How do evolutionary processes create information?

Dembski is of course correct, in that we have no clue how Dembski's god magicks reality into being, and no clue how to GET a clue. You either accept or reject that he's on the right track; you can't check it out. Those who reject Dembski's view of how his god does it can't in principle be answered through scientific means, nor is there any serious effort to do so. They must be answered through political and administrative means, as has traditionally been the practice in theocratic systems.

The DI's claim that magic is science probably isn't taken at face value even by Johnson or Luskin. Explicitly, the goal is to position magic as science with the minimum level of verisimilitude to provide creationist school boards, judges, and ideally legislators and Presidents with a nominally plausible rationale for using civil authority to impose and enforce religious doctrine.

And thus the wedge: If only we can get government's stamp of scientific approval on creationism, we can use the pervasive authority of the State to indoctrinate children young enough so that verisimilitude is no longer necessary. The critical mass of creationism-supporting voters is already there across much of the US, we have a born-again President who's been stuffing the Supreme Court with religious lackwits; the wedge is working.

The effort to protect the word "information" from the DI's carefully orchestrated semantic void is certainly worthy. As Orwell taught us so well, we can't think straight when the words we think with have been hijacked. Yet I don't think the average Kansas-style voter really much cares what "information" means in any rigorous or technical sense. It's just WORDS they can use to justify convictions that the educational system, in order to minimize hassles and complaints, sidestepped around correcting.

I'm not qualified to evaluate the technical meanings of "information" or "scale free networks" or "the lower q fraction of the codomain" (huh?), nor am I inclined to make what I recognize would be the significant effort of reaching that point. I either accept that evolution is creative as I understand creativity, or that it is not. If I start with the unquestionable conviction that goddidit, then evolution didn't do it. Now, do I want my child to have a solid technical understanding of science, or do I want my child to get into heaven? The DI's overriding goal is to convince me that these choices are mutually exclusive, at least until we can get Jesus back into science classes where he belongs (and get anti-Jesus science OUT).

I note that Tom English (or I assume it to be him) is a member of the Evolutionary Informatics lab:

http://www.evolutionaryinformatics.org/

I was wondering if he'd turned IDist or whether or not the lab is more than simply a bit of ID propaganda.

These people wouldn't know the technical definition of information from a hieroglyph. If they knew the first thing about Shannon's Information Theory they'd know that it is precisely random processes that are the sources of information - the more random the process, the more information it generates.

So, in short, the information comes from mutations and the close match of genome to environment, IDers so called "specification," comes from natural selection.

There, I explained it in one sentence with two paragraphs of background - the second paragraph being the unwritten one about natural selection.

The adaptive immune system is a straightforward example of biology creating information. Vertebrates can make antibodies to a vast array of substances, including novel chemical compounds. Not only does the immune system create immense variation, but it does so an a time scale of weeks. This is a time scale that even creationists can comprehend.

Thomas M. English, Ph.D. Bounded Theoretics Lubbock, Texas 79410 USA Thom.English(at)gmail(dot).com

Surely there's more than one Tom English.

Not one which has authored the same papers...

My vita is available, as it has been, at my web site. I am not going to counter with a biosketch — I hate the things. But I will hint at why my work is more relevant to ID than is that of a creationist interested in biodiversity. In 1996, six years prior to the release of Bill Dembski’s No Free Lunch, I argued that “no free lunch” in search is a consequence of conservation of (Shannon) information. This should have a familiar ring for many of you here. I also established that, contrary to intuition, optimization is easy under the assumptions of the “no free lunch” theorems. It took some time for IDists to catch on to that — there are still some who have not. (By the way, this was the first theoretical paper I ever wrote, and it is far from my best work on “no free lunch.”) I gave well-publicized tutorials at major conferences when Bill was completing NFL: • “Introduction to ‘No Free Lunch’ in Optimization and Learning,” 2001 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC2001), Seoul, 2001 • “No Free Lunch: A Gentle Introduction to Conservation in Optimization andLearning,” Sixth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN VI), Paris, 2000 In 2000, I showed that almost all fitness functions are algorithmically random. This is definitely something that IDists need to comprehend, but that most have not. Bill seems to deal with it now by stipulating fitness functions “of interest” in his work. Presumably a function is of interest only if it is compressible. I hope IDists will understand that what drew me into the debate over ID was an overlap in Bill Dembski’s interests and my own. I am more comfortable with the topics of search, information, and complexity than are most IDists. In fact, I have spent considerable time studying Bill Dembski’s arguments, and I would be highly surprised if Thomas D. English can relate them more accurately than I can.

— Tom M English

I chatted with a Tom English last year regarding Dembski's website. I don't know what his middle initial is, though. I just emailed him about the situation.

The problem, as I see it, as that the term "information" is applied as an analogy (like "genetic blueprint," "genetic code," etc.), yet DNA is NOT information. Yes, we can glean "information," as humans define it, from the "code," but it is not information in and of itself. It is a set of chemical reactions that have been honed by natural selection into recurrent processes, just as the principles of physics shape crystalization of water elements into snowflakes. What sets life apart from other physical phenomena is self-reproduction, and we are getting close to understanding possible mechanisms by which that may have happened. Once it is started, there is no need for an informant of the "information" process, because it is not technically "information."

I intended for all in the know to know I was posting under an alias at PT. I once told Bob Marks I didn't care to make public statements on the EvoInfo (virtual) lab, and I'm using the alias to stick to what I said, if only legalistically. Please do not make my identity widely known. The reason I'm posting is that I'm getting pissed, watching the [ID movement] use the affair at Baylor to get ID cast in a sympathetic light in the media. I joined the lab to protest Baylor's infringement of Bob Marks' academic freedom. In my opinion, it's impossible to discriminate against ID, because it's a sociopolitical instrument that has no intellectual legitimacy. If you look at the discussion page of the Wikipedia article on "no free lunch theorems," which I maintain, you'll see that I decided in June, prior to the controversy, that there was no ID at the EvoInfo lab's site. My concern at the time was only to avoid bias in the article. It happens that Marks' definition of evolutionary informatics covers most of my research of the past twelve years, no matter its motivation. It also happens that I was expelled from a Baptist institution 30 years ago for opposing discrimination against women, and I have strongly supported freedom of expression ever since -- especially for those I don't agree with. It seemed to me I was, like it or not, the perfect person to step forward and support Marks. I resisted for a while, worrying about what sort of games I might be sucked into. Now I'm in the difficult position of not only backing a guy everyone I know in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society regards well, but aiding and abetting the ID movement. I believe that individuals are higher than causes, and academic freedom is a higher cause than opposition to ID, so I'm really just whining about being in a tight spot. I don't know the pub date for the book. [...] I think I parsed Dembksi's latest definition of specified complexity more closely than anyone else has. I rewrote his expressions with more explicit notation to expose the details of what he was saying. I also identified some severe computability problems it seems no one else has. I'm not saying I did more than Wes Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallitt did with an earlier version. But I think I've been lucky enough to address the final morph of specified complexity. It appears Dembski has given up on the concept.

— Tom

WD: It’s too early to tell what the impact of my ideas is on science. To be sure, there has been much talk about my work and many scientists are intrigued (though more are upset and want to destroy it), but so far only a few scientists see how to take these ideas and run with them. There’s a reason for this slow start. My work in The Design Inference was essentially a work on the philosophical foundations of probability theory, trying to understand how to interpret probabilities in certain contexts. This led naturally to some ideas about information and the type of information used in drawing design inferences. My book No Free Lunch was a semi-popular overview of where I saw the ID movement headed on the topic of information. The hard work of developing these ideas into a rigorous information-theoretic formalism for doing science really began only in 2005 with some unpublished papers on the mathematical foundations of intelligent design that appeared on my website (www.designinference.com). With the formation of Baylor’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab just this month and work by me and my colleague Robert Marks on the conservation of information (several papers of which are available at www.evolutionaryinformatics.org), I think ID is finally in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information. This, I believe, will have a large impact on science.

Btw, should Dembski's statement be seen as an admission that his work so far has been far from stellar in making the ID argument?

That would be quite some news...

before engaging a creationist in a discussion on information, you need to very clearly ask "by information, do you mean an intended message by an intelligent being"? then beat with a stick until they indicate they are prepared to argue about something sensible

PvM,

Evolutionary processes search for biosystems just as tornadic processes search for trailer parks. In other words, I think it's a huge mistake to regard evolution as a search process. Search implies a target, and what Marks and Dembski may well show is that it is infeasible for "evolutionary search" to hit certain "biological targets." That would be fine with me. They would count it as evidence for a supernatural source of information, but others would come to the fore with search-free models of evolution.

As I see it, complex specified information is dead, and active information is its replacement. But I hasten to add that while CSI had serious shortcomings, active information is reasonable and interesting.

I don't see evolutionary processes as creating information, but as latching it in. I'm going with haploid organisms here. In the stage of evolution known as reproduction-with-variation, the variation is not reasonably attributed to evolutionary processes. The organism "tries" to make a perfect copy of itself, and random errors are caused by, for instance, thermodynamic effects. Errors can either increase or decrease the Kolmogorov complexity (algorithmic information) of the genome. Any change in the information of the genome indicates that there was information in the random errors. I think it's very important to place the source of information (randomness) outside the evolutionary processes, partially to avoid "creation," and partially to reflect the fact that evolutionary processes get information "for free." Incidentally, Paul Davies, commenting on the informational physics of evolution, suggested that evolution is analogous to a Brownian ratchet. I like that idea, though I'm not sure how close the analogy is.

ID relies here on an equivocation of the term ‘information’ since ID’s definition of information is merely a measure of our inability to explain it.

So now the question is not “how does science explain information in the genome” but “how well do science’s explanations perform”? For that we have to take existing genetic data and determine actual pathways.

snaxalotl wrote:

"before engaging a creationist in a discussion on information, you need to very clearly ask “by information, do you mean an intended message by an intelligent being”? then beat with a stick until they indicate they are prepared to argue about something sensible."

I agree. I once gave a lecture and said something about the information in the genome. Someone raised their hand and asked' "does that imply intelligence", meaning of course does that imply an intelligent cause for the information. I replied that there is informatioin in the periodicity of a pulsar but that does not mean that the pulsar is intelligent or that an intelligence was required in order to create it. However, intelligence is required to interpret the information. I don't know if that is the best answer I could have given, but as you point out, that was certainly the assumption implicit in the question.

Tom,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I commend you on your courage in defending academic freedom. If you are still reading posts here, perhaps you could give us the benefit of your expertise. What do you think is the best definition of information and what do you think is the best way to measure it?

By the way, I completely agree that evolution is not a "search" in the ordinary sense and that it definately does not involve a "target" in the ordinary sense. Creationists and ID proponents always seem to inject anthropomorphisms into their arguments, I wonder why that is?

I decided in June, prior to the controversy, that there was no ID at the EvoInfo lab’s site.

I think it’s very important to place the source of information (randomness) outside the evolutionary processes,

Paul Davies, commenting on the informational physics of evolution, suggested that evolution is analogous to a Brownian ratchet.

The probability that all n values are in the lower q fraction of the codomain is p = qn

infeasible

see, Tom, herein lies the problem.

Neither marks, nor Dembski, nor yourself, nor I know how to define the real world probabilities of hitting a specific "target" wrt to a specific trait.

even knowing ALL the competing selective pressures, even in simple systems like John Endler's Poecilliids (guppies) in Trinidad, it is still not easy to predict exact probabilities with any confidence. general directions to expect, yes, but exact probabilities? no.

hence the entire argument from "improbability" is completely flawed to begin with.

it really is that simple.

mental masturbation and playing with models is one thing, but what we see in the real world has to fit the models, too.

If the IDists are going to talk about a technical
subject WHY DON'T THEY MAKE TECHNICAL DISTINCTIONS?

Information information information, I'm sick to death of information. Is it really that hard to say SEMANTIC INFORMATION versus SHANNON INFORMATION versus....?

Tom English, I'm glad to hear from you and have some things cleared up. I am surprised to read, though, that imperfect replication of DNA is not part of evolution, or an 'evolutionary process' as you put it. I think what you are saying, sans surprising use of terms, is that variation is the source of information rather than selection plus drift. Some would say it is the combination of these, but it is all part of evolution.

Torbjorn the unprintable, you must be thinking of some other Brownian ratchet. The biological ones are not 'unphysical'.
Search molecular motor brownian.

I'm currently reading The Touchstone of Life by Werner R. Loewenstein. From this, I get the impression that evolution doesn't so much "create" information as reflect self-organization within flows of information. One of his starting points is that information is originally carried in photons and they of course are abundant. If his is the better concept, then the question isn't so much how information is created but rather how it is captured and how and why the molecular forms which carry it develop and interact the way they do (a question which evolutionary biology addresses and ID doesn't). I guess I wonder if anybody is familiar with Loewenstein enough to say a) if I'm understanding him correctly and b) if his treatment of information and biological evolution is mainstream and productive of useful lines of research.

Robert Marks' good past research: some people are perfectly reasonable as long as the subject is not creationism....

Dembski and Marks at Baylor: it may just be that Baylor and Dembski have a history and Baylor does not want him back, period. He and Marks can do all the research they wish with Dembski affiliated with his Seminary, provided they can figure out anything to do that suits the creationist agenda. All that has happened is that Dembski's attempt to claim to be from Baylor again, and to have a grant from a regular foundation, did not work. He is a seminarian, and the grant was actually part of his support from Disco. It's not like Dembski now has no affiliation; he just doesn't have one to match his ego. Sometimes in life, one just can't have one's heart's desire.

Perhaps what I am going to say here has some relevance to both the question of the connection between ID and Marks's virtual lab, and to Tom English's remark about Dembski's model of evolution as a search algorithm.

In the past I posted at least two entries right here on PT and also on Talk Reason where I argued against Dembski's model - a search for a small target in a large search space. (See for example here). As usual, Dembski ignored my comments, which is OK - my intention was far from a desire to convince Dembski.

Now about Tom English's comment (I never knew there are two Tom Englishs: the one I have some knowledge about is imho a highly qualified expert on NFL). Now Tom asserts that Marks is a great scientist and has nothing to do with ID. While Marks indeed may be an excellent scientist, I take the liberty to doubt assertion of his being not in cahoots with Dembski. Here are some facts (besides having Dembski affiliated with Marks's lab). Some time ago a Swedish mathematician Olle Haggstrom published an article critical of Dembski's concepts (see here). After a while, a reply to Olle was posted authored by Marks and Dembski (see here). This reply maintains that evolution necessarily has certain intrinsic targets and therefore Dembski's model is valid. This article is imho unsubstantiated; it brazenly asserts that all Olle's arguments not only do not disprove Dembski's thesis but in fact support it. Such a chalenging view of Marks/Dembski is not supported by any substantial arguments but just declared as self-evident. Maybe Marks is great in his field, but his (with Dembski) anti-Haggstrom paper seems to show, first that he shares Dembski's pro-ID views, and, second, that perhaps he is not really great beyond his field. Just IMHO of course.

All of this has no bearing on Tom's decision to join Marks's lab and I wish him success in that endeavor.

I'm glad that discussions on the actual content of Marks and Dembski's work are starting to pop up. Here are my own beliefs on the EIL work:

1) Casting the concepts in information terms serves only to create confusion. The issues are much clearer when expressed in terms of probabilities. According to Shannon surprisal, which is the information measure that D&M use, D&M's exogenous information measures the amount of information in the success-or-failure outcome of the baseline search, not the amount of information in the search parameters. Likewise with endogenous information, and active information doesn't measure the amount of information in anything.

2) The "active information" measure yields a number that has no useful significance. It doesn't tell us anything of use that we didn't already have to know in order to calculate it.

3) The "active information" measure is always relative to a somewhat arbitrary baseline. Apparently, the baseline should be a blind search, but over what search space? And using what search structure? For instance, M&D's response to Schneider discusses two related blind searches, one far more efficient than the other (so they say) because of its search structure. Which of these should we choose as a baseline for Schneider's ev search?

4) Applying the EIL concepts to evolutionary processes in the real world requires that a target be defined. How do we do this? D&M's notion of "intrinsic targets" has very obvious logical problems.

As an interesting sidenote, a very obvious discrepancy can be found by comparing Schneider's Evolution of biological information to M&D's response. It turns out that the problem is on M&D's side, and it stems from a bug in one of their MATLAB scripts. The problem is so huge that M&D are going to have to rewrite that paper. 50 panda points for whoever can find the bug.

Perhaps what I am going to say here has some relevance to both the question of the connection between ID and Marks's virtual lab, and to Tom English's remark about Dembski's model of evolution as a search algorithm.

In the past I posted at least two entries right here on PT and also on Talk Reason where I argued against Dembski's model - a search for a small target in a large search space. (See for example here). As usual, Dembski ignored my comments, which is OK - my intention was far from a desire to convince Dembski.

Now about Tom English's comment (I never knew there are two Tom Englishs: the one I have some knowledge about is imho a highly qualified expert on NFL). Now Tom asserts that Marks is a great
scientist and has nothing to do with ID. While Marks indeed may be an excellent scientist, I take the liberty to doubt assertion of his being not in cahoots with Dembski. Here are some facts (besides having Dembski affiliated with Marks's lab). Some time ago a Swedish mathematician Olle Haggstrom published an article critical of Dembski's concepts (see here). After a while, a reply to Olle was posted authored by Marks and Dembski (see here). This reply maintains that evolution necessarily has certain intrinsic targets and therefore Dembski's model is valid. This article is imho unsubstantiated; it brazenly asserts that all Olle's arguments not only do not disprove Dembski's thesis but in fact support it. Such a chalenging view of Marks/Dembski is not supported by any substantial arguments but just declared as self-evident. Maybe Marks is great in his field, but his (with Dembski) anti-Haggstrom paper seems to show, first that he shares Dembski's pro-ID views, and, second, that perhaps he is not really great beyond his field. Just IMHO of course.

Tom also asserts that, unlike Dembski's CSI, "active information" (discussed in particular in Marks/Dembski's anti-Haggstrom article) is a useful and reasonable concept. I agree that this concept as such may be construed as reasonable. However, the question is not whether AI as a concept has contents, but rather whether or not evolutionary algorithms can only succeed if the AI is ether front-loaded or supplied from outside sources. This question is related to both Dembski's "displacement problem" and the essence of the NFL theorems. Neither Dembski nor Marks offer any evidence that AI necessarily must be added to what they call "endogeneous information." They simply claim that this is so (which is just another representation of the "displacement problem.") In fact, as long as we stay within the framework of the NFL theorem, they are only valid for "black box" algorithms which by definition have no access to any information besides that accumulated by the search algorithm in the course of exploration of the fitness landscape and gleaned exclusively from that landscape. They neither possess a front-loaded AI nor receive it from outside during the search. This however does not prevent certain specific algorithms to immencely outperform blind search, which is just a routine occurrence. Therefore all the talk about AI is as irrelevant to biological evolution as the talk about CSI of the NFL theorems.

All of this has no bearing on Tom's decision to join Marks's lab and I wish him success in that endeavor.

Neither marks, nor Dembski, nor yourself, nor I know how to define the real world probabilities of hitting a specific “target” wrt to a specific trait. even knowing ALL the competing selective pressures, even in simple systems like John Endler’s Poecilliids (guppies) in Trinidad, it is still not easy to predict exact probabilities with any confidence. general directions to expect, yes, but exact probabilities? no. hence the entire argument from “improbability” is completely flawed to begin with. it really is that simple. mental masturbation and playing with models is one thing, but what we see in the real world has to fit the models, too.

And when we use a specific information measure to characterize some structure, the question remains if it is descriptive and above all predictive. Is it useful, and how useful is it?

Apology for multiple posts - it was some glitch in PT's software, not due to my intention.

What do you think is the best definition of information and what do you think is the best way to measure it?

— David Stanton

Creationists and ID proponents always seem to inject anthropomorphisms into their arguments, I wonder why that is?

But I hasten to add that while CSI had serious shortcomings, active information is reasonable and interesting.

— Tom English

Replace "so P(A) >= P(A)" with "so P(A) >= P(X)" in the above.

Thus, when Haggstrom writes, "In almost all concrete optimization problems, we have some prior information," he does not in fact "refute [design arguments] ... irreparably." He merely restates them.

— Marks and Dembski

As usual, a nice description of the “Brownian Ratchet and Pawl” is given by Richard Feynman in Volume I, Chapter 46 of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

The key point, and a source of much confusion, is the uniformity or non-uniformity of the temperature. If there is damping in the pawl, there is implicitly a flow of energy, which in turn implies a temperature difference that allows the ratchet and pawl device to run “uphill”.

Another key point that is often missed is that temperature is essentially the kinetic energy per degree of freedom in a system. Transfers of energy can take place differently in different directions if momentum transfers are different in different directions. That is why adding salt to ice lowers the temperature. The salt breaks molecular bonds in the frozen water, which opens up more degrees of freedom for the same amount of energy, hence the kinetic energy per degree of freedom (temperature) drops. If this kind of situation occurs in a system in which momentum transfers in some directions are changed and in other directions are not, a system can crawl “uphill” in a given direction. Molecules and atoms on catalytic surfaces can be such an example.

In fact, there are many situations in physics where these kinds of events happen. Calling it "added information" may be technically correct given a proper definition of "information", but calling it intelligently added information is extremely misleading.

You're driving through the mountains and you pass through a road cut. You've all seen road cuts.

On the left side is a series of layers. Different rock layers of different colors.

On the right side is a series of layers but there's a fold in the rocks like a big inverted U.

I have two questions:

1. Do the rock layers contain information?

2. Does the rock layer with the fold contain more information than the rock layer without the fold?

Tom,

Thanks for the informative response.

And yes, that is exactly the point I was alluding to. Starting from the assumption that "God made me in his image" and "God made the universe especially for me" would seem to predispose one to extensive anthropormorphism and other logical fallacies in trying to understand nature. That might not be the best way to understand reality.

It is conceivable that someone could establish an inequality on very imprecise quantities that would make a persuasive argument that “evolutionary search” could not have “hit targets” without an extrinsic source of information.

my use of the word "exact" is in fact far too extreme; even general areas of probability calculations are fraught with grand assumptions.

calculating probabilities is not possible at all if you are looking at the evolution of traits in the past (fossil record).

there is insufficient information available to even generate GENERAL assumptions regarding probabilities in that case.

all we have available is looking directly at how specific selection pressures (or lack thereof) influence the directions of traits we can measure.

there is no way to generate any realistic measure of probability for say, the evolution of the first invertebrate eye.

it is not possible without huge assumptions, not based on ANY real world data whatsoever.

Looking at measures of probability even within currently well studied systems is damn near impossible, though of current interest to several evolutionary biologists who have been musing about how to mathematically calculate it. I'm blanking on names at the moment, but when they pop in my head, I'll add them in.

suffice it to say, even people who have been studying the issue for decades don't pretend to be able to formulate even general probability estimates for the specific directions a trait will take in the field. Unless the population under consideration is entirely controlled for all relevant selection pressures (lab, and even then, difficult), generating remotely realistic probability estimates on the frequency of specific alleles within that population after X generations would be difficult, at best. There are surely exceptions; as the behavior of all alleles within a given population are not equivalent, and large scale mutations like chromosal duplication would likely have quite predictable results over several generations. Still, I think my point is at least a bit clearer now.

what Dembski et. al. have been trying to do isn't even based on extant studies of allele frequencies; it's based entirely on assumptions they basically pulled out of their collective asses.

sorry, but that's not science, and until one of these folks starts to actually base their conceptualizations on real world data, there's little reason to take it seriously, even if the math "works out".

teleology is inherent in the search metaphor

yes, it is.

not saying that that still might not produce something worth thinking about, but that's as far as I would take it without testing the assumptions first.

To expand a bit on what I said above, it seems to me that teleology is inherent in the search metaphor. Most of us believe, at least when we stop and think, that it’s just a metaphor, or perhaps that it’s a model that must be taken with a grain of salt, and that evolutionary processes do not have the end of hitting targets.

I note that Marks and Dembski’s papers criticize evolutionary biological models especially, and that they do so based on ID ideas that the modeled structure “smuggles in” information. As this isn’t a neutral view on algorithms but a specifically chosen example my own decision is different.

— Torbjörn Larsson

Certainly information (measured as randomness) is created by the environment, but it is also created by biological mechanisms such as sexual recombination or biological processes such as selection or drift (as in both cases traits are fixed in a probabilistic process).

Incidentally, discussing analogies, some population models are analogous to bayesian inference models used in machine learning. The populations genomes (the distribution of alleles over the population) is analogous to a learning machine that learns of the environment by trial and error.

[Btw, which knowledge becomes obsolete when the environment changes, so has to learn anew. The natural specification of the object, how the resulting traits work out in fitness terms, to measure (as well as the object itself) changes with the environment. So this isn’t exactly analogous to the minimal description length algorithmic information measure, at least as far as this layman understands.]

The major inconsistency I see in the ID literature is that they make the claim that certain end states are extremely improbable because they have an underlying assumption that they are only one of an extremely large number of states that exist simultaneously.

I know for a fact that such coupling and feedback makes for a complex dynamical system

i do believe we had a discussion on that very issue not that long ago.

anybody recall the specific thread? it was a discussion of feedback and fitness spaces.

Mark,

I especially appreciate a gentle response from an active and effective opponent of ID like you.

I believe it was late last year that I glanced at the response by Marks and Dembski. I noted a new "information" as I would a new chunk of space debris, and guessed that Marks was openly involved in ID. I have not read the two papers yet, but seeing active information invoked when Haggstrom's criticism is of vintage 2002 ID makes me queasy.

It appears that ID and what came to be evolutionary informatics overlapped last year. I have no desire to be defensive about my affiliation with the lab, or to sweep anything under the rug. I can only say that I hope Marks will keep evolutionary informatics cleanly separated from ID in the future. I believe that Marks and Dembski have the goals of IDists, but I must back them when they "play fair."

Pete Dunkelberg,

It is very common for molecular biologists to speak of cells as exporting entropy. I'm not sure about the formal correctness of what they're saying. But my point is that there's an established notion of information moving between biosystem X and not-X.

I don't see how a closed system can do much in the way of evolution. I am far from the first person to suggest that evolution depends critically on the fact that the earth is an open system far from equilibrium. (Granville Sewell's attempts to support ID with the Second Law are ludicrous.) So I was trying to say that I think evolutionary systems should be modeled as open. I cannot see how an organism implements a mutation operator. It seems that a non-biological entity causes the mutation. Perhaps I am missing something.

I'm getting a bit weary, and will have to focus on my work soon. Forgive my rush here.

Hardened mud contains information about what strode or rolled across it. Smart mud, that.

It seems that a non-biological entity causes the mutation. Perhaps I am missing something.

yes, you are. perhaps you will recall what in the morning.

Tom wrote:

"I meant to rule out sex."

Now wait just a minute here. Academic freedom is all well and fine and playing fair is all well and good, but when you rule out sex I really must object. That kind of neoconservative abstinance only crap is ... What? Oh ... never mind.

If you will notice, Casey Luskin's article "Richard Dawkins on the Origin of Genetic Information" has been updated. I emailed Casey yesterday and mentioned that the EvolutionNews blog statement of purpose is as such:

"The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution."

Yet he failed to mention that Dawkins rebutted the video and very nicely answered the challenge: http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/dawkins.htm. This is a prime example of "sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased". A quick google search of "Dawkins and Information" would have been enough research to have discovered Dawkins response.

Therefore, while I commend Luskin for posting the rebuttal, he still is not excused from poor research. He also doesn't admit that Dawkins answered the question (Luskin says: Read Dawkins’ response at http://www.skeptics.com.au/articles/dawkins.htm and see if he still has yet to satisfactorily answer the question!).

Now that Luskin admits that Dawkins answers the "Information Challenge", I think someone on Panda's Thumb should challenge Luskin, who says, "Read Dawkins’ response...and see if he still has yet to satisfactorily answer the question!", to show where Dawkins is wrong. Don't let him off the hook here.

Now that Luskin admits that Dawkins answers the “Information Challenge”, I think someone on Panda’s Thumb should challenge Luskin, who says, “Read Dawkins’ response…and see if he still has yet to satisfactorily answer the question!”, to show where Dawkins is wrong. Don’t let him off the hook here.

— JM Ridlon

calculating probabilities is not possible at all if you are looking at the evolution of traits in the past (fossil record).

— Sir_Toejam

But footnote 4 on page 7 of Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success gives me pause.

— Tom English

I read this and the rest of your post as saying that that argument from improbability is sure to be closely akin to argument from ignorance.

akin, yes, rather much like trying to produce a testable hypothesis about a non-existent designer.

not sure it has as much to do with blind ignorance as willful ignorance, however.

btw, did you recall some of the biological vectors of mutation yet?

there are quite a few; but the most commonly thought of are ones involving insertion events (think oncogenes).

Looking at measures of probability even within currently well studied systems is damn near impossible, though of current interest to several evolutionary biologists who have been musing about how to mathematically calculate it. I’m blanking on names at the moment, but when they pop in my head, I’ll add them in.

How can probabilities be measured for evolution as a "search algorithm" without taking into account that it has failed more often than it has succeeded? The TOL is full of dead-ends. How can anyone impute teleology and compute probabilities without some mathematical means of acknowledging it's failures as well as it's successes?

I apologize if this seems amateurish; I still have much to learn about information theory.

That does put an interesting perspective on it, doesn't it.

ID says, "Look how unlikely life is!".

The fossil record says, "No kidding: almost everything goes extinct."

Where's the teleological 'design' in that?

Unlike the human world, biological history is not written by the winners.

ID says, “Look how unlikely life is!”.

Greg Kuperberg and Tom English, thanks for your responses!

I was informed yesterday that my (late) replies had been erased by a server accident. If energy permits I may post new ones.

you must be thinking of some other Brownian ratchet.

It seems to me that ontogeny is much like a chain of behaviors extended through trial and error.

I.e., that line of “argument” supports common ancestry

That does put an interesting perspective on it, doesn’t it. ID says, “Look how unlikely life is!”. The fossil record says, “No kidding: almost everything goes extinct.” Where’s the teleological ‘design’ in that? Unlike the human world, biological history is not written by the winners.

Hmm. IMHO it doesn’t work out directly, since the mechanisms including fixation under selection is varying, in effect the same problem that the original ratchet had.

Hmm. IMHO it doesn’t work out directly, since the mechanisms including fixation under selection is varying, in effect the same problem that the original ratchet had.

Mike Elzinga:

Perhaps, but I think that depends on the time scales and other details of the involved processes such as fixation. It isn't obvious (at least to me) which is why I said "[not] directly".

but I think that depends on the time scales and other details of the involved processes such as fixation.

Mike Elzinga said: I am not clear in my mind about the meaning of “fixation”, but certainly at the molecular level, things can happen very quickly (dt = dp/F), because the forces are large relative to the changes in momentum.

PvM said:
Interesting, Tom English is an affiliate indeed, a recent addition .

Thomas M. English, Ph.D. Bounded Theoretics Lubbock, Texas 79410 USA Thom.English(at)gmail(dot).com

English is no friend of ID though.

As an ID'er I am very happy to see that Tom English has joined the Marks Informatics group. I would certainly consider him a friend. I have very much appreciated Tom's critical contributions thus far and I remember him from the ARN board. Being a "friend" in science does not necessarily mean not being a critic. In science, critics and proponents work together.

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the link to the very good Grunwald Vityani paper.