a suffix meaning name. Put acro + onym together, compress one o and we get acronym, again, acrostic name which is exactly the function in view. KF
PS: I add, that in former years educated people studied Latin and Greek. It was natural for them to construct words they needed from components from those languages, maybe with a bit of modding to smoothen out. We often saw that with key scientific terms. A good, fairly familiar case in point is the metric system of units. Of course they did things like putting in names of people such as Ohm or Joule etc.
UB @ 51: “How did the first cell become specified before the organization required to specify something?”
Excellent question. Has anyone responded to this yet?
On complexity. From the beginning, Dembski spoke of odds 1 in 10^150 as marking a reliability threshold. I was not comfortable with that for a gamut beyond sol system and squared its bit form, 500 bits –> 1,000 bits. 500 bits specifies 3.27*10^150 and 1,000 bits 1.07*10^301 possibilities, thus measures of complexity and haystack size to be searched. At such thresholds sol system and observed cosmos scope searches do not have resources to be more than negligible by contrast, so isolated islands of function are effectively impossible on blind search. Down that road, active, intelligently injected information as Dembski and Marks later discussed. Objectors simply have not done basic homework. KF
“But, but, but, your use of an acrostic is slightly off.” Really? That’s it? That’s all the materialists can come up with? Seriously? Hmmmmn! Perhaps this explains why Neo-Darwinism is crumbling away.
@UB.
Organisms are replicators. The first cells were primitive replicators. They did not have to replicate with great precision because they did not need to compete with the level of accuracy in replicators we observe today. In fact, NASA has a specific department to prevent this very thing from happening in off world environments.
From this article on the constructor theory of life
And how does “mind” result in those things in human designers? What is the theory behind how human knowege grows? This argument assumes we know nothing about it and haven’t made any progress on the issue for, thousands of years.
If one is making the appeal, every human designer we have observed is a complex, knowege laden entitiy, that has a complex material brain, which itself would need to be explained, etc.
critical rationalist @59:
Yes, it all sounds so easy. As long as we don’t actually look into the details or ask any hard questions.
The initial question isn’t whether early cells self-replicated. The question is how early cells could come into existence with a capability of self-replication.
And this is just wishful thinking, again based on a failure to actually look at what is required for self-replication:
“They did not have to replicate with great precision . . .” There is no basis for this claim. There is no reason for thinking it is true, other than the fact that it supports a materialistic narrative.
—–
What an absolute load of bunk!
Take some time to think through what is required for your primitive cells to exist in a real-world environment and to self-replicate. Then these facile, naive, made-up stories about “highly-inaccurate, non-purposive” chemicals accidentally bumping into each other to form living cells won’t seem so impressive to you.
The level of gullibility one would have to embrace to believe stuff like this “constructor theory,” is truly remarkable.
Why doesn’t a “highly inaccurate, non-purposive construction” fall completely apart? In order for something to continue to exist homeostasis needs to be fine-tuned.
CR, how does mind result in the typing of the text of your comment just now? How is this relevant to the point that we know intelligent agents exist, that we do not exhaust the possibilities and that there are observable characteristics such as FSCO/I that are reliable indicators of design as cause. This is more than enough to effect a revolution in origins science already, and without taking on a world of further issues that are not germane to what is already clearly seen. KF
CR
During replication DNA mutates. How would these early cell survive if their DNA was continually breaking down?
This sentence is written in the unambiguous affirmative. “The first cells were primitive replicators”. Additionally, there was “no need for precision”, because they did not have to compete against more precise replicators. Poof! Done! All assumptions have been demonstrated.
good grief
CR, since you apparently know all this to be true, then will you please summarize the number of different physical constraints required to interpret the “recipe” and the number of representations within that “recipe” that are required to describe the construction of the constraints? (This is not a wild-eyed request, after all, we can do this for modern cells). 0nly under such an analysis could you possibly even begin to gauge the level of accuracy necessary to create the (required) semantic closure. You see, it wasn’t other critters that the original cell had to overcome, it was the necessity of describing the translation apparatus in a transcribable memory, and being able to successfully interpret the description. That’s how the cell cycle works.
So can you provide any of this data? Of course not. This is because constructor theory provides no answers to any of the central issues, and in doing so, becomes the perfect theory for people like yourself. At any point where an actually explanation and data are needed, the “theory” merely kicks in the ludicrous (and non-falsifiable) assumption that unless we can state a law that prohibits a thing, then that thing must have happened the way we assume it did.
Really? Give it a rest.
UB, we actually see homeostasis with defences, metabolism with controlled intake and disposal of wastes, all coupled to the additionality of a von Neumann type kinematic self replication facility. Where, the processes are code centric, using text with algorithms carried out on molecular nanotech machines. Such things require very specific functional configurations of high complexity and information content. The search space challenge to get to that information blindly is a patent empirical supertask, not credibly feasible on the gamut of the observed cosmos. So, what we are seeing is grand question begging backed up by the fallacy of confident manner and an ideological takeover of key institutions. Such, in the end cannot stand. But it can do a lot of damage before the inevitable collapse occurs. KF
@Florabama:
No, for me, that is not longer the point of this tangent – I have a problem with KF making up an etymology of acrostic to bolster his quite unusual use of this word, i.e., as just the adjective for acro.
@KF:
I should have been forewarned by the clumsy compound noun which you use as a moniker. So, let’s have a look at your comment #55:
UB, dead right. And the continued side-tracking speaks glaringly of that which must not be named. yes, it is just a minor subject, but one which sheds a light on your modus operandi
-onym of course is a suffix meaning name. no problem with this sentence…
Put acro + onym together, compress one o and we get acronym,… and this one is correct, too
again, acrostic name which is exactly the function in view. and here you fail miserably: acrostic isn’t the adjective to acros (?????)!!! Without any doubt, acrostic is a compound of ????? (akros) and ?????? (stikhos): put acro + stikhos together, compress the hos and we get acrostic
While acronym means “heads of words”, acrostic means “heads of lines”. Your phrase “acrostic name” doesn’t make sense in this context.
PS: I learned Greek and Latin at school, and I’m informed about the basic techniques of creating compound nouns – heck, I’m German, it’s our pasttime (just ask Heidegger…)
what a pity, Greek characters are displayed as question marks…
good grief, really?
let it go, man
If you need something to get worked up about, try helping CR decide how many non-integrable constraints it takes to specify the primeval translation apparatus.
@UBP: I like Greek and Latin, so, yes, really….
Really. I like building slot-loaded dipoles and walks on the beach. So what?
The pedantry over words is still a completely pointless distraction.
If someone is so stubbornly wrong in my area of expertise, why should I trust his conclusions in other areas?
Orloog,
I took note of KF’s use of acrostic in stead of acronym. To me it was a triviality. It had no bearing on what he was saying, in my view, so I read past it and made the adjustment as I so often do to get past typos and such. No big deal.
You, and others, want to focus on minutia and ignore the main point, altogether.
Regarding “why should I trust his conclusions in other are?”
You are engaging in a form of the genetic fallacy.
Furthermore, KF has asked no one to “trust his conclusions” about this topic whether it be an acrostic or an acronym or a widget. In point of fact, KF has many times laid out his reasoning to his conclusion in a detailed, linear, point by point manner. If you do not agree with his conclusion, prey tell, why? Where is his chain of reasoning broken. Do you need some clarification on his part about a point or two.
What does it take to get you people to focus? If, to you all, the most important aspect of KF’s post was the use of the word acrostic, you have proven to me that you all are really not serious about addressing the real points of this debate at all.
Stephen
PS You can all ignore me, now, while we fight about whether I should have used “past” or “passed” in my first paragraph. I am sure opinions will vary and it is so, so important to achieve clarity that this particular needs to be resolved before the main point can be properly addressed.
PPS For those who are figure of speech challenged, that PS was sarcasm. Need to avoid a further distraction, so I am stating that explicitly for your benefit.
“stubborn”
That’s rich. Really.
Allow me to offer you some unsolicited advice. Go find yourself a 3×5 index card and a good sharp pencil, and write down the naked honest answer to the following question:
Was I truly confused by the meaning Kairos conveyed?”
After you write “No”, you can then fold up that card and carry it around with you as you go through life demanding adherence in “your area of expertise” from the other 7 billion of us. And if you ever become frustrated — particularly in situations where your area of expertise isn’t even the topic on the table — you can take out your card and contemplate it. Perhaps you’ll come up with your own answer to your question.
@UB
Sounds like you’re looking for this paper on information theory.
And this paper on the contractor theoretic theory of life
Frankly I can’t get worked up over rvb8’s, oorlog’s, DaveS’ and others’ bone of contention over whether FSCO/I is an acronym or an acrostic. It is like arguing over the best way to market numerology, phrenology or astrology.
CR, I’ve read your second paper, now can you answer my question?
“please summarize the number of different physical constraints required to interpret the “recipe” and the number of representations within that “recipe” that are required to describe the construction of the constraints?”
Upright Biped:
“This type of organization has a very specific set of physical characteristics that uniquely identify it among all other physical systems. Your mineral example demonstrates none of those characteristics.”
Rubbish.
Chalconatronite clearly is uniquely specified by its physical characteristics. Where did those characteristics come from? Natural causes that generated new and increased complexity? Or an intelligent agent when they were formed?
Would you like to explain how the kestrel [SNIP- family forum TA, and broken window theory, consider yourself on notice] was intelligently injected into the mineral? The Famous Onlookers await your explanation.
Orloog (et al),
I see you wish to prolong a distractive tangent and we can see the usual trend to turn it into an ad hominem, atmosphere-poisoning attack.
Now, first, I am NOT making up an etymology.
I have reported on what should be a readily acknowledged longstanding acknowledged fact regarding what we could term “academic coinage.” A fact that leaves “fossils” in the terms, which we may readily inspect and which are accessible to all.
There are words commonly used in academic related contexts that are and were routinely assembled from esp. Greek antecedents. In relation to Acros as I highlighted long since on historically significant cases, Acros + Polis –> Acropolis, Athens. Acros + Corinth –> Acrocorinth. In the case of Jerusalem, in a Hebrew-Aramaic culture, Greek invaders built a citadel which was known as the Acra which played a key part in the rise of the Hasmoneans, thus we see a loan word.
In another case, in 1 Cor 6, Paul seems to have created a term based on Leviticus as rendered in Septuagint: arsenocoitai.
As a result, we should be open to the obvious in looking at academic words. The ending -ic is commonly to be found with adjectives and adjectives in as loose a language as English, tend to become nouns. (And yes, I saw the same derivation you noted in the dictionaries. With all due respect to the learned authors, they are not telling the whole story as there are other socio-linguistic dynamics at work, pardon as follows.)
That is why I dared suggest that Acrostic Poem likely became simply Acrostic, a long time since. I am aware of the construction of acrostic from stichos, but note that it is a well known pattern that words of similar form have influence on how meanings are taken. One of the bugs/features of English as a language. That Acrostic was chosen invites the question of influences on meaning from closely resembling suffixes, roots etc.
Indeed, in my native land, a whole folk philosophy has grown out of the aural resemblance between “I” and “eye,’ leading to “I-man.” The one who is, and who sees in a world of pain and exile, Babylon. (And yes the famous song on the psalm reflects that philosophy.) A philosophy that cannot simply be brushed aside as ignorant conflation of words that have different meanings.
Money has likewise become “dun-ny,” in an ironic pun that utilises a rhyme.
As for kairos + focus, there is a world of meaning compressed there, and your sneer is of no consequence, thank you.
Likewise, we readily see that Acros + -onym yields a contracted form acronym, equivalent to acrostic name. (I have it on not only memory of my teachers but also painful memories of required memorisation of roots, prefixes and suffixes in lessons and texts — or even online as I checked yesterday between work assignments and power cuts, that taking apart such words based on their components is reasonable praxis. [A machine seized up yesterday morning, they are hoping to get a long delayed new genset in synch to restore a stable grid. And yes, this is loaded with further examples from the sci-tech world. English is maybe the most flexible major language, which needs to be recognised as a bug/feature.])
I put it to you, also, that there is no need to make a mountain out of a molehill of dictionaries [including even the famous OED] if I chose to use -ic in a readily understood context, in its obvious adjectival sense.
I appreciate that you are concerned over language, but this should not be used as an in the end toxic distraction. English is exceptionally loose and/or flexible.
And, please, at this time of pivotal decision for our civilisation, this rhetorically strategic moment, let us focus as a general or admiral would, on the key dangers and opportunities.
(Yes, all of that is loaded into that “clumsy” handle. Where, if you think my handle is bad, ponder the bitter history lessons written into my personal name!)
KF
PS: Assume I am utterly in the wrong on using Acrostic in adjectival sense. What relevance is that to FSCO/I apart from distraction? Nil.
@KF
1) You are definitely making up the etymology of “acrostic” – there is no doubt about its origin as “acros” + “stikhos”. You try to reanalyse this into “acros” + “ic”, an interesting example of folk etymology. I gave you the link to the OED, where you can see that “acrostic” was used as a noun first!
2) I repeat: “acrostic” isn’t just the adjective to “acros” – btw, that rather would be “acric”. You invented that meaning, and now you insist that it is commonly used. It is not!
3) I called you moniker clumsy as it should be “kairofocus” or perhaps “kaironfocus” (it isn’t acrospolis, is it?)
4) I’ll end with the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. “
KF:
“Where, if you think my handle is bad, ponder the bitter history lessons written into my personal name!”
Could you let us know what those lessons might be?
AJ,
I find it interesting that you chose to invidiously compare FSCO/I with ” . . . the best way to market numerology, phrenology or astrology.”
Now, let us see, you posted a text, using ASCII code, in English, of 225 characters, manifesting functionally specific, complex organisation and associated information. Such a text comes from a field of 2^(7 * 225) possibilities, 1.325*10^474.
Blind chance and/or mechanical necessity, using all the atomic and temporal resources of our observed cosmos — 10^80 or thereabouts atoms for about 10^17 s, at 10^12 to 10^14 tries each per s, could not search anything but a negligibly small fraction of that total, and would face a supertask to reach such islands of function in the config space.
You tossed it off through intelligently directed configuration in a matter of minutes.
That remarkable difference reflects injection of active, intelligent information.
It also points to what you are loath to acknowledge, but which is empirically reliable on an observation base of trillions. FSCO/I is observable, can be quantified and compared to thresholds of utter implausibility for blind search [500 – 1,000 bits], and is a strong sign of design as cause.
To overturn that, we do not need loaded comparisons with superstitions, nor ideological question-begging enforced by the new lab coat clad magisterium. No, we need to see demonstration that blind chance and mechanical necessity has the needed capability. Studies so far are a factor of 10^100+ short of the threshold band.
It is an empirically reliable, analytically plausible inference that FSCO/I is a sign of design as cause.
On analyses and observations that are quite similar to those that give us high confidence in the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Further to this, we can detect a trace of the perception that equates worldview level acceptance of ethical theism with ignorant superstition. I suggest, such a dismissive leap is ill-advised and speaks more about the objector than about the credibility of such theism as a worldview.
KF
TA, kindly scroll up to the OP and take time to learn what Leslie Orgel put on the table in 1973. KF
PS: Also, you know far better than you have done with language.
@KF
1) Sigh. You may use “acrostic” in an adjectival sense – just not as the adjective to “acros”, but to “acrostic”
2) If you keep up repeating a demonstrably wrong fact – even after being confronted with overwhelming evidence – what relevance is that to your credibility?
KF:
“Where, if you think my handle is bad, ponder the bitter history lessons written into my personal name!”
TA: My question is: Could you let us know what those lessons might be?
KF’s response:
“TA, kindly scroll up to the OP and take time to learn what Leslie Orgel put on the table in 1973. KF
PS: Also, you know far better than you have done with language.”
TA: Sorry, but I can’t see anything that is related to your “handle”. Was Leslie Orgel personally acquainted with you? Was he referring to you personally in his paper? Please explain.
critical rationalist @76
‘Natural selection’ is, in fact, a process of elimination. Elimination only explains why some organisms go out of existence, but does not explain why organisms come into existence. Darwin’s theory promotes the false belief that elimination is creative.
Given that natural selection is a process of elimination, existent organisms are the ones that got away. Instead of being created by ‘natural elimination’, exactly the opposite is true: they are “untouched” by ‘natural elimination’. Existent organisms are those organisms on which natural selection has precisely no bearing whatsoever. They are the undiluted products of chance.
Orloog,
I have not disputed the direct construction [I have had no reason to doubt it], I have pointed to the influence of -ic as a suffix, which WILL have an influence. And no I am not simply indulging folk etymology. In that context, given repeated pointing out of the distractive nature, I must point out the rhetorical pattern, red herring –> strawman caricature –> ad hominem driven dismissal of a case on the merits through atmosphere tainting.
The sustained evasion of empirical evidence on the reality of FSCO/I, the ducking of the observation base of trillions of cases and the refusal to engage the search challenge analysis in the end speak volumes regarding balance on the merits.
TA,
My first given name — I am what could be called a name-bearer — is written in my family’s martyred blood over the door of my native land’s parliament. Which, per family tradition, stands on the site of my relative’s house; seized after his execution on false charges of fomenting rebellion.
Kangaroo court in front of two idiot militia officers who would not allow time for GWG’s physician to be called in witness as to why he was absent from a pivotal meeting. (The doctor was all of 40 miles away and a man’s life was on the line, never mind he was facing a prognosis of maybe one year to live.)
A Governor who had helped preside over the Irish famine approved the execution, in an ill-judged action likely driven by resentment over GWG warning in parliament that famine and the people of my native land were a volatile mix and calling for reasonable acts of relief.
GWG was hanged on one hour’s notice to himself.
Not, one of Britain’s finer moments.
At least, the Governor was recalled in disgrace — though cheered on his way to the ship as a hero by some — and was tried. He of course got off. The cockneys rendered their verdict by hanging him in effigy. To give due acknowledgement, Darwin protested.
But, the matter is replete with lessons of history bought with blood and tears.
[I add: kindly, note time stamps. above, I pointed to the remarks of Leslie Orgel in 1973 on the differences between crystals, random polymers and the functionally specific complex molecules found in cell based life. And, not for the first time. On language, you know the vulgarity you used, one of the seven notorious words.]
KF
KF:
“My first given name — I am what could be called a name-bearer — is written in my family’s martyred blood over the door of my native land’s parliament. Which, per family tradition, stands on the site of my relative’s house; seized after his execution on false charges of fomenting rebellion.
Kangaroo court in front of two idiot militia officers who would not allow time for GWG’s physician to be called in witness as to why he was absent from a pivotal meeting.
A Governor who had helped preside over the Irish famine approved the execution, in an ill-judged action likely driven by resentment over GWG warning in parliament that famine and the people of my native land were a volatile mix and calling for reasonable acts of relief.
GWG was hanged on one hour’s notice to himself.
Not, one of Britain’s finer moments.
At least, the Governor was recalled in disgrace — though cheered on his way to the ship as a hero by some — and was tried. He of course got off. The cockneys rendered their verdict by hanging him in effigy. To give due acknowledgement, Darwin protested.
But, the matter is replete with lessons of history bought with blood and tears.
[I add: kindly, note time stamps. above, I pointed to the remarks of Leslie Orgel in 1973 on the differences between crystals, random polymers and the functionally specific complex molecules found in cell based life. And, not for the first time. On language, you know the vulgarity you used, one of the seven notorious words.]”
Is “GWG” George William Gordon? And was the Governor that you refer to George Eyre? I do know a bit about him (coming as he did from Australia). If so, he was most certainly an imperialist murderer in the Jamaican uprising and Gordon’s death was most certainly a judicial murder.
KF, were you named after George Gordon?
If anyone is interested, here is one part of the Wikipedia account of the Jamaican uprising: “According to one soldier, “we slaughtered all before us… man or woman or child”. In the end, the soldiers killed 439 black Jamaicans directly, and they arrested 354 more (including Paul Bogle), who were later executed, many without proper trials. Bogle was executed “either the same evening he was tried or the next morning.”[5] Other punishments included flogging of more than 600 men and women (including some pregnant women), and long prison sentences. The soldiers burned thousands of homes belonging to black Jamaicans without any justifiable reason, leaving families homeless throughout the parish. This was the most severe suppression of unrest in the history of the British West Indies, exceeding incidents during slavery years.”
This is what British imperialism stood for.
By the way, Edward Eyre had nothing to do with the Irish potato famine. Bad as he was, it isn’t fair to tar him with that one. He was in Australia the whole time it happened.
TA, I was named after my paternal grandma, he was her great uncle; the family line ties to Jacobins and likely [I speculate] people in the famous regiment which was in Jamaica for a time — which would renew family ties and would leave “brown skin” descendants also. And yes, the events I speak of showed the ugly side of British global piracy. As in small-time operator — pirate. Big time operator — navy. A language is a dialect backed by an army or navy, and more. You duly noted the 1,000 houses (my history books did not speak of multiple thousands) razed to the ground and we should note the fact that that parish has never fully recovered down to today. I once knew a descendant of Bogle, and it made a bittersweet flavour to our friendship and joint fight to create a new generation of technology education programmes in the teeth of the wishes of the powers that be. Blood tells. BTW, the story I got was Bogle’s [common law?] wife fled pregnant over mountain trails; beating of such women was not in the history books but I don’t doubt the sort of idiots who ran a kangaroo court and callously murdered an innocent man under colours of justice could easily do that. The behaviour surrounding the Christmas 1831 uprising was just as questionable. KF
PS: If it is the same one, it is an error of sources that gave the history, they point to the Irish famine. I have never heard of that figure other than as Governor Eyre; without a given name.
PPS: it is Edward John, and he was in Australia. I always wondered about Lake Eyre mentioned in 2nd or 3rd form Geography [it is too long ago now to be clear], it is the same man; no wonder I had a queasy feeling in those classes — someone walking across your grave. Somebody was, though I thought at the time, it’s just a name; likely it is not THAT monster. I will adjust my understanding of the Irish famine connexion. The comparison is there at institutional level, especially given the Bogle petition and the ill-advised reply, but it is not directly personal.
If you have time, there is an honest account of the uprising, and its brutal suppression in Jan Morris’ “Pax Brittanica”, a history of the British Empire. It is in Volume 2, “Pax Brittanica”, an ironic title in this case.
#79
Chalconatronite has a genome?
Do tell.
Uprid Biped:
“#79
Chalconatronite has a genome?”
Has anyone said so? If so, where and when?
You specifically presented chalconatronite as a counter-example in comment #79.
You, of course, already know this.
Your counter-example is easily refuted.
And so, now you play the troll.
You don’t need me around for that.
timothya:
The initial, basic, starting point of the analysis remains on the table for you:
Let’s start back at square 1: Do you or do you not acknowledge that there is a difference between the information contained in the molecules making up your genome and the molecules making up a pile of inanimate dirt?
Or, since you prefer to talk about Chalconatronite, we can word it this way:
Do you or do you not acknowledge that there is a difference between the information contained in the molecules making up your genome and the molecules making up Chalconatronite?
—–
Answer the above question and then we will know whether there is any point in further discussion with you.
Sev:
Really? You say this as if it is obviously true. Yet we routinely produce things the universe seems incapable of producing via random chance over a much greater time frame.
From wikipedia on the Infinite Monkey Theorem:
So multiple times in this one thread you’ve managed to produce what the universe almost certainly cannot. You could probably do so again quite mindlessly over lunch, between bites of a sandwich, with no government funding whatsoever.
You are either giving random processes way too much credit, or selling intelligent agency much too short. Either way, it is fantastically surprising that the universe should have merely stumbled onto and preserved processes and codes so technologically advanced and sophisticated that the best minds in the world cannot replicate it after more than a century. Any lack of surprise at this fact is a clear sign that ideology is being given precedence over rationality in forming one’s expectations.
BTW, critical rationalist, Orloog, Armand Jacks, Seversky and any others:
Feel free to jump in and answer the question @98 in an honest and objective way so that we know you aren’t just avoiding the central issues and focusing on red herrings.
Or you could remain conveniently silent on the substantive issue and hope timothya somehow squirms out of answering the real questions . . .
Phinehas @99
Excellent!
Orlong @67 “No, for me, that is not longer the point of this tangent – I have a problem with KF making up an etymology of acrostic to bolster his quite unusual use of this word, i.e., as just the adjective for acro.”
That sounds like you just said, “no it’s not, but yes it is.”
Arguing about the use of acrostic is just being the grammar police while ignoring the point of his very detailed and in depth post, isn’t it?
Kairos,
OT,
More than seven hundred murdered children found in a sewer in an Irish orphanage. The sweet sisters of Bon Cecours murdered them over a period from the 1930s-1960s, for the crime of being bastards. The Church is ‘shocked!’
I’m not!
Thank you God for this priceless example of Christian Love, and understanding of Christ’s teachings.
Are Protestants any better? Read a book!
rvb8 @103
The murderers were not Christians, regardless of what they claimed they believed. (Mat 7:16,20)
You’re a troll.
M62, sadly, you are right. Here is 1 John 3:15b: ” . . . you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” This is a critical test, no one impenitently guilty of blood and/or of the hate that leads to such overt actions is or could be in right relationship with God; there is need for repentance and reformation. That is why in reviewing how he made havoc of the faith in former days through excessive zeal for his religious agenda, Paul called himself the chief of sinners, and a trophy of God’s grace. No-one intent on responsible commentary on the Christian faith and the sins and blessings of Christendom, will be ignorant of or will fail to soberly understand and address this issue of critical moral tests for genuine Christian discipleship. morally freighted truth demands moral transformation and absence of the latter implies that profession is empty — and so such emptiness should be promptly remedied through repentance and reform of life. KF
PS: Notice, how — hours after EA’s challenge at 100 above — what we are seeing is yet another intended toxic tangent rather than any serious grappling with the pivotal issue; something that is actually a matter of back to longstanding basics? Where, notice also just whose remarks are specifically headlined in the OP. That speaks saddening volumes as to the actual motives and willful distortions at work.
EA@98
Yes, I acknowledge that there is a difference.
Yes, I acknowledge that there is a difference.
Now, to make it interesting, are you willing to answer a question? Here goes:
Do you or do you not acknowledge that there is a difference between the information contained in the molecules making up a pile of inanimate dirt and the molecules making up Chalconatronite?
AJ, you have asked a trivial matter, which EA long since highlighted the answer to, and beyond him, Leslie Orgel, when he wrote, as follows, in 1973 as cited in OP:
The repeated side tracking of this thread i/l/o that point from the OP, is telling. KF
KF, with respect, it was EA who asked the questions, not you. But, since it is your thread, I will explain my point.
EA was trying to show that there is a significant difference between the information in the molecules making up dirt or Chalconatronite (both naturally formed) and the information in the molecules making up a genome. Which is not being contested. But there is also a significant difference between the information contained in the molecules of the two naturally ocurring materials. Therefore, how does the difference between the genome and dirt mean design, but the difference between dirt and Chalconatronite not mean design?
AJ, you seem to be referencing the presence of physical information in the dirt. Is that correct?
I have just a question for clarity. I was wondering if you can tell me anything about this information – a piece of the information perhaps – contained in the dirt?
UB:
I wish I could. But it was EA who brought the issue up. You should probably ask him.
Armand Jacks:
Thank you for at least answering the question.
You went on to say:
Since you make this interesting assertion, can you please let us know what you imagine to be this significant difference between the information contained in Chalconatronite and that contained in a pile of inanimate dirt or any other naturally occurring mineral?
Note, the question is not whether Chalconatronite has the same molecules as some other mineral. The question is about the information contained therein — given your claim that there is some.
Alternatively, we can get to the same point if you are willing to expound on what you think the difference is in the information contained in your genome, as opposed to Chalconatronite.
Either way, the answer, should you be willing and able to come up with it, will point toward the fundamental issue KF is highlighting in this thread.
It seems to me you were asking someone to agree that there is a difference between the information contained in a pile of inanimate dirt and the information contained in Chalconatronite. I then asked you if you knew what any of this information is. Now you seem to be saying that you don’t actually know if any information is there.
Eric, I am an analytical chemist by trade. More specifically, spectrometry. I can tell you with certainty that there is far more information stored in your basic lump of amorphous dirt than there is in any crystal. And, the more pure the crystal, the less information.
So, given your argument, how does the assertion that the genome has more information than a lump of dirt support your argument? Whatever that argument is. There are huge differences in levels of information within the natural world.
UB:
I aplologize. I was just being a smart ass in my response to you. You did not deserve that.
I could go into great detail about the spectroscopic information contained within crystals and within “dirt” but it wouldn’t add much to the discussion. Suffice it to say, because your basic clump of dirt (soil, sediment) is a mix of many elements, it is far more information rich that any crystal, which is essentially a purified form of one or more elements in specific ratios.
But, it is late at night, I am old, and I have forgotten what the original argument was about. Catch you on the flip side. Good night.
That’s fine AJ.
In your answer you mention “the spectroscopic information contained within crystals and within dirt”, and say that one contains “far more” than the other. Not meaning to sound obtuse, but spectroscopic information would almost certainly be a representation created by a spectroscope, and not really contained in the material. Many people here would suggest that this type of information does indeed exist in a real physical sense, but it is the product of a measurement taken from the material, not contained within it. Given your background, I will assume that you appreciate the distinction between the measurement and the soil, and so I would simply ask you if the soil contains any of this kind of information? After all, this is the type of information contained within the cell, which is the actual topic of this conversation.
Armand Jacks:
Thank you for your response. I’ll pose a brief response and then we can continue tomorrow.
You seem to be conflating complexity with information. You then mention that because a clump of dirt is “a mix of many elements, it is far more information rich than any crystal.”
Where is that information? What is the information about? What language or symbolic system is it represented in?
—–
Ideally I would prefer to do a back-and-forth on each nuance, but realistically we don’t have that kind of time, so I will cut to the chase:
Physical objects — whether a clump of inanimate dirt or a single mineral — do not contain information by their mere existence. Certainly not in the sense relevant to the present debate or the origin of biological systems.
Yes, we as intelligent beings can analyze physical objects using our intelligence and our tools of discovery. At that point we have produced information as a result of our intellectual effort. We can then describe our findings (the information we have produced) in some kind of symbolic language. This can then, as all symbolically-represented information can be, transmitted and translated.
This is how information works. It is how it always works.
There is a world of difference between the fact that we can describe physical objects using information, and the fact that some physical objects actually contain information.
This is the issue that ultimately lies at the crux of origin of life studies. It is the fundamental issue that origin of life researchers are trying to grapple with. It is the ultimate chasm that must be crossed from inanimate matter to living systems.
It is not the case that there is some gradient from a tiny bit of information in a mineral, to a bit more information in a clump of dirt, to a lot of information in DNA.
Every molecule can be described using information. But only some molecules contain representative information. These are entirely different domains.
Erik Anderson:
“There is a world of difference between the fact that we can describe physical objects using information, and the fact that some physical objects actually contain information.”
Not some, but all physical objects contain what you describe as information.
Although I agree that the chasm you point out is deep and wide, I would like to suggest that the ‘ultimate chasm’ has to do with functional coherence at the level of an organism as a whole.
Crossing the chasm of symbolism, so words, sentences and paragraphs can be formed, the question arises: what power makes it all into a coherent story? And beyond that: given that the story of an organism is ever-changing, incorporating a myriad of external and internal events, what power perpetuates the coherence, precisely for a life time?
It is at the level of an organism as a whole that we see the true miracle of unity in life. Even ‘representative information’ falls short as an explanation.
TA, kindly define information as you use it, and provide some backdrop for justifying that usage. Explain to us how your usage is not a case of so broadening a concept as to render it useless, which is a rhetorical tactic that is often driven by ideological considerations. KF
PS: As a starter, observe this on entropy and information onward to FSCO/I, as clipped in my always linked note, which is key backdrop:
@UB
Unfortunately, indicating you have “read the second paper” has not clarified what you mean by “constraints”.
As such, I’m going to assume you’re looking for a theory of information that is physical, despite the fact that information is media independent, and does not have Shannon’s circularity in defining what is distinguishable. Is that correct? If so, that’s why I posted the link to the first paper.
Specifically, it brings information into fundamental physics using constructor theory – what must be possible and impossible. Also, Shannon’s theory is lacking because it is not compatible with information in the context of quantum mechanics and computation.
IOW, If by “constraints”, you do not mean what must be possible and not possible, then please clarify.
timothya:
You are perilously close to denying objective reality, which will render any further discussion pointless and prevent you from even comprehending the issue KF is raising, much less being able to engage in a useful discussion about it.
I echo KF’s kind request in his first paragraph @119 for you to clarify.
If the question about whether there is information in physical objects generally is too nuanced and confusing, we can approach the issue from an easier angle.
Let’s give you one more try, back to the basics:
Do you or do you not acknowledge that there is a difference between the information contained in your genome and the information you think is contained in “all physical objects”?
And what is that difference?
Please do answer logically and honestly. Don’t worry. An honest answer to this question by itself won’t mean you have lost the debate about functional specified complexity. It won’t mean that intelligent design is true. It won’t mean that Darwinism and the materialist creation story are false. But it will help us assess whether you even understand one of the most basic and fundamental issues on the table.
Origenes, good points. Yes, there are multiple levels of functional integration and organization before we get to a complete organism, particularly a large, multi-cellular organism. At a very basic, foundational stage I’m just trying to get some people to acknowledge and articulate the important difference between DNA and a rock at this point! One step at a time. 🙂
@Origenes#87
This is what I mean by assuming we know nothing about how human designers design things.
We start out with a problem to solve, conjecture solutions to those problems then criticize them and discard errors we find. Creative solutions are not “out there” for us to observe via our senses any more than creative solutions to biological problems faced by organisms. They start out as guesses which are criticized. In evolution, variation is random to any problem to solve, as opposed to being completely random.
So, what we have is a universal theory for the growth of knowledge. This includes knowledge found in brains, books and even the genome.
Eric,
DNA contains knowledge. What do I mean by that?
Knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium. As pointed out above, this includes knowledge found in brains, books and genes. Nor does it require a knowing subject.
From Popper’s book Objective Knowledge..
Knowledge: Subjective Versus Objective, page 59
critical rationalist
We do this with a goal in mind and understanding.
I would say that creative solutions are “in there” for us to observe via our internal senses. In short, rationality cannot be compared to random mutations.
Random “guesses”, based on … neither plan nor understanding.
And ‘criticized’ by two things:
1. The filter of existence — is the organism still viable?
2. Random environmental change.
Now ‘natural selection’ has to do with (2), which means that perfectly viable organisms are eliminated on a whim. Think about it: ‘natural selection’ removes perfectly viable organisms. Random mutations hit the jackpot and produce a miracle — a perfectly viable creature — and next natural
selectionelimination steps in …. Organisms that could have unique solutions to the problems life was trying to solve. Or organisms that could be on the brink of evolving a spectacular new feature. Eliminated, because of temporary draught, a severe winter, an epidemic or whatever.That’s clearly beyond ‘criticizing’, natural selection is a hindrance to evolution. Evolution would be better off without it. Natural selection makes evolution perform worse than a blind search.
CR:
Right. So we start out with a goal. That goal helps us develop methods or heuristics for determining whether we are approaching the goal or moving further away from it. These are refined as we continue our search for a solution. Thus, our search for a solution is not blind at all.
Variation doesn’t have a goal. There is no ‘solution’ for it to find because there is no ‘problem’ in the first place. It cannot define any methods or heuristics for determining whether anything will get it closer to a target it doesn’t have. It’s merely taking pot-shots in the dark. Thus, its search for any solution whatsoever is totally and completely blind. Even if you can imagine lots of theoretical targets out there, variation has no concept of a near miss and no process for refining its aim. It continues to fire randomly and either hits a target or not.
Just because variation is random to any problem to solve, how does that stand in opposition to it being completely random? Why can variation not be random to any problem to solve as well as being completely random? Where and how is variation not completely random? What is directing it?
@Origenes
All solutions to all problems are inside us and we can simply observe them with our “internal senses”? So, how does that work? Please be specific.
I’m not comparing them. Rationality is an approach to how we criticize our theories. As you said, it’s part of our “process of elimination.”, not a source of our conjectured ideas.
Again, I’m suggesting people start out with a problem to solve, conjecture theories about how the work works that solve those problems, criticize them, which includes empirical tests, and then discard those we find in error.
Nor am I suggesting all knowledge is the same. While people can create both explanatory and non-explanatory knowledge, only people can create explanatory theories.
To elaborate, imagine I’ve been shipwrecked on a deserted island and I have partial amnesia due to the wreck. I remember that coconuts are edible so climb a tree to pick them. While attempting to pick a coconut, one falls, lands of a rock and splits open. Note that I did not intend for the coconut to fall, let alone plan for it to fall because I guessed coconuts that fall on rocks might crack open. The coconut falling was random *in respect to a problem I hadn’t yet even tried to solve*. Yet it ended solving a problem regardless. Furthermore, due to my amnesia, I’ve hypothetically forgotten what I know about physics, including mass, inertia, etc. Specifically, I lack an explanation as to why the coconut landing on the rock causes it to open. As such, my knowledge of how to open coconuts is merely a useful rule of thumb, which is limited in reach. For example, in the absence of an explanation, I would likely assume I’d need to collect coconuts picked from other trees, carry them to this same tree, climb it, then drop them on the same rocks to open them.
However, explanatory knowledge has significant reach. Specifically, if my explanatory knowledge of physics, including inertia, mass, etc. returned, I could use that explanation to strike coconut with any similar sized rock, rather than vice versa. Furthermore, I could exchange the rock with another object with significant mass, such as an anchor and open objects other than coconuts, such as shells, use this knowledge to protect myself from attacking wildlife, etc.
So, explanatory knowledge only comes from intentional conjectures made by people and has significant reach. Non-explanatory knowledge (created by variation that is random to specific problems to solve, and selection) represent unintentional conjectures, which have limited reach. None of that was gained from my experience.
While there are important differences, neither variations in evolution or theories conjectured by people come with any guarantee they are correct. In the case of people, rationality is an additional means by which we can criticize and eliminate them.
CR:
Or, rationality, along with recognizing a goal, is what saves our problem-solving from being completely random…like variation is.
Again, variation in evolution is random to a specific problem to solve, not completely random. This is because proteins in evolutionary theory do not arise all at once from random variations. Natural selection plays the role of criticism in evolution. So, it’s not completely random, either.
My key point is, in both cases, we start out with something that isn’t guaranteed to be true. Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them. People can create useful rules of thumb and accidentally solve problems without recognizing them as such at the time or having that goal in mind. See my concrete example above.
An educated guess is still a guess, none the less.
critical rationalist,
Mutation is completely random period.
Even if that is true, which it isn’t, it doesn’t change anything: we start with a protein and next some completely random change is going to happen.
Now, proteins and everything else are caused by sheer dumb luck, according to a proper understanding of evolutionary theory. Natural selection does nothing to help and makes matters worse.
Sheer dumb luck is all you have to offer:
Given that natural selection is a process of elimination, existent organisms are the ones that got away. Instead of being created by ‘natural elimination’, exactly the opposite is true: they are “untouched” by ‘natural elimination’. Existent organisms are those organisms on which natural selection has precisely no bearing whatsoever. They are the undiluted products of chance.
Natural
selectionelimination makes evolution perform worse than a blind search — see #125.CR, #120
You were making statements about the physical requirements of the first self-replicating cells on earth. You claimed that these first cells did not need “great precision”, and you based this conclusion on the idea that they didn’t have to compete with better replicators than themselves.
However, the primary requirement for the first heterogeneous self-replicating cells on earth was their capacity to produce a description of themselves in a transcribable memory and be able to successfully interpret the description. My question to you was intended to gauge how you were taking these requirements into consideration, which clearly, you were not doing.
There’s no need for this assumption; I am looking for no such thing.
Also, the information in DNA (the topic of this conversation) doesn’t need to be “brought into fundamental physics” by “constructor theory”; it has been well-understood in terms of fundamental physics for a great number of years. Additionally, I don’t know why you introduced Shannon to the conversation.
(Attempting to speak to you using your map of the road)
What you call “knowledge” is actually representations encoded in a material medium. Like all representations, they require interpretation via physical constraint.
As an example, the representations contained in DNA (codons) are interpreted by a set of contingent physical constraints (aaRS) in order to produce functional proteins. This reflects the Peircean logic that representation and interpretation are necessarily complimentary realities. This logic was followed by Turing; followed by von Neumann; and is demonstrated in every instance of recorded information ever known to exist. Not only was it predicted by logic and reason, but it has been demonstrated in physics, and in the structural architecture of the system itself.
So, circling back to the top of the issue, in order to establish the life cycle of the heterogeneous cell, you have to have enough of these organized representations and constraints to describe the system in a transcribable medium and be able to successfully interpret the description. It is only the coordination of these two sets of objects that enables the system to persist.
Thus, statements about the origin of the living cell that either obscure or ignore these fundamental requirements are basically useless to the conversation.
CR:
And, again:
Just because variation is random to any problem to solve, how does that stand in opposition to it being completely random? Why can variation not be random to any problem to solve as well as being completely random?
What? That doesn’t make the variations themselves non-random. In a game of Yahtzee, I can select dice toward some goal (which, as Origenes points out so clearly above is NOT what natural selection does), but that doesn’t preclude in any way the fact that each roll of the dice (the variation) is still utterly random. For it not to be random, the dice would have to be loaded somehow. Are you suggesting that variation is loaded? What is influencing the variation itself such that it is not random?
@UB
You wrote:
UB,
If not Shannon’s theory then what physical theory that we have supposedly known for a great number of years are you referring to? And how does it account for information in the context of quantum computation? Please be specific.
@UB
I’m trying to understand what you mean here.
You wrote:
Are you suggesting that the design of organisms already existed in these physical constraints? If so, this sounds like the opposite of “no-design laws” mentioned in the paper, where the physical interpretations are somehow built into the laws of physics.
From the paper….
Variation in the process of evolution is not completely random. This is because it’s a repeating process of variation and selection, not just variation on its own.
Just as in the growth of human knowledge, guesses are not completely random. This because conjectures take into account background knowledge that itself came from earlier conjectures and criticisms. This happens consciously and subconsciously.
Ever find yourself about to suggest a solution, but then say “never mind”, since it won’t work? That’s a conjectured solution that just slipped though subconscious criticism. A vast number of solutions don’t make it that far. And then there is instinct, which itself based on variation and selection, such as a foal that can walk after just being born.
IOW, all knowledge grows though some form of conjecture and criticism. It’s a universal theory that brings unification – just like gravity unified the motions of apples and planets.
However, you seem to be suggesting that we can’t make any progress on the subject of knowledge, since unification is impossible.
critical rationalist:
This theory you are talking about seems to be largely OT for the current thread.
Please feel free to put together a brief exposition of the theory and how it is relevant to Darwinian evolution and/or design, and I’d be happy to elevate it to a new thread so we can discuss in more detail.
CR, your post at 133 doesn’t directly address any of my empirical criticism of your position, so I don’t feel particularly compelled to respond to it.
As for your post at 134, I have no idea what it would even mean to say that “the design of organisms exist in these physical constraints”. Likewise, I have no idea what it means to say that “physical interpretations are built into the laws of physics”.
The arrangement of codons in a DNA sequence establishes what pattern of amino acids will appear in a polypeptide, and the collective arrangements of the aaRS specify which amino acids will appear in that pattern. These things have been well known for half a century. End of mystery. The notion that we need to show that biological organization is “possible under no-design laws” seems rather meaningless.
A more intriguing and relevant question is how does a lawfully determined system enable the specification of unlimited variation in an environment that allows no alternatives to those laws.
That question has already been answered.
By the way CR,
— “A more intriguing and relevant question is how does a lawfully determined system enable the specification of unlimited variation in an environment that allows no alternatives to those laws.”
The physical independence created by such an organization, happens to be exactly what is physically required to describe the system in a transcribable memory and interpret the description. And the only other place such an physical system can be identified is in written language and mathematics. That’s one part of the inference to design in biology. It’s an completely empirical and unapologetic inference to design, identified right at the point where biology begins.
The reason I am telling you this is that it might give you an opportunity (with a clear explanation in hand) to go read up on the system, verify it for yourself, and then re-read your articles.
@UB
You wrote:
Information theory and it’s relation to physics isn’t relevant despite the top of discussion being the information in DNA?
I don’t feel particularly compelled to respond to a theory of information merely defined as the one “everyone knows”.
@UB
First, if you have no idea what that would mean, then how do you know it’s not relevant to the topic?
Second, if you read the paper I referenced, that was addressed at length, through contrast with no-design laws of physics.
and…
@UB
Again, It’s unclear how the theory about physics and it’s relationship with information is not relevant to an argument based on the relationship between physics and information.
CR, your theory has been thoroughly criticized. It presents nothing substantive about the most unique and important aspect of the system its being applied to. It doesn’t even mention it.
Even your response fails to address the issue.
cheers
So, mutations (or ‘variations’ if you prefer) are not random because selection is not random? For clarity, let’s tease it apart: we have process A (mutation) and process B (selection). Now which of those is not random and why?
Inapt comparison for reasons already provided.
@UB,
It doesn’t? Then please point out which comment contains this criticism, in which the relationship between information an physics is not relevant.
critical rationalist:
With due respect, this so-called “constructor theory” seems to add little of substance and also appears to contain serious misunderstandings about the nature of both information and physical laws.
Again, though, feel free to write up a brief exposition in your own words, with a few links to the key research in this area, and I’ll elevate to a new thread for discussion, as it is largely OT here.
@Origenes
I wrote:
You wrote:
Let’s ignore that it’s a process? And my response was inapt?
Again in the process of evolution, variations are random to any specific problem to solve, not completely random. What you seem to be implying is that an entire protein was created from scratch all at once from random variations. That’s not evolutionary theory. Complexity grows in a Piecemeal fashion
That clarification is sufficient to indicate that the goal variation plays is not goal oriented, yet not completely random.
@Eric Anderson
Can you be more specific than “seems to add little of substance”?
Which physical theory of information, which CT supposedly “misunderstands”, are you referring to? Please be specific.
As for being off topic, was UB incorrect when he said…
I posted a link to a public article on Aeon, then posted links to published papers when a similar claim was made.
critical rationalist @146
You keep repeating that. I agree 100%. I hold that a proper understanding of evolutionary theory entails that anything creative is due to sheer dumb luck / randomness, so I do agree with you. I hold that variations are completely random to any specific problem to solve and completely random to any non-specific problem to solve. Variations are completely random —period.
For the umpteenth time: why not?
And every evolutionary step is due to complete randomness. So tell me, what is the non-random factor here?
@Origenes
For the umpteenth time, you are ignoring that it is a process. Evolution does not suggest that any protein of today’s complexity was randomly generated all at once.
Knowledge is information that plays a casual role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium. Genes that are better at being passed down to the next generation play that casual role. Selection represents error correction and genes represent knowledge. That is the non-random factor.
Or, perhaps you have some other definition of random you would like to present, which you’re referring to here?
Agan, to be clear, I’m coming from a universal theory for the growth of knowledge. This includes the knowledge in books, brains and even genes are explainable and using the same umbrella theory. Nor does it assume that knowledge in specific spheres comes from authoritative sources. Knowledge genuinely grows and is created.
On the other hand, my guess is that you disagree than any such unification is possible and that knowledge in some spheres does come from authoritative sources. The knowledge in question was merely copied from the “mind” of a designer that “just was”, complete with that knowledge already present.
UB,
Having re-read some of your comments, perhaps you’re referring to the reach of DNA and its leap to universality? IOW, are you’re referring to the universality of computation?
Critical rationalist @149
Nor do I suggest ‘all at once’. So?
You have yet to explain the existence of such a system.
The causal role of remaining what they are in the next generation?
Aha ‘selection’ is the non-random factor. Well, no, ‘selection’ (read: elimination), instead of being ‘error correction’, is a severe hindrance to evolution. Perfectly viable organisms are offered by complete randomness — it’s a miracle! — and what does ‘selection’ do? It kills off the vast majority. Behold the alleged ‘creativity’ of “natural selection”! This whole theory is fake.
@Origenes
Is error correction random?
Is it random that mutation X is retained, while mutation Y does not? No! Mutation Y doesn’t play a causal role in it being retained when instantiated in a storage medium. X does. And it does so because X contains some approximation of truth about some problem in the biosphere, even if the organism cannot comprehend that problem or is not even aware of it.
People start out with problems, then guess solutions to those problems. Unless we have some infallible way to identify and interpret sources, we start out knowing that our ideas contains errors to some degree. Error correction isn’t random in that case either. People exhibit universality in that they can create explanations about how the world works. The process of evolution does cannot. As such, bacteria is the result of non-explanatory knowledge.
Neither have any guarantee of starting out as being correct. Both rely on error correction.
critical rationalist
A severe winter, an epidemic or whatever can wipe out mutation Y. Is that random? You betcha.
Yes!
By ‘being retained’ you mean ‘not eliminated’? If so, I agree. One could say that ‘being retained’ is the absence of natural
selectionelimination. Rather meaningless, right?And I bet that Y also contains ‘some approximation of truth about some problem in the biosphere’, but Y gets eliminated nonetheless. Maybe Y cannot cope with a severe winter, but has a unique solution to a hot summer that will kill X. We will never know, because all the information is lost thanks to that hindrance called ‘natural selection’.
“Everyone is world champion in a sport that hasn’t been invented yet”, someone once wrote. The same applies here: every organism has some approximation of truth about some problem in the biosphere. It is a meaningless statement.
Of course it isn’t. However you cannot compare free responsible rational persons with blind particles bumping into each other.
More on info basics from my always linked note:
We can now see how information, intelligence, design and entropy are all closely linked. Indeed, entropy of a system can be seen as a metric of the average missing info to specify particular micro-state, given only the gross values that characterise macroscopically observable state. Also, it is useful to go beyond the focus on info-carrying capacity to look again at information as a functional issue:
We can go on, but the above is enough backdrop for now.
KF
PS: Still very busy locally.
PS: Cicero, c. 50 BC:
–> Yes the concept and inferred significance of FSCO/I on observing coded text etc is THAT old, at least.
@Origenes
You’re attempting to conflate random changes in problem spaces with error correction being random in respect to some problem space. The latter is not random. You’re presenting a false dichotomy that, unless every aspect of a process is not random, then the output must be completely random.
How does being a “free, rational person” enables us to always start out with the right conjectured solutions to problems in the first place – preventing the process from being completely random?
So, what’s the difference? IOW, it seems that you’ve arbitrary decided what’s random and what’s not.
Again, I’m making a distinction between non-explanatory knowege and explanatory knowege. Only people can create non-explanatory knowege. So, I’m not saying the creation of knowege or even the kind of knowege evolution creates is exactly the same as a rational person. I’m saying they can be explained by the same universal theory of how knowege grows.
In fact, I’m saying there is a common explanation where you apparently think none can exist since they supposedly cannot be compared at all.
In the case of non-explanatory knowege, people accidentally discover solutions to problems they never intended to solve by accidentally testing solutions they didn’t conceive of in the first place via unintended circumances, the “dumb luck” of being at the right place at the right time, etc. Does that make the outcome completely random? No it does not.
Some research data is randomly destroyed via random accidents. Researchers stop their work due to random reasons, such as loosing their job, contracting an illness, randomly running into a future spouse and deciding to change jobs to accommodate them, etc. Does the loss of research in those specific instances somehow make all research completely random? No, it does not.
The knowege in books play a cause role in their being retained when embedded in a storage medium. They get reprinted. They are put on a shelf to be referenced at a later date, rather than recycled. A repair manual for a car is reprinted because it contains the knowege of how to repair cars that are still on the road and that people want to fix. Should that no longer be the case, it will stop playing a causal role. The same can be said for knowege in brains and even the genome.
CR, did you notice how error correction of coded information occurs? As in via built-in organised redundancy and algorithms designed to detect same, that have to run on appropriate hardware set up to detect and correct? (Try, a simple 3-m, triple repetition and bitwise or equivalent voting code.) The phenomenon you are appealing to is based on codes, thus language, protocols (rules that manage contingency!) and integrated, organised, information rich systems to carry out algorithmic functions. Algorithms are yet another level. In short, your whole discussion is riddled with the issue of functionally specific, coherently organised, complex information. From just the text you wrote we readily see the source of such FSCO/I, intelligently directed configuration, i.e. design. As for discussion on books and manuals, intelligent, volitional action is even more explicitly present. So, kindly explain to us how you plan to demonstrate FSCO/I arising from lucky noise starting at arbitrary configurations filtered for function with elimination of non-functional forms. Explain how one gets TO islands of function that way on config spaces of scale 10^150 – 10^301 or worse, then let us know how we get to D/RNA and metabolising cells from a Darwin’s pond or the like, with empirical observational warrant. Absent this, we have a perfect right to conclude that you are doing little more than putting up ideological posturing in the teeth of a trillion member observation base on the source of FSCO/I backed up by needle in haystack search challenge analysis. KF
@KF
Can you be more specific? As mentioned in the paper….
So, this is one simpler form of error correction. Analog values are not copied exactly, which allows errors to build up.
Yes, KF, books written by people contain explanatory knowledge, which only people can create. I’ve already addressed the difference in the kinds of knowledge.
Knowledge in the genome is not explanatory in nature. It is non-explanatory, in that it represents useful rules of thumb that have a very limited reach. On the other hand, the knowledge in books, which were created by people has a significantly greater reach.
For example, take the laryngeal Nerve in the neck of a giraffe. As its neck became longer, the knowledge in a giraffe’s genome did not not contain an explanatory theory about routing necessary to reroute the nerve so it didn’t go all the way down the neck, around the heart, and then back up again. It’s reach is significantly limited.
One exception to this, which UB might be alluding to, is that DNA does have significant reach, in that it can be used to encode which transformations of matter necessary to convert raw materials into all organisms in the biosphere. However, this represents a leap to universality, not explanatory knowledge.
Before the first universal number system was created, people developed systems that were not universal. In fact, some systems could had been universal if it not for additional rules that were added to prevent it. And the same is said with the universality of computation, universal letter systems, etc. They all evolved from much simpler systems and made a disproportional leap to universality when a single addition was made, which was often unintentional and not planned. They are examples of emergent properties of matter.
I’ve already given the explanation, KF. All knowledge grows via variation and criticism. It’s a universal theory of the growth of knowledge in brains, books and even the genome of organisms. Evolutionary theory doesn’t suggest any specific features in biology were intentional targets to hit. Yet the numbers you quote assume they were. Some other solution could have occurred instead. And they were initial formed from simpler solutions, etc.
Again, evolution isn’t completely random, it’s random to any specific problem to solve. Complexity grows via variation and selection in a piecemeal fashion.
If knowledge grows via variation and selection, then empirical observations can we use to test that theory?
One example is the order in which organisms appear. Evolution could not result in organisms appearing in most complex to least complex. Nor could it appear all at once. The order in which organisms appear is necessary consequence of the theory that complexity grows via variation and selection.
On the other hand, there is no necessary order for an abstract designer because it has no limitation on what knowledge it possessed or when it possessed it. Any order would be compatible with such a designer, including the most complex to least complex, or even all at once. There are significantly fewer necessary consequences of such an abstract designer, for which we can make empirical tests.
Furthermore, this designer apparently intentionally and unnecessarily decided to use an order that would be only necessary for evolutionary theory. Didn’t this designer realize how this would look? Was the designer surprised that evolutionary theory would be proposed based on that order?
IOW, evolutionary theory (complexity grows via variation and selection) explains that order, while ID does not. That order must be “just what the designer wanted”, which is a bad explanation.
CR:
You’ve included ‘variation[2]’ in your description of what ‘variation[1]’ is. I hope you can see how confusing this could be. Obviously, [1] cannot be synonymous with [2].* I’ve been talking about [2], which is clearly random, is it not? I’m not sure what you mean by [1]. Can you elucidate?
*In case this isn’t obvious enough…
variation = variation + selection
variation = (variation + selection) + selection
variation = ((variation + selection) + selection) + selection
…
CR:
You’ve never actually worked on a large software project, have you?
Yeah, software designers apparently intentionally and unnecessarily decide to use this same order over and over again. Evidently, they don’t realize it would be only necessary for evolutionary theory and other purposeless processes that have no end goal in mind. I imagine they would be surprised that evolutionary theory would be proposed as the origin of their software based on the described order.
@Phinehas
You seemed to have misinterpreted what I mean by “it” in that sentence. “it” refers to the process of evolution, not variation.
The role that variation ultimately plays across multiple loops is not random, it is random to any problem to solve. It does not need to start over anew with each loop but builds on other solutions. So, while specific variations in a single iteration of the loop is random, the resulting variations that accumulate are not.
Think of human knowledge, which uses a vast number of auxiliary theories that themselves were the result of conjectures and criticized, etc.
The key point being that variations are not guaranteed to solve a problem.
When people conjecture theories, they are in the context of a problem. But they are not derived from anything, such as experience. They are guesses. There is no source that we can turn to as a last resource that will not lead us into error.
CR:
I interpreted “it” the way I did because it made even less sense for “it” to refer to evolution. When “it” refers to evolution, your statement just becomes a non sequitur.
Variation in the process of evolution is not completely random. This is because evolution is a repeating process of variation and selection, not just variation on its own.
Variation is a component of evolution, not the other way around. How does what evolution is explain what variation is? Or how it is not random? I see how one might think your second sentence could support the notion that evolution is not random, but I don’t see how it says anything at all about variation not being random.
@Phinehas
I wrote:
You wrote:
Yes, I have. I’m working on one right now. This is what I mean by assuming we know nothing about how human designers design things.
Software developers are not abstract designers. They are concrete with defined limitations, such as what they know and when they know it, etc. Human knowledge genuinely grows, where it did not exist before, via conjecture and criticism. Are you willing to impose such limitations and conditions on ID’s designer?
An organism could not be “built” until the knowledge of what transformations necessary to construct them from raw materials was created. That is a necessary consequence of variation and selection. However, ID’s designer has no such limitations. It merely has the property of “design”, which is like saying fire has the property of dryness. As such there is no limitation on what it knew and when it kew it. So, it isn’t limited from having the knowledge of how to build any organism that has, does or could exist. That means it could have created them in the order of most complex to least, or all at once. At best, one could say “that’s just what the abstract designer must have wanted”
Also, software engineers are well adapted to the process of designing software. As such they exhibit the appearance of design and would need to be explained, etc.
I don’t see how adding a designer to the mix in regards to biological complexity improves the problem because it relies on the pre-existence of, well, a designer, which would be well adapted to the task of designing organisms. Or are you saying there can be a designer that isn’t well adapted to designing things? How would that work, exactly? Can just anything design something? Again, that would be like saying fire has the property of dryness.
Do you have evidence of designers that are not themselves complex and well adapted for the purpose of designing things? If you’re going to limit theories to what we have observations of (which is bad philosophy, by the way), every designer we’ve observed has had a complex, material brains. So a designer cannot be the solution to the problem.
To summarize, some designer that “just was” complete with the knowledge of just the right genes would result in just the right proteins that would results in just the right features, already present, does’t serve an explanatory purpose. That’s because, one can more efficiently state that organisms “just appeared”, complete with the knowledge of just the right genes would result in just the right proteins that would results in just the right features, already present. Neither case accounts for the origin of that knowledge.
And, no, the latter is not evolutionary theory, BTW.
CR:
Is there any reason I should assume necessarily that “ID’s designer” doesn’t have such limitations and conditions? Why shouldn’t I just follow the evidence where it leads? I’m willing to do that. Are you?
In short, it appears we both agree that designers as well as evolution share the characteristic of creating in the order described by the evidence. Progress!
Again, you are referring to variation in a single iteration of the loop. I’m referring to the net variation that occurs across multiple loops. If all you had was variation, the net variation would be random. But that’s not the case.
There are constraints regarding what kinds of variations that can occur in DNA. In addition it is thought that mutations are not distributed equally and that some repair mechanisms are more effective in some areas than others, which can skew the results of mutations and even cause mutations themselves in the process. But they are random to any problem to solve.
The key thing is that, in both the case of people and evolution, variation and conjectures are not guaranteed to be correct. We start out knowing they contain errors. In the case of people, the contents of our theories are not derived from observations. And in the case of evolution, the content is not mechanically transcribed or derived from some preexisting source.
Why not? The net variation is the result of a series of random mutations. If one base mutation is random, why is a collection of, say, 100 random base mutations, separated by time, not random?
@Phinehas
I wrote:
You wrote:
As a software developer, you know we currently cannot simply rewrite an entire application overnight to migrate from, say, Win32 to C#. It’s simply not practical due to our limitations.
However, ID’s designer is abstract and has no defined limitations. As such it’s not limited by what it knows, when it knew it, what resources or time has at it’s disposal, etc. So, it’s not limited from rewriting an application, in it’s entirety, for every single customer, to meet their specific needs that day. And the same could be said about designing computers. Entire one-off operating systems could be written for each one-off computer built for each customer, along with one-off versions off each application to run on them.
Nor is ID’s designer limited from creating one-off programming languages for each customer’s application.
To use another example, we currently do not design entirely new automobiles every year because doing so is simply too resource intensive, expensive, etc. It’s simply not practical. Even then, new models often reuse existing parts and even the same power train because next gen engines need to be long term tested on the track, etc. Manufactures must price their cars so customers will by them, so they can make a profit. They must report to their shareholders and request R&D budgets.
However, ID’s designer would not be limited from designing an entirely new model, from the ground up for every single vehicle. This is because it has no limitations on what it knows, such as if a design is crash worthy, if it has long term engineering issues, etc. It has no customers, competitors, shareholders, R&D budgets .etc. Nor is it limited from designing automobiles in the order of most complex to least, or even all at once.
IOW, what you’re appealing to are today’s human designers, and human beings could not have designed themselves. Even then, that appeal won’t hold.
At some point in the future, assuming we create the necessary knowledge in time to prevent ourselves from going extinct, we’ll use exponentially more powerful computers that we have now to create one off systems and products for each customer, in conjunction with vastly more capable manufacturing systems which make 3D printing look like child’s play. The need for reuse will simply be virtually nonexistent. Heck, customers will do it in their own homes and garages. So will their *children*.
IOW, you greatly underestimate the role that knowledge, or the lack there off, plays in design. Human beings are good explanations for human deigned things, precisely because of our current limitations.
You seem to be confused about the role that evidence plays. Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them. So, you cannot “follow” evidence in the sense you’re referring to.
From the article “What did Karl Popper Really Say about Evolution”
@Origenes
Because they are not merely, “separated by time”.
A series of random mutations is not random because they are not merely separated by time?
I don’t get it.
@Origenes
Usually when you criticize a theory, you start with the actual theory, rather than a straw man. But if you “don’t get” that, well, I’m not sure how I can help.
critical rationalist,
Write it up, man.
Please.
Again, I’ll give you a head post and you can tell us about this remarkable theory that resolves the information problem in biology that origin of life researchers have been grappling with for decades.
I’m sure once you explain it to us in some clear detail we’ll be able to understand.
@Eric Anderson
Evolution isn’t just variation, it’s variation and selection. Again, if people here can’t even get that right, then I’m not sure how I can help.
Why should I bother writing up what’s already written in a high level Aeon article and expanded on with two published papers?
Yes, you’ve led us down a rabbit hole with this so-called “constructor” theory that you claim addresses a critical puzzle that origin of life researchers have been frustrated with for decades — the puzzle KF focused on in the OP.
The “constructor” theory’s alleged application to biology is unfortunately completely incoherent, referencing nonsense like “no-design laws” that are supposed to help bring about life, and a bald-faced claim that a “highly inaccurate, non-purposive construction . . . eventually produced knowledge-bearing recipes out of elementary things . . .”
There is exactly zero explanation how this could occur in the real world or why it should be taken seriously. It is unclear why anyone would be so gullible as to believe such rubbish. It was a nice attempt at smoke and mirrors and I’m sorry that you are frustrated people didn’t just roll over and accept the fancy-sounding terminology.
I don’t give a hoot whether someone got a paper published about this nonsense. People have gotten gibberish published before.
What I’m asking for is a simple exposition. Nothing too grand. You don’t need to write an essay or a lengthy article. A few paragraphs is sufficient.
Something short — in your own words, in plain English — that would explain how you think this so-called constructor theory applies to the origin of life and addresses the long-standing problem of information content.
—–
Time isn’t an issue. You’ve posted so many comments on this thread you could have written up a brief description in half as much time.
I’ve even offered you your own head post so that you can explain your views.
There are a couple of possibilities here:
1- You sincerely believe this “constructor” theory, but aren’t quite able to explain it or to articulate how it works. This is understandable. It seems incoherent, so explaining it would be a challenge.
2- You realize this “constructor” theory is nonsense and that you threw out a literature bluff, so you are trying to avoid actually having to explain the thing. This often happens when true believers wade into territory they don’t understand and then do a quick Google search to come up with some “explanation” they can throw at the wall to see if it sticks. No problem. We understand not everyone is familiar with the issues. You’re in good company. Nick Matzke offered up a similarly-nonsensical literature bluff a while back about a so-called “kinetic theory” that was supposed to help explain the origin of life. They had a published paper too. 🙂
In the first case, I would hope that you would nevertheless give it a try so that we can understand where you are coming from. Writing it up will also cause you to undergo the very valuable process of actually thinking through the issues.
In the second case, fine, don’t bother. We realize it is probably a literature bluff anyway. I just wanted to offer you a chance to explain things — assuming you are sincere in your beliefs about it.
Show me the straw man and the actual theory.
Evolution is mutation and elimination. Elimination destroys perfectly viable organisms and is a severe hindrance to evolution as a blind search.
It’s important to note that elimination does not explain organisms, as Darwin believed.
Darwin got it all wrong: existent organisms are the ones that got away. Instead of being created by ‘natural elimination’, exactly the opposite is true: they are “untouched” by ‘natural elimination’. Existent organisms are those organisms on which natural selection has precisely no bearing whatsoever. They are the undiluted products of chance.
If EA does not host such an article, I would. Remember, the challenge starts in Darwin’s pond or the like pre-live environment and proceeds to the origin of body plans up to our own. In my underlying offer several years ago, I suggested a feature article of up to 6,000 or so words, with room for links etc but the main story must be summarised. As just one clue on the challenge, FSCO/I naturally comes in deeply isolated islands of function as the space of protein fold domains in AA sequence space shows aptly. In trying to cross a sea of non-function, there is no differential success to use as a culling filter, all alternatives are equally failing. The key challenge here is that to originate life and body plans, such intervening seas must be crossed. KF
CR:
The “net variation that occurs across multiple loops” is already covered quite nicely by the term “evolution” isn’t it? You basically say this in so many words:
It is no longer merely variation, so why insist on continuing to use that term? The variation itself is still very much random. What happens after the fact can’t change this about it.
“Selection,” as used above, is a circularly-defined eliminative process dressed up in anthropomorphized, teleological clothes to make it look like it can accomplish more than a circularly-defined eliminative process ought to be able to accomplish. You’ve a long way to go to demonstrate that such a process can save randomness from itself.
CR:
This looks to me like you are making an ontological conclusion from an epistemological premise. I don’t think that works. What follows appears to be built upon this initial error.
Unless evolution causes all organisms to go extinct, not all are eliminated. Right? So, what remains is selected. When we select one theory from many, we eliminate all but one. The theory survives criticism. Deciding to call it “elimination” instead of selection just muddies the waters.
Again, as I’m using in the context of this discussion, knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium.
Publishers do not randomly decide to reprint an automotive repair book. The knowledge it contains plays a casual role in it being retained when embedded in a storage medium. Nor is that knowledge only useful 50% of the time, or some other random statistical distribution. It’s useful because it contains some approximation of truth in respect to the automobile in question. That is independent of any knowing subject.
For example, if you ordered the plans to build a car but were accidentally shipped plans for a boat instead, you don’t end up with a car because you believed that’s what knowledge the plans contained. You still end up with a boat, assuming you continued to following the instructions to the end. That’s not random. The plan contains some approximation of truth as to how to build a boat. Anyones belief or desire won’t change that.
In the case of neo-Darwinism, it’s not the survival of the fittest. That’s a straw man. Genes play a causal role in being passed down to the next generation. There is nothing “random” about the causality there, either. Nor does it randomly stop playing that casual role, if the environment doesn’t change. Again, that is independent of any knowing subject.
@Eric Anderson
Eric,
I’m really quite confused by your response. Apparently, you expect me to write a better version of the high level article written by the author of the published paper, who actually took the time to write it for a popular audience. It’s unclear why you expect a better outcome, even if I had the time.
That’s simply not reasonable.
Now, if you have questions about the Aeon article, I’d be glad to field them, in detail. But merely saying it’s “incoherent” isn’t a question or good criticism.
@Phinehas
What about it “doesn’t work” and why?
Epistemology is key to the complexity of biology because the specific complicity is due to the knowledge those organisms contain. So, the origin of those features is the origin of that knowledge.
Again, at some point in the future, that appeal won’t hold with human designers, which is supposedly the inference for ID.
This is why I keep saying, I’m *not* ignoring what we know about human designers. We know that knowledge plays an important role. Designers do not “magically” design things. Epistemology plays a key role in that explanation. So, if anyone isn’t taking what we know about designers into account, it’s you.
CR:
This is an epistemological statement:
Yet you take it as an ontological one. Your argument assumes it is ontologically true. This is a simple category error. It does not follow that the above is true from an ontological standpoint simply because it is true from an epistemological one. Before you can argue as though it is ontologically true, you would need to demonstrate that this is actually the case, not merely potentially the case.
CR:
Where did Eric ever ask you to write a “better version” of the article? I only saw him ask you to write something in your own words. Is that really such an unreasonable request?
Right.
Wrong. The absence of elimination does not equal ‘selection’. Selection implies teleology, which is not grounded by materialism.
I agree, but you cannot equate our teleologically driven theory selection with the absence of elimination in nature.
Exactly the opposite is true. Materialism cannot ground teleological selection, it can only ground random elimination.
Yes, it is. I’m saying that epistemology is relevant because knowledge plays an important role in design, including the design of organisms. That’s part of what we know about human designers, for example.
My point is that you’re making the same sort of epistemological assumption. The assumption that all designers must necessarily have the epistemological limitations that current day human designers have, and therefore would have necessarily designed organisms in the order of least to most complex, does not follow, as I’ve illustrated. Furthermore, the idea that the future (or the distant past) will resemble the past is simply isn’t valid. For example, I do not think you assume that all designers must have complex, material brains because all designers we’ve observed do.
On the other hand, if knowledge grows via variation and selection, which is what Darwinism implies, that would have necessary epistemological consequences for the present day system that we can empirically test for: the order of complexity in organisms.
An abstract designer with no limitations has no necessary consequences that must result in that order. Even in the case of human designers, it will eventually not necessarily need to reuse parts. At best you can say that order is “just what ID’s designer must have wanted”, which is a bad explanation. Furthermore, human beings cannot have designed human beings. And human-like designers would be complex, knowledge laden entities that exhibit the same properties that need to be explained in human beings.
Being “well adapted to serve a purpose (design things)”, cannot be the explanation for why things are “well adapted to serve a purpose.”
@Origenes
You don’t need teleology to effectively select things. That’s why it’s called “natural selection”. Quibbling over the definition of words doesn’t change the effective outcome and is not an argument. Call it whatever you like.
@Phinehas
Eric wrote:
This implies the references I’ve provided lack “clear detail”, which I would be expected to provide. is that not a “better version” of the article?
Oh yes you do. When you destroy 99% of your furniture by wielding a scythe blindfolded, you are not ‘selecting’ 1%. There is no selection of things in evolution. There is just an innumerous amount of all types of viable organisms — all produced by blind luck — and then there is an enormous amount of elimination. The organisms that we see are not ‘selected’, they are ‘not eliminated’ — the scythe of the grim reaper failed to do its job.
It’s important to note that this elimination has no explanatory power whatsoever wrt existent organisms. Elimination is not creative.
Hugo De Vries said it in 1904:
Elimination only explains the fact that some organisms no longer exist.
No it’s very important to use one’s words carefully, otherwise one may ascribe powers to things that are not there.
Alrighty, I call it ‘absence of elimination’.
As I think others have hinted at, it is important to remember:
Natural selection doesn’t do anything. It is not a force of nature. It has no value or measure or vector.
It is simply a convenience label applied to the results of some change in a population. A change that took place due to random mutations, random environmental factors, the vagaries and hazards of nature, and so on. Those are the real causes. Natural selection isn’t doing anything.
We observe a population at timepoint A. We observe the population at timepoint B. We notice some difference in the population and call it “natural selection”.*
It is really no more substantive than that.
—–
* I should add that there are a number of changes in populations that would not even be properly assigned to “natural selection.” But, at most, what we have with natural selection is the fact that we are observing a change and applying a convenience label.
CR:
You’ve done it again. And here, you’ve even made a slight change by dropping the “defined” qualifier for limitations in the original formulation. Why did you do that?
The designer is not defined and the designer’s limitations are not defined simply as an acknowledgement that an inference to design does not require this knowledge. This is not a statement about what is or is not necessary with regard to a designer. It cannot be such, because it is precisely the opposite. It is a deliberate lack of a statement about what is or is not necessary with regard to a designer.
@Phinehas
A completely abstract designer merely has the property of “design”, which is like saying fire has the property of “dryness.” It does not say anything about what the designer knew and when it knew it. Nor does it have any limitations except it cannot design things that are logically impossible. For example, it cannot design itself, married bachelors, etc. That is a statement about abstract designers.
ID’s designer is abstract and has no additional limitations defined by the theory itself. As such, no necessary limitations of the theory can be used in any sort of explanation for what it supposedly designed. That’s a statement about ID’s designer.
Again, that is an epistemological assumption. I’m suggesting you are vastly underestimating the role that knowledge plays in an organism’s features and, therefore, the role knowledge would play in any designer that was supposedly responsible for those features.
For example, I’d like to design a drug to cure cancer. However, regardless of what intention or purpose I had in formulating any such drug, it would only actually cure cancer if the necessary knowledge of what transformations of matter required to do so were actually present in it when administered. My mere desire, enthusiasm or benevolent intent are insufficient to actually cure cancer. Right? So, it’s unclear why knowledge is “not necessary with regards to a designer” and biological organism.
Organism’s are well adapted to serve a purpose because they contain the knowledge of what adaptations (transformations of matter) should be performed which will result in a copy of that organism. They do not “phone home” to a designer to receive instructions as to what transformations to perform. Rather, those transformations only occur when the requisite knowledge is present in the organism itself. So, organisms are not only well adapted to serve a purpose but they are well adapted due to having the knowledge of how to construct their own features embedded in them as a storage medium.
For example, to copy the knowledge of how to build a car onto a flash drive, its physical medium is transformed to embed that knowledge. In that sense, it is well adapted to serve a purpose (store that knowledge.) And the source storage medium of that knowledge would have been well adapted to that purpose as well, such as book or a human brain.
So, the origin of an organism’s features is the origin of the knowledge of how to make a copy of itself. IOW, that knowledge is what needs to be explained. In the case of ID an explanation for this knowledge is either absent or irrational (based on bad epistemology)
Any designer that “designed” an organism would have also been responsible for that knowledge being present, not just the organism’s features. So, said designer must have already possessed that knowledge, so it could have embedded it in the organism when it was created. Right? Otherwise, where did it come from? Did that knowledge spontaneously appear when the organism was “created”?
Returning to my example, this is like adapting raw materials into a flash drive with knowledge of how to build a car already on it. Not only is necessary to possess the knowledge of which transformations to perform to result in the flash drive but also the actual knowledge of how to build a car, which determines which additional transformations are needed to embed that knowledge in the drive’s NAND cells. If that knowledge wasn’t present somewhere, it would have been spontaneously generated when the flash drive was “created.” Right?
A designer that “just was”, compete with the knowledge of just the right genes required to result in just the right proteins, which result in just the right features, already present, doesn’t serve an explanatory purpose. That’s because one could more efficiently state that organisms “just were”, compete with the knowledge of just the right genes required to result in just the right proteins, which result in just the right features, already present. Neither explain the origin of that knowledge.
And, in anticipation yet another straw man, “No.”, the latter is not neo-Darwinism.
@Eric Anderson
Nothing in the above conflicts with the universal epistemological view that knowledge grows via variations controlled by criticism. Mutations plays the explanatory role of variation and natural selection plays the explanatory role of criticism. The objection that natural selection does not ‘do anything'” in the traditional sense is arguing over the definitions of words.
Again, knowledge is information that plays a casual role in being retained when embedded in a storage medium. That causality contains some approximation of truth in relation to the environment, which includes the organism itself. It is in that sense that it is selected by nature.
IOW, what I’m suggesting is there is a universal explanation for the growth of knowledge in books, brains and even genes. While this explanation does take into account knowing subjects and people who are universal explainers, they are not required to create non-explanatory knowledge. Explanatory knowledge can only be created by people, which has significantly greater reach. Non-Explanatory knowledge can be created by both people and Neo-Darwinsim. It has significantly less reach.
So, it’s not that I’m ignoring what we know about designers. If anything, I’m suggesting the opposite is true. You’re assuming there can be no explanation for what designers do and, therefore, unification by a shared underlying explanation is not necessary or even possible.
Stop embarrassing yourself any further. You obviously don’t know the difference between the terms ‘epistemological’ and ‘ontological’. Simply put, ID is neutral on the identity of the designer, which doesn’t mean that the designer is ‘abstract’ or whatever. The designer(s) may be aliens, humans transported back in time, Zeus or some telic force. ID simply does not say. That’s all.
And BTW knowledge implies a knower who understands it. Knowledge cannot exist in isolation. One can say that knowledge is a functional aspect of a larger whole. You are using the term in the context of blind particles bumping into each other, which renders the term meaningless.
cr @192:
What is this?
—–
Look, we can draw a vague analogy to the fact that people sometimes experience random events and sometimes learn by trial and error. But to suggest that the way a conscious, intelligent, aware, sentient being learns is equivalent to a random, purposeless, non-sentient, non-conscious, unintelligent natural process seems beyond the pale. It is wrong on its face and commits a serious conflation of two very different domains.
It is still unclear exactly what you are trying to argue, with terms like “non-explanatory knowledge” and “no-design laws”.
@Origenes
If something is absent in a theory, it cannot be used to explain phenomena. “Identifying” the designers in each case above does not improve the situation. Again, my criticism is that the explanation for that knowledge is either absent or irrational.
If you’ve identified the designer as Zeus or a telic force, you have a supernatural origin of that knowledge. No such explanation can be given, because it is inexplicable by definition. A designer that “just was”, compete with the knowledge of just the right genes, etc., already present, doesn’t serve an explanatory purpose. That’s because one could more efficiently state that organisms “just were”, compete with the knowledge of just the right genes, etc., already present. The explanation is absent, so you are back to a designer that merely has the property of “design” in an abstract sense.
In regards to aliens or human beings, the appearance of design is being well adapted to serve a purpose. Alien or Human-like designers are well adapted to serve the purpose of designing things. It’s unclear how being well adapted to serve a purpose can be the explanation for being well adapted to serve a purpose. That’s irrational.
The traditional use of a word is not an argument. For example, the term “atom” implies indivisibility. Yet, that wasn’t used as an argument against subatomic particles.
Again, from Popper’s book Objective Knowledge..
Knowledge: Subjective Versus Objective, page 59
Clearly, there is a difference in these two thought experiments. That difference is due to the objectivity of knowledge independent of a knowing subject. Do you have any criticism of this beyond it’s not the traditional use of the word “Knowledge”? Would using a different word make it more palatable for you?
@Eric Anderson
Non-explanatory knowledge is information that causes itself to be retained when embedded in a storage medium and does not contain explanatory theories about how the world works. As such, it has significantly less reach. The knowledge in genes is one example of non-explanatory knowledge.
See #127 and #158.
How can information “cause itself” to be retained? What, exactly, is this information doing to interact with the physical world and cause itself to be retained?
And what does the embedding in the first place?
You do not understand the design inference. ID does not explain how or by who phenomena are designed.
Ponder this:
The appearance of design is being well adapted to serve a purpose. If you do not have an explanation for that adaptation, then how can you identify it as actually being design, as opposed to something else?
You have no explanation for design, but I know new-Darwinism cannot achieve it? It’s unclear how this is good criticism.
Furthermore, being well adapted to serve a purpose (design organisms) cannot be an explanation for being well adapted to serve a purpose.
As I’ve already given multiple examples. For example, genes play a causal role in being copied into future generations in a specific environment, which includes the organism itself.
In the case of books, the knowege it contains solves a problem, so it is reprinted. Variations of that book that solve more problems or do so better are reprinted, while the ealirer version is not. Knowege plays causal roles because it is independent of a knowing subject.
If I ordered a set of plans to build a car, but received plans for a boat instead, I wouldn’t end up with a car because that’s what I believed the knowege the plans contained would result in.
It is embedded as part of the coping process, which is currenly high-accuracy.
Again, the earliest cells would not need to be highly accurate template replicators. They just need to make some kind of copy.
The key point here is that knowege solves a problem. It causes transformations, independent of what anyone believes. See #191.
What on earth?
The information isn’t doing anything to “cause itself to be retained.” An intelligent being, operating outside of the information, is recognizing value in certain pieces of information and making an informed decision about what to retain and what to improve.
You can’t change that fact by using sloppy personification language when talking about information.
Sure. For the next generation. So what? The question is where information comes from and how it got there in the first place.
Yes, that is the naive claim. Unfortunately no-one has ever seen these purely hypothetical early replicators. And no-one has ever been able to show how a “highly inaccurate, non-purposive construction” could possibly replicate faithfully in a prebiotic environment, in the lab, or anywhere else.
—–
This constructor theory, as you have outlined it, is completely nonsense. It is worse than wrong. It is anti-knowledge, because it gives people who aren’t familiar with the facts the false impression that it solves an important biological issue, when it doesn’t. It is just a mix of sloppy language, poor definitions, personification of inanimate objects, and general vague assertions about how it supposedly works.
I know you have invested a lot of time and energy on this thread pushing this theory in a public forum. As a result, it will be difficult to back down and admit that it doesn’t hold water. But please, for your own intellectual integrity, take some time to understand the issues kf is raising on this thread and look hard in the mirror to examine the constructor business. It may be painful, but it will be a good learning experience.
@Eric Anderson
Before a person can actually improve the contents of a book, they must posses knowledge of what improvements to make. Desiring or wanting to make improvement isn’t enough. Variations are conjectural, so a change that is retained depends of that knowledge actually improving solutions to existing problems or even expanding the kinds of solutions it contains. That’s objective in that is independent of what anyone believes. In the sense, it plays a key causal role.
Yes, that is the question. The knowledge in a organism’s genes determines what its features will be. So, the origin of that knowledge is the origin of those features. What is your explanation? Some designer put it there doesn’t explain that knowledge. How did it possess it?
What you seem to be appealing to is an authoritative source of knowledge, which is bad philosophy.
Some designer that “just was” complete with the knowledge of just the right genes would result in just the right proteins that would results in just the right features, already present, does’t serve an explanatory purpose. That’s because, one can more efficiently state that organisms “just appeared”, complete with the knowledge of just the right genes would result in just the right proteins that would results in just the right features, already present. Neither case accounts for the origin of that knowledge.
The former is like saying a robot came off the assembly like already programmed how to build cars. That knowledge would have spontaneously appeared when the robot was being built.
If the inference is human designers via induction, then every designer we’ve observed is well adapted for the purpose of designing things. So, you only think you are using induction. Being well adapted to serve a purpose (designing organisms) cannot be the explanation for being well adapted to serve a purpose. And if the designer is not well adapted, then how does that work, exactly?
Again the criticism is that the origin of that knowledge Is either absent or irrational.
You’re merely objecting to the idea that knowledge in brains, books and genes can be unified because it’s not the traditional definition of knowledge. That’s just bad criticism in you’re claiming we cannot make progress, which is anti-knowledge.
Do you have any other criticism other than that?
CR:
Over two hundred comments after the OP and it still has not registered that the design inference is not about the appearance of design, it seems.
I suggest you revisit inductive logic 101.
Functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information describes a readily observed phenomenon. Indeed, in Crick’s March 19, 1953 letter, he speaks to DNA as a case in point — readily recognising it as text.
There are trillions of cases of separately known origin and utterly reliably it is by design. There are zero credible counter examples by which blind chance and/or mechanical necessity create de novo FSCO/I. The search challenge on sol system or observed cosmos scale to find needle in haystack islands of function in config spaces for 500 – 1,000 bits and beyond give a very good explanation for that. Where by the very need for well matched, correctly arranged and coupled parts to achieve relevant functionality, islands of function are a natural consequence.
Random document generation exercises are a factor of 10^100 short, no surprise there.
None of this would be controversial if there were not an established school of thought on origins that demands that such FSCO/I must somehow come about by blind chance and/or mechanical necessity.
But that puts the cart before the horse: we have a major theory of origins that is failing key, empirically based tests.
Mind you, too often nowadays that seems to have but little impact.
Such are the days we live in.
KF
@KF,
First, so it’s just induction? The distant past resembles the recent past we have and have not observed? Really? If not, then what is the explanation for the knowledge in organisms, which is uses to make a copy of itself?
Our explanation for what you call FSCO/I in the case of human designers is due to having been well adapted to serve a purpose. What do I mean by being “well adapted”? If you change it slightly, then it doesn’t serve that purpose as well, if even at all.
Everything from the knowledge in our genes, biological features and and knowledge in our brains represents being well adapted. For example, DNA is a substrate that is transformed as part of a construction task (well adapted) from raw materials, etc. The original instructions are well adapted matter. We either utilize instincts that come from our genes via variation and selection, or ideas that come from conjecturing ideas and criticizing them. That knowledge is our explanation for designed things, including computers, binary data, compilers, languages, etc. In their current state, they are often copied as is. And, before that, were were genuinely created via conjecture and criticism. In either case, they represent adaptations of storage mediums.
Transformations that result in human designed things occur when the requisite knowledge is present in them, in some kind of adoption of matter. To quote an earlier comment..
How did the knowledge get into the drug? If I was responsible, I would have had to posses it in the first place before I could put it there. Otherwise, it would be like manufacturing a pill and having that knowledge spontaneously appear there when the filler was pressed.
If you’re just using induction, it’s unclear why you wouldn’t also assume that the distant past would be like the recent past, in that any such designer would also be well adapted as we are. Nor have we ever observed a designer that is not well adapted to serve the purpose of designing things. So, following your “inference”, designers of the distant past would also be well adapted for the purpose of designing organisms. That rules itself out.
CR why do you refuse to address the elephant in the room?
The capacity to acquire “knowledge” requires organization prior to function. This is not a trivial amount of organization, and it is virtually defined by its independence from physico-dynamics.
You have no source for that organization, or the coordination required for semantic closure. Why go on pretending that you’ve offered something that impacts these fundamental physical issues?
Repeatedly assuming the capabilities of the system is a non-starter.
CR,
Inductive reasoning is never a “just.”
Your first quarrel is obviously with the province of logic that allows us to access empirical, credibly reliable knowledge of the external world. No wonder you seem to treat empirical evidence so cavalierly.
I suggest that it would be wiser for you to heed Locke in his Intro to his Essay on Human Understanding, sec 5 (where ATBC, AE, TSZ et al . . . trying to tell true/false by the clock is a fallacy):
Also, Newton, in Opticks, Query 31, has somewhat to instruct you:
I suggest that you need to address the absurdity of scanting inductive reasoning before further venturing out to criticise the design inference on FSCO/I as an inductively grounded, analytically backed strong sign of design as credible cause. Where, case no 1 is the algorithmic TEXT in DNA and the associated molecular nanotech macines that give it functional effect.
As in, what is the empirically grounded, inductively known source of text (as in a manifestation of alphabetic language that per the usual timeline dates to what, 3.5 – 3.8 BYA?): ______________
As also in, what is the similarly grounded source of algorithms, codes and linked data structures: _____________
As further, what is the similarly grounded source of execution machinery that coherently accesses, reads and executes algorithms: _______________
As yet further, what is the similarly grounded source of coherent, unified, structured organisation that establishes automata that carries out such processes: ______________________
And finally, what would be the reasonable source of a von Neumann, kinematic self replication facility [vNKSR] that integrates all such into a self-replicating automaton: _______ , and why do you conclude such: ___________ , with what empirical warrant: ____________ ?
(Do you see why the issue of absurdity arises, starting with OOL? Also, with burning down the house of inductive reasoning?)
KF
PS: For those inclined to play at dismissive attack the man on seeing the abbreviation of a descriptive phrase, FSCO/I, I suggest a look at the OP above. CR, this particularly includes you. Unresponsiveness to facts and evidence right in front of you on what a simple phrase means and addresses — an OBVIOUS phenomenon you created a further example of by posting a comment — does not lend you credibility in dealing with more difficult, more distant matters. And yes, it counts that the text of comments in this thread are further examples of FSCO/I and of its credible, reliable cause, intelligently directed configuration. Note the OP:
THAT is what is being so stoutly resisted. And if something so simple is being so ferociously opposed [remember, I have been subjected to stalking] there is no point, really, in trying to discuss more complex matters. Such evidence demonstrates that we are dealing with ideologically induced closed-mindedness and its handmaiden, selectively hyperskeptical dismissiveness . . . to the point of some objectors plainly being willing to burn down inductive reasoning, the core logic of the methods of science.
That’s the thing I’m most confused about. The elephant in the room is the knowledge physical embedded in organisms. They do not “phone home” when making a copy of themselves, Rather, that knowledge to transform raw materials in a construction task. So, the origin of that knowledge is the origin of that organism’s features. How do you explain it?
An entire cell is constructed from prior knowledge from raw materials. It exists as information embedded in a storage medium prior to being put in the organism’s copy, Including the storage medium, etc. That is a non trivial amount of organization that any such designer must have possessed prior in some physical form, were it actually responsible for it. So, it would have been well adapted to design organisms. It’s unclear how being well designed to serve a purpose (design organisms) can be the explanation for being well designed to serve a purpose.
And If the “designer” didn’t have prior possession of that knowledge, by nature of not being well adapted, then how did it end up in an organism it supposedly designed? Merely saying the knowledge appeared as part of the “design” process doesn’t explain the origin of that knowledge. This would be like an industrial robot coming off an assembly line somehow pre-programed with the knowledge of how to build a car, already present. That’s the spontaneous creation of knowledge, which is strangely what people here seem to claim evolution equates to.
I’m still not exactly sure what you’re referring to here. Are you referring to the universality of DNA? Or are you suggesting that the knowledge of how to build organisms was somehow already present in the laws of physics?
As the paper states, some have proposed that the level of accuracy in which genes are copied in biological template replicators may not be compatible with no-design laws. That is, that level of accuracy would require the design of template replicators, including their copying mechanisms, to be already present somehow in the laws of physics themselves. Therefore, evolution doesn’t actually play the role it is thought to play. In constructor theory, that is a claims that the copy process that occurs would be prohibited by no-design laws of physics. Is that what you’re suggesting?
From the Aeon article..
The laws of physics do not provide what’s necessary to make those copies. The article then goes on to point out that even if we could somehow predict that specific forms of life would appear from initial contains in the prevailing conception of physics, objectors could always claim the design of those organisms was somehow already present in the laws of physics.
So, what is addressed here is (1) how the accurate transformations in life are possible when the organization your are referring to is not present in the “toolbox” of the current laws of physics and (2) how their recipe for organisms need not be in the initial conditions or the laws of physics. Note, that (1) necessarily includes information, its storage and the transformations that occur during copying. Details on information in constructor theory are the first paper I referenced.
If this isn’t relevant to your objection, then please elaborate on how it is different from what is presented here as a starting point. Or some other starting point. I’ll be out of town on a cruise until Wednesday, so I won’t be able to respond until then.
@KF,
Why do you keep assuming I must think we can know nothing unless there is some infallible source of knowledge? I’ve specific indicated this is not the case. Yet, the first quote is aimed squarely at someone who held that assumption.
Furthermore, it suggests you think we do not need an explanation for how induction works because induction is what we use, we use what God wanted us to use and he wouldn’t want us to use it unless he made it work via some inexplicable means. After all, God is an inexplicable mind that exists in an inexplicable ream that works in inexplicable means and methods.
So, don’t bother worrying abut induction works, because no progress can be made there. It’s inexplicable.
In addition, Isn’t that curricular because it assumes God deigned us as one of its premises? Doesn’t Newton infer those assumptions due to the Biblical claims you listed in the quote?
Nor have we ever seen a designer that wasn’t well adapted to serve the purpose of designing things. So, apparently, it’s not just induction, but induction plus a supernatural source of revealed and preserved knowledge?
CR I am making no such assumptions as you project. I have responded to your statements and arguments, pointing out some of the challenges they face. I suggested earlier today, for example, that you need to be careful of how you respond to inductive reasoning, based on your remarks in-thread. KF
PS: I have also pointed out that evolutionary materialism inherently lets loose grand delusion in our reasoning, warrant, knowledge and morality, utterly undermining itself. Fellow traveller schemes fall under the same fault.
@KF,
First, a correction…
The candle designed (setup) in us by God is faillable, but is good enough to know that he designed us via induction? Again, how does that work, in practice?
Assuming it works because it’s worked in the past is, well, induction. Assuming it works because God set it up that way appeals to a supernaturally revealed source and preserved knowege.
I’m not discounting empirical evidence. I’m suggesting it doesn’t play the role you think it plays. You seem to think either it’s all or nothing, which is a false dichotomy.
Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them. That’s not a claim that emeprical evidence doesn’t play a critical role in science. It’s just not the role you claim it plays. No one has developed a principle of induction that works in practice. No one. So how can you or anyone else use it?
If you did, it would seem that you’d also assume that all designers are well adapted to design things, since we’ve never obsereved a design that was not. As you said, there are trillions of known examples of designers that are well adapted for the purpose of designing things and none that are not. Furthermore, designers that were well adapted but experienced an accident that disrupted that well adaptedness can no longer design things nearly as well or not at all.
FSCO/I is an specific example of being well adapted to serve a purpose. Being specified is being well adpated. Being functional is to serve a purpose. When copied information is a transformation of matter, which again is an example of a storage medium being well adapted when embedded there. If modified, it woud not serve that purpose nearly as well if not at all. It checks all the boxes.
So, why hasn’t induction lead you to conclude that all designed things which exhibit FSCO/I are a clear indication of a designer that is well adapted for the purposes of designing things? Something just doesn’t add up.
Being well adapted to serve a purpose (designing organisms) cannot be the explanation for being well adapted for a purpose. That rules itself out.
CR, Locke and Newton both highlighted the known nature of one branch of reasoning, induction. If we neglect it, it will severely damage ability to operate in the world. And in fact, what is really done by hyperskeptics is to selectively doubt and dismiss what they don’t like through double-standards on warrant. As to constructing bodies of knowledge and world views, including the role of self evident plumbline truths, I have already linked, but for convenience point here again: http://nicenesystheol.blogspot.....u2_bld_wvu . KF
#207
CR, this is an ID blog. ID suggests that an act of intelligence can be empirically detected in the origin of life on earth. This is the claim that ID theorists attempt to answer. In order to validate the claim, there must be some measurable aspect of known intelligent processes found in the physical embodiment of living things. To that end, science has documented the necessary physical conditions of semiotic systems – that is, systems that use information bound in physical memory to create functional effects. Science has documented that these systems are unique (and exclusively identifiable) among all other physical systems found in the cosmos. Science has shown that these systems are only related to living things.
Inside this very small set of physical systems, science has found an even smaller subset of systems. These are systems that use spatially-oriented representations (tokens) to encode their physical memory (i.e. they use a reading-frame code). Science has documented the additional physical requirements of this smaller subset of systems, and found that they are identifiable only in written language and mathematics – two unambiguous products of intelligence. It is now known that this same physical system is also found in the translation of the genetic information inside the cell (i.e. the genetic code), thus forming an inference to intelligent action 4 billion years before the appearance of human intelligence on earth. So to answer your question, ID theorists claim that the origin of the genetic translation apparatus — underlying all of biology – is best explained as the product of intelligent action. Moreover, the ID claim about detecting a universal correlate of intelligent action in biology has been validated by physics, using the scientific method. Indeed, the observations that fundamentally support the claim are not even controversial.
You place a paradox in front of you that is of your own making. It is not a necessary conclusion drawn from interpreting the physical evidence; it is a paradox under your prior assumptions and biases. You place this paradox in front of you in order to (not only) avoid the physical evidence as we find it, but also to avoid the actual claim that ID proposes to answer. I don’t know why you think the people on this board should be impressed by this maneuver.
And then there is also this problem:
Given materialism there is no organism. There is just a conglomerate of fermions and bosons, which presents itself to us as one thing: an organism. But materialism informs us that this unity is but an illusion. There is, in fact, not one thing, there is no organism. You may think so, but it is an illusion.
Materialism attempts to unmask the world we are familiar with. It informs us that things are not what they seem to be, that is, there is no intrinsic unity — and as such no reality — to the macro-level of things we know from daily life.
Similarly a human being, made from fermions and bosons, may present itself to us as one indivisible thing with its own intentions, but in fact there is nothing over and beyond fermions and bosons which care about neither human beings nor their intentions. The illusion of an intentional personal human being is produced by unintentional impersonal fermions and bosons. To be clear, there is no person and there are no intentions.
Moreover, according to materialism, for similar reasons, there is no such a thing as “knowledge” and/or “information”. It simply cannot exist. Atheist philosopher Alexander Rosenberg puts it like this:
cr,
It appears that you have made a decision to not pursue our conversation further (#205, #207, #212).
Perhaps you’ve realized that under your own observations, and specifically your contemplation of those observations, you are committed to concur with the design inference as it is actually presented — i.e. with your prior assumptions and biases set aside.
@KF & UB
KF wrote…
Neglect it? Not only is induction not possible, but it’s undesirable. Many of the contents of our best, current theories didn’t come from empirical observations and simply do not take that form. For example, the evidence that space-time is curved wasn’t a picture of space-time, but a dot in one place, instead of another, on a screen. They are explanations about reality that no one has experienced. Nor did the contents of those theories did not come from observations. They came from conjectured arrangements and variations of the contents of our existing, best theories – which did not come from observations either, etc. So, none of the contents of our theories come from observations.
Astrophysics is not primarily about us, in respect to what we will experience when we look into the sky, but about what stars are, in reality: their composition, what makes them shine, how they formed, etc., along with universal laws of physics under which all of that happened. The vast majority of which has never been seen or experienced by anyone. No one has experienced a light year, let alone a billion years or the Big Bang, which happened over 13 billion of years ago. Nor will anyone experience a law physics except in their mind, as a theory. Our predictions of what we will experience (how stars will look to us) are deduced from a long chain of independently formed unseen explanations about how the world works. Inductivism completely fails to account for how we can know about these things as separate from distinct lights in the sky.
IOW, if anything will severely damage our ability to operate in the world, it would denying we can make progress in this way. And that’s exactly what you’re doing here.
Another misconception of inductivism is that scientific theories predict the future (or the distant past) resembles the past, that the unseen resembles the seen (or probably will), etc. But, when we attempt to take this idea seriously for the purpose of criticism, we find the future is unlike the past and the unseen reality we conclude is responsible for it is very different than the seen. Science often predicts – and even causes the appearance of – phenomena that is drastically different than anything we’ve experienced before.
For example, people dreamed of flying for thousands of years. But they experienced nothing but falling. What made the momentous change in what we experienced? People discovered good theories about flying. Then they flew. In precisely in that order. A nuclear-fission explosion had never been observed by a human being before 1945. In fact, there may have never been any such explosion in the entire universe. Despite this fact, the first explosion, along with the conditions under which it would occur, had been accurately predicted. Not based on the future would resemble the past, or even probably so, but on explanations about how the world works.
UB wrote…
What do you mean by “intelligent processes” and what is your explanation as to how they bring about the physical attributes you are referring to? In the absence of an explanation, it’s unclear how you know only they can produce them. At best, you have an abstract authoritative source of knowledge. But that’s bad philosophy.
UB wrote…
Science doesn’t “document” or “show” anything. That assumes there is some way to mechanically derive theories from observations. Again, that’s a mistaken idea about how science works.
For example, if you look into a microscope, your not looking at the sample directly. What you’ve done is introduce equipment that will relay information about the sample according to a theory about how the equipment works. Specially, a good explanation is hard to vary. It constrains what parts you need and how they must be arranged to give you accurate information about the sample. You can’t replace a lens with, say, a cucumber and expect to see bacteria, right?
IOW, one’s ability to setup equipment correctly to obtain evidence depends on having a good explanation for how that equipment works. So, an observation is always an explanation, even if it’s setting on a bench right in front of you.
Without an explanation about how “intelligent processes” bring about symbols, it’s unclear how they can be the only source of them. What you’re left with is just induction: every “symbol” we’ve observed was correlated to “intelligent processes”. Thats simply bad philosophy. In addition, I’ve referenced a deeper, universal explanation for knowledge, including the knowledge in biological organisms, that does not require a knowing subject and references to a theory of information that resolves the circularity in Shannon’s theory in regards to distinguishability, which you seem to be eluding to in regards to symbols that mediate gene expression, etc.
From the constructor theory of information…
What theory of information are you referring to, Shannons? And, if not any particular theory then, again, it’s just induction, which is based on what we experience. See above.
UB wrote..
The genetic translation apparatus is constructed anew during each copy, when requisite knowledge is present in the cell. It does not phone home to some remote source to determine what transformations to perform. Nor do they just spontaneously appear when the cell is copied. The origin of that knowledge is the origin of the translation apparatus and the rest of the organism’s features. That knowledge is what needs to be explained. Merely saying a designer just copied that knowledge there when creating a cell merely pushes the problem up a level without solving it.
Again, I wrote…
UB wrote…
This is what I mean when I say induction is impossible. Specifically, when you claim ID is a necessary scientific conclusion, you’re supposedly just practicing induction. Yet, when I try to take that seriously, for the purpose of criticism, I’m just making a unnecessary, biased interoperation of evidence. Every designer we’ve observed has been a complex, knowledge laden entity that is well designed to serve the purpose of designing things. That’s what information is. Matter that is well adapted.
Portraying designers as mere authoritative sources of knowledge ignores what we know about designers. It ignores your own arguments about information, except when it suites your purpose. It ignores the role that knowledge plays in design and in biology. Any designer would have the appearance of design, which is the very thing that needs to be explained. If you don’t have a hard to vary role as to how “Intelligent processes” result in knowledge, then it’s unclear how you know it couldn’t be genuinely created though variation and selection
If you assume knowledge only comes from authoritative sources then, of course, Neo-Darwinism cannot be the source of that knowledge because it’s not an authoritative source. But that’s bad philosophy.
Good grief, cr, you are reduced to bafflegab.
1520 words and you still refuse to address the central claim that ID is based on.
Just speak the words, cr, if you can.
Can you do it? Can you answer the question straight up?
What is the central claim that biological ID seeks to support?
You are never going to detangle yourself until you get it right.
(hint: the answer is in #212)
Prediction: Hell will freeze over
@UB
I quoted from #212, then make relevant criticisms based on that claim, such as your appeal to the scientific method, etc.
Your response? A word count and vague claim that I was supposedly reduced to “bafflegab”. Neither of which is a response to my points. And you’re not impressed?
Again, what theory of information are you implicitly referring to? it’s unclear why you think something so critical to ID doesn’t need a theory. Apparently, it’s just “obvious” and everyone knows. But things only seem obvious, after the fact. And, when better explanations are presented, they suddenly don’t anymore. One way explanations are better is that they explain more phenomena and unify what was once considered separate.
Furthermore, the mechanism you refer to is constructed anew when the cell makes a copy of itself. Those transformations occur when the requisite knowledge is present there, as opposed to phoning home to some designer. So, that’s what needs to be explained.
Again, in the absence of an explanation, what you have is induction. Namely, information has been experienced in conjunction with intelligent agents. But despite being intelligent, I cannot design a drug that cures cancer, regardless of how much I want too. Cancer cells would only be destroyed (a transformation of matter) when the requisite knowledge is present in the drug. What’s key is knowledge.
Human designers are well adapted in that they posses knowledge in physical form. When human beings become less adapted, due to some kind of accident, for example, they perform that purpose less well, if event at all. A human designer that designed organisms would do so because they are we adapted to serve the purpose of designing organisms.
Some designer that “just was”, complete with the knowledge of just the right transformations of matter to perform, already present (already well adapted), doesn’t serve an explanatory purpose. This is because one could more efficiently state that organisms “just appeared” complete with the knowledge of what transformations to preform, already present (spontaneously well adapted).
And, of course, ID doesn’t want to actually explain anything. Its designer must remain abstract and without limitations because, otherwise, your preferred designer couldn’t have done it. So, it must remain merely an authoritative source of knowledge, which is bad philosophy.
Hell will freeze over.
Chilly.
Unfortunately, you’re serious.
This is why you need to answer the question I posed to you. The problem for you is that the moment you answer the question, all your justifications become irrelevant, and you are left in the position of agreeing with the argument you are trying so hard to defeat. This is the impetus for your bafflegab and the strength behind it.
@UB
Do you have any actual criticism of what I wrote?
Is the the answer not what I quoted and responded to? If not, then how am I supposed to know?
Furthermore, I don’t have justifications. What I’m doing is attempting to take ID seriously for the purpose of criticism.
Specifically, when I attempt to take ID’s claim seriously, in that a designer designed organisms, this would include the knowledge of what transformations of matter to perform when making a copy of those organisms. A designer that just copied that knowledge into organisms would itself had possessed that knowledge, which would make it well adapted as a storage medium from which the copy originated. It would be well adapted to serve the purpose of designing organisms. Also, ID fails to explain how the knowledge wound up in the designer in the first place. A designer that “just was”, complete with this knowledge, already present, doesn’t serve an explanatory purpose. This is because one could more efficiently state that organisms “just appeared” with that knowledge, already present.
Without an explanation for how intelligence results in knowledge, it’s unclear why you think knowledge only comes from intelligent agents unless you’re appealing to induction. We’ve only experienced knowledge in conjunction with intelligent agents.
However, taking ID seriously for the purpose of criticism doesn’t necessarily mean I think knowledge only comes from designers. In fact, unlike ID, I’ve already presented explanations for knowledge that ID does not.
Again, I’m suggesting that knowledge is information that plays a causal role in being retained when embed in a storage medium. Nor is there just one kind of knowledge. Explanatory knowledge, which is only created by people, has significant reach. On the other hand, non-explanatory knowledge has limited reach. See #127.
In fact, since this explanation suggests only people can conceive of problems, conjecture explanatory theories of how the world works to solve them, and criticize them, an indicator of design would be the discovery of explanatory knowledge in organisms. Yet, the knowledge we find it organisms is non-explanatory in that it has limited reach.
Take Dawkins’ example of the laryngeal nerve in a Giraffe. If the knowledge of nerve routing in a Giraffe’s genome was explanatory, it could be employed to re-route the nerve so it didn’t go down its neck, around it’s heart and back up to its larynx. It would have reach beyond the rule of thumb that was merely useful for short necked ancestors before it.
IOW, the claim that the laryngeal nerve in a Giraffe is “bad design” refers to the limited reach of non-explanatory knowledge reflected in it. So it’s not merely subjective. Our current, best explanation for the rapid growth of knowledge is the search for hard to vary, independently formed chains of explanatory theories. This is in contrast to useful rules of thumb. Yet, non-explanatory knowledge is what we find in organisms.
So, it’s only through some kind of explanation for knowledge that ID could suggest that a specific kind of knowledge in organisms indicates design, in that our only explanation for it is people. Otherwise, we’re back to mere induction or the bad philosophical view that knowledge comes from authoritative sources.
You did it again CR.
You refuse to address a very simple question — even with the answer right in front of you (#212) — because answering the question makes your argument irrelevant.
For the reasons already noted, you will continue to do so.
@UB
The answer to your question makes my criticism irrelevant if I type it in into a comment on a blog?
But that makes no sense. A good argument is independent of its source or who makes it. So, you don’t need me. Right?
It is interesting to watch someone who simply cannot put the words together. What does it say about your counter-arguments that you can’t even state the thing they are intended to criticize?
Can’t put the words together? I’m just being consistent, UB.
Again, we start out with a problem to solve, conjecture solutions and criticize them. This includes the problem of what your argument actually is. IOW, it’s always possible to misunderstand someone because we always have to interpret them. That always comes first.
So, I’ve quoted you, then presented relevant criticisms of what I think your argument is. I expect it to contain errors to some degree because we start out with a guess. There is no way to extrapolate or derive directly from experience.
Your response? Claim that I “refuse to address the central claim that ID is based on.” It’s unclear how that helps me correct errors in my interpretation. Apparently, it’s obvious and I just refuse to acknowledge it. (Which sounds oddly like the idea that we all know God exists, and are without excuse)
How do we make progress? I guess then, based on feedback, I vary my guess, etc. It’s a process. Look though my comments. I’ve made several attempts to clarify what I think your argument is (#150, #158, #207) Merely claiming I’ve got it wrong and suggesting it’s somewhere in #212 doesn’t help. I’ll ask again: did I quote the wrong part? If so, what is the right part? How is the lack of a theory of information not relevant if the central claim of ID is based on information? Effectively saying “You got it wrong” doesn’t address that, either.
Again, apparently, that’s just not necessary because it’s all obvious and I’m just avoiding the issue. (That’s yet another conjecture, in case you didn’t recognize it)
CR,
Biological ID claims that an act of intelligence can be empirically detected in the origin of life on earth. I keep trying to bring you back around to it, because nothing you’ve presented even makes a dent in that claim (i.e. your criticisms have no impact on the observations that support the claim, they are irrelevant to those observations).
And as far as the claim itself, it has already been validated by physics — about half a century ago.
UB,
You’ve just repeated what I already quoted in #215. It’s unclear how this is helpful. Nor does it address any of the questions or criticisms I presented there.
For example, its unclear how the specific role empirical evidence plays in science is not relevant to the claim that something can and has been “empirically detected” in the origin of life. Nor is it clear what in organisms you are referring to and how it is explained by “an act of intelligence”
“they are irrelevant to those observations” is not an argument, It’s an assertion. It’s irrelevant because?
As for being supposedly having been “validated by physics — about half a century ago”, I assume you’re referring to this?
Again, this seem to be a reference to information theory, which is why I keep asking for the specific theory your claims are based on. Again, why is this not reinvent? Apparently you think it is not necessary because it’s somehow obvious to everyone else. After all, you seemed to think it would become obvious to me if I just typed ID’s premise into a blog comment.
You’ll have to unpack what you mean by “related to” as well. It’s unclear how this gets you to “an act of intelligence” in organisms.
There are symbols in organisms therefore they were designed by an intelligent agent? There is information inside organisms therefore they were designed by an intelligent agent? But, again, without an explanation for how intelligence results in knowledge, it’s unclear how you know that only intelligent agents are the only source of it.
I.E. present an explanation for knowledge, which is X, Y and Z. Then point out that evolution doesn’t fit that explanation. Otherwise, you’re just appealing to induction in that Information is always experienced with intelligent agents and the future (or the distant past) resembles the recent past. But the future is unlike the past in a vast number of ways, many of which you ascribe to.
For example, we’ve always experienced intelligence with complex material nervous systems. So, if you’re just “following the evidence”, you should conclude that all designers would have them as well. Yet, when I point this out, you claim it’s just bias on my part.
However, I’m not just appealing to induction. The very explanations about information you’ve indirectly appealed to, such as how it is stored, etc, indicates that our explanation for designed things is that the knowledge required was present there. They possess the knowledge of what transformations of matter are necessary. They are well adapted for the purpose of designing things. It’s unclear how being well adapted to serve a purpose can be the explanation for being well adapted to serve a purpose.
Furthermore, a designer just copying that knowledge from one place to anther doesn’t explain how the designer possessed that knowledge in the first place. If that is the key factor in an organism’s features, including it’s self replicating ability, then the origin of those features is that knowledge. Right?
If a designer didn’t posses that knowledge, yet it ended up in organisms it created, that would be the spontaneous creation of knowledge. And saying a designer just was, complete with that knowledge, doesn’t actually improve the problem. You’ve just pushed it up a level into an inexplicable mind that exists in an inexplicable realm that operates in via inexplicable means and methods. Neither of these two explain the origin of that knowledge. At best, you have a authoritative source of knowledge which is bad philosophy.
This is in contrast to neo-Darwinism, which says that the knowledge in organisms was actually created over time through variation and selection. It genuinely grows in that it did not exist before, becoming more and more accurate over time.
What is the origin of the knowledge in biological organisms? I keep trying to bring you back around to it, because nothing you’ve presented inidcates it’s even on your radar as a genuine problem to be solved or that it’s relevant to the issue at hand.
CR, I am just now seeing that you returned with a response. I’ll be brief.
#1 ID claims that a universal correlate of intelligent action can be detected in the origin of life on earth. It’s the only life we know of, and the only life we can even hope to explain. (In other words, we cannot explain life that we’ve never experienced, possibly existing somewhere, in a place that we know nothing about).
Yet, when ID presents concrete universal evidence of an intelligent act in the origin of life on earth (i.e. evidence of the type that neither you nor anyone else can reasonably argue against), you then move the goalposts and demand that ID must explain ultimate causes instead. Hello?
This is a defensive maneuver, which you refuse to give up, and you will continue to do so (regardless of the fact it’s hopelessly illogical). Hello?
#2 You want to attribute the “knowledge” in the cell to evolution (i.e. a physical process of variation and selection; continually compiling and polishing the arrangement of a medium of information).
However, evolution requires a very special type of physical system in order to exist in nature (meaning that it requires a known threshold of organization in order to function). Physicists have thoroughly studied this necessary system, and have related it directly to the material laws that govern nature. And they have determined that the only other place that such a system can be found (anywhere else in the cosmos) is in written language and mathematics – two universal correlates of intelligence. Hello?
So what we have here, is that you first deny ID evidence by strategically moving the goalposts –then– you turn around attribute the origin of life to a cause that requires the very system that ID advocates present as necessary for life. In other words, you attribute life to a cause that requires the very thing it is intended to explain, which is obviously a non-starter. If A requires B to exist, then A cannot be the source of B.
In response, of course, you will refuse all of this. And the beat goes on…
First, it’s unclear how something as vague as “intelligent action” can be detected in the very thing that is in question (the origin of life). Especially since we use the unseen to explain the sceen.
Specifically, how does intelligent action result in symbols? What would that even mean?
Furthermore, the last time I checked, it’s a fallacy of logic to assume that correlation equals causation or a specific direction.
From the Wikipedia article on correlation and dependence.
IOW, it’s unclear how human beings discovering that symbols can be useful implies that organisms were designed.
So, if corrections do not imply causation, then the goal of ID is making useful predictions that can be exploited in practice? What might those be?
And how would that differ from or be incompatible with the theory that knowledge in organisms grows via variation and selection? Specially, knowledge plays a casual role in being retained when emended in a storage medium. it solves a problem. That’s not random.
You wouldn’t happen to be referring to the idea that accurate reproduction is not part of the default tool kit of physics and that is a problem for evolution? That was addressed in an entire paper, which you supposedly read and indicated was irrelevant for reasons which you have yet to elaborate on.
Vague? Post #231 is the result of your “intelligent action”. How “vague” is that?
Have you never seen “intelligent action”?
Which is an important message to those who try to bolster their naturalism with neuroscience — not so for ID.
Look at post #231 ….