Creationism v. Intelligent Design v. Evolution

  • Thread starter Thread starter sea_krait
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
For those interested in the informational aspects of DNA, I suggest the book Programming of Life by Donald E. Johnson. From the back cover: “This book highlights the informational aspects of life that are generally overlooked or ignored in chemical and biological evolutionary scenarios.”

Peace,
Ed
 
Sorry, didn’t see your qualification criteria before I voted.

It’s good to see that the right answer is (currently) in the lead, although it’s depressing to see the high proportion of people who reject the irrefutable evidence in favour of what they merely wish were true.

Still, it’s early days, who knows what will happen. But I guess you’d better subtract one vote in favour of the fact of Evolution, as I’m not catholic.
 
One vote for “don’t know.”

IMHO, it’s an incomplete picture. Drawing conclusions on incomplete data is, at best, a best guess.
 
balt_orioles54 said:
The starting point of the central thesis is:
  1. DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism.
Click to expand...
DNA is indeed a molecule with a pattern. It has some similarities with human designed codes, but these similarities are not an exact match. DNA is not a language. DNA is an information storage mechanism.
  1. All codes are created by a conscious mind;
Click to expand...
All known codes have been created by conscious human minds. You cannot use DNA as an example, because that is under discussion. Do you have an example of a code that was not created by a conscious human mind?
there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information.
Click to expand...
We disagree, there are known and observed natural processes that can increase both Shannon Information and Kolmogorov Information. Your sources are lying to you here. There are also processes known to science that copy information. Copying information from one place to another can increase the amount of information at the destination without actually generating any new information.
  1. Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.
Click to expand...
False. The correct conclusion is “Therefore DNA was designed by a human mind.” You cannot arbitrarily extend that restricted known result of your #2 to all minds. I am sure you can see that this conclusion is false, hence we can be sure that there is an error somewhere in your argument.
If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs naturally, you’ve toppled the proof. All you need is one.
Click to expand...
I can. The dance language of bees transfers information from the scout bee to the other bees in the hive.
And DNA doesn’t count as a choice, Rossum
Click to expand...
I didn’t pick DNA.

rossum
 
wanstronian said:
Sorry, didn’t see your qualification criteria before I voted.

It’s good to see that the right answer is (currently) in the lead, although it’s depressing to see the high proportion of people who reject the irrefutable evidence in favour of what they merely wish were true.

Still, it’s early days, who knows what will happen. But I guess you’d better subtract one vote in favour of the fact of Evolution, as I’m not catholic.
Click to expand...
I’m interested in why you post here since you think religion is irrational. I mean if Catholics believe in Jesus Christ and are therefore, irrational, then what’s the point?

Peace,
Ed
 
rossum said:
We disagree, there are known and observed natural processes that can increase both Shannon Information and Kolmogorov Information. Your sources are lying to you here.
Click to expand...
You’re my source here.

There’s a difference between Shannon Information and Functional Information.
 
reggieM said:
You’re my source here.

There’s a difference between Shannon Information and Functional Information.
Click to expand...
Yes. Shannon Information has a mathematical definition, while Functional Information does not appear to. What is “Functional” varies from place to place. Thick white fur is functional in the Arctic and non-functional at the Equator. How are you going to measure Functional Information? What if the bear walks from Equador to Northern Canada? Would that be a natural increase in Functional Information?

rossum
 
rossum said:
What is “Functional” varies from place to place.
Click to expand...
How do you know?
How much does it vary?
… Functional Information does not appear to [have a mathematical definition].
Click to expand...
I guess that’s something that is impossible for science to ever determine. We can observe function but not measure it. Right?
 
You should write to these guys and explain that it’s not possible to measure functional information …

Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity

Complex emergent systems of many interacting components, including complex biological systems, have the potential to perform quantifiable functions. Accordingly, we define “functional information,” I(Ex ), as a measure of system complexity. For a given system and function, x (e.g., a folded RNA sequence that binds to GTP), and degree of function, Ex (e.g., the RNA–GTP binding energy), I(Ex ) = −log2[F(E x)], where F(Ex ) is the fraction of all possible configurations of the system that possess a degree of function ≥ Ex .

I notice that they are all affiliated with these Creationist Organizations also …

Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution, 5251 Broad Branch Road NW, Washington, DC 20015-1305;
‡California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research and Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology, University of California, 717 Potter Street MC 3224, Berkeley, CA 94720-3224; and
§Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Molecular Biology and Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, 7215 Simches Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114-2696
 
Another creationist publication:

National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD, 20894 USA

Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2217542/

Yes, the authors do believe in God so that should disqualify them from any scientific research, but somehow this paper slipped through Peer Review.
 
This is a nice illustration of the difference between Shannon Information and Functional Information:

“Shannon information,” means mere complexity. Under this definition, a functionless stretch of randomly garbled junk DNA might have the same amount of “information” as a fully functional gene of the same sequence-length. For example, under Shannon information the following two strings contain identical amounts of information:

String A:

SHANNONINFORMATIONISAPOORMEASUREOFBIOLOGICALCOMPLEXITY

String B:

JLNUKFPDARKSWUVEYTYKARRBVCLTLODOUUMUEVCRLQTSFFWKJDXSOB

Both String A and String B are composed of exactly 54 characters, and each string has exactly the same amount of Shannon information–about 254 bits. Yet clearly String A conveys much more functional information than String B, which was generated using a random character generator.10 For obvious reasons, Shannon complexity has a long history of being criticized as an unhelpful metric of functional biological information. After all, biological information is finely-tuned to perform a specific biological function, whereas random strings are not. A useful measure of biological information must account for the function of the information, and Shannon information does not take function into account.

Some leading theorists recognize this point. In 2003, Nobel Prize winning origin of life researcher Jack Szostak wrote in a review article in Nature lamenting that the problem with “classical information theory” is that it “does not consider the meaning of a message” and instead defines information “as simply that required to specify, store or transmit the string.” According to Szostak, “a new measure of information – functional information – is required” in order to take account of the ability of a given protein sequence to perform a given function.

In 2007 Szostak co-published a paper Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with Carnegie Institution origin of life theorist Robert Hazen and other scientists furthering these arguments. Attacking those who insist on measuring biological complexity using the outmoded tools of Shannon information, the authors wrote, “A complexity metric is of little utility unless its conceptual framework and predictive power result in a deeper understanding of the behavior of complex systems.”
 
edwest2 said:
I’m interested in why you post here since you think religion is irrational. I mean if Catholics believe in Jesus Christ and are therefore, irrational, then what’s the point?

Peace,
Ed
Click to expand...
That’s a good question. But why direct it solely at me? Start a new thread open to all non-theists and I’ll gladly contribute. I think it’ll be an interesting discussion.
 
reggieM said:
46% believe in Intelligent Design or Creationism.
Click to expand...
Excellent point - I lost sight of the fact that ID is merely Creationism trying to appear scientific.

It’s even more depressing than I thought…
 
reggieM said:
How did you arrive at that conclusion?
Click to expand...
A number of ways:
  1. The ID hypothesis is invariably put forward by theists. Theists believe in God, therefore they believe the “intelligent designer” to be God, even if some pretend otherwise. So in both cases, the existence of everything boils down to “God did it.” Neither variant offers any supporting evidence or explanatory power. They’re effectively the same thing.
Do you believe in ID? Who do you think the designer is?
  1. From the horse’s mouth
  2. It’s obvious. Science has disproved Creation as written in the bible - ID is the theistic response which allows the retention of God as the ultimate creator, while having to concede the irrefutable findings of science.
 
reggieM said:
You should write to these guys and explain that it’s not possible to measure functional information …

Click to expand...

Thank you for reminding me of the Hazen paper, I had forgotten about it. If you want to calculate the Hazen Functional Complexity of something then there is a calculator here, about half way down the page. You will need to know both the total number of possible configurations and the number of functional configurations (which will will in general be greater than one). For example there are obviously well over 6 billion functional DNA configurations for a human being.

The difficulty is in accurately estimating the number of functional configurations. How would you do that? It is not difficult for simple cases, such as RNA-GTP binding, but it is extremely difficult for complex cases.

rossum​
 
wanstronian said:
A number of ways:
  1. The ID hypothesis is invariably put forward by theists. Theists believe in God, therefore they believe the “intelligent designer” to be God, even if some pretend otherwise. So in both cases, the existence of everything boils down to “God did it.” Neither variant offers any supporting evidence or explanatory power. They’re effectively the same thing.
Do you believe in ID? Who do you think the designer is?
  1. From the horse’s mouth
  2. It’s obvious. Science has disproved Creation as written in the bible - ID is the theistic response which allows the retention of God as the ultimate creator, while having to concede the irrefutable findings of science.
Click to expand...
  • Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), p. 36.
    Code: 
      		 			Consider  some feature of the universe, such as its beginning to exist (assuming  that it did begin to exist). There are various competing explanations we  can consider for such a feature, and one of those explanations will be  that the feature was due to an intelligent cause. We may judge this  explanation to be the best one but it doesn’t follow that the  explanation is true. The right account could be that there’s no  explanation at all for why the universe has the feature that it does.
Thus, if the doctrine of intelligent design is as I’ve stated above, with the claim that the best explanation for the features is an intelligent cause, then I endorse intelligent design. I can do this, as an atheist, because I reject the inference that the best explanation is true or even likely to be true. My opinion is that it’s probably the case that the true account is that there’s no explanation at all.
 
wanstronian said:
Excellent point - I lost sight of the fact that ID is merely Creationism trying to appear scientific.

It’s even more depressing than I thought…
Click to expand...
Why are you depressed? Of what possible consequence does this have for the world at large? No one has given me a straight answer on this. If I believe differently will l forget how to use my cell phone?

Peace,
Ed
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top