Posted on 08/26/2004 7:41:29 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories
Proceedings of the Bioligical Society of Washington August 25, 2004
Link to PDF only. No text.
(Excerpt) Read more at discovery.org ...
I am well-qualified to evaluate that paper, and the math is easily within my grasp.
I'd never seen that paper before, but it just reinforces my opinion. As with everywhere else, he tries to equate the vague notion of "meaning" with mathematical information, ignores relevant theorems, and makes some unsupportable assertions. Most of his schtick involves trying to redefine the strict mathematical definition of "information" to the looser pedestrian definition so that he can try and shoehorn it into supporting his conclusions. I doubt he's ever written a paper that is actually strict and rigorous relating to information theory, particularly since he is still attempting to discover something novel in the basics of the field. It is kind of like the cranks that think they have a special insight into rudimentary physics that has never occurred to anyone else that will allow them to design a perpetual motion machine
BTW, the paper is actually an essay dressed up like a math paper, in case you couldn't tell. Apparently you don't understand the paper...?
One more thing to add to the list.
I firmly believe that God is behind this whole mess and that science is simply figuring out how he did it.
Easy to do since I never actually said it before.
Rest assured that I am firmly on the side of rational thought, even though I rarely ever excercise any myself.
I'll finish it later, but I had to stop for now when I read that Meyer tried to ignore away the gene duplication scenario. We routinely spank creos on these threads for feigning ignorance of same. Meyer tried it will the biology community rather than deal with the real objections to his non-theory.
... tried it with ..., or "avec," as Jean LeKerry would say.
peer-reviewed placemarker
lurking placemarker
OK, I finished the thing. My God, that was a spanking!
Off topic, but about 15 years ago on my second Med, we pulled into a French port for liberty. The USO handed out handy phrase booklets including, and I'm not making this up (but you'll have to pardon the rusty French):
"Je suis seulement. Vous êtes belle. Venez avec moi."
From the article (emphasis mine!):
IOW, let us consider the reduction of uncertainty (information) necessary for geometric form in addition to the rise of information in causation for biological life (normally viewed in two dimensions, i.e. DNA).
It doesn't matter whether it is one dimension or twenty-seven dimensions, information is information. The "geometric form" in countable dimensions is not separate from the information, and in fact all multidimensional information theoretic structures have an equivalent one dimensional form. Transforming information theoretic structures to various numbers of dimensions is both trivial and relatively basic theory. As a conceptual example, this is in evidence in computers, which have a single linear address space (one dimension) but in which we can represent geometries with an arbitrary number of dimensions to an arbitrary precision. Anything that can be represented on a computer can be transformed to a one-dimensional description ipso facto.
Most people have a hard time visualizing it when you put it literally, but it is done routinely in computer science and is a basic theorem in the mathematics. There is nothing special, in an information theoretic sense, about forms in 3-space or 4-space or n-space and you can move information between dimensional forms at will. This is related to the reason that there is nothing special about massive parallelism; there is an equivalent serial form for all parallel computations.
Junior writes:
[...Science always proposes naturalistic explanations....That is what science does. Sounds one sided, but what is the purpose of proposing explanations that can't be tested?]
Trying to follow the arguments of evolutionists always reminds me of what Wm. F. Buckley wrote of Eleanor Roosevelt: that her unvarying tactic was to squirt, squid-like, an obfuscating cloud of verbal ink on every issue she touched.
You keep telling us that "evolution is a fact"; only the "mechanism" is still in question. That is utter sophistry & you know it; evolution IS the mechanism.
Testable Fact: The universe (a time/space/matter continuum) IS.
Question at issue: How (BY WHAT MECHANISM) did it come to be?
Mechanistic Hypothesis #1: "In the beginning (time) God created the heavens (space) and the earth (matter)" & "in Him all things consist (hold together)".
Mechanistic Hypothesis #2: The universe came to be & holds together via undesigned, unsuperintended, chance.
If #1 is unscientific because it is untestable, so is #2. Quick1 asks "How do you scientifically prove that God did something?" I ask him--or anyone--how you scientifically prove that God did NOT do something?
I hope you've proven it to your own satisfaction, at least, because it's the "truth" you've built your entire edifice on.
The creationist hears the impeccably-credentialed archaeologist Nelson Glueck say, "It can be categorically stated" [that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a properly-understood Bible reference] & rests in the knowledge that the same can be said of astronomy/biology/physics/chemistry/geology.
You hear your own Dr. Colin Patterson, science author & curator of the world's largest & oldest fossil collection, ask your own Field Museum/AMNH/etc. scientists if they can tell him ONE fact about evolution they KNOW to be true, & they sit silent.
Junior squirts inkily on:
[If science cannot test for it, it has to dismiss it.]
THEN DISMISS IT, FOR GOD'S SAKE; you've been testing it every conceivable way for a century & every empirical test that's moved knowledge in any direction has gone due south on you. Get your obstructionist pseudo-science out of the way of human progress & stop torturing poor little fruitflies.
The Scientific Revolution trod the heels of the Protestant Reformation because the people could finally read the Bible for themselves & know this to be a rational, ordered, predictable earth they had been given dominion over & could freely explore, test, & exploit without fear that the Church would excommunicate them or the sun god be offended & refuse to shine.
Common sense, unfortunately, is not testable, which must explain why evolutionists are so devoid of it.
Correction in addressing the previous post.
I didn't mean to pick on VadeRetro & ignore everyone else--Junior, my old buddy Patrickhenry, (where's Dirtboy?),....
Hi RightWhale! As to these allegations, let Meyer reply:
“Historical scientists, in particular, assess or test competing hypotheses by evaluating which hypothesis would, if true, provide the best explanation for some set of relevant data…. Those with greater explanatory power are typically judged to be better, more probably true, theories. Darwin … used this method of reasoning in defending his theory of universal common descent.”
[Do you suppose Charles Darwin was a closet metaphysician?]
Meyer details this point in a footnote:
“Theories in the historical sciences typically make claims about what happened in the past, or what happened in the past to cause particular events to occur…. For this reason, historical scientific theories are rarely tested by making predictions about what will occur under controlled laboratory conditions…. Instead, such theories are usually tested by comparing their explanatory power against that of their competitors with respect to already known facts. Even in the case in which historical theories make claims about past causes they usually do so on the basis of pre-existing knowledge of cause and effect relationships. Nevertheless, prediction may play a limited role in testing historical scientific theories since such theories may have implications as to what kind of evidence is likely to emerge in the future. For example, neo-Darwinism affirms that new functional sections of the genome arise by trial and error process of mutation and subsequent selection. For this reason, historically many neo-Darwinists expected or predicted that the large non-coding regions of the genome – so-called “junk DNA” – would lack function altogether…. On this line of thinking, the non-functional sections of the genome represent nature’s failed experiments that remain in the genome as a kind of artifact of past activity of the mutation and selection process. Advocates of the design hypothesis, on the other hand, would have predicted that non-coding regions of the genome might well reveal hidden functions, not only because design theorists do not think that new genetic information arises by trial and error process of mutation and selection, but also because designed systems are often functionally polyvalent. Even so, as new studies reveal more about the functions performed by the non-coding regions of the genome (Gibbs 203), the design hypothesis can no longer be said to make this claim in the form of a specifically future-oriented prediction. Instead, the design hypothesis might be said to gain confirmation or support from its ability to explain this now known evidence, albeit after the fact. Of course, neo-Darwinists might also amend their original prediction using various auxiliary hypotheses to explain away the presence of newly discovered functions in the non-coding regions of DNA. In both cases, considerations of ex post facto explanatory power re-emerge as central to assessing and testing competing historical theories.”
In short, “for historical scientists, ‘the present is the key to the past’”, and “present experience-based knowledge of cause and effect relationships guides the plausibility of proposed causes of past events.” This “experience-based knowledge” is not the simple product of laboratory experiments, for it reaches to issues of “plausibility” and “power of explanation,” which involve irremovable subjective judgments.
Yet here’s where the neo-Darwinist account of the origin of biological information may “objectively” be hoist on its own petard, on the basis of new discoveries in microbiology and information theory:
“…natural selection lacked any ability to generate novel information precisely because it can only act after new functional CSI (i.e., complex specified information) has arisen. Natural selection can favor new proteins, and genes, but only after they perform some function. The job of generating new functional genes, proteins, and systems of proteins therefore falls entirely to random mutations. Yet without functional criteria to guide a search through the space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed. What is needed is not just a source of variation (i.e., the freedom to search a space of possibilities) or a mode of selection that can operate after the fact of a successful search, but instead a means of selection that (a) operates during a search – before success – and that (b) is guided by information about, or knowledge of, a functional target….
“The causal powers that natural selection lacks – almost by definition – are associated with the attributes of consciousness and rationality – with purposive intelligence…. Thus, by invoking design to explain the origin of new biological information, contemporary design theorists are not positing an arbitrary explanatory element unmotivated by a consideration of the evidence. Instead, they are positing an entity possessing precisely the attributes and causal powers that the phenomenon in question requires as a condition of its production and explanation.” Design theorists, in short, are concerned with the problem of the origin of biological information, and regard natural selection as patently insufficient in this regard. This insufficiency of natural selection “corresponds precisely to powers that agents are uniquely known to possess. Intelligent agents have foresight. Such agents can select functional goals before they exist. They can devise or select material means to accomplish those ends from among an array of possibilities and then actualize those goals in accord with a preconceived design plan or set of functional requirements. Rational agents can constrain combinatorial space with distant outcomes in mind.”
I’ve just culled some main points of Meyer’s article here. He provides ample supporting details in the text. His analysis of neo-Darwinism – and also of Kaufmann’s (et al.) self-organizational model, punctuated equilibrium, structuralism, and cladism – appears well supported by observational data and probability theory.
Whether you agree with him or not, Meyer’s article is a great survey of the current state of development in the main trends or approaches being taken to explore the subject of his title: “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories.” IMO FWIW.
there is an equivalent serial form for all parallel computations.
There are two ways to understand how the spheres come to be. Consider a digital message consisting of independent voltage pulses. The independent voltage values specify a point in a high dimensional space since independence is represented by coordinate axes set at right angles to each other. Thus three voltage pulses correspond to a point in a 3 dimensional space and 100 pulses correspond to a point in a 100 dimensional space. The first `non-Cartesian' way to understand the spheres is to note that thermal noise interferes with the initial message during transmission of the information such that the received point is dislocated from the initial point.
Since noisy distortion can be in any direction, the set of all possible dislocations is a sphere. The second `Cartesian' method is to note that the sum of many small dislocations to each pulse, caused by thermal noise, gives a Gaussian distribution at the receiver. The probability that a received pulse is disturbed a distance x from the initial voltage is of the form p(x) * e-x2. Disturbance of a second pulse will have the same form, p(y) * e-y2.
Since these are independent, the probability of both distortions is multiplied: p(x,y) = p(x) p(y). Combining equations, p(x,y) * e-(x2 + y2) = e-r2, where r is the radial distance. If p(x,y) is a constant, the locus of all points enscribed by r is a circle. With more pulses the same argument holds, giving spheres in high dimensional space. Shannon used this construction in his channel capacity theorem.
For a molecular machine containing n atoms there can be as many as 3n-6 independent components (degrees of freedom) so there can be 3n-6 dimensions. The velocity of these components corresponds to the voltage in a communication system and they are disturbed by thermal noise. Thus the state of a molecular machine can also be described by a sphere in a high dimensional velocity space.
However, in this article, the author also raises the causation of (functionally unified) biological geometric form in 4 dimensions (3 spatial, 1 time). That exceeds the investigation of channel considerations in higher dimensions (Shannon) and raises the issue of causation - which (instinctively) would suggest a reduction of uncertainty in communication (information) inter-dimensionally, at origin.
Where's the abstract or the journal reference? When I click the link, all I get is a PDF of the Adobe, Inc. campus.
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