Science Icon Fires Broadside At Creationists

London Times vis The Statesman (India) ^ | 04 July 2004 | Times of London Editorial

[Dimensio]

Wow. You really have absolutely no arguments of any substance or intelligence whatsoever, do you?

[O.C. - Old Cracker]

You know, you're right. I was being lazy. You guys presented your cases much better than I. I was just trying to be combative, and not very good at that. Regards, O.C.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your post!

Of course I don't buy that for a minute, but it is the only way around the problems that the physical sciences see in your posts. Otherwise, it just couldn't happen - unless created. That is why I keep pointing out here that NASA is spending a great deal of effort to find the so called precursors to life at exterrestrial sites. Without saying so, they(many in science) have come to believe in the "intrinsic nature" origen of life hypothesis.

Indeed. IMHO, things started to shift when the mathematicians and physicists became more involved.

[Alamo-Girl]

Nice to see you, too, balrog666! And thanks for the reply!

But the continuous and gratuitous use of the word "information", as if it conveys some nebulous qualities beyond the simple physical characteristics or chemical attributes of self-replicating molecules, is, to speak frankly, looney.

Not at all. If you'd really like me to spam the thread with a ton of excerpts, you know I'll be glad to do so. But I can make this a lot easier just by asking you to do this thought experiment:

Put a live cell next to a dead cell and describe for us the difference.

Please remember in your answer that the Shannon definition of information is "successful communication".

In sum, one cannot reasonably discuss the "origin of life" without first being able to describe the physical difference between that which is alive and that which is not.

[betty boop]

If you define it so as to mean that DNA contains some kind of message from somewhere....

But Patrick, I don't have to allege that the information is a "message" coming from "somewhere" when -- so to speak -- the "medium is the message."

I will repeat again: I don't have to put God on the stage here in order for the natural world to explain itself. If we would but listen.

Why is this point so elusive, so difficult for you?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Well, evolution has been treated as religion by many.

True, but only creationists do so.

[js1138]

Once the cell quits communicating, it is dead.

Or mostly dead. What about the spore form of bacteria?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Pearcy and Thaxton write: ... "A [physical] law produces regular, predictable patterns..."

Then Pearcy and Thaxton are simply wrong. I don't know who either of them are, but in making such a nonsense statement, they exhibit a lack of knowledge of modern (post 1900) mathematics and physics. You would be better served by examining what ia actually going on in these fields rather than relying on whoever these two are.

You mention Wolfram's book which in fact refutes P&T completely. Wolfarm gives simple rules which generate complicated, unpredictable patterns. There is much more available in scientific journals (qv).

[Alamo-Girl]

mostly dead

LOLOLOL! That reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Princess Bride.

A spore is not dead, it is vegetative or dormant form which still has information and can communicate, e.g. once it has a food source.

Thanks for your post!

[Tax Government]

Evolution is a reality. It takes nothing away from's God's divinity or role as creator everything. If God wants to use evolution to change things, who are we to say otherwise? Babies evolve from single-celled animals. Don't they?

As for the origin othe universe, it happened about 5:00 a.m. this morning, when I woke up.

[Alamo-Girl]

Oops, I pressed post too soon. It should have said:

A spore is not dead, it is in a vegetative or dormant form which still has information and can communicate with its environment when it permits, e.g. once it has a food source.

[AndrewC]

Or mostly dead. What about the spore form of bacteria?

Congratulations, you are the only one of your crowd to use your noggin. There are bacterial spores and cysts. Some bacterial spores were said to be revived after 250 million years. That result is suspect. Studies have been done as to the sturdiness of the spores with the aim to investigate them as the source of cosmic life(panspermia). It was found that they need some protection from UV radiation.

[js1138]

But the question from this child in the back row is, is active communication going on in this dormant state? Or, as Martha Stewart might say is "life" a somewhat different concept from "living"? Or to be less frivolous, is there a state of matter that does not metabolize, but which will when conditions are right?

[Doctor Stochastic]

Please remember in your answer that the Shannon definition of information is "successful communication".

I haven't found this definition used by Shannon anywhere. I did find a reference from Berlinski making the claim. If Berlinski's horrible book on algorithms is an example of his work, his re-definition of information isn't very accurate or useful.

According to Shannon and Weaver information is defined as “a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message”. In information theory, information and uncertainty are closely related. Information refers to the degree of uncertainty present in a situation.

It's better to go to Shannon (or Shannon and Weaver, an easily accessible booklet) to find out what is actually meant rather than rely on a (seeming unreliable) third party. Shannons papers are available online.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The boundaries between life and non-life are inherently fuzzy. It's easy to claim that a chipmunk is living and a rock is non-living. (It's just as easy to claim the converse, but not so accurate.) It's not so easy to tell with viruses. Viruses do mutate and are themselves amenable to evolutionary descriptions. (The feline leukemia virus recently, maybe about 1972, underwent a favorable mutation which allowed it to infect dogs.) Prions are another matter; it's not clear whether one wants to call them living. Non-living matter can have biological effects.

[Alamo-Girl]

But the question from this child in the back row is, is active communication going on in this dormant state? Or, as Martha Stewart might say is "life" a somewhat different concept from "living"? Or to be less frivolous, is there a state of matter that does not metabolize, but which will when conditions are right?

Indeed. It is like the "stand-by" state of your computer. A spore is in a dormant state, but information continues, for as soon as the environment permits, the spore reacts. Anthrax is a good example.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for the links!

It's been a while since I read through Shannon's papers, but I will do it again (though probably not tonight).

As I recall, his work in the 1940's was oriented to communications, the mathematics of communications. That was the "state of the art". The term "information" was coined for success and "entropy" for failure. The second term (as I recall) was coined with his permission and has led to much confusion because of its usage in other contexts.

[js1138]

Definitions of life become arbitrary as the molecular size diminishes. But an evilutionist would probably that the essential qualities of a living unit are replication and susceptibility to variation and selection. It is not unreasonable to include prions, because -- as our ID proponent in chief has pointed out -- proteins do not occur in the absence of living processes.

How would you classify an obviously living thing that cannot reproduce without the presence of specific other living things? Is a parasite dead if there are no hosts? If not, is a virus alive in the absense of a host? Is a prion?

[Alamo-Girl]

Viruses do mutate and are themselves amenable to evolutionary descriptions.

I was not implying that viruses are not living. To the contrary, I would characterize them as alive by reason of their information.

Non-living matter can have biological effects.

But non-living matter is not alive.

So being presented with one cell which is dead and one which is alive, how would you describe the difference?

[Doctor Stochastic]

No, "entropy" was used because the formula for information was the negative of the formula derived by Boltzmann for thermodynamic entropy. Someone (I think Hamming told me that it was von Neumann) suggested jokingly that Shannon should call information "entropy" because no one would understand what he meant.