Posted on 11/17/2003 6:02:20 AM PST by Tribune7
The idea that he is a devotee of reason seeing through the outdated superstitions of other, lesser beings is the foremost conceit of the proud atheist. This heady notion was first made popular by French intellectuals such as Voltaire and Diderot, who ushered in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.
That they also paved the way for the murderous excesses of the French Revolution and many other massacres in the name of human progress is usually considered an unfortunate coincidence by their philosophical descendants.
The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.
In fairness, he cannot be faulted for this, except when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in this regard, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most unthinking Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Still, this is not irrational, it is only ignorance and a failure of perception.
The irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions – and it is here that the cowardice of his intellectual convictions is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.
In fact, such ethics, as well as the morality that underlies them, are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist. Nevertheless, he usually seeks to live by them when they are convenient, and there are even those, who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them.
Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
This guy did. Musgrave's TalkOrigin article is destroyed on the second page. :-)
Examples, please.
If we are going to review Yockey’s work I suggest we start with rebuttals from his peers and not the kind of postings that appear on Talk-Origins.
The posters at Talk-Origins are not speaking to issues of information theory at all. Information theory is the focus of Yockey’s analysis. The best analogy I could think of off-hand is one guy saying it is hot outside and another thinking he has rebutted that statement by answering “but the grass is green.”
In fact, the Talk Origins posters do not seem to understand Shannon entropy at all. It is not the same thing as entropy in a physical sense; it is entropy in communications, uncertainity. Certainity in communications is information! IOW, the posters are looking at the biological and chemical aspects while ignoring the main point - probability of information content.
That’s why – if you want to critique Yockey – we must discuss Shannon entropy, information content, communication, Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction and so forth.
Concerning the article linked by Right Wing Professor, if you check the cites you'll notice it also uses the 1977 article by Yockey and not his 1992 book, “Information Theory and Molecular Biology.” And, as with the Talk Origins posters - it doesn't address information theory at all.
The objections from your Talk-Origins message board are basically three:
Ignoring the dynamics of chemical reactions. The poster said (in 1992): “His final conclusion is that no, the random sloshing of amino acids together is a very unlikely explanation for the origin of cytochrome c, despite previous suggestions to that effect. This was way back in 1977, of course, so people were still trying to figure that one out. Today, this is standard knowledge, and nobody bothers with such models.
This poster completely ignores the information theoretics. The problem is not with the chemical reactions but the information content given a finite time frame (anything is possible in infinity – that is the ”plentitude argument”.)
From the information theory perspective, here is the state of the art:
First, the issue of ”what is life?”: The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
Second, the bootstrap mechanism for the information content: Syntactic Autonomy: Or Why There is no Autonomy Without Symbols and how Self-Organizing Systems Might Evolve Them
Given many random distributions of the reactivity of a RNA sequence space, we could study how easily can reactive sequences be constructed from RNA edition of non-reactive molecules. A study of this process is forthcoming.
This poster at least appears to understand Markov process. However, he should also know that regulatory control genes are not mutable and thus the Markov process does not apply up stream and cannot overcome the requirements for an information content bootstrap to initiate self-organizing complexity (according to my reading of Rocha).
I also suspect he does not understand that Shannon entropy deals with uncertainty of communications – not conventional entropy and thermodynamics! From the Origin-of-Life Prize link:
This is the old confusion of information and meaning that I discussed in the book and in my paper in January BioEssays.
In the first place, the Shannon-McMillan Theorem tells us that if the probability distribution is not all equal we may divide the total number of the sequences in the ensembles into two groups. The number of sequences on one group, called the high probability group, is 2^NH where N is the number of elements in the sequence and H is the Shannon entropy. The number of sequences in the other group, called the low probability group, is negligible and may be ignored. Thus the number of sequences in a chain of 100 amino acids, such as cytochrome c, that one needs to be concerned with, is not 20^100 but 2^100x3.3966 a number smaller by a factor of about 10^27. See Table 6.4 in my book.
This result is virtually unknown by molecular biologists. Be the first in your neighborhood to amaze your colleagues!
Close. It's retrospective astonishment. Looking back on the past, and how things might have been different, and declaring the present to be a miracle.
As in: Gee whiz, with all the options and choices available every day to all of my ancestors, the odds against my parents' meeting and producing me are incalculable; so it's obviously the hand of Providence that placed me here."
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think in a summary of your summary would be the following:
- Yockey rejects modern abiogenesis theory because of questionable theories on information and ethnography.Again, I apologize, but I’ll be unavailable to reply for awhile
- You follow that. (And follow what PatrickHenry calls retrospective astonishment .)
- You choose to acknowledge abiogenesis theory only in its initial form (a form that’s disproved in a paragraph or two) promoting it as the theory recognized by those with atheistic ideologies.
- When someone like me recognizes that you are misrepresenting unsupported older theories as current theories, you (without acknowledging the misrepresentation) attempt to steer them into refuting much more complex and controversial criticisms of current abiogenesis theory by Yockey.
See #707.
How could I exist? The odds against it are so amazingly huge!!!I've been struggling for a term to apply to this fallacy. The fallacy involves looking back to some earlier and arbitrarily chosen initial state, then speculating on all the nearly infinite events that might have happened (but which didn't happen), and concluding that the present state has such a low degree of probability that it must have been impossible to achieve by natural means. This "reasoning" makes literally everything impossible (and thus miraculous), and it is therefore an absurdity.
The explanation is that if each event in the chain was a natural event, then the whole chain of events was also natural. It only seems improbable in retrospect.
Improbability works in the other direction too -- it is unlikely that in the beginning, with all the intervening variables, the final state could have been accurately predicted. (This does make sense, which is why accurate predictions, if unambiguous, are so highly regarded.)
I'm onto something here, but I wish I knew what to call it. longshadow, who is lurking here, has suggested The Fallacy of Probabilistic Illiteracy, which is accurate but too cumbersome. I'm still working on it. Perhaps "The fallacy of retrospective astonishment."
Yockey argues that there is no "balancing act" between algorithmic informational entropy and Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs-type entropy. The two are not on the same see-saw. The two probability spaces are not isomorphic. Information theory lacks the integral of motion present in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. In addition, there is no code linking the two "alphabets" of stochastic ensembles.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to post this material for the forum! Happy Thanksgiving!
I can't expect anyone to bother to remember my own coinages. It's amazing that you remembered that I had once come up with such a thing. And now that you bring it up in the context of the Anthropic Principle, I must confess that I had not until now sat down and considered them together. Now I'm going to be mulling it over whether the whole Anthropic Principle isn't just an overblown example of retrospective astonishment.
I can't read all the nonsense in the world, BB, just to confirm for myself it's nonsense. I read excerpts from both; they were sufficient to convince me to go no further.
So, he doesn't make the stupidest error most creationists make. Instead, he calculates probabilities for processes that no one yet understands. Did you read that part of the article?
Yockey argues that there is no "balancing act" between algorithmic informational entropy and Maxwell-Boltzmann-Gibbs-type entropy. The two are not on the same see-saw. The two probability spaces are not isomorphic. Information theory lacks the integral of motion present in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. In addition, there is no code linking the two "alphabets" of stochastic ensembles.
The 'informational entropy' as he defines it is just a subset of the thermodynamic entropy. Now, surely it is clear that there is no thermodynamic bar to a decrease in the total entropy, then there is no bar to a decrease in part of the entropy.
The link you provided is not speaking of Yockey – it is complaining about the exact kind of thing that Yockey eschews, namely trying to present Maxwell-Boltmann-Gibbs (thermodynamic) entropy under the cloak of information theory, Shannon entropy. They are not the same thing at all!
The informational entropy as Yockey defines it, is just part of the total entropy. There is nothing in the Shannon entropy that he calculates that is not present in the total entropy of the molecule.
As I've noted previously, you can calculate the 'informational entropy' in the same way for a salt crystal, whose ions can be denoted by 0 and 1. The then whole crystal would be 0101010101... with a total sequence length of twice the mass times Avogadro's number and divided by the molecular weight. The negative entropy of this arrangement is far greater than the negative entropy involved in assembling a cytochrome C of exact sequence from random amino acids. Yet salt crystallizes!
Short lesson; unimaginably small probabilities are mundane things in statistical mechanics. They impress only the uninformed.
As a final comment, attribution of motive and personal affronts are red flags in any science debate on Free Republic. Such assertions indicate that any further dialogue between us is futile.
Whatever. In the past I've very politely hinted this stuff is poppycock. Since it keeps getting reposted, and is now being used to attack evolution, I've decided to call it as it is. Deal with it as you wish.
You hit a home run.
Damn.
That's mine now. :-)
What a shame that Christianity is blamed for so much that is "un-Christ-like" - and not part of the Faith.
Agreed...but who is doing the blaming and what is their agenda?
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