What properties of the four forces of nature predict linguistic sequences? Or can an intelligent cause be inferred from the discovery and decryption of hieroglyphics?
That is the foundational challenge to Darwinism in explaining the discovery and deciphering of the Indus hieroglyphs.
Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script.
The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols’ placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language.
“The statistical model provides insights into the underlying grammatical structure of the Indus script,” said lead author Rajesh Rao, a UW associate professor of computer science. “Such a model can be valuable for decipherment, because any meaning ascribed to a symbol must make sense in the context of other symbols that precede or follow it.”
. . .
The new study looks for mathematical patterns in the sequence of symbols. Calculations show that the order of symbols is meaningful; taking one symbol from a sequence found on an artifact and changing its position produces a new sequence that has a much lower probability of belonging to the hypothetical language. The authors said the presence of such distinct rules for sequencing symbols provides further support for the group’s previous findings, reported earlier this year in the journal Science, that the unknown script might represent a language.
“These results give us confidence that there is a clear underlying logic in Indus writing,” Vahia said.
Seals with sequences of Indus symbols have been found as far away as West Asia, in the region historically known as Mesopotamia and site of modern-day Iraq. The statistical results showed that the West-Asian sequences are ordered differently from sequences on artifacts found in the Indus valley. This supports earlier theories that the script may have been used by Indus traders in West Asia to represent different information compared to the Indus region. . . .
. . .”One of the main purposes of our paper is to introduce Markov models, and statistical models in general, as computational tools for investigating ancient scripts,” Adhikari said. . . For more information, contact Rao at rao@cs.washington.edu.(emphasis added)
See full news: Computers unlock more secrets of the mysterious Indus Valley script
Prof. Dr-Ing. Werner Gitt develops a hierarchy of information in his book: In the Beginning was Information ISBN: 3-89397-255-2
Gitt develops five levels of information:
# Fifth level Apobetics: Intended purpose & achieved result
# Fourth level Pragmatics: Expected and implemented actions
# Third level Semantics: Ideas communicated and understood
# Second level Syntax: Code employed and understood
# First level Statistics: Signal transmitted and received
Rao et al’s research is developing the first level Statistics and from that discovering the Syntax or code used and from that trying to understand the ideas being communicated.
What basis can Darwinism provide for ANY of Gitt’s five levels of information?
We have clear current and historic evidence of intelligent agents being the direct cause of encoded information (such as you are reading.) Thus, objectively, Intelligent Design provides a more satisfactory explanation for the existence of hieroglyphs – as well as for the computers and software tools used to analyze them.