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Truly, I am amazed that you hold Hubert P. Yockey in such contempt. He is probably twice your age (if not more) - worked with Oppenheimer on the first atomic bomb, is a physicist who studied the effects of radiation on living systems and has studied and published for decades the application of information theory to molecular biology.

I'm sure he was alive at the same time Claude Shannon developed his ground breaking theory which began the field of information theory. The second edition of his book is available: Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life

Here are some of his other publications from the “Chowder Society” website of other scientists who work in the field of information theory and molecular biology:

Yockey, Hubert P. Information Theory and Molecular Biology, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press (1992)

When is random random? Nature 344 (1990) p823, Hubert P. Yockey

Yockey, Hubert P. (1981). Self-organization origin of life scenarios and information theory. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 91, 13-31.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1979). Do overlapping genes violate molecular biology and the theory of evolution? Journal of Theoretical Biology, 80, 21-26.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1978). Can the Central Dogma be derived from information theory? Journal of Theoretical Biology, 74, 149-152.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1977a). A prescription which predicts functionally equivalent residues at given sites in protein sequences. 67, 337-343.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1977b). On the information content of cytochrome c. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 67, 345-376.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1977c). A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 67, 377-398.

Yockey, Hubert P (1974). An application of information theory to the Central Dogma and the sequence hypothesis. Journal of Theoretical Biology,.46, 369-406.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1960) The Use of Information Theory in Aging and Radiation Damage In The Biology of Aging American Institute of Biological Sciences Symposium No. 6 (160) pp338-347.

Yockey, Hubert P., Platzman, Robert P. & Quastler, Henry, eds. (1958a). Symposium on Information Theory in Biology, New York, London: Pergamon Press.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1958b). A study of aging, thermal killing and radiation damage by information theory. In Symposium on Information Theory in Biology. eds. Hubert P. Yockey, Robert Platzman & Henry Quastler, pp297-316. New York,London: Pergamon Press.

Yockey, Hubert P. (1956). An application of information theory to the physics of tissue damage. Radiation.Research, 5, 146-155.

Information in bits and bytes; Reply to Lifson's Review of "Information Theory and Molecular" Biology BioEssays v17 p85-88 (1995)

Comments on "Let there be life; Thermodynamic Reflections on Biogenesis and Evolution by Avshalom C. Elitzur Journal of Theoretical Biology in press (1995).

I assert that Yockey - with his formidable credentials – is an authoritative source for our purposes in exploring complexity in biological systems (including information theory, biosemiosis and randomness).

From my vantage point, Yockey looks more like a dabbler in information theory than a genuine expert. There are not that many "genuine experts" in the field, and I am acquainted with most of them -- he is not one of their peers.

AFAIK, your expertise lies more specifically with strong artificial intelligence than the application of information theory of biological systems. But I could be wrong. If you are in Yockey's arena, then Tom Schneider would be one of your peers.

Truly, I am amazed that you hold Hubert P. Yockey in such contempt.

It is not contempt, it is indifference. Do you realize that he basically stopped publishing before the "reformation" of information theory into its modern form? I don't care what he's done in other fields, but his understanding of information theory is antiquated. Incidentally, while Chaitin is famous in relation to "algorithmic information theory" (and a smart guy), his area of specialty is really kind of a tangential thing -- he has kind of google-bombed the namespace. This has been a chronic problem with the Intelligent Design "information theory experts"; from everything I've read, I was in kindergarten the last time they updated their understanding of the mathematics. They NEVER cite any of the core theory papers that make up modern information theory, nor do they exhibit familiarity with the important new concepts that are in those papers. If you compare the reference appendix of a paper by a credible leading mathematician in the field (e.g. Schmidhuber) and compare it with the reference appendix of folks like Yockey, there is almost no intersection. Yockey is not an outright fraud (unlike Dembski), but he is way past his academic prime and it shows. We have newer and better models for dealing many of these things, and simply ignoring these advancements is not helpful. It would be kind of like a physicist refusing to acknowledge post-Newtonian physics. Any derivative work would only be "correct" in a qualified sense.

As for strong AI, modern mathematical theory is almost completely derivative and deeply intertwined with the broader field of algorithmic information theory (the unified grand-daddy of all the little subfields in that general area). Yes, I do a lot of work in that area, but it is basically the same theorems and math as we are talking about here, and I've done a hell of a lot of work in this area of mathematics. Intelligence is purely a mathematical problem, and the fact that it traditionally has not been treated that way goes a long way toward explaining what has taken so long to develop an implementation theory in computer science.

Information theory, computational theory, transaction theory, decision theory, a lot of probability theory, and bits and pieces of a lot of other fields are all the same mathematical thing. You treat these fields like the blind men in the old fable about the elephant. I routinely work on the unified theoretical constructs (which is nominally described as "algorithmic" or "computational" information theory) and make no distinction between them because it would be nonsensical for me to do so, and would make my work impossible in any case.

I'm waiting for any view of this that actually applies modern information theory i.e. a perspective that understands and fully integrates the computation and transaction theoretic aspects into the simple Shannon model. Time and again, I get the impression that no one really wants to deal with the inconvenient consequences of this, metaphorically prefering to stay in the comfy Newtonian physics rather than redefining their perspective as required by acknowledging Relativity and its applicability to real problems. If all these "theorists" make no effort to stay relevant, I see no reason to treat them as though they are relevant.