Evolution Disclaimer Supported

The Advocate (Baton Rouge) ^ | 12/11/02 | WILL SENTELL

[gore3000]

Really? So I am sure you know the explanation of how a species can scientifically change its mode of reproduction WHILE CONTINUING TO REPRODUCE. Specifically you should be able to explain how mammalian reproduction scientifically arose by random stochastic mutations from reptilian egg layers.-me-

You, as usual, completely ignored my other points.

In other words, you have excuses, not an answer, you have rhetoric, not science.

Because parts of a theory cannot be explained yet, does this immediately disprove a theory?

A theory to be legitimate has to provide the best explanation for the facts. The above is a pretty elementary fact, known long before Darwin was born. It is also a pretty obvious fact that the change is quite big. It is also pretty obvious that a species to continue to 'evolve' has to continue to reproduce. So I consider the above a very conclusive rebuttal of the theory of evolution. Further, I have never seen a discussion of this problem by evolutionists in the literature (certainly not by Darwin), on the internet, or on these pages. It seems that evolutionists think that if they ignore the problem it will go away - which is what evolutionists have been doing since I first posted this question. It will not go away.

[gore3000]

NEW POINT #2: This is for you and f.Christian and it attempts to counter the ludicrous connection with liberalism and evolution. I will prove the point by asking you a question, your answer will either show you that you're wrong or prove that you only equate conservative thinking with Christian thinking. A man explained all of his beliefs to you over a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and you learned that he was against any increase in taxation from what it is now, especially for welfare purposes. If you learned that he thought that the government was too filled with bureaucratic nonsense and needed to be slimmed down. He believed that the capitalist state is the only one which will eventually lead to a strong economy, and a strong foreign policy is essential to the protection of its people. After all this, he told you he thought that there was something to the theory of evolution, would you label him a liberal? Would you be so narrow minded?

Made up situations do not prove anything. There are also many people who will say they believe in evolution because they have never really looked at it. I think one of the basis of liberalism is moral relativism and this is very much a part of evolutionary theory. Ideas have consequences and the tendency of evolution is towards liberalism.

New Point #3: I've learned a lot since joining this thread, and the following statement derives from this attained knowledge. If a large number of RATIONAL men believe something to be true, it is irrational to conclude with complete authority that they are incorrect unless you can provide absolute and compelling evidence which destroys the theory. This is true for religion, and right now, it holds true for evolution.

The argument from authority does not work if those who claim authority do not have any rational refutation to the point being made.

[B. Rabbit]

In other words, you have excuses, not an answer, you have rhetoric, not science.

Let's use your line in a little make-believe conversation between Newton and the Pope during his time.

Pope: So I see you have a new little theory.

Newton: Yup. It is called gravity. It attracts objects together based on mass and distance. It's a very easy formula, actually, look.

Pope: Well, it seems to have a discrepancy here in the motion of Mercury. Can you explain how your theory and reality don't quite coincide? Do you have an answer?

Newton: No but it's a start. It isn't perfect yet!

Pope: In other words, you have excuses, not an answer, you have rhetoric, not science. If you cannot explain everything about the motion of planets with your new theory, then throw it out. It seems you have a problem of planetary proportions! Hahahaha!

Newton: Hahahaha! (Newton looks into the camera and shrugs with his hands out. A muted trumpet plays "Waah, Waah, Waah, Waaaaaa!". Freeze frame, roll credits).

[B. Rabbit]

Made up situations do not prove anything.

The only thing made up there is the Starbucks. Insert Free Republic instead. The person is me.

[VadeRetro]

On this forum, we've had such outrageous characters as medved and God's Traveler, just to name two. Medved pumped the forum full of malarky about psychic parrots, Earth orbiting Saturn in prehistory, a funny compressed version of civilized history which says about a millenium and a half never happened, etc. God's Traveler, among his little idiosyncracies, claimed to sit at the right hand of God. That looked blasphemous even to agnostic lil' ol' me. He was also poisonously nasty. Neither of them or anybody else from a bizarre cast of creos got a peep of anything but praise from the creo crowd so long as they tended to slap high-fives with the right side. Do that and you can do no wrong.

Against that, one No-Kin-To-Monkeys violated the sacred rule of "Thou shalt not bitch-slap a fellow creo." At the time, embroiled in argument with the receiver of the rebuff, I simply thought that the behavior showed that intellectual honesty in a creo was possible after all. What happened next was a revelation. A howl went up from slappee that No-Kin was obviously an impostor.

That proved right. Accused of being that impostor, I authorized the mods to check. I was innocent but somebody else presumably got yelled at. If you're ever going to impersonate a creo, remember "Solidarity over honesty."

[B. Rabbit]

Made up situations do not prove anything.

Well maybe not 'prove' anything. But the use of parables can be a handy teaching tool. They can also be used to show another where he is at fault without obviously and personally attacking him or her. Somebody else did the same in history, can't think of the name, um... Can you help me?

[Right Wing Professor]

Maybe this is all simple for those who love their differential equations, but I don't think it's a simple matter to compute either the information content or the channel capacity of a DNA sequence, per se.

Agreed. But we can certainly put an upper limit on the information content,. If we say the number of combinations in DNA is 4^N, where N is the number of base pairs, then the entropy of the specific sequence can be no more than k*N*ln 4 lower than total randomness. As I've noted before, this is a thermodynamically tiny quantity; for 10^9 base pairs, it is of the order of 10^-14 J/mol K, or equivalent to the order produced by freezing about a 10 femtograms of water. If the sequence is not unique in terms of phenotype (which, as you note, it will not be), the negative entropy will be lower than the number computed above, but it cannot be higher.

We could also argue that not all the order in the cell resides in the genome. After all, a genome cannot produce a new organism unless it has the entire apparatus of the cell to work with. We could put an upper bound on this by ordinary thermodynamic measurements - just by burning the organism, for example - and again it appears the negative entropy is absolutely minuscule.

It's a sobering thought, but the human genome does not appear to be particularly complex. The Bible, I'd warrant, has nearly as much information content as any of our genomes.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for your post and the additional explanation!

I agree that we most likely do not need randomness to do probability, statistics or physics!

The reason I’m circling this like a buzzard is that it is important in my hypothesis that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design. In other words, should we discover information content at inception (either big bang or abiogenesis) – then I must have some way of knowing it is algorithmically irreducible or my hypothesis is just so much hot air (not that anyone else cares, but I do.)

Chaitin refers to Champernowne in his article, Randomness & Complexity in Pure Mathematics. In speaking of algorithmic randomness, Chaitin says that Champernowne’s is the first example of a normal real number and “it follows from the fact that the halting probability Omega is algorithmically irreducible information, that this

0 < Omega = Sum_{p halts} 2^-|p| < 1

is normal in any base.” He explains this later in the section as follows:

“Let me try to explain better what this means. It means that you can only get out as much as you put in. If you want to prove whether an individual bit in a specific place in the binary expansion of the real number Omega is a 0 or a 1, essentially the only way to prove that is to take it as a hypothesis, as an axiom, as a postulate. It's irreducible mathematical information. That's the key phrase that really gives the whole idea.

Irreducible Mathematical Information
0 < Omega = Sum_{p halts} 2^-|p| < 1
Émile Borel --- normal reals
Champernowne
.01234567891011121314...99100101...

Okay, so what have we got? We have a rather simple mathematical object that completely escapes us. Omega's bits have no structure. There is no pattern, there is no structure that we as mathematicians can comprehend. If you're interested in proving what individual bits of this number at specific places are, whether they're 0 or 1, reasoning is completely useless. Here mathematical reasoning is irrelevant and can get nowhere. As I said before, the only way a formal axiomatic system can get out these results is essentially just to put them in as assumptions, which means you're not using reasoning. After all, anything can be demonstrated by taking it as a postulate that you add to your set of axioms. So this is a worst possible case---this is irreducible mathematical information. Here is a case where there is no structure, there are no correlations, there is no pattern that we can perceive.

Unless you see a flaw in my reasoning, I’ll use Chaitin for a definition of algorithmic irreducible information.

[Alamo-Girl]

Sigh... I need another cup of coffee. That sentence,

Unless you see a flaw in my reasoning, I’ll use Chaitin for a definition of algorithmic irreducible information.

should have read

Unless you see a flaw in my reasoning, I’ll use Chaitin for a definition of algorithmically irreducible information.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Actually we do get the first few bit of Chaitin's omega: http://apru.nus.edu.sg/pdf%20files/student/Shu%20abstract.pdf.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the reply and link! It just gave me a 404, but I'll try it a little later on.

I was just fixing to add something to my previous post for the lurkers who may be following our discussion.

The way I worded my post to you, it sounds as though algorithmically irreducible information would support my hypothesis algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design.

To the contrary, it would falsify it; but every hypothesis must have a means to falsify (Popper.) IOW, I must have a way to show that information content cannot be reduced by algorithm, i.e. that it is truly random.

In this scenario, at inception - where nothing (null) precedes, whatever is must be truly random - if it contains algorithm (step by step instruction), then there must be an intelligent designer.

[Alamo-Girl]

Sigh, I'd better quit typing until I down a cup of coffee. I left the thought in my previous post wide open.

For the lurkers: if my hypothesis is falsified, it does not constitute proof for or against an intelligent designer - it would only show that my hypothesis is no good.

[Alamo-Girl]

Sigh... I'm still getting the 404 and am very anxious to read that pdf file. If you still have it up, could you capture it and email it to me: Alamo_Girl@hotmail.com?

[Alamo-Girl]

It's a sobering thought, but the human genome does not appear to be particularly complex. The Bible, I'd warrant, has nearly as much information content as any of our genomes.

You might find it curious that some Kabbalists believe our DNA is our "name" and the Bible is one of God's names, as He is revealing Himself to us.

[Condorman]

You are here.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker.

[balrog666]

.rekramecalP

[Doctor Stochastic]

I cannot copy the file. When I click on the link I get the 404 error too. However, I could get to look at the file by searching Google using: "chaitin omega first bits" as the search terms.

[Doctor Stochastic]

An amusingly similar suggestion was made to me that the stars themselves spell out the name of God. However, the Coyote spilled a bucket of extra stars into the sky just to obscure things.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the information on how to retreive that document!

I finished reading it and naturally went looking for Chaitin's response, which I found at Paradoxes of Randomness - Complexity Vol. 7, No. 5, May/June 2002, pp. 14-21:

And that means that not only you can't compress it into a smaller algorithm, you can't compress it into fewer bits of axioms. So if you wanted to be able to determine K bits of Omega, you'd need K bits of axioms to be able to prove what K bits of this number are. It has---its bits have---no structure or pattern that we are capable of seeing.

However, you can prove all kinds of nice mathematical theorems about this Omega number. Even though it's a specific real number, it really mimics independent tosses of a fair coin. So for example you can prove that 0's and 1's happen in the limit exactly fifty percent of the time, each of them. You can prove all kinds of statistical properties, but you can't determine individual bits!

So this is the strongest version I can come up with of an incompleteness result...

Actually, in spite of this, Cristian Calude, Michael Dinneen and Chi-Kou Shu at the University of Auckland have just succeeded in calculating the first 64 bits of a particular Omega number. The halting probability Omega actually depends on the choice of computer or programming language that you write programs in, and they picked a fairly natural one, and were able to decide which programs less than 85 bits in size halt, and from this to get the first 64 bits of this particular halting probability.

This work by Calude et al. is reported on page 27 of the 6 April 2002 issue of the British science weekly New Scientist, and it's also described in Delahaye's article in the May 2002 issue of the French monthly Pour la Science, and it'll be included in the second edition of Calude's book on Information and Randomness, which will be out later this year.

But this doesn't contradict my results, because all I actually show is that an N-bit formal axiomatic theory can't enable you to determine substantially more than N bits of the halting probability. And by N-bit axiomatic theory I mean one for which there is an N-bit program for running through all possible proofs and generating all the theorems. So you might in fact be able to get some initial bits of Omega.

Verrry interesting! Thanks for the heads up to this property of Omega.