The AP Model and Shannon Theory Show the Incompleteness of Darwin’s ToE

self | January 26, 2009 | Jean F. Drew

[betty boop]

Thanks, svcw, for your kind words of support!

[js1138]

The brain doesn’t function like a digital computer, and no one has completely modeled a linked cluster of neurons, so estimates of computing power are, at the moment, garbage.

Even the rather rigidly wired visual cortex hasn’t been modeled. The temporal lobes — the ones most distinctively large in humans, have not been analyzed in any meaningful way.

[js1138]

He did the probability calculations respecting the chance origin-of-life scenario, and decided that conjecture simply doesn’t hold water.

There is a difference between someone who calculates probabilities and says something can't be done, and someone who does experiments that demonstrates it can be done.

[Alamo-Girl]

Of course the protein has information content! It is part of the channel or noise – but it does not contain the message which is either DNA or RNA under the Shannon model.

Using radio transmission/reception as a metaphor – the airways have information content as things are being sent and received. But the content of the air is not the message. Likewise, the air does not constitute the communication - communication consists of message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, decoding and receiver. As with prions, things happening in the air (e.g. other pressure waves caused by storms) can foul the success of communications from sender to receiver.

The reason the Wimmer experiment to bootstrap the polio virus in the laboratory succeeded was precisely because he began with the message, e.g. text off the internet.

Conversely, the success of Urey/Miller (circa 1953) in simulating lightning strikes to bootstrap amino acids, whereas it caused quite a stir, went no further than amino acids. Following the air metaphor, they created turbulence not coherence.

They of course did not have the whole story. About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered information in life, i.e. DNA. But neither did they at the time understand the full import of information theory (Shannon, 1948) to molecular biology.

Only recently, circa 2002, in the Wimmer experiment was it made clear.

Wimmer began with the information sequence of RNA which he synthesized to DNA and then synthesized the message from DNA to RNA. When he added the message to a cell free juice, it began transmitting and duplicating.

The bottom line is that information (successful communication) is at the root of life v non-life/death in nature. But of course the evolutionary biologists (Darwin through Urey/Miller) were not aware of this.

Thank you for this delightful sidebar, dear allmendream!

[svcw]

Childhood? Not always. My uncle was an atheist. During the time he studied for his PhD in geology he became a “born again Christian”. Why because he said the geological structures of the earth proved a Creator and if that was the case....well he started studying and became born again.

Having said that, I am a Bible believing born again Christian, who does not get all weirded out about about 'evolution' or the concept of 'evolution'. I find it a fascinating study. Personally I don't care, it makes no difference to me, if God created everything in a single thought, 6 days or 6 trillion years. God can do what He wants in any fashion He wishes. I am certainly not going to tell Him what to do or how to do it.

So there you have it another prospective. I do find it amazing though how the people who swear by evolution get so agitated by differing opinions or thoughts. Oh, well. Maybe Bible believing Christians are just farther along on the evolutionary scale, with ability to accept more diversity and all.

[Alamo-Girl]

I don't dispute your assertions, js1138. The figure was pulled from memory though also speculated by at least one actual article (I looked no further.)

The bottom line is that "the beast" supercomputer IBM just created is barely scratching the surface on biological equivalent computing power. The supercomputers however cause quite a bit of excitement for researchers in molecular biology because of their power to simulate things they haven't yet been able to simulate.

Do you want me to find a cite for that too?

[allmendream]

The message as a radio transmission only conveys “information” if there is a person there able to hear and understand it.

If DNA and RNA are the “message” transmitted by radio wave, the “message” only conveys “information” if it results in an active functional protein.

Proteins are also able to convey “messages” as in the example of Signal Transduction.

Your writing about Prion is an absolute embarrassment, and it was the very first thing I read.

If you are actually interested in conveying a “message” to those able to understand it, it would behoove you to become more knowledgeable about the subject and clean up your language as the things you say make no sense to someone who understands the subject.

[js1138]

I think if you are going to write on the subject of abiogenesis you are going to have to master organic chemistry and study current research. You can’t simply do probability calculations when you don’t know what events form the basis of the calculation.

No one thinks RNA or DNA formed in one step. Calculations that assume this are simply wasted time. This is really in the hands of chemists now.

http://www.exploringorigins.org/nucleicacids.html

[CottShop]

[[If DNA cannot be used to determine kinship, there are a lot of court decisions that need to be reversed.]]

you’ve made this statement several times in several threads- DNA comparison for court cases has absolutely no relevence to Genetic change that supposedly happeend in species- Common design accounts for similarities, however it does not need to ifner relatedness. Genetic comparisons in cases of relations shows FAR more similarities than does say even a man and ape comparison.

[js1138]

My assertion — not contradicted by any of your sources — is that brains cannot be compared to digital computers. It may be possible to build a computer that models brain activity, but it hasn’t been done yet.

My best sources tell me that the theory is in place, but the hardware is not, and it isn’t a matter of speed.

Neurons operate at something like 10 to 100 Hz. That’s firings per second. Whatever they are doing, it isn’t matched by the switching of a transistor.

[js1138]

Genetic comparisons in cases of relations shows FAR more similarities than does say even a man and ape comparison.

It's not the quantity of similarities and differences, but the nesting that argues for kinship. The best evidence is not the nesting of common coding genes, but the nesting of retrovirus scars in the genome.

[js1138]

The nestability of non-coding DNA has other implications.

The whole premise of intelligent design and common design rests on the analogy with human designers. After all, humans are the only designers we can actually observe.

But we have many examples of genomes designed or modified by humans — plant crops, insulin producing bacteria and so forth — and all of them have an instantly identifiable characteristic: they don’t nest. They can’t be the product of common descent.

So if we are using the designer analogy, we can sort living things into two categories: those things that fit the nested hierarchy required by the common descent hypothesis, and those things that don’t. The things that don’t fit are known to have been designed by humans.

[CottShop]

[[To put it another way, it deals with information (successful communication) in nature as the necessary element for increased complexity - and more startling than that, that the message being communicated anticipates that which has not yet occurred.]]

I need to expand htis to be a bit more precise and clear- if you don’t mind- the last part “and more startling than that, that the message being communicated anticipates that which has not yet occurred.”

Should read “and more startling than that, that the message being communicated anticipates that which has not yet occurred, and is species specific in nature- meaning that any changes that occure within hte species is species specific, and falls within species specific parameters.”

The importance of this distinction lies in the fact that change within a species is controlled by species specific parameters, which is why all lab tests and experiments to move a psecies beyond hteir own kind have failed- the metainfo for such change is simply NOT present i nthe species to allow such drastic changes. This is not to mean that ifnromation from an outside source that isn’t specific to hte species can not be itnroduced- experiments in ‘lateral gene transference’ have been ‘succesful’ i nthe sense that they were able to introduce foriegn genetic material and incorporate into the species genetic info- however, this resulted in degredation of the geentic info, and hte species own metaifno was at work tryign to eliminate this foriegn info as would be expected.

This issue of metainfo is quite an important issue to concider- it shows how species can handle foriegn invaders, can anticipate such changes, and can either utilize mistakes to the genome, or reject them all within a species specific paramter. We know for a fact that species have paramters- boundaries that dictate how far the genome can be altered- and we also know for a fact that the upper limits are still well within a species own kind. Whiel htere can be quite dramitic microevolutionary change within kinds, these fall far short of the drastic changes needed via complete itnroduction of new non species specific informaiton into hte genome- which, accordign hte metainfo ‘guidelines’ woudl be prohibited

The other important point brought up is the fact that this fully functional metainfo simply can not arise from a stepwise process of ‘change’. Simply altering info already present can not account for hte directive powers of metainfo in regards to the whole system.

Small changes don’t just affect the cell they work on- they affect entire systems, and htere NEEDS to be a controlling, governing metainfo inplace to make sure that ALL the changes brought about by mistakes don’t muck the whole works up. As mentioned, small cjhanges don’t simply affect single cells, and htrowing the numbers of changes that HAD to result in the introduction of NON species specific information into hte genome that macroevolution supposedly resulted in woudl have been absolutely dissasterous to the species

[CottShop]

[[Why are you writing on the subject of abiogenesis if you aren’t familiar with the most important researchers?]]

Why are you tryign to derail the thread by ignoring hte FACT that this article exposes those ‘important researchers’ as clueless abotu how information could supposedly arise via natural processes? This whole article exposes the fact that it is impossible for metainfo to arise from non life- it can’t happen- IF you have soemthign worthwhile to contribute to the article’s precepts, do feel free to contribute- but tryign to discredit the article by pointign to abiogenisis researchers, and their ASSUMPTION driven claims that DEFY the actual observed science of information, and it’s observable limits and or abilites, isn’t a valid coutner argument.

[Alamo-Girl]

If you are actually interested in conveying a “message” to those able to understand it, it would behoove you to become more knowledgeable about the subject and clean up your language as the things you say make no sense to someone who understands the subject.

Conversely, it would behoove you to read Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication.

Or to sum it up:

Information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver (or molecular machine) as it goes from a before state to an after state.

It is the action of successful communication not any particular element of it.

For instance, it is not the message. It doesn't matter whether the message is DNA, RNA, Hamlet, this reply, etc.

Nor is it the language, though the sender (encoding) and receiver (decoding) should speak the same language (semiosis) for the communication to be successful. It does no good to send a letter in Spanish to someone who only understands Greek. In our little sidebar, I am speaking in one language and you are speaking in another. But I'd wager the Lurkers on the Religion Forum are more apt to successfully receive what I have been broadcasting.

"Broadcast" brings up another element of Shannon's model that the Religion Forum Lurkers would find interesting. A successful communication is autonomous between sender and receiver. "Noise" in the model can also be a broadcast message from an external sender, e.g. God speaking creatures into being.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. - Genesis 1:20

Nor is it the channel. The math is the same whether the communication is over the airways, land lines, electronics or a molecular machine.

Personally, I see the unreasonable effectiveness of math as God's copyright notice on the cosmos.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard.– Psalms 19:1-3

To God be the glory!

[js1138]

This whole article exposes the fact that it is impossible for metainfo to arise from non life- it can’t happen-

That's for experimenters to decide. If ID proponents and creationists want to make such claims they need to get some lab work done and publish some experimental data.

[CottShop]

[[The point was that the prion contains no message (DNA, RNA) and is not autonomous to the molecular machine. Under the Shannon model, it would a type of “noise.”

In sum, when the prion is introduced into the communication - it causes malfunctions either in the channel or decoding, e.g. blocking the successful communication of beneficial messages perhaps as you say by causing other proteins to misfold.]]

and here again we see the importance of metainfo- species specific metainfo controlling, directing, allowing or dissallowing change- all withint species specific parameters.

The changes that would have had to occure for macroevolution would have included introducing, not just simplistic /micro-changes accumulating harmlessly, that had no apparent effect on the species, but would out of necessity had to include drastic changes to bring about hte morphological and biological changes that would move a species beyond it’s own kind- even gradually this would have presented a HUGE problem for hte speices, and would have proven deadly, as htese changes woudl have broken the boundaries of allowable microevolutionary change, and would have affected many many systems and subsystems, and would not have had rthe proper metainfo to deal with al lthese changes- to control htem, intigrate them, coordinate, and utilize htem for hte preservation of the species. The info to do so would simply have been non existent- We know htis from experiments and breedign programs.

[Diamond]

betty boop:

"...science has not identified any naturalistic source for “information” within the universe, biological or otherwise."

js:

Programmed cell death is a rather modern invention in living things, a requirement of having specialized cells.

The teleological words in bold taken in their ordinary sense are inconsistent with naturalistic assumptions, but they are consistent with the fact that in every case where the origin of a code is known, it is without exception the product of intelligence. It doesn't really make any sense to speak of it otherwise, as there is no known example of a code originating from an unintelligent source. Not one. None. Zero.

All the naturalist has to do to show that a genetic code could arise naturalistically would be to provide an example of a code, defined as a communication channel with an input alphabet A and an output alphabet B, (outside of DNA or any of its derivatives, which would of course be begging the question) arising from a unintelligent source.

So why do naturalists continue to assume something which has none of the evidence to support it, and all of the available scientific and mathematical evidence against it; namely, that genetic code, which is a encoding / decoding mechanism isomorphic with Shannon's model, arose solely by the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?

[js1138]

IF you have soemthign worthwhile to contribute to the article’s precepts, do feel free to contribute- but tryign to discredit the article by pointign to abiogenisis researchers, and their ASSUMPTION driven claims that DEFY the actual observed science of information, and it’s observable limits and or abilites, isn’t a valid coutner argument.

Actually I posted links to laboratory work, not assumptions.

[Alamo-Girl]

This sidebar began with a concern about Artificial Intelligence and the state of the art in supercomputers. Your replies and mine both dissuade such concerns.