Posted on 12/28/2005 3:01:53 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
I looked at the last 20 posts on this thread and didn't see anything by you about fossil evidence; just name-calling "jerk", "blowhard".
Calling people names, as here, is all you have. I have always made detailed, precise, respectful arguments. Many other people have attested to this. Want to explain why that makes me a nutcase. You are the one who should go away.
Want to back up your claims with evidence? I acted like a "jerk" because I didn't ping you when responding to someone else who was responding to you?
I am "whining" because I call you out for having nothing more than name-calling in your rhetorical quiver?
You know, you seem like a very unhappy person. I suggest you find a program or something. There is help for people like you out there.
You'll notice that my posts, as always, are backed up with something us creationists like to call "facts". Your accusations are backed up entirely with more accusations. You ever wonder why that is?
You mean, like What is this? The Beavis and Butthead hour?...Do we need a separate, plastic-coated kids' table for you people?
Delusional. You're now on my Virtual Ignore list. I've no doubt you'll precisely and respectfully claim as evidence you 'squished' me.
Responding to myself here but ... just for the record, I'm going to do my best to ignore the RWP person from this point on and allow all slanders, insults, ad hominems, absurdly false and unsupported claims to go unanswered regardless how rude, baseless, or vulgar.
It is, after all, the Christian thing to do...
If he decides to make a coherent point without insulting anyone, someone please ping me.
Actually, I find RWP to be one of the most coherent posters on these pathetic, tired ID threads...
Thanks. Appreciate it.
Wow. That's fascinating. Okie dokie.
Can you point me to his most coherent argument against Dr. Sewell's article. Coherent means free from slander, insult, presuppositional dismissal of people he disagrees with. (I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I just didn't see it).
Thanks.
P.S. One of his most coherent arguments against me was where he accused me without basis of being "as ignorant of Latin as [I] am of science" despite the fact that not only had I not indicated any ignorance of science -- oh, except for being skeptical of evolution -- but also the fact that I was a Classics Scholar at my private English school, and the son of a Classicist. After pointing this out to RWP, he fell oddly silent and forgot about me. :-)
Doh!
It's Christian to wallow in ignorant sanctimony?
js113, where have you been? You know what, I hate to get all sentimental and stuff, but after dealing with these other folks I've been starting to miss you (and b_sharp and bobdsmith). Good to know you're still there.
By the way, those are some excellent vocab words you used there!
Seriously, though, last time we talked we were actually having a decent conversation. If I recall correctly, we had decided to place the abiogenesis issue off the table for the meantime because you guys admit you have no clue how that happened, and you had asked what processes of evolution might possible violated the SLoT.
I did some looking around, and found that the most developed argument seems to be that:
1) The genome contains information;
2) Evolution involves adding information to the genome via mutation+selection.
3) The SLoT, as extended in Information Theory (Shannon, etc.) says you can't do that spontaneously (ok, it's a bit more formal than that, but you get the idea).
Here's a site on your side that summarizes some of this: http://home.mira.net/~reynella/debate/spetner.htm. (See, I'm not scared to read your stuff!!!)
Anyway, your position is that mutations can add information to the genome in the "Shannon" sense, I take it? And this isn't a problem from a SLoT point of view because... (I'm still reading).
NOTE: this is a bit like arguing with liberals; I find I'm usually better figuring out what their best arguments are myself. (just being a "jerk"!) :)
Natural selection explains it perfectly. They can only continue to hold onto the ToE in an information-selected environment. At the racetrack blinders are used to similar effect.
So only the selectively blind survive as ToE-ers.
My twin sons when they were wee lads would have loved it if their room self-organized upon turning on the lights. But, not so. If anything the heat of the lights causes more dust to fly.
Somehow if I utter the words "hurricane" and "snowflake" I have refuted your point.
Not sure quite how though...
Yeah, but it will certainly show up if God wants it to.
Shannon didn't study information. He studied information transfer. Information, that is what information is, is nothing but "philosophy". Yet without a common understanding of what the "information" is that we are talking about discussions run in circles.
All structure is in the mind's-eye of the observer. What fosiil record is there of the mind's eye?
Not only here, but in any real system. What needs to be understood is that if the system exists, then it doesn't violate the 2nd law. There are no biological systems that violate the second law. They all run off the Sun's output, or the Earth's heat and chemical energy.
"Second, your other analysis seems to ignore completely the development of Information Theory, and to mistakenly assume that the primary SLoT objection to information-adding mutations is thermal."
The entropy of information theory and thermodynamic entropy are not the same. In general they can be equated, but in that case the thermodynamic meaning renders the information theory obtuse and overly complex. I've seen many attempts to equate them and most are wrong. Schneider's informaiton theory is the best I've seen, but his grasp of thermodynamic entropy isn't that good. Here's a page from one of his papers where he calculates the minimum energy to communicate one bit of info.
Here he considers a coin flip and mixes thermodynamic entropy with info theory info-Hbefore-Hafter. He gets ln(omega) right (1.14*1023) for a 3g Cu penny at 300K, but then says the number of microstates decreases by 1/2 after a coin flip. That is wrong. The number of microstates can change at 300K by 1/2, if the penny's weight decreases by 1/2. The penny's microstates aren't a function of marks placed anywhere on it. As far as counting microstates goes, all that matters is 3gs of CU at 300K.
His information theory concerns are satisfied, as he does elsewhere, by simply ignoring the microstates. That's appropriate, because they don't change here. They don't change significantly in his other bio examples I saw, or the energy for the interaction is clearly provided allowing the discount. All that matters is noting the features that have meaning as far as info is concerned. In this penny case calculating a real entropy change would require giving a time to flip and calculating according the heat required to accelerate and the disipation required to gain a result. I haven't verified his calculation of the Emin for any bit change in general yet.
The second law is thermodynamics and refers to energy. Information theory is not thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is all that's important for the physics. Applied information theory, as I just noted for Schneider's penny example, is not thermodynamics. He touches on this elsewhere by providing an ACS educaitonal article about papers tossed around the room, or neatly organized as having the same entropy, but forgot it in this case. Note that paper arrangement can transmit a message, but any entropy change is contained in calculating the heat disapation during the acceleration and drag of rearrangement. The microstates of the papers don't care hwere they are, or what's written on them.
"By the way, you previously stated, if I'm not mistaken, that the genome contains no information? Surely this is a rather "innovative" suggestion?"
My comments above should clarify that. The thermodynamics are independent of what is represented in the DNA. Schneider's reciver of information theory is the reader of the DNA. Themodynamics has no senders and receivers and as above doesn't recognize "signals", "order/disorder", or other qualificaitons.
" if you use the Shannon-Weaver index to measure "complexity", then your "complexity" increases when you add random noise "
Yes. So? If the noise reduced the channel capacty the signal won't be recognized. That's a nonviable situation. Biologists study existing, viable organisms.
"to talk about information solely in terms of the bits in the message outside of the receivers interpretive "filter" may not be a complete understanding of the issue."
What matters is Esignal/Enoise. That can be observed and measured. It can be observed if that ratio is greater than (2r-1)/r. Where r=bit rate / bandwidth. If noise, or bit rate is a problem, the system is not viable and will not be observed. The 2nd law is never violated in any real process.
That's a darn good point. Perhaps the creationist side is guilty of this too -- don't know, I spend more time reading evolutionist arguments -- but the evo side of this seems to obscure this fact in everything I'v read on this topic. Bits don't "mean" squat in and of themselves. It's dependent completely on the decoder, right? Because information has only been transferred once it's been decoded? Do you know of any study of the application of information theory to genome evolution that does not obscure this at all?
Yet what information is created? Organization is not information of itself. It is only some intelligent observer that can apply any pattern of information onto it.
When an obsever takes on a bent towards ToE, he drops the "amazing" first, and as time goes by becomes less and less able or motivated to apply any informative patterns. For all become equivalent for defiency of a philosophy.
And once equivalency takes hold, it affects all cognition and interaction -- they become more and more base, animalistic, crude.
Simple socio-physics.
QED. ToE, Dawkins-extreme, is very anti-science.
I think the evolutionist would argue that anyone can observe "patterns", but are you saying that without the philosophical basis upon which to ascribe meaning to some patterns over others, science becomes impossible?
(Or do I misunderstand?)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.