Posted on 07/24/2003 12:01:57 PM PDT by bedolido
July 24 In a new study, researchers speculate that a towering undersea hot-water chimney laden with microbes is just the sort of place that might have spawned life on Earth or even other planets.
THE HYDROTHERMAL VENT SYSTEM discovered two years ago has now been found to have endured for 30,000 years. Researchers said similar setups on Earth and possibly on other worlds might last millions of years and could have been incubators for the first life. The Lost City, as it has been named, is a craggy column of minerals and microbes sitting 2,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. It is 180 feet (55 meters) tall, higher than any other known underwater vent system and more than twice as tall as most.
UNIQUE SYSTEM Underneath the structure, seawater seeps down into the fractured crust of Earth. There, the decay of one mineral forms another, called serpentine, and releases heat in the process. This process of serpentinization lifts warm water laden with minerals back into the ocean, building the structure.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
Information can't be conserved in the real universe and the information of the system increases with time. Information creation is a fundamental characteristic of the system.
In fact, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics mandates a trend towards increased information over time (via entropy aka information efficiency). If entropy increases in a system, the amount of information in the system also has to increase, since that is what entropy is more or less directly measuring.
If you look at the universe as a transaction theoretic system (i.e. with the "copy" law I mentioned earlier), the lower the entropy is the more likely that a particular instance of a pattern will be destroyed/altered by the dynamics of the system. An analogy would be like a register in a CPU, except that every location memory is potentially a register. When an operation is performed between two patterns the state of some register is modified except in this case it is some location in memory which previously contained another pattern. (This is a computational model variation theoretically similar to but not the same as things like LISP machines.) Over many iterations, the distribution of patterns becomes random i.e. approaches perfect entropy.
Yes, this is the primary theoretical difference between Kolmogorov and Shannon. Shannon only deals with "zero-order" information, whereas Kolmogorov information deals with "n-order" information.
Using a fixed fifth-order structure for his theory is only slightly less wrong than using a fixed zero-order structure (i.e. Shannon). From what you are saying, he is trying to reinvent Kolmogorov, badly. It is puzzling that someone who nominally knows so much about information theory is apparently unaware of Kolmogorov's redefinition of the field, since it is really the essence of the matter.
What is even more puzzling is how it is that someone who nominally knows so much about information theory manages to have NO papers published in the relevant technical journals to that field, but instead publishes a book on the topic.
Or perhaps I should say it is temporarily puzzling, that is until one becomes aware that technical journal articles must undergo a nominally rigorous peer-review process before the are accepted for publication, while book manuscripts do not.
How do you escape the obvious conclusion of acommon ancestor where the mistake arose?
The odds are very much against the same mutation occurring multiple times. There is no theological reason to suppose that the mutation in people is a result of the Fall, but for His own mysterious reasons, God decided to put **the exact same mistake** into the apes. In fact, that sounds blasphemous to me.
Why isn't the logic used in copyright cases (common mistakes imply copying) applicable here?
Click on arrow to the left of Chimps and humans - are they similar?
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