Uncommon Dissent

In a way this is a flashback to the reason "Febble," a British neuroscientist, was banned from UD four years ago. She argued that on Dembski's definition of the behavior of an "intelligent" designer, natural selection qualifies as an intelligent designer.

The take-home is that to the extent that ID notions like "intelligence" or "complex specified information" can be made operationally explicit and testable, naturalistic processes are entirely adequate to produce the phenomena those notions are invoked by creationists to explain (where "explain" in the latter case is used very loosely, of course).

The biggest problem is that design is quite easily detected without it having to be complex at all. Handaxes are not very complex, yet are readily understood to have been designed--by humans, oddly enough, not God (really, if God were busily operating in the environment, what right would we have to ascribe intelligently-made ancient artifacts to humans?).

That's why Dembski attempts to redefine simple design as being "complex," because all life is actually complex, while design per se can be either simple or complex. Dembski wanted to conflate design and life, so he calls simple "unlikely" (via "natural" means) artifacts complex when they are in fact simple.

Only modern life can be said to be reliably complex in every known instance. "Elegance" and "simplicity" mark many designed objects, and these objects are typically as readily demonstrated to be designed as the latest computer chips are. What is strikingly obvious in most designed objects is rationality in its construction, regardless of their simplicity or complexity, while known non-engineered (or artificially selected) life is invariably both complex and without rational design and construction.

Design is not characterized by CSI, rather by rationality. Life is complex, but without rational design behind it (evolution can sometimes come close to what we might (wrongly, in fact) consider to be rational ends, yet the beginnings are obviously not rationally chosen--they are simply what is available to evolution).

ID's conflation of design's frequent simplicity with life's complexity exists only to obscure the importance of rationality's existence within designs, and its lack in all "wild-type" life.

Glen Davidson

The definition of CSI you provide was described in a 2007 PNAS paper by Jack Szostak (2009 Nobel laureate).

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 104 Suppl 1:8574-81.
"Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity."
Hazen RM, Griffin PL, Carothers JM, Szostak JW.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl.1/8574.long

Szostak calls it "functional information". (It's identical to a definition I came up with and submitted to the Journal of Theoretical Biology back in the early 90's, but the paper was rejected -- blah, blah, blah).

I'm getting very leery of the word "information". The word is perfectly valid in an informal sense, of course: "Boyo, there's a lot of good information in this book!" However, in a technical discussion its usage has to be defined relative to the subject at hand.

That is, unlike a concept like "energy", it has little general applicability, and outside of the specific discussions for which "information" is variously defined, it simply causes confusion. We know that one of the basic features of life (as opposed to nonlife) is heredity; we know that heredity is embodied in the sequences of the genome.
If we ask the question of whether there is "information" in the genome, what do we know when we get an answer that we didn't before?

The CSI argument of ID seems identical to Paley's notions of organized complexity, as in a watch, with the same conclusion, that it is a trademark of Design. Modern evolutionary theory disagrees; the CSI argument of ID is simply reiterating Paley's assertion, under a smokescreen of technical verbosity, and claiming it as a proof when it hasn't moved any of the old pieces on the chessboard.

Of course, any discussion of the merits or lack thereof of the use of "information" as a scientific term is beside the point when it comes to the dubious individuals who show up in Pandaland, and throw the term around as a measure of what in military terms would be called "noise jamming".

mrg said: (snip) The CSI argument of ID seems identical to Paley's notions of organized complexity, as in a watch, with the same conclusion, that it is a trademark of Design. (snip) Of course, any discussion of the merits or lack thereof of the use of "information" as a scientific term is beside the point when it comes to the dubious individuals who show up in Pandaland, and throw the term around as a measure of what in military terms would be called "noise jamming".

Don't forget that they can't even define 'C', 'S', or 'I' in a consistent way that makes sense. And just to reiterate what RBH pointed out, there is nothing in any aspect of "Intelligent Design Theory" that requires... well... intelligence.

One Pro-ID commenter has even claimed that termites are intelligent, at least as ID defines the term. (http://ogremk5.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/what-is-intelligent-design/#comment-81)

Further, I maintain that it is impossible, even in theory, to determine whether a genetic sequence or protein was designed or the result of pure randomness or randoness + natural selection, which renders the entire ID 'argument' moot.

The stuff I've seen that provides some semblance of a positive argument for ID has zero difference from what would be expected if evolution were the designer.

They cannot detect design, even in theory. So, yeah, ID is vacuous nonsense. It's totally not needed or useful.

A simple definition of Specified Information would be that it is the negative log (to the base 2)

of the fraction of those sequences that are better at flying than a bird.

We don’t have enough information to actually calculate it, but we can be sure that it is big enough to pass Dembski’s threshold of 500 bits, and thus CSI is present.

"A simple definition of Specified Information would be that it is the negative log (to the base 2) of the fraction of those sequences that are better at flying than a bird. We don’t have enough information to actually calculate it, but we can be sure that it is big enough to pass Dembski’s threshold of 500 bits, and thus CSI is present."

This is a better piece of work on CSI than any creationist has ever managed to produce.

Oh, unless the bird is a penguin. Or a moa.

Douglas Theobald said: The definition of CSI you provide was described in a 2007 PNAS paper by Jack Szostak (2009 Nobel laureate). ... (It's identical to a definition I came up with and submitted to the Journal of Theoretical Biology back in the early 90's, but the paper was rejected -- blah, blah, blah).

mrg said: I'm getting very leery of the word "information". The word is perfectly valid in an informal sense, of course: "Boyo, there's a lot of good information in this book!" However, in a technical discussion its usage has to be defined relative to the subject at hand. That is, unlike a concept like "energy", it has little general applicability, and outside of the specific discussions for which "information" is variously defined, it simply causes confusion. We know that one of the basic features of life (as opposed to nonlife) is heredity; we know that heredity is embodied in the sequences of the genome. If we ask the question of whether there is "information" in the genome, what do we know when we get an answer that we didn't before?

The CSI argument of ID seems identical to Paley's notions of organized complexity, as in a watch, with the same conclusion, that it is a trademark of Design. Modern evolutionary theory disagrees; the CSI argument of ID is simply reiterating Paley's assertion, under a smokescreen of technical verbosity, and claiming it as a proof when it hasn't moved any of the old pieces on the chessboard.

OgreMkV said: ... Further, I maintain that it is impossible, even in theory, to determine whether a genetic sequence or protein was designed or the result of pure randomness or randoness + natural selection, which renders the entire ID 'argument' moot. The stuff I've seen that provides some semblance of a positive argument for ID has zero difference from what would be expected if evolution were the designer. ...

harold said: Sorry, I'm still confused by how CSI is meaningful.

A simple definition of Specified Information would be that it is the negative log (to the base 2)

The log or negative log to the base 2 is a common function to come across in discussions of information that touch on the binary system, because, among other things, it relates the minimum number of digits of string length needed (number of "bits") to convey numerical information. For example, the log base 2 of 8 is 3, and the log base 2 of 16 is 4. To express the numerical information "eight" through the numerical information "fifteen", you need four binary bits (1000 through 1111). For fractions it works the same way, except with negative log 2.

of the fraction of those sequences that are better at flying than a bird.

I'm seriously not sure what you mean here. I'll ask the easy questions first - which birds are we talking about, and how do we measure the quality of their flying in a reproducible way? Which sequences are we talking about? I'm guessing you're talking about randomly generated genome-sized sequences of DNA, and imagining what would happen if those sequences were substituted for the genome of a bird at earliest embryonic stage, or something. Is that right?

We don’t have enough information to actually calculate it, but we can be sure that it is big enough to pass Dembski’s threshold of 500 bits, and thus CSI is present.

At one level, obviously, we are in complete agreement that either CSI is a meaningless term, or it is a trivial term that refers to something, but that has no relevance to the theory of evolution. I'm just not sure it is in any way a meaningful term.

Their hypothesis (if you can call it that) seems to be that they can use CSI to detect design, and by extension a designer (i.e., God). Do they really want to make God a testable hypothesis which they would be forced to reject if/when their arguments fail?

harold said: Sorry, I'm still confused by how CSI is meaningful. ,,,

me: of the fraction of those sequences that are better at flying than a bird.

I'm seriously not sure what you mean here. I'll ask the easy questions first - which birds are we talking about, and how do we measure the quality of their flying in a reproducible way?

Which sequences are we talking about? I'm guessing you're talking about randomly generated genome-sized sequences of DNA, and imagining what would happen if those sequences were substituted for the genome of a bird at earliest embryonic stage, or something. Is that right?

me: We don’t have enough information to actually calculate it, but we can be sure that it is big enough to pass Dembski’s threshold of 500 bits, and thus CSI is present.

At one level, obviously, we are in complete agreement that either CSI is a meaningless term, or it is a trivial term that refers to something, but that has no relevance to the theory of evolution. I'm just not sure it is in any way a meaningful term.

CSI appears to be a designation applied to whatever the cdesign proponentsists have already determined is Designed, using some theological test never made explicit.

Matt G said: Their hypothesis (if you can call it that) seems to be that they can use CSI to detect design, and by extension a designer (i.e., God). Do they really want to make God a testable hypothesis which they would be forced to reject if/when their arguments fail?

Flint said: CSI appears to be a designation applied to whatever the cdesign proponentsists have already determined is Designed, using some theological test never made explicit.

The purpose of the concept "Complex Specified Information" is to sneak the concept of a Specifier into the discussion. In the context in which it was inserted, the unstated assumption is that the Specifier is an active entity, i.e. The Designer.

As noted before, a more honest terminology would be "Complex Specifying Information". But this can obviously arise from natural processes, and therefore is a non-starter as an IDC propagational tool.

Complex Specified Information could take practically any form, and have any number of purposes, the number of which could, practically speaking, be zero.

Examples: a grocery shopping list tucked into my shoe by my wife yesterday morning. The painting The Persistence ff Memory by Salvador Dali.

Joe Felsenstein said:

Douglas Theobald said: The definition of CSI you provide was described in a 2007 PNAS paper by Jack Szostak (2009 Nobel laureate). ... (It's identical to a definition I came up with and submitted to the Journal of Theoretical Biology back in the early 90's, but the paper was rejected -- blah, blah, blah).

... and a special case of it was described by me in a paper in American Naturalist in 1978. I wasn't a reviewer on your 1990 submission but if I had been I might have noted that!

Unless I'm mistaken, you can even see casual admissions that the stuff of evolution produces "active information" at least in an attempt to critique the digital organism Avida:

"Mutation, fitness, and choosing the fittest of a number of mutated offspring [5] are additional sources of active information in Avida we have not explored in this paper."

Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a
Digital Organism Ewart Dembski and Marks

http://evoinfo.org/papers/2009_EvolutionarySynthesis.pdf

I can't think of a compelling reason that if those are sources of active information in Avida, that they are not also in life.

CSI appears to be a designation applied to whatever the cdesign proponentsists have already determined is Designed, using some theological test never made explicit.

I disagree – I think it is just a way of arguing that there is so much adaptation that it could not be explained by pure mutation (without natural selection).

Douglas Theobald said: I imagine it's been "invented" independently many times -- it seems a natural measure of functional information to me.

The CSI concept fails on the C, the S, and the I. But its greatest failing is the "Specified" -- because gene sequences are not specific. Not just in theory, but observably so. There are many mutations which make no difference at all to a gene's function. There are other mutations that reduce a gene's function, but not enough to make it completely non-functional. There are genes that vary in function depending on whether they are homozygous or heterozygous (e.g., heterozygous sickle cell malaria resistance good, homozygous sickle cell anaemia bad). There are species that lack enzymes of related species but do just fine (jawless fish can form clots just fine despite having a much simpler clotting cascade than we do, with 6 enzymes instead of our ten).

The idea that the enormous variation in genetic sequences in the biosphere is *specified* is wrong from the start. Even if one posits for the sake of argument that God created life pretty much as it is today, it is demonstrable that this fictional God did not do so with specified genetic information.

Not that I mind Dembski trying to enumerate and measure the complexity of genetic information. It could be an interesting project if he wasn't obsessed with squaring the circle to prove that God made circles.

Simply put, birds fly and fish swim. They do so a lot better than organisms coded by random strings of DNA (formed by mutation without natural selection – organisms coded for by monkeys typing with four-key typewriters). If we could imagine looking at all possible such organisms with the same length genome as (say) a bird, the fraction of them that would fly as well as a bird, or better, would be incredibly tiny. So tiny that if every particle in the universe were a monkey with an ATGC typewriter, there would not have been enough time by now to produce anything as good as a bird even once since the time of the Big Bang.

a better definition would be the log of the fraction of sequences that provide the same absolute fitness

Joe Felsenstein said:

Flint said: CSI appears to be a designation applied to whatever the cdesign proponentsists have already determined is Designed, using some theological test never made explicit.

I disagree -- I think it is just a way of arguing that there is so much adaptation that it could not be explained by pure mutation (without natural selection). So it is just a mathematicized version of the explosion-in-a-junkyard analogy. As many people here have noted, that analogy has no counterpart to natural selection. If Dembski's Law of Conservation did the job, it would rule out natural selection. But, alas for them ...

Joe Felsenstein -

Would it be reasonable to say that you are pointing out that the term "CSI" as used by Dembski is essentially synonymous with the more common terms "fitness" and "adaptation" (which are themselves more or less synonymous in many contexts)?

To put it another way, Dembski invented the term CSI, claimed that it is a feature of modern living organisms (presumably of those pesky plants that nobody in creationism cares about, too, as well as "sexy" mammals and motile bacteria), and then claimed that it was a feature that could not have evolved.

There are two possible ways to process this, in the light of the strong evidence for the theory of evolution and Dembski's failure to rebut any of the positive evidence.

1) The term is meaningless and there is no reason to think organism or anything else "have" it, or

2) The term is meaningful but the claim that evolution could not have created the feature is false.

You make a fairly good case for "2)", but it is dependent on a coherent and reproducible definition of "CSI". If ID/creationists start dissembling about the definition of CSI, and my dime says they will, because you have drawn attention to it, that might be a weak argument in favor of "1)".

I think the real crux to this thing is whether or not a certain type of "information", let's call it "Dembskian Information" can be created or must be conserved.

How does Dembski address the effects of selection?

We all know, and I think that even Dembski himself cannot successfully gloss over, the fact that selection actually exists.

A population of gazelle is born. They are all somewhat different. Some of them are better at surviving to maturity than others. Though there are statistical blips ( some otherwise very fit gazelle will still be struck by lightning, for example ) in general the environment makes a decent decision about what works.

This works, that doesn't. Speed, yes. Tendency to stand their ground against the lions... not so much.

The environment has made a selection based on experimentation with what works, therefore adding information to the genome. Certain choices worked, and were kept, certain choices didn't and were discarded in a pile of bloody fur.

Did Dembski ever get around to addressing what effect selection might have on Dembskian Information?

Bullshit.

This is the definition of a scientifically vacuous concept. You can't precisely define (let alone measure) any of the terms involved in his equations He's asserting that something is "impossible" by assigning an arbitrary threshold on an unmeasurable quantity. Dembski is just inconsistently flinging technical terms around to create an intellectual smoke screen. In the end, he's made a decades long career out of ineptly obfuscating an argument from ignorance.

Think about it, Joe. You wouldn't even let an undergrad get away with this kind of crap.

Ryan Cunningham said: Think about it, Joe. You wouldn't even let an undergrad get away with this kind of crap.

Ryan Cunningham said: Bullshit. This is the definition of a scientifically vacuous concept. You can't precisely define (let alone measure) any of the terms involved in his equations He's asserting that something is "impossible" by assigning an arbitrary threshold on an unmeasurable quantity. Dembski is just inconsistently flinging technical terms around to create an intellectual smoke screen. In the end, he's made a decades long career out of ineptly obfuscating an argument from ignorance. Think about it, Joe. You wouldn't even let an undergrad get away with this kind of crap.

Douglas Theobald said:

Ryan Cunningham said: Think about it, Joe. You wouldn't even let an undergrad get away with this kind of crap.

Joe is not defending Dembski's argument; he is defending the reasonableness of at least one possible definition of CSI. This is no different than the analogous creationist argument against evolution using the second law of thermodynamics. The argument is BS; the concept of entropy is not. To take the analogy a bit further -- the definition of CSI that Joe proposes is measurable in some simple situations (see the Szostak PNAS paper I cited http://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl.1/8574.long ). In real, complicated organisms it will of course be impossible to measure, but that doesn't mean that we should conclude that a value for it does not exist. Analogously, entropy changes are measurable in simple systems, but try to measure the entropy change for the development of a chicken from an egg to an adult hen.

natural selection qualifies as an intelligent designer.

Informally speaking, there's no reason not to talk about "genetic information" or "biological information", and I certainly will accept that such concepts could be reasonably defined for specific cases.

But only for those specific cases, and more importantly, "is this trip really necessary?" How much would we lose if we didn't pay any attention to "genetic information"? Its utility seems limited, and I worry that any discussions of it are simply contributing to the dedicated efforts of the ID camp to muddy the waters.
I think you could train a parrot to be a creationist if you just taught him to squawk: "No new information!"

Actually, I think you could have always trained a parrot to be a creationist, but these days "information" is the relevant verbiage.

I don't claim to understand the mathematical equations, but I think Jeffrey Shallit and Wesley Elsberry have been quite thorough in debunking Dembski's mathematical absurdities and have been so effective ...

As we note in section 5 and in the appendix, we believe that what CSI actually identifies, when it can be said to work at all, is the outcome of simple computational processes. That's why our "specified anti-information" (SAI) is a superior approach to "specification" than Dembski's methods. [Posted here.]

Ryan Cunningham said: Bullshit. This is the definition of a scientifically vacuous concept. You can't precisely define (let alone measure) any of the terms involved in his equations He's asserting that something is "impossible" by assigning an arbitrary threshold on an unmeasurable quantity. Dembski is just inconsistently flinging technical terms around to create an intellectual smoke screen. In the end, he's made a decades long career out of ineptly obfuscating an argument from ignorance. Think about it, Joe. You wouldn't even let an undergrad get away with this kind of crap.

One of the few "intelligent" posters in reply to MathGrrl's post:

Noesis

03/24/2011

6:40 pm

MathGrrl,

I was not challenging you with my remark about Omega. I was trying to give you a hint.

I’ll say outright this time that Dembski wanted (past tense, because we’re talking about work he seems to have abandoned) dearly to have a probability measure on the space of possible biological forms, so he could take the negative logarithm of the probability of a form to get information.

As Stuart Kauffman has pointed out, there can be no such probability measure, because none of us can know the space of possible biological forms (or phase space, as he puts it).

Dembski does not know the phase space. He has often complained that evolutionary biologists won’t give him the probabilities that he needs. He has indicated that evolutionary theory is deficient because it does not yield those probabilities. He seems to believe that if the theory says that there are chance contributions to biological evolution, then it should provide probabilistic models. This does not follow logically. If I see you flipping an apparently fair coin to select inputs to a “black box,” then I know that there is a chance contribution to the behavior of the system. But there is no way for me to provide a detailed probabilistic model. In particular, I do not know the range of responses of the black-box system.

Dembski promised long ago to produce an upper bound on the probability of evolution of the bacterial flagellum. He has yet to get back to us with that. If should ever claim to have that bound, it will be bogus. Again, he cannot measure probability on a set he cannot hope to define. And without probability, there is no CSI.

Greetings to all the people who hollered “bullshit” and insisted that all parts of Dembski's argument are completely wrong and that I was naïve. No, I'm not naïve, and yes, I've put a lot of work into understanding Dembski's arguments over the years, and yes, I know who I'm dealing with.

And no, not all parts of his argument are meaningless or wrong. Specified Information is not a silly concept -- not when Leslie Orgel invented it, not when I invented a relative of it, not when Doug Theobald invented it, and yes, not when Dembski used it. We can't really compute it in real cases, but we can easily see that the amount of it (500 bits) that Dembski needs to call it Complex Specified information is a lot less than the amount of it in any real life form. That is, any old life form you care to study has a genotype whose fitness is certainly in the upper 1-in-10-to-the-150th part of the distribution of fitnesses of all possible DNA sequences of the same length as that genome.

And that's all you need to show that a genotype that fit cannot happen even once in a number of trials equal to the number of events that have happened in the whole universe, if each trial is just mutations of all bases, with no natural selection. For Dembski that seals it, the explanation must be design. For the rest of us, no, it could well be repeated rounds of natural selection. The reason Dembski thinks it couldn't is that he has his Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information. This law has been shown to be (a) unproven, and (b) of the wrong form to do what he needs it to do. And if it is put in the right form it is easily seen to be wrong.

That's where the real body is buried in Dembski's argument, and all the attempts to show that everything else is wrong too actually don't help -- they just distract from understanding where the real problem is in the argument. I would be interested in seeing whether Dembski could make any defense of his argument on this point (so far he has declined to, pointing instead to later arguments of his that are not about the same thing at all).

The fact that MathGrrl, as admirably as she has conducted herself, felt that the point to concentrate on was whether CSI could be precisely defined shows to me that anti-ID people have not understood the importance of concentrating on the issues involving the LCCSI.

I think that something that is clearly illustrated by the whole affair is that CSI is NOT well understood, even by the people who allege that it is a "problem" for evolutionary biology. And a lot of the blame has to be placed on Dembski's shoulders - in fact even the name is misleading.

I would suggest that the specific measure proposed in this article is another error. I have suspicions that it is close to Dembski's original idea, but if so, he had deviated from that by the time The Design Inference was published. By my reading Dembski does not insist on taking a uniform probability for all possible sequences but instead says that all relevant factors should be taken into account. Which would include the influence of natural selection. But in closing off an obvious error he has made his method impractical and even unworkable in more complex cases, which is why it is never used correctly in any non-trivial case.

Douglas Theobald said: Analogously, entropy changes are measurable in simple systems, but try to measure the entropy change for the development of a chicken from an egg to an adult hen.

Joe,

I agree with most of what you say and certainly don't think you should be accused of being soft on ID for analysing their claims on face value. So I agree. Except for the "Specified Information is not a silly concept" bit. As soon as the word "Specified" is in there, it ceases to have bearing on evolution AND it plays into the hands of Dembski's rhetorical tactics.

A term like "genetic probability of fitness" would be better. In this case, words really matter.

Law of conservation? Law?? Of conservation? Sorry, I am out of the water here, but out of what does that law emerge? Why and how would something abstract be conserved?

I have to turn my back on the transcendental world and turn to the world in which I live and ask: WTF has that got with the real world to do? It looks so outlandish to me. Is it really that hard to make sense out of the real world, to explain in plain language what it is all about?

IMHO, it seems to me that Dembski is somewhere out in another worlds, otherwise he might perhaps have done what I often find in books: Attempts at making science accessible for the general public and people like me.

OTOH, if it isn't science it may be hard to popularize - that might reveal a fundamental flaw in the subject.

(Most) birds fly, don't they?

Just have to add, Joe Felsensteins comments helps a lot to make me get an inkling of what it is all about.

The only thing interesting happening here is Joe seems to have Stockholm Syndrome.

Hooray for Chris Lawson with "A term like “genetic probability of fitness” would be better. In this case, words really matter"

Indeed creationists when they see the word "information" think of Genesis and are trying to shoe horn (wedge) purely subjective beliefs into some muddy metric that doesn't stink.

As far as "The Law of Conservation of Information"?

Want to buy a nice swamp or a free energy machine?

get real.

I’m a visitor here, so perhaps I’m not familiar with the conventions of this blog. But if this were a physics blog and an Aristotelian asked how to calculate the position of an object from its motion, I wouldn’t expect the respondents to spend time arguing about the motives of the poster, or whether objects remain in motion or naturally come to rest — I’d expect someone to simply post:

y = x + vt + 1/2at**2 where:

• y = final position
• x = initial position
• v = initial velocity
• a = acceleration
• t = time

If an alchemist asked on a chemistry blog how one might calculate the pressure of a gas, one wouldn’t argue about the nobility of gold or the Philosopher’s Stone — one would simply post:

p=(NkT)/V where:

• p = absolute pressure of the gas
• N = number of gas molecules
• k = Boltzmann’s constant
• T = temperature of the gas
• V = volume of the gas

And if a young-earth creationist asked on a biology blog how one can determine the relative frequencies of the alleles of a gene in a population, one wouldn’t argue about the literal interpretation of Genesis — one would simply post:

p² + 2pq + q² = 1 where:

• p = population frequency of allele 1
• q = population frequency of allele 2

These are examples of clear, detailed ways to calculate values, the kind of equations that practicing scientists uses all the time in quotidian research. Providing these equations allows one to make explicit quantitative calculations of the values, to test these values against the real world, and even to examine the variables and assumptions that underlie the equations. Is there any reason the same sort of clarity cannot be provided for CSI?

We can’t really compute it in real cases, but we can easily see that the amount of it (500 bits) that Dembski needs to call it Complex Specified information is a lot less than the amount of it in any real life form.

k.e., said: The only thing interesting happening here is Joe seems to have Stockholm Syndrome.

k.e., said: Hooray for Chris Lawson with "A term like “genetic probability of fitness” would be better. In this case, words really matter"

k.e., said: As far as "The Law of Conservation of Information"?

k.e., said: Want to buy a nice swamp or a free energy machine? get real.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Joe Felsenstein:

We can’t really compute it in real cases, but we can easily see that the amount of it (500 bits) that Dembski needs to call it Complex Specified information is a lot less than the amount of it in any real life form.

I've pointed out before (still looking for the link) that given Dembski's analysis of a bacterial flagellum in "No Free Lunch", any functional protein of more than a certain relatively low number of peptides exceeds his "universal probability bound", and thus Dembskian "design" would be just about everywhere in biology.

Douglas Theobald said: Analogously, entropy changes are measurable in simple systems, but try to measure the entropy change for the development of a chicken from an egg to an adult hen.

SWT said:

Douglas Theobald said: Analogously, entropy changes are measurable in simple systems, but try to measure the entropy change for the development of a chicken from an egg to an adult hen.

This can be measured using whole-body calorimetry. The easiest portion of the process to measure would be from the time one acquires the freshly fertilized egg to the time the chick emerges.

Douglas Theobald said:

SWT said:

Douglas Theobald said: Analogously, entropy changes are measurable in simple systems, but try to measure the entropy change for the development of a chicken from an egg to an adult hen.

This can be measured using whole-body calorimetry. The easiest portion of the process to measure would be from the time one acquires the freshly fertilized egg to the time the chick emerges.

Could you explain, please? I see how you could perhaps get the enthalpy change by enclosing an egg in a calorimeter and measuring the heat given off until the time the chick hatches (isothermal I suppose) -- but how could you get the change in entropy?

Paul King: I would suggest that the specific measure proposed in this article is another error.

The Design Inference, Chap 3, pg 69 ...the probability of an event is never the prob­ability of an event simpliciter, but always the probability of an event in relation to certain background information... Change the back­ground information and the probability changes as well... Definition: The probability of an event E with respect to background information H, denoted by P(E|H) and called “the probability of E given H,” is the best available estimate of how likely E is to occur under the assumption that H obtains.

Advocates of ID endlessly repeat the mantra that the presence of CSI proves that design is present.

Terenzio the Troll said:

Advocates of ID endlessly repeat the mantra that the presence of CSI proves that design is present.

Please excuse the stupidity of my question: I am pretty sure this point has already been discussed over and over again here at Pandasthumb; being the troll I am, though, I will try and ask nonetheless. How do the advocates of ID define "design"? As others have mentioned in earlier comments, design is something that all of us have an intuitive grasp of, but I don't think has ever been formally defined by anybody. I might be wrong, of course. As mr. Felsenstein stated, even if one can formally define CSI and even if a LCCSI does exist and we have a mathematical form for it, if we can not specify "design" in any measurable (numeric) form, then we can not derive any useful inference linking CSI and "design". As Venture Free (or rather Tulse) puts it, the very first step should be something like D = f(i(t)) integral over time T of (i(t)/dt) = K (btw, is it possible to write mathematical symbols like integrals in a comment?)

I have two issues with the material being discussed.

1) The Law of Conservation of Complex Information (or whatever it is). I think that the reason no one bothers even talking about it is because it is so demonstrably wrong. There is no law. While I agree that this is a critical error to Dembski's arguments, it's not the thrust of Dembski's arguments.

He claimed that it was possible to detect design in a particular sequence of information. That claim is impossible. It cannot be done.

This is a much easier argument than what you are suggesting. It deals directly with both his claims and his processes[sic] and shows simply that he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

2) On the calculation of specified information. I think that this too, is a useless task as applied to genetics/proteins. There is no simple way to extract useful information about a sequence. Mathematically speaking, there is no difference between

AAA GGG CCC UUU
and
AUG CCG GUC UAA

One codes for a valid protein (start and stop included), one does not. Yet, in the search space of protein sequences, they have the same value.

One sequence is more compressible than the other, but for biological purposes that's meaningless.

I think Joe's exmaple of the bird wing is somewhat useful and somewhat disingenius. Yes, it would be theoretically possible to search for a system (genome) that provided for 'better' flight (for some definition of better). But that doesn't help us, because we still could not determine if the sequence was designed, evolved, or random.

Complexity, fine, I think we can grasp that at some level. I think it needs a lot more detail though. Information, again, possibly understood by some (and the meaning of the information has nothing to do with it), but again needs a lot more detail. Specified, totally useless, by what to do what?. If you start with a genome that is a bird and modify it through the search space and end up with a penguin, is that more specified or less specified? It's a valid genome (it results in an organism), it just can't fly... but then the original genome probably can't swim and survive Antarctic temps either.

Does this help or am I just saying the same things...

Seems to me that the issue is quite simple. Dembski needs to define complex specified information. Then he needs to define the "Law" of Conservation of Information. Preferable he should do both of these things before publishing books on the subject. In particular, he needs to provide some experimental evidence, or at least some rationale for the latter concept.

Now here is the important part. After defining his terms, Dembski needs to demonstrate conclusively that random mutations and natural selection cannot increase information. So basically, he needs to show that adaptation cannot occur. Until then, all you have is the bold assertion that natural selection cannot produce adaptations. So the argument ultimately comes down to refusing to accept that Darwin was right.

Of course the last one hundred and fifty years of research have show conclusively that Darwin was right, sometimes in spectacular ways that he himself could never have imagined. Dembski is simply two hundred years behind the times. Maybe that is why he never publishes in real journals. Natural selection is the designer, no intelligence is required. Deal with it.

If we compare just a young chicken with an adult chicken, the adult is approximately a young chicken with a larger volume. If they have approximately the same body temperature, then the adult has more total energy as well as more volume to contain more microstates. Thus the adult has more entropy (entropy scales with volume).

OgreMkV said: I think that the reason no one bothers even talking about it is because it is so demonstrably wrong. There is no law.

DS said: Maybe that is why he never publishes in real journals.

harold said: Mike Elzinga -

If we compare just a young chicken with an adult chicken, the adult is approximately a young chicken with a larger volume. If they have approximately the same body temperature, then the adult has more total energy as well as more volume to contain more microstates. Thus the adult has more entropy (entropy scales with volume).

Interestingly, this is more or less a big part of what my initial response was the very first time I heard a creationist say "entropy".

Dembski sez: "I've just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more."

John Kwok said:

DS said: Maybe that is why he never publishes in real journals.

No, DS, here's Dembski's rationale as to why he doesn't publish in scientific journals: "I've just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more." These comments of his have been posted elsewhere on the web on many occasions, but I got the direct quotes here: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/ID/ However, I don't quite "buy" Dembski's argument since I have offered him assistance in writing the definitive textbook on Klingon Cosmology which I am certain would be an instant bestseller. Much to my surprise, he has refused my most generous offer (Of course I have stipulated that he must desist from publishing anything further on his favorite mendacious intellectual pornography; Intelligent Design cretinism). He's interested in getting royalties from his Xian flock and from those in the public who are gullible enough into thinking that he is a credible mathematician.

Joe Felsenstein said: The point is that even without going into detail about how to measure flying ability, they are way better at it than any bird that whose genome was a random string of DNA.

Claiming that publishing in journals takes too long will only work for a couple of years. It has now been over ten years and still no real publications. By now that defense is getting pretty weak, especially since he knows that he will never be taken seriously by the scientific community unless and until he publishes in real journals. If there were anything at all in any of the books it would be in journals by now.

The really funny thing is that if you asked him, I'm sure Dembski would not deny that natural selection can produce adaptations. He just won't get the connection of how that simple admission destroys all of his pseudoscience. Oh well, at least he can still find some rubes to buy his nonsense.

Glen Davidson said: ...Handaxes are not very complex, yet are readily understood to have been designed--by humans, oddly enough, not God (really, if God were busily operating in the environment, what right would we have to ascribe intelligently-made ancient artifacts to humans?). ... Glen Davidson

I still have a challenge for ID people that hasn't been attempted. Find the CSI of a Garden of Eden pattern in the Game of Life cellular automaton.

Unlike the real world, all the rules of the Game of Life are known, which makes it perfect to experiment in. And, unlike in the real world, a Garden of Eden is known to be designed - it cannot exist naturally in the Game of Life, since there is no combination of cells that can result in that pattern. It has to be placed by something outside the automaton.

It's the perfect test subject! Everything about these patterns should show design, if we can detect it as Dembski suggests. But we can't. Garden of Eden patterns don't have a function beyond 'be an impossible pattern'. To calculate CSI we'd need to find all other impossible patterns of the same size. In other words, we need to know everything that's designed before we can tell if something is designed! That's the whole trick of CSI - the only information it finds is what you put into it. If you specify a function, the information you find comes from your specification, not from the organism.

Of course, the explanation for the above is that ID is just nonsense intended to forward a Christian agenda, but I always like to point out their inexplicable refusal to focus on cellular automata, which I think would be the perfect testing ground for something like ID.

Joe
Thank you for the clarifications.

Your article is the best explanation I have read yet for Dembski's 'C','S', an 'I' particularly where he co-opted those terms from. It's a pity the UD crowd don't take more notice they might learn something.

The most problematic term is "I". Dembski and his followers conflate together "Information" as defined by Shannon, “Knowledge" as in Fundamentalist Christian Theology and "Function or Fitness"

Dembski has stated "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

Dembski's private definitions for Information aside I don't think even the above assertion will prove much use for advancing the study of evolution.

His agenda clearly is one of social engineering through the use of rhetoric. And that’s the problem with offering him a fig leaf. ID will co-opt honest players and spin it for their own uses.

Such as here with Hazen et als Functional Information.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3995236/mathematically_defining_functional_information_in_molecular_biology_kirk_durston/

Using unambiguous language and clearly establishing terms where consensus can be agreed is not in ID’s interest.

The use of the word ‘Law’ I think it's unfortunate that such a powerful word is used for inverse transformations. The law of gravity cannot be argued with; Poe's law on the other hand fills blogs. Equally Conservation with a capital 'C' which with Medawar's LCI is just an operation event followed by an error comparison not an actual conservation of potential energy. The terms certainly don't bear the same weight or should that be mass? In the real world. If Shannon Information i.e. a string of data in a noisy channel if by invoking Medawar's LCI ite was to conserve energy we really would then have a breakthrough worthy of a Newton. Obviously he had no such intention.

I understand why you are going about this the way you are so good luck.

My blog was one of the one Joe pointed out -- BTW, thanks Joe my hits shot up nicely -- My issue wasn't so much that CSI is vacuous, but more to the point, worthless. I see the problem as two-fold. The first, hilariously pointed out by MathGrrl and all of the commenters, that no one seems to be able to calculate this number. The idea of CSI isn't a bad one, but it doesn't mean much if no one seems to be able to calculate one. Plus how can the idea even be supported if no one can explain how to get there.

The second problem is how W. Dembski keeps trying to use it. It's core to his Explanatory Filter, the filter used to detect design. It's been MIA since Dembski first said he would be delivering it to the world, just like PZ pointed out with Paul Nelson and ontogenetic depth. So currently we can detect design, no that's not right, we can detect Intelligent Design by comparing something to a numeric index that no one can calculate. Oh yea, that takes us down the road a ways. [sarcasm intended]

Dembski also offers CSI as a supporting leg of the whole concept of Intelligent Design, along with Behe's Irreducible Complexity (IC), another completely unsupported idea. So now we have this ID concept that is standing on two unsupported legs CSI and IC. Don't know about you, but two legged stools are pretty unstable and even worse when the two legs cannot provide any support.

I think Joe makes a valid point, something Behe has admitted in one of his many responses to criticisms of IC. I can't imagine Dembski being brave enough to say that even if CSI is found, and be calculated to a repeatable degree -- that it still would not be evidence countering evolution. In reality it's not the CSI alone, but it's the acceptance that CSI cannot come about through natural causation -- another yet to be supported idea from Dembski.

And this is something Dembski and Co want to teach in HS biology classes? It sure as hell isn't ready for primetime, let alone a classroom.

Ted Herrlich
tedhohio@gmail.com
http://sciencestandards.blogspot.com

SAWells said: Oh, unless the bird is a penguin. Or a moa.

Harold said: Would it be reasonable to say that you are pointing out that the term “CSI” as used by Dembski is essentially synonymous with the more common terms “fitness” and “adaptation”

Here is my summary of how I understand this conversation, so far.

1) Dembski claimed that CSI is a factor which, if detected, rules out biological evolution as an explanation for whatever "has CSI". However, a) he cannot accurately define CSI, b) he cannot measure CSI, and c) he cannot offer any rationale to support his claim that even if he could define and measure it, its presence would rule out biological evolution, even in the presence of abundant positive evidence for evolution.

2) Joe is generously offering to help out with issues "a)" and "b)" above. He offers a definition and calculation for CSI. His definition and calculation are not pragmatic (as he concedes), and rely on subjective evaluation of features of organisms, as "how well a bird flies".

Having said that, he defines CSI, in essence, by estimating the frequency of DNA sequences that would produce a "genome of a well-flying bird", out of the total number of sequences of the same nucleotide length* that can be generated if nucleotides are randomly selected one at a time. *Of course, the actual exact number of nucleotides in a bird genome varies from individual to individual, but let's put that aside for now.

So if some species of bird that flies has ~3 billion base pairs, the total number of random possible "genomes" is about 4 to the power of 3 billion, which is far greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe.

The number of variations that still represent a genome of a viable bird that "flies as well or better" than an example of a living bird of that species is probably surprisingly high, but it is an infintesimal fraction of the larger number. Assuming inter-observer reliability with respect to flight quality, Joe takes the negative log 2 of this fraction and generates a CSI number (in theory).

3) However, Joe then points out that bird flight did evolve, so that, even after Joe doing some of Dembski's work for him, the actual rationale for Dembski's CSI - to contradict evolution - is invalid.

4) Joe's purpose seems to be to emphasize part "c)" of section "1)" above - that even if you do make a reasonable effort to assign a meaning to the term CSI, it still has nothing to do with contradicting evolution.

5) I finally add that, in my opinion, creationists will either ignore Joe, or contradict his definition of CSI without offering a coherent alternative.

Also, I should note that, in my opinion, Dembski's whole CSI spiel is nothing but the "747 created by a tornado in a junkyard" meme, expanded to many hundreds of expensive pages.

Ironically, creationists are attacking themselves when they use this meme. They contradict their own claim. Substitute "God" for "tornado" above, and you have the creationist claim.

No scientist has ever claimed that living organisms magically appeared in some modern, highly developed state suddenly, so the probability of a living organism being "randomly" assembled all at once is not relevant to science.

Dembski's claims about information are just a variation of the "it is improbable that such and such appeared out of nothing" meme.

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

Mike Elzinga -

Another interesting point.

Of course, all biological systems are endothermic over any reasonable defined scale or time period. All life requires energy input or dies. Chicken embryos utilize stored energy.

The primary energy for life comes almost exclusively from the sun (I'm aware of chemotrophic bacteria; I said "almost" exclusively).

This is actually one of two reasons why the Matrix movies are absurd. You can't "harvest" energy from comatose humans, you have to feed them.

The other reason being that if our lives are "illusions", but the illusions are sustainable and there is no particular advantage to the non-illusory state, there is no logical reason to care.

eric said: Fitness measures are inherently relative. Dembski's CSI fundamentally is not - or at least it's not supposed to be. It shouldn't matter in what context we find some string of characters, we should be able to determine designed/not designed solely on the internal characteristics of the string itself. That is the whole point of CSI! So to the extent that Joe's definition works, he has killed the patient to save the patient. He has thrown out one of the defining, fundamental principles of CSI (design can be determined without consideration of other evidence) to try and make it work. Evolutionary concepts of fitness recognize that it is both relative and context-dependent. As the joke goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun YOU." But creationist concepts of CSI want to say that your legs are either designed or they aren't regardless of the existence of bears. So I would say, no, not the same.

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

It has to be, on the average, endothermic. This can be inferred from what happens when the temperature of the system is reduced. It stops operating.

Douglas Theobald -

Of course the fact that a system is endothermic doesn't mean that the rate of energy input doesn't matter.

All life requires SOME energy input to survive, of the right type and at the right rate.

Your egg-frying system won't work very well if you try to fry an egg at the temperature of the surface of the sun, either. That doesn't mean the you don't need energy to fry an egg.

Biochemical reactions in modern organisms are very temperature sensitive. You'll find organisms adapted to arctic waters and blazing deserts, but that's actually a very narrow temperature range in the grand scheme of things.

harold said: Douglas Theobald - Of course the fact that a system is endothermic doesn't mean that the rate of energy input doesn't matter. All life requires SOME energy input to survive, of the right type and at the right rate.

I'd love to ask Dembski about the Noether theorems.

For every quantity that is conserved, there is some associated invariance in physical law.

conservation of energy requires that physical laws don't change with time
conservation of momentum requires that physical laws don't change with position

If "specified information" is conserved, what invariance in physical law corresponds to it?

Gabriel Hanna said: I'd love to ask Dembski about the Noether theorems. For every quantity that is conserved, there is some associated invariance in physical law. conservation of energy requires that physical laws don't change with time conservation of momentum requires that physical laws don't change with position If "specified information" is conserved, what invariance in physical law corresponds to it?

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

It has to be, on the average, endothermic. This can be inferred from what happens when the temperature of the system is reduced. It stops operating.

This reasoning doesn't seem sound -- the system stops operating if I fry the egg, too.

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

It has to be, on the average, endothermic. This can be inferred from what happens when the temperature of the system is reduced. It stops operating.

This reasoning doesn't seem sound -- the system stops operating if I fry the egg, too.

Yes; that is correct.

Kevin B said:

Gabriel Hanna said: I'd love to ask Dembski about the Noether theorems. For every quantity that is conserved, there is some associated invariance in physical law. conservation of energy requires that physical laws don't change with time conservation of momentum requires that physical laws don't change with position If "specified information" is conserved, what invariance in physical law corresponds to it?

Judge Jones' Law: Creationist arguments don't change with time.

Kevin B said: Judge Jones' Law: Creationist arguments don't change with time.

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

It has to be, on the average, endothermic. This can be inferred from what happens when the temperature of the system is reduced. It stops operating.

This reasoning doesn't seem sound -- the system stops operating if I fry the egg, too.

Yes; that is correct.

So you agree that we can't predict endothermic vs exothermic? Or what?

Kevin B said: Judge Jones' Law: Creationist arguments don't change with time.

mrg said:

Kevin B said: Judge Jones' Law: Creationist arguments don't change with time.

I do have to hand them the cookie for sheer brass in simply making up a fundamental law of physics.

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

It has to be, on the average, endothermic. This can be inferred from what happens when the temperature of the system is reduced. It stops operating.

This reasoning doesn't seem sound -- the system stops operating if I fry the egg, too.

Yes; that is correct.

So you agree that we can't predict endothermic vs exothermic? Or what?

ENDOTHERMIC. And the systems operate within an energy window of 0.01 eV to about 0.04 eV Below that range they "freeze out", and above that range they start coming apart.

Gabriel Hanna said: That's the problem, you can't just invent conservation laws.

Gabriel Hanna said:you can't just invent conservation laws.

mrg said: It would lose all its confusion value otherwise.

I prefer my eggs poached and runny.

Henry J said: Is that the law of conservation of confusion?

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: And regarding the egg-in-a-calorimeter experiment -- I don't even know what to expect for the enthalpy change. Is chicken development exothermic or endothermic? If it were endothermic, that would actually be fun because that would mean that the egg increased in entropy during the process.

It has to be, on the average, endothermic. This can be inferred from what happens when the temperature of the system is reduced. It stops operating.

This reasoning doesn't seem sound -- the system stops operating if I fry the egg, too.

Yes; that is correct.

So you agree that we can't predict endothermic vs exothermic? Or what?

ENDOTHERMIC. And the systems operate within an energy window of 0.01 eV to about 0.04 eV Below that range they "freeze out", and above that range they start coming apart.

So, let's get this straight. An egg sits in a calorimeter, held at constant temperature and pressure, and as it develops into a chick you think it takes in heat? What again is the reason? What you've given so far provides absolutely no justification for that belief.

Douglas Theobald said: So, let's get this straight. An egg sits in a calorimeter, held at constant temperature and pressure, and as it develops into a chick you think it takes in heat? What again is the reason? What you've given so far provides absolutely no justification for that belief.

My apologies to all the people smarter than I am, like Joe, who can accept the existence of fantasy stuff like Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information.” Because for the life of me, I cannot get past the fact that even Joe’s attempt to salvage some sense for it fails miserably on the very example he used to help it along. It had two parts;

“Simply put, birds fly and fish swim.”

“A simple definition of Specified Information would be that it is the negative log (to the base 2) of the fraction of those sequences that are better at flying than a bird.”

You see the problem?

Let’s act like good ostriches and pull our heads out of somewhere, and consider the example of the rhea, or the emu, or a slew of other flightless birds. They fly much, much worse than Exocoetidae, but flying fish are said not to fly for some values of “fly.” So, we could substitute bats, who do fly much better than many species of birds. (I’ll skip the thousands of flying insects, or the other thousands that cannot fly). They cannot run worth a damn, so the emu pulls ahead on that score. Which asks another question of CSI, “Do we need to recalculate (not the we can really calculate it) a new “value” of CSI for birds “Running,” as opposed to “Flying?” Or, is it in addition?

The 20 or so species of penguin swim very well, an advantage they share with a dozen or so other bird species, and nearly all fish over most other birds (and bats). (I would say that penguins actually do swim much better than some species of fish, ie many sculpin, and gobies). So, do we calculate a new CSI score for swimming, too?

It seems we can exclude ostriches from the "created kinds" based on the flying, or swimming CSI, but include them from the running CSI. It makes Genesis much simpler, don't it?

The temperature of the environment only affects the temperture range of the interior of the egg (providing for optimum enzyme reactions).

The energy used for the growth and development of the chick is entirely contained within the yolk of the egg. I think the shell is not a gas barrier. If that is correct, then the egg will lose energy (most as heat) as the structure within develops (the chick).

Tulse said:

Gabriel Hanna said:you can't just invent conservation laws.

If you invent one conservation law, does another have to go away?

OgreMkV said: The temperature of the environment only affects the temperture range of the interior of the egg (providing for optimum enzyme reactions). The energy used for the growth and development of the chick is entirely contained within the yolk of the egg. I think the shell is not a gas barrier. If that is correct, then the egg will lose energy (most as heat) as the structure within develops (the chick).

OgreMkV said: The temperature of the environment only affects the temperture range of the interior of the egg (providing for optimum enzyme reactions). The energy used for the growth and development of the chick is entirely contained within the yolk of the egg. I think the shell is not a gas barrier. If that is correct, then the egg will lose energy (most as heat) as the structure within develops (the chick).

JimNorth said: the egg farmer in me says that a 60-watt light bulb hanging approximately one foot above a fertilized egg will eventually lead to the development of a hatched chick. That sounds like an input of energy to me.

I really bet this has been measured. If not, it should be. I think this paper has some on topic citations:

http://jp.physoc.org/content/150/1/239.full.pdf

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: So, let's get this straight. An egg sits in a calorimeter, held at constant temperature and pressure, and as it develops into a chick you think it takes in heat? What again is the reason? What you've given so far provides absolutely no justification for that belief.

As far as I know, all eggs are incubated at some temperature.

Douglas Theobald said:

JimNorth said: the egg farmer in me says that a 60-watt light bulb hanging approximately one foot above a fertilized egg will eventually lead to the development of a hatched chick. That sounds like an input of energy to me.

It of course takes energy to maintain constant temperature in an open system, where heat is always dissipating away. But a calorimeter is very very close, by design, to an isolated system (it is extremely well-insulated and will hold a constant temp for a very long time with no heat input). In fact, it takes no energy input (zero) to maintain constant temp in an isolated system at equilibrium (a perfectly insulated system). If an egg is sitting in our extremely well-insulated calorimeter, you don't need a heater to incubate it, as long as it all starts out at the right temp -- the insulation keeps heat from entering or leaving. Now what happens to the temp in the calorimeter as the egg sits there? If the egg is mostly just oxidizing carbs, then it gives off a little heat itself (carb oxidation is exothermic), and the temp goes up a little bit. On the other hand, many reactions take in a little heat, and those are endothermic. If the development of that egg is endothermic, the temp will drop a bit. But just saying "you gotta maintain temp for the reaction to go" tells you nothing about whether the reaction is exothermic or endothermic.

I only have time for a quick hit and run right now, hopefully I'll get back to this later tonight.

Turns out there have been a couple of calorimetric studies of hen egg gestation (see citations in Lamprecht, Thermochimica Acta 405 (2003) 1-13). The gestation process is exothermic; it's driven by the metabolism of the embryo/fetus/whatever you call it for birds.

To get a handle on the entropy production of a subject in a calorimeter (in this case the egg and its inhabitant), you have to work simultaneously with the mass, energy, and entropy balances for the system. (I have a truly marvelous proof of this, which the margin of this comment is too narrow to contain.)

Actually, penguins fly in the water and birds swim in the air. Ironically, birds do the butterfly stroke.

I've never seen a fish do a legal breaststroke, although turtles qualify.

Flies have been reported to do the backstroke, but only in soup.

Reed A. Cartwright said: I really bet this has been measured. If not, it should be. I think this paper has some on topic citations: http://jp.physoc.org/content/150/1/239.full.pdf

Gary Hurd said: "You see the problem?"

It is not particularly enlightening to look at several individual processes. The overall processes within a living organism have to have a net energy cascade from high to low. You can look in on any particular stage of development of an organism and find one or the other of endothermic or exothermic processes.

If you want to point to a particular stage and show that it is exothermic, you have to ask how that energy got stored there.

Whether some individulal processes are endothermic (need an energy kick over a potential barrier) or are exothermic (are releasing energy as they drop into lower potential energy states) is not the issue I understood was being discussed.

Of course there are both kinds of process taking place. But to release stored energy stored in a dimple at the top of a hill, some input of energy is required. Whatever benefit the organism gains from that depends on the ortganism.

But overall, living organisms require an energy cascade and a heat bath that keeps their internal systems within the temperature range at which they can function.

The phenomena of hypothermia and hyperthermia are telling us about the functioning temperature ranges of the crtitical systems that coordinate all this.

Douglas Theobald said: As an aside, Jim, the weight loss of the egg is apparently due to slight evaporation (water loss).

Mike Elzinga said: Whether some individulal processes are endothermic (need an energy kick over a potential barrier) or are exothermic (are releasing energy as they drop into lower potential energy states) is not the issue I understood was being discussed.

TomA said: Wouldn't there be loss due to metabolism of carbohydrates for energy production in the form of CO2? This also implies that an egg can't be a closed system because of the gas exchange required for metabolism.

JimNorth said: Oh, and the mass of the egg does decrease during incubation by around 2.5% indicating a loss of energy through the eggshell.

Paul Burnett said: Do you mean that 2.5% of the mass of an egg is converted into energy? E=mc² and all that? Can we harness that effect?

John Vanko said: Well, I think the ID crowd sees the problem now. Just look at MathGrrl's forum on UD. They can't give her a decent answer.

mrg said:

John Vanko said: Well, I think the ID crowd sees the problem now. Just look at MathGrrl's forum on UD. They can't give her a decent answer.

That's never been an obstacle before, and I doubt they see the problem now. If they had been inclined to, they would have never gone down this road to begin with.

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said: Whether some individulal processes are endothermic (need an energy kick over a potential barrier) or are exothermic (are releasing energy as they drop into lower potential energy states) is not the issue I understood was being discussed.

I did keep asking you about an egg in a calorimeter. But in any case I think you're probably wrong. For most animals, I'm going to bet that overall they are exothermic (put me or a dog or chicken or a snake or a cricket or a ... in a calorimeter, and we'll give off heat due to respiration). Probably the only major endothermic metabolic process on the planet is photosynthesis, and from there on for everybody else it's downhill exothermy.

mrg said: "If they had been inclined to, they would have never gone down this road to begin with."

SWT said: To get a handle on the entropy production of a subject in a calorimeter (in this case the egg and its inhabitant), you have to work simultaneously with the mass, energy, and entropy balances for the system.

I can only think of (most) fish, and some amphibian eggs that don't require external warming. Not even all amphibians eggs can survive without external heat during incubation, and some fish (esp. Surf Perch: Embiotocidae) internally provide O2 and nutrition to embryos/larva.

Why is this still interesting?

Again today, I suspect you are far smarter than I am, and are enjoying a joke I have failed to understand.

David Utidjian said: I prefer my eggs poached and runny.

Tulse replied to comment from Gabriel Hanna | March 28, 2011 3:21 PM | Reply | Edit
Gabriel Hanna said:you can’t just invent conservation laws.

If you invent one conservation law, does another have to go away?

Yup .....The Lemon Test/Law

Thanks, folks, for an interesting thread so far. No trolls disturbed it (even though one commenter used Troll in their name), unless you count the boiled chicken subthread.

A few thoughts:

1. Maybe I should not have tried to formally define CSI. My point was not that there is some way to make a formula, but that Dembski's argument can skip all the information theory and just rely on the self-evident fact that real organisms are far out in the tails of the distribution of fitness (or flying ability, or swimming speed), so far that mutation alone (no natural selection allowed) could not have got them there. I think my definition will be useful in some future model, but it got everybody focussed on whether one could precisely define it. So let's forget it for now. My point was really that one didn't need to. And that the fatal problem of the Design Inference was elsewhere in the Law which was supposedly able to rule out natural selection as the explanation for the high level of adaptation.

2. Dembski's conservation law sort-of-isn't a conservation law., For evolutionary forces that carry out a deterministic one-to-one mapping in genotype sequence space, he sort-of sketched a proof (a flawed one, as it turned out). For evolutionary forces that had randomness involved, such as random mutation or genetic drift, he didn't get as far, but one can see where he was headed. He chose the 500-bit threshold (for calling the result Complex) on that grounds that random trials in this universe, by all particles since it started, could not be expected to get you any farther than that. (He never dealt with many-to-one mappings, as far as I know). Of course the whole thing, even if formalized and corrected somehow, fails on the grounds that it changes the specification in midstream. Anyway, with the threshold of 500 bits, it is not really conserving anything. More like trying to put a bound on it.

I notice that at Uncommon Descent there is a new post by vjtorley arguing that they don't have to precisely define CSI. However they are still avoiding dealing with the criticisms that Shallit, Elsberry, and I made of the Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information. And those criticisms are lethal. And any attempt to declare that seeing CSI (even if you can formally define it) implies Design (or anyway, not-natural-selection) founders in the absence of a Law like that. Something that rules out natural selection in explaining why fitness is so high, or why birds can fly, or why fish can swim.

Now I will let you go back to Kentucky Fried endothermic chickens and eggs.

Gabriel Hanna said: I'd love to ask Dembski about the Noether theorems. For every quantity that is conserved, there is some associated invariance in physical law. conservation of energy requires that physical laws don't change with time conservation of momentum requires that physical laws don't change with position If "specified information" is conserved, what invariance in physical law corresponds to it?

Mike Elzinga said:

OgreMkV said: The temperature of the environment only affects the temperture range of the interior of the egg (providing for optimum enzyme reactions). The energy used for the growth and development of the chick is entirely contained within the yolk of the egg. I think the shell is not a gas barrier. If that is correct, then the egg will lose energy (most as heat) as the structure within develops (the chick).

Energy storage may be part of the confusion. I don't know of any example of a living organism that does not exist within an energy cascade and within a narrow energy window within that cascade. Any system that is driven by some form of energy flow is not going to violate any laws of physics. It is not possible to have any kind of system that puts out more energy than it takes in. Whatever stored energy it has eventually gets used up unless replenished. Replenishing that energy takes at least as much energy as what is replenished. I think most living systems are quite inefficient in their use of energy. The net flow though them over their lifetimes may be zero, but in the overall process, more energy is spread around and the overall entropy of the universe increases.

I’d like to give a perspective that may be unpopular here. I don’t think Complex Specified Information is a vacuous concept, though we usually do not have enough information to actually calculate numbers for it.

— Joe Felsenstein

• Calculating CSI without any historical knowledge whatsoever can be done with just the barest minimum of historical knowledge.
• Lack of knowledge can lead to inflated estimates of CSI. But of course there isn't anything we don't know about biology, so we can't make that mistake.
• Our calculations of the amount of CSI are reliable because even if they're wrong the real value of CSI hasn't changed.
• Our calculations of the amount of CSI are reliable because even if different people arrive at different values they will eventually just come to agree on which answer is the right one.
• Quote: ...while the CSI of a complex system is calculable, it is not computable, even given a complete physical knowledge of the system.

Harold – in thermodynamics, rates are irrelevant. Enthalpy is a state function. You seem to be confusing enthalpy with free energy (Gibbs free energy is the relevant state function here, being the measure of spontaneity at constant temp and pressure, which is roughly the condition for a chicken, especially an egg in our calorimeter). You can have energy input in endothermic and exothermic reactions. I was gently correcting Mike, as the fact that running a reaction at a lower temperature or a higher temperature does not tell us anything directly about its enthalpy change. And in this case, both reducing and increasing the temperature kill the reaction, so something is wrong with his reasoning.

Mike Elzinga said:

Douglas Theobald said: For most animals, I'm going to bet that overall they are exothermic (put me or a dog or chicken or a snake or a cricket or a ... in a calorimeter, and we'll give off heat due to respiration). Probably the only major endothermic metabolic process on the planet is photosynthesis, and from there on for everybody else it's downhill exothermy.

I am not sure why you are saying life is exothermic based on only one of the processes in the cascade. How long can any process remain exothermic?

harold said: I don't think this discussion is entirely off track, because I think the analogy between creationist misuse of the term "information" and creationist misuse of the terms "entropy" and "thermodynamics" is a valid one. In fact, I would add creationist misuse of the term "probability" to this list.

Venture Free said: Wow, check out the massively obfuscatory post made by Mr. Torley: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-csi-scanner-or-reasonable-and-unreasonable-demands-relating-to-complex-specified-information/

Rolf Aalberg said: From my layman's perspective, is that another way of expressing the question I've been asking myself: Since life is a physical thing, what use is (conservation of) CSI if it can't be tied to physics?

Rolf Aalberg said: There's got to something to that: I sleep both summer and winter with only a thin sheet as cover but quite often I'll wake up hot as hell during the night and have to let some of that heat out. But there's more to it: My wife complains of freezing even with the $1000 down duvet I bought her. Now that's a thermodynamic riddle far more important than CSI to me. (This thread needs a little diversion, doesn't it?)

Gabriel Hanna said: I was thinking about it this way: Dembski says something like "natural laws can't produce new complex specified information". A snowflake is produced by natural laws, for example, so whatever information it has, I guess, isn't "complex specified information".

Make that "on their own turf a better word would be".

mrg

...maybe self designed as per requests from the customer -the enviroment which includes the self designers offspring.

Why invoke actors?

Natural Selection may be an agricultural pre-modern term but at least it doesn't invoke ghosts.

The whole ID arguement is a stage trope invoking Deux Ex Machina to satisfy the stupidest in the audience.

Free entry and "Please buy my book/CD/DVD"

mrg said: The beauty of this argument from their point of view is that heredity, as embodied in the genome, is a distinct feature of life not found in nonlife, and so they can declare that life is Designed while nonlife is not.

DS said: How can anyone take any of this nonsense seriously?

DS said:

mrg said: The beauty of this argument from their point of view is that heredity, as embodied in the genome, is a distinct feature of life not found in nonlife, and so they can declare that life is Designed while nonlife is not.

Gee, now let's think about this. What else can genomes do that nothing else can do? I know, random mutations. What else can life do that nothing else can do? I know, cumulative selection. So, once again, the argument just boils down to refusing to admit that random mutation and natural selection cannot produce adaptations. Once again, unless it can be shown that adaptations do not increase information, then the whole thing falls apart. How could random mutation and natural selection NOT produce adaptation? How could adaptations NOT increase information? How could anyone argue that microevolution is just fine, but adaptations are not? How can anyone take any of this nonsense seriously?

"Random variation, directed selection."

"Directed by whom?"

"The Grim Reaper."

What I'm wondering is, whatever has happened at UD that they would allow a thread like mathgrrl's? Any theories?

aagcobb said: What I'm wondering is, whatever has happened at UD that they would allow a thread like mathgrrl's? Any theories?

aagcobb said: What I'm wondering is, whatever has happened at UD that they would allow a thread like mathgrrl's? Any theories?

aagcobb said: What I'm wondering is, whatever has happened at UD that they would allow a thread like mathgrrl's? Any theories?

The egg is a self contained unit with sufficient nutrition to develop a chick. The incubation temperature is needed for enzyme function until late in the incubation when the temperature must be dropped a little because the chick begins to make its own heat. The weight loss is primarily evaporation through the shell. Of course the shell is a gas exchange medium how else would the aerobic chick breath?

I have to wonder, what's the point of trying to figure out the entropy of something as complicated as an egg?

DS said: How could adaptations NOT increase information?

Yeah, they like to point out that one step of a multiple-step process does not by itself complete the entire process. To that one might say "so what?".

Duplication of a DNA sequence can increase redundancy, in that subsequent changes to one copy won't break the other one, so that the original function remains intact. (At least that's how I understand it.)

Depends on what you mean by 'information'. It does take slightly more effort to transmit two copies of something, even using compression, than it does to transmit one copy of the same thing (using the same compression).

By that definition, it is an increase in information. What ID always does in conflate 'information' with 'meaning', which is totally incorrect.

Of course, a simple point mutation can then alter the meaning of one sequence which changes the information content as well, resulting in more information (by any definition) and more meaning (using the conflated version of meaning).

OgreMkV said: Depends on what you mean by 'information'. It does take slightly more effort to transmit two copies of something, even using compression, than it does to transmit one copy of the same thing (using the same compression).

Is that what one might call flour power?

Get a haircut, hippie.

What I’m wondering is, whatever has happened at UD that they would allow a thread like mathgrrl’s? Any theories?

Mary H said: The egg is a self contained unit with sufficient nutrition to develop a chick. The incubation temperature is needed for enzyme function until late in the incubation when the temperature must be dropped a little because the chick begins to make its own heat. The weight loss is primarily evaporation through the shell. Of course the shell is a gas exchange medium how else would the aerobic chick breath?

My argument is that all living systems require a net energy input over their lifetimes

Mike -

Also note that Douglas Theobald is, as well, 100% correct.

Exothermic reactions release heat (I'm bothering to make obvious statements because someone other than the regular posters may read my comments). Many, many biochemical processes are unequivocally net exothermic. This is not at all at odds with the fact that the biochemistry of the biosphere ALSO requires a power source, and that all living cells, studied at any reasonable scale of space and time, consume, rather than generate power.

Again, those aliens in the Matrix movies are idiots. Of course you can feed a human being (or other homeotherm) and then use the human as a weak heat source. However, it would be far more efficient just to burn the food directly.

That should be "net consume" rather than "net generate", of course.

Shorter Theobald: if you put a charged battery in a calorimeter, its can release stored energy into that closed system.

Shorter Elzinga: right, but since no battery is 100% efficient at storing energy, its always going to take more energy to charge the battery than you get out of it.

Shorter Theobald: if you put a charged battery in a calorimeter, its can release stored energy into that closed system.

eric said: Shorter Theobald: if you put a charged battery in a calorimeter, its can release stored energy into that closed system. Shorter Elzinga: right, but since no battery is 100% efficient at storing energy, its always going to take more energy to charge the battery than you get out of it.

Mike Elzinga said:

eric said: Shorter Theobald: if you put a charged battery in a calorimeter, its can release stored energy into that closed system. Shorter Elzinga: right, but since no battery is 100% efficient at storing energy, its always going to take more energy to charge the battery than you get out of it.

Very nice summary! Thank you. :-)

Douglas Theobald said:

Mike Elzinga said:

eric said: Shorter Theobald: if you put a charged battery in a calorimeter, its can release stored energy into that closed system. Shorter Elzinga: right, but since no battery is 100% efficient at storing energy, its always going to take more energy to charge the battery than you get out of it.

Very nice summary! Thank you. :-)

No, that's not a good summary at all. Many people here, including Elzinga, are confusing enthalpy (H) with energy (E) and with Gibbs free energy (G). Contrary to popular belief, spontaneous reactions do not require energy input -- what they require is free energy (and I'm using this in the technical sense). For any and all reactions, including the development of a chick in an egg in a calorimeter, energy is always conserved -- that's the first law of thermo. The total energy is the same at the beginning and at the end of the reaction. Period. On the other hand, a charged battery can release free energy to power some reaction, but that DOES NOT mean that the reaction is releasing heat (i.e., that it is undergoing an exothermic process). Endothermic processes can be spontaneous, and they can release just as much free energy as an exothermic process (or more).

C.P. Snow had something to say about thermodynamics:

Zeroth: "You must play the game."
First: "You can't win."
Second: "You can't break even."
Third: "You can't quit the game."

JimNorth said: C.P. Snow had something to say about thermodynamics:

Douglas Theobald said:

JimNorth said: C.P. Snow had something to say about thermodynamics:

So did Arnold Sommerfeld: "Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you anymore. " But what he forgot to mention is that the process cycles :)

But, as it turned out, it often didn’t matter which order one took those two courses; so students who took statistical mechanics first would say, “Statistical mechanics made no sense to me until I took thermo.”

Henry J said:

But, as it turned out, it often didn’t matter which order one took those two courses; so students who took statistical mechanics first would say, “Statistical mechanics made no sense to me until I took thermo.”

Interesting! It sounds like one of those courses focuses on the theory, and the other on the methods used in dealing with it. Henry J

Douglas Theobald said:

SWT said: To get a handle on the entropy production of a subject in a calorimeter (in this case the egg and its inhabitant), you have to work simultaneously with the mass, energy, and entropy balances for the system.

I'm really skeptical -- but if you are doing something exceptionally clever, I'm quite interested. As I understand it, the entropy change of the system is never directly measured, only inferred from other state function changes that are directly measured (from, for instance, ΔG or K_eq and ΔH). If we have a calorimetric enthalpy change, and we can get the equilibrium constant for a reaction (and there's usually some experimentally tractable way to do that), then getting the entropy change of the system is easy. The problem here is getting an equilibrium constant or something analogous -- it's hard to even imagine what it could be in the case of an egg hatching a chick.

SWT said: ... I'm not convinced that the experiment can't be done, but I have to admit that I haven't found a way through the analysis to the result of interest. More to come if I need more distraction from things I'm actually supposed to be working on ...