Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin: Growing Majority of Americans Support Teaching Both Sides of Evolution Debate

[PEPCIS]

"PEPCIS:

Ok, let’s see if I can get this back on track. I’ll agree with you that random processes can create patterns that are periodic. If the pattern is aperiodic, then there is a high chance that intelligence is behind it.

You’ve opted to drop the definite/indefinite distinction in patterns in favor of periodic/aperiodic.

Yes. It is more accurate, and I was on the wrong path…

Leela:

I assume periodic means that a patterns repeats and aperiodic means that a pattern does not repeat?

Yes.

 

[PEPCIS]

I noticed that you are maintaining that. Care to answer my question now? What is the intelligence that interprets this language?

If you study linguistics, you’ll note that in language there is someone sending the message, and someone receiving it. Language exist between individuals.

You have said it is a language. Who reads it?

Basic biology informs us that DNA is the language that is used on the micro level. The DNA is unique in that it performs the sending, instructing, and other control aspects within a cell. RNA also plays a crucial role.

I would think that you already knew that…

 

[PEPCIS]

In the english text there are more than 53 possible symbols in each position: ‘A’-‘Z’, ‘a’-‘z’, ‘.’ and some other punctuation. Hence each morse code symbol, one of your “data points”, is worth two bits of information because log[sub]2/sub = 2. Each english language character is worth between 5.7 and 6.0 bits, depending on how much punctuation you allow. The morse code is 4 * 49 = 196 bits while the english text is between 5.7 * 15 = 85.5 bits and 6.0 * 15 = 90 bits. If you removed redundant spaces from the morse code message:

“…/.-… — …- ./-- -.–/.-- … …-. .”

its Shannon information reduces to 4 * 40 = 160 bits. Either way the morse code has more information.

You keep on clinging to the nonsense that the MEDIUM is equal to the information. Not much I can do to help you there. You just have to catch up.

rossum:

Since morse code does not have capital letters and you did not include the final full stop, a fairer comparison would be with “i love my wife”.

When translating between languages, it is neither “fair” nor “unfair” to utilize the syntax and grammatical rules of the language that you are translating to. English utilizes capital letters. Either way, the information in English is actually greater because of this uniqueness that is not shared with the morse code. Morse code cannot include this information.

rossum:

In this case the symbols come from an alphabet of 27 characters, ‘a’-‘z’ and ’ ', so they are each worth 4.75 bits. This gives 14 * 4.75 = 66.5 bits for the english text. Again the morse code has more information.

Once again, we see that you are intent on measuring the data points, and not the actual information.

Which translation has more information? The obvious, and logical, answer is that neither does.

rossum:

The obvious answer is wrong in this case. Using Shannon information they are different, as I have shown. I have shown my calculations; if you disagree then please show yours.

It’s not a question of calculations. It has everything to do with what you are measuring, not how.

If I then increase the amount of information by stating:

“I love my wife, and my children, and my dog, and my cat”, I would significantly increase the amount of information, yet the data points alone are insufficient to quantify how much information I have increased.

rossum:

False. I can easily quantify the amount of Shannon information present in the new string.

You’re only quantifying the medium. Nice try.

Yet, one thing is indisputable: The information has increased.

rossum:

Agreed.

PEPCIS:

How much has the information increased?

rossum:

By 240 bits.

Wrong. The MEDIUM data points increased by 240 bits. This can certainly represent an increase in the information, but an increase of 1 data point in the MEDIUM is not necessarily an increase in information by 1 bit.

 

[Ender]

Telling me about a newspaper story isn’t what I want. If your answer is you trusted a newspaper reporter to accurately quote a biologist, but you really don’t know what you’re talking about, then we can let it rest. But if you’re asserting that you know this for a fact, it’s time to show us.

I was quoting from Dr. Mayr’s book What Evolution Is, copyright 2001, in paperback pp 278-279. If you only have access to a hard copy version it is in Appendix B, section 12: “How can long lasting stasis be explained?” I guess I can only say for a fact that in 2001 the world’s greatest living evolutionary biologist thought it was true; you are disagreeing with him, not with me.

Sideline:

One other point, you use the quote by Ernest Mayer to prove your point that there are living fossils that haven’t changed in millions of years. Well… you are both wrong:

The point above is a teacher’s guide for teaching about crocodiles.

Regarding Ernst Mayr:

• He was a Darwin-Wallace award winner in 1958. The award was set up to be awarded every fifty years by the Linnean Society of London;
• He won the National Medal of Science, the International Prize for Biology, and half a dozen other awards;
• He won the Craford Prize in 1999 for his work in a field for which there is no Nobel Prize awarded;
• Another winner of the Darwin-Wallace award (Steven Jay Gould) referred to him as the “World’s greatest living evolutionary biologist.”

Against that you present a teacher’s guide. I got Mayr’s book specifically so I would be able to quote what Darwinist’s themselves have to say about evolution only to find that when they say something objectionable regardless of who they are they are as easily dismissed as if I was quoting some creationist manifesto.

Ender

 

[The_Barbarian]

(Barbarian suggests that Ender name even one species that remains essentially unchanged for hundreds of millions of years)

I was quoting from Dr. Mayr’s book What Evolution Is, copyright 2001, in paperback pp 278-279. If you only have access to a hard copy version it is in Appendix B, section 12: “How can long lasting stasis be explained?” I guess I can only say for a fact that in 2001 the world’s greatest living evolutionary biologist thought it was true; you are disagreeing with him, not with me.

You’ve simply failed to read it carefully. He says;

“Once a species has acquired effective isolating mechanisms, it may not materially change for millions of years. Indeed, the so-called “living fossils” have hardly changed for hundreds of millions of years.”

So he doesn’t say that species stay the same that long. But families and genera can. There are no known species that have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.

If you doubt this, find us an example. You’ve assumed you knew what you were talking about, and so you confused species with the “living fossils” comprising a good number of different species each. Limulus, (horseshoe crabs) for example, has no living species that go back hundreds of millions of years. Neither do coelacanths. Would it be unreasonable for us to expect you to at least know what the terms mean?

Against that you present a teacher’s guide. I got Mayr’s book specifically so I would be able to quote what Darwinist’s themselves have to say about evolution only to find that when they say something objectionable regardless of who they are they are as easily dismissed as if I was quoting some creationist manifesto.

In this case, you just got tangled up in terminology. If you’d do more than pore over the literature, hoping to find a quote you can use, you wouldn’t be in your present fix. Read it and learn what it means.

If you still want to argue the point, it’s up to you to present a species that has been essentially unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. That would shut us all up, very effectively.

Quote mining is a very dangerous game, if you don’t know what you’re doing. You claim that species have remain unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Are you going to support that claim by showing us an example?

 

[Sideline]

Bone up on it then.

I said the intelligence was copied. The language, the map, the plan encoded in DNA is copied to a receiver.

Where did this come from? I said - a mind. Whose mind? God’s.

What I don’t understand is that you don’t seem to think that your point of view is a religion.

You believe that everything is created by God, but that somehow life is special. It was created “supernaturally” while God created the rest of the universe “naturally”.

You don’t seem to realize that saying that it is supernatural means that it isn’t a science. Once you say that this isn’t a natural event, then it is a religion, or a philosophy, but not a science.

How can you not see that?

 

[Sideline]

• He was a Darwin-Wallace award winner in 1958. The award was set up to be awarded every fifty years by the Linnean Society of London;
• He won the National Medal of Science, the International Prize for Biology, and half a dozen other awards;
• He won the Craford Prize in 1999 for his work in a field for which there is no Nobel Prize awarded;
• Another winner of the Darwin-Wallace award (Steven Jay Gould) referred to him as the “World’s greatest living evolutionary biologist.”

Yes, he is a legend in biology. I can barely read his name without getting chills.

Against that you present a teacher’s guide. I got Mayr’s book specifically so I would be able to quote what Darwinist’s themselves have to say about evolution only to find that when they say something objectionable regardless of who they are they are as easily dismissed as if I was quoting some creationist manifesto.

Ender

Welcome to science. In the great world of science a schmuck like me can say that a genius like Hawking was wrong when it comes to a collapsing universe, as long as I have the data and the arguments to back it up.

Did you read the teacher’s guide? It was really informative.

You should come to a family dinner at my place some time. It is really interesting hearing how I talk to my family compared to how I talk to the rest of the world. When I am talking to my family, I use words and expressions to describe how I am feeling that I would never use with other people. We use a language that is ours, and it makes little sense to those who haven’t grown up with it.

Biology isn’t quite so exclusive, but there is an exclusivity to those that don’t use terms the same way. I assume that Mayr realized that when he was saying that it was virtually the same, he realized that it was only virtually the same morphologically, but maybe I am wrong. I really don’t know what he thought about it. If he really did think that they hadn’t changed in hundreds of millions of years, he was wrong. The lowly teacher’s guide explains why. If you want, I’ll find some award winners that will set the record straight.

I personally love it when people use real world examples and accessible publications, but perhaps that is just a sign of my inferior intellect.

 

[PEPCIS]

. . . birds lack teeth, because there’s a new allele that suppresses the formation of teeth. They still have the genes for teeth. Hence, this mutation added information.

PEPCIS:

Well, that’s a BELIEF

that evolutionists have.
Barbarian:

In the sense that “because experiments have demonstrated that birds retain genes for teeth, scientists believe that the loss of teeth was due to a mutation suppressing their formation.” The loss of teeth required additional information for a suppressor, not the loss of information for teeth.

As I said, BELIEF. It could be that they were CREATED that way, with the gene suppressor already in place. But, evolutionists are too stuck in their fairy tale to consider any other option. All you guys have are “Just-so” stories.
Barbarian:

Knowing what you’re talking about is a great advantage, yes.

Ditto.

Therefore, order is not information (not equal to information), and neither is it sufficient to define information (contrary to what Barbarian was attempting to claim).

Barbarian:

You’ve gotten confused again. I told you that information was a measure of uncertainty. You may find that objectionable, but nevertheless, if you use that definition, it’s possible to greatly compress data and see that it gets transmitted with minimum error. In other words, it works.

PEPCIS:

No, I am not confused on this point. You have repeatedly made assertions that do not stand up to scrutiny. Ender was the one that brought that to light when he noted that you agreed with one of my statements, but a similarly worded statement you disagreed with.

Barbarian:

You are quite confused. A measure of uncertainty (which is what I told you information is) is not “order.”

Firstly, when I told you that “order alone is insufficient to define information”, you said “That’s absurd.” You then went on to relate how the order of the Hurricane vortex is an excellent example of information. Now you contradict yourself to tell me that order is not information.

Secondly, you can sit there and spout out that “information is a measure of uncertainty” all day long, but you would continue to be wrong. The ONLY way that that statement could be rendered as “true” is in the specific context of the transmission of data, when the data points are analyzed for data loss. That is why it is stated that a loss of uncertainty is **an increase **in the verification of data transmission.

Thirdly, when I told you that “order is not equal to information,” you stated “Of course. Information is a measure of uncertainty.” You then claimed that “if you use that definition, it’s possible to greatly compress data and see that it gets transmitted with minimum error.” No one doubts that Shannon’s computations work very well for their intended purpose - the transmission of data. But it does poorly in the realm of identifying biological information.
Barbarian:

And in population genetics, you can measure the amount information in a population.

You can’t even identify it when it smacks you in the face!

 

[buffalo]

What I don’t understand is that you don’t seem to think that your point of view is a religion.

You believe that everything is created by God, but that somehow life is special. It was created “supernaturally” while God created the rest of the universe “naturally”.

You don’t seem to realize that saying that it is supernatural means that it isn’t a science. Once you say that this isn’t a natural event, then it is a religion, or a philosophy, but not a science.

How can you not see that?

I believe everything was created supernaturally. Generation comes from pre-existing matter.

I do not have to go all the way, I choose to. I can stop at the language here on earth coming from aliens.

 

[Sideline]

I believe everything was created supernaturally. Generation comes from pre-existing matter.

Do you remember this quote from post #470?
God “designed” nature to abide by certain laws. Within nature patterns can emerge that He doesn’t need a direct intervention. ( One could say they have been designed/ordered to behave this way) They are natural. In the the other hand we have the supernatural.

Now you are claiming that all nature was created supernaturally.

Okay, what was it? Did God create everything naturally? Or supernaturally? Or a combination of them both?

I do not have to go all the way, I choose to. I can stop at the language here on earth coming from aliens.

Do you think that aliens created life on Earth? No? Then why are we discussing it. If you are saying that something supernatural had to come in and create life, then you aren’t doing science. Do you see that or not?

 

[buffalo]

Now you are claiming that all nature was created supernaturally.

Okay, what was it? Did God create everything naturally? Or supernaturally? Or a combination of them both?

Do you think that aliens created life on Earth? No? Then why are we discussing it. If you are saying that something supernatural had to come in and create life, then you aren’t doing science. Do you see that or not?

The universe was created supernaturally, in the beginning, yes. It is in a state of journeying. Life was created supernaturally and given the ability to naturally generate. The instructions needed are the language of DNA.

 

[The_Barbarian]

You then went on to relate how the order of the Hurricane vortex is an excellent example of information. Now you contradict yourself to tell me that order is not information.

You’re confusing “order” and “information” again. Hurricanes are highly ordered, and contain much information, but order is not information.

Secondly, you can sit there and spout out that “information is a measure of uncertainty” all day long, but you would continue to be wrong.

It’s quite true. And more to the point, using that definition allows us to efficiently transmit information. It works.

Information is a measure of the uncertainty of an event.
tinyurl.com/bosjxg

Information is a measure of uncertainty, or entropy, in a situation. The greater the uncertainty, the more the information. When a situation is completely predictable, no information is present. Most people associate information with certainty or knowledge; consequently, this definition from information theory can be confusing. As used by the information theorist, the concept does not refer to a message, facts, or meaning. It is a concept bound only to the quantification of stimuli or signals in a situa*tion.
shkaminski.com/Classes/Handouts/Communication%20Models.htm#TheShannonWeaverMathematicalModel1949

**The entropy of the unknown result of the next toss of the coin is maximised if the coin is fair (that is, if heads and tails both have equal probability 1/2). This is the situation of maximum uncertainty as it is most difficult to predict the outcome of the next toss; the result of each toss of the coin delivers a full 1 bit of information.

However, if we know the coin is not fair, but comes up heads or tails with probabilities p and q, then there is less uncertainty. Every time, one side is more likely to come up than the other. The reduced uncertainty is quantified in a lower entropy: on average each toss of the coin delivers less than a full 1 bit of information.

The extreme case is that of a double-headed coin which never comes up tails. Then there is no uncertainty. The entropy is zero: each toss of the coin delivers no information.**
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy

The ONLY way that that statement could be rendered as “true” is in the specific context of the transmission of data, when the data points are analyzed for data loss.

Nope:

This paper discusses how Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, came to be regarded a biologist. It was discovered that Shannon’s channel capacity theorem only applied to living organisms and their products, such as communication channels and molecular machines that make choices from several possibilities. Information theory is therefore a theory about biology, which makes Shannon a biologist. Shannon’s work then meant that communications systems and molecular biology are headed on a collision course. As electrical circuits approach molecular sizes, the results of molecular biologists can be used to guide designs. There may come a time when communications and biology will be treated as a single field. The codes discovered for communications potentially teach new biology if the same codes are found in biological system. On the other hand, discoveries in molecular biology about systems that have been refined by evolution for billions of years could help build new and more efficient communications systems.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1578661

That, from an engineer, mind you.

Thirdly, when I told you that “order is not equal to information,” you stated “Of course. Information is a measure of uncertainty.” You then claimed that “if you use that definition, it’s possible to greatly compress data and see that it gets transmitted with minimum error.” No one doubts that Shannon’s computations work very well for their intended purpose - the transmission of data. But it does poorly in the realm of identifying biological information.

See above. Engineers know better. So do biologists. You’re in way over your head here. Go to some of the links, learn about it, and then you can contribute something to the discussion.

Barbarian observes:
And in population genetics, you can measure the amount information in a population.

You can’t even identify it when it smacks you in the face!

Be honest with yourself. I even showed you how to calculate it.

 

[The_Barbarian]

Barbarian observes:
In the sense that “because experiments have demonstrated that birds retain genes for teeth, scientists believe that the loss of teeth was due to a mutation suppressing their formation.” The loss of teeth required additional information for a suppressor, not the loss of information for teeth.

As I said, BELIEF. It could be that they were CREATED that way, with the gene suppressor already in place.

So God created birds with genes for teeth, then realized that was a bad idea, and added a repressor so the genes wouldn’t work? You honestly believe that?

What about the very ancient birds that had teeth? God overlooked them?

But, evolutionists are too stuck in their fairy tale to consider any other option.

Someone is.

All you guys have are “Just-so” stories.

You mean like God making birds with genes for teeth, and then adding genes so they wouldn’t work?

Barbarian observes:
Knowing what you’re talking about is a great advantage, yes.

Ditto.

So tell us how you know God made birds with genes for teeth, and then added genes to prevent them from working. You’re just making it up as you go along, aren’t you?

Barbarian observes:
You’ve gotten confused again. I told you that information was a measure of uncertainty. You may find that objectionable, but nevertheless, if you use that definition, it’s possible to greatly compress data and see that it gets transmitted with minimum error. In other words, it works.

No, I am not confused on this point.

You certainly are. You couldn’t be making up these stories and telling us about them, if not for the definition of “information” that biologists use. It also makes sure that data is accurately moved along wires and fiber optics.

You have repeatedly made ssertions that do not stand up to scrutiny. Ender was the one that brought that to light when he noted that you agreed with one of my statements, but a similarly worded statement you disagreed with.

No. The problem was that Ender confused “species” with “living fossils.” The former are individual taxa, and the latter are survivors of larger groupings. There are genera or families that have existed for hundreds of millions of years, but no species. This is why Ender refuses to name any.

Barbarian observes:
You are quite confused. A measure of uncertainty (which is what I told you information is) is not “order.”

Firstly, when I told you that “order alone is insufficient to define information”, you said “That’s absurd.”

Sorry, no quote-mining allowed. Use the quote in context.

 

[grannymh]

What I don’t understand is that you don’t seem to think that your point of view is a religion.

You believe that everything is created by God, but that somehow life is special. It was created “supernaturally” while God created the rest of the universe “naturally”.

You don’t seem to realize that saying that it is supernatural means that it isn’t a science. Once you say that this isn’t a natural event, then it is a religion, or a philosophy, but not a science.

How can you not see that?

Dear Sideline,

How about considering the human being as a hybrid? His physical body comes about from chemical compounds etc. that are part of the earth’s natural environment. Thus, he is in union with the rest of nature and is a candidate for scientific study especially in the medical field.

If I am understanding the evolutionary theory’s application to the development of the human person, the brain evolved from within the human which makes it in union with nature. In this aspect, the brain would also be a candidate for scientific study.

Herein lies the mystery. There is something ethereal about the brain’s functions. One can observe brain movements or waves when being stimulated by thought or maybe emotions, but where is the thought or the emotion? The effects are part of the natural being, but the actual thinking and feeling are beyond the natural physical being.

I doubt if anyone would call my laughter or crankiness supernatural; yet, they are beyond what science can probe. When the rubber hits the road, all we can say is that the human person is amazing. How a human person can operate with one foot in the physical natural world and the other in the super- or non-natural world is truly amazing.

Religion goes beyond the functions of the brain in that it says that human beings have super-natural souls which distinguish them from other animals. Souls are also the connection between the created human being and the super-natural Creator.

The thing to remember is that the super-natural soul and the totally natural body are not mutually exclusive. Like a hybrid, the human can be considered from both a philosophical, spiritual view point and a scientific view point at the same time. This is a very difficult thing to do in practice because the spiritual and scientism are often opposed to each other.

Blessings,
granny

All humanity is worthy of profound respect.

 

[rossum]

Firstly I notice that you have again failed to answer my often repeated question about how you measure information. Until you can give me a practical method then I will continue to use the methods that I have and that have served science well for many years.

Here are two partial amino acid sequences from a real protein from different species. Which has the more infomration and why? For convenience I have marked the differences:

Species A: fimkcsqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqapgysyt aanknkgiiw
Species B: fVQkcAqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqaAgFsyt DanknkgiTw

I have answered your questions now you please answer mine.

You keep on clinging to the nonsense that the MEDIUM is equal to the information.

When information is transferred from parent to child it is transferred through the MEDIUM of DNA. It is the MEDIUM that contains the information so it is fine to measure the information content of the MEDIUM in order to determine the amount of information present. At the very least we can tell that if the capacity of the MEDIUM is a pint then there was not a transfer of a gallon of information.

I await your answer to my question.

rossum

 

[The_Barbarian]

Herein lies the mystery. There is something ethereal about the brain’s functions. One can observe brain movements or waves when being stimulated by thought or maybe emotions, but where is the thought or the emotion? The effects are part of the natural being, but the actual thinking and feeling are beyond the natural physical being.

A mystery, indeed. You might find Douglas Hoffstader’s The Mind’s I interesting. I disagree with some of the science, and much of the philosophy therein, but it’s an interesting opening to the question. And you don’t seem like an easily corrupted person.

 

[Ender]

Did you read the teacher’s guide? It was really informative.

Yes, I did and I found these comments:

The crocodilian body plan is hugely successful and only minor changes in it have occurred over the last eighty million years.

There is really no such thing as a living fossil because life is always changing.

If you can reconcile the first statement with the second (and as they both appear in the same document I see no difficulty with doing so) then I don’t see how you can object to Mayr’s statement that “the so-called living fossils have hardly changed for hundreds of millions of years.” Are you objecting to Mayr’s claim of hundreds of millions of years (versus the 80my for crocs) or do you object that “hardly changed” means something other than “minor changes”?

I really don’t see a difference between what your source said and what Mayr said except yours gave a time frame for crocs (80my) while Mayr’s time frame was generalized to all species. I found nothing in your reference to contradict Mayr.

Ender

 

[Sideline]

Yes, I did and I found these comments:

The crocodilian body plan is hugely successful and only minor changes in it have occurred over the last eighty million years.

There is really no such thing as a living fossil because life is always changing.

If you can reconcile the first statement with the second (and as they both appear in the same document I see no difficulty with doing so) then I don’t see how you can object to Mayr’s statement that “the so-called living fossils have hardly changed for hundreds of millions of years.” Are you objecting to Mayr’s claim of hundreds of millions of years (versus the 80my for crocs) or do you object that “hardly changed” means something other than “minor changes”?

I really don’t see a difference between what your source said and what Mayr said except yours gave a time frame for crocs (80my) while Mayr’s time frame was generalized to all species. I found nothing in your reference to contradict Mayr.

Ender

Okay, you got me. I shouldn’t have said Mayr was wrong. His answer was incomplete and… obviously given your reaction… misleading. But I should not have said he was wrong. The changes… to body shape… were only minor. I should have assumed he meant only body shape. Even though a body can have the same shape and have a number of changes that don’t fossilize. I should have still assumed that his generalization was every bit as valid as a detailed account.

So, now that we are admitting our errors, do you want to admit that it has been amply demonstrated why such species would occur? How evolution can choose stability over change?

 

[PEPCIS]

"PEPCIS:

You then went on to relate how the order of the Hurricane vortex is an excellent example of information. Now you contradict yourself to tell me that order is not information.

You’re confusing “order” and “information” again.

You related how the order of the Hurricane vortex is an excellent example of information. Now you contradict yourself to tell me that order is not information. Yep, you be confoosed.
Barbarian:

Hurricanes are highly ordered, and contain much information, but order is not information.

Fantasy land and contradiction go hand in hand.

Secondly, you can sit there and spout out that “information is a measure of uncertainty” all day long, but you would continue to be wrong.

Barbarian:

It’s quite true.

Yes, I know that it’s quite true that you would continue to be wrong. Truth doesn’t change just because you sit in fantasy.
Barbarian:

And more to the point, using that definition allows us to efficiently transmit information.

No, more to the point, that definition does not change how information is transmitted. The definition could be tossed into the sea of forgetfullness, and never to be remembered, and Shannon’s computations would continue to work - irrespective of your fantasies.

Information is a measure of the uncertainty of an event.
tinyurl.com/bosjxg

Too bad you can’t even read your own stuff for comprehension. The book you cited states that “information is a measure of the uncertainty ABOUT THE OCCURRENCE of an event.” Of course, you’d be wrong on both counts, because whether information is stated to be the uncertainty of an event or the uncertainty about the occurrence of an event is SPECIFIC TO THE TRANSMISSION OF INFORMATION.

It is SPECIFIC to that discipline, and that discipline alone. It is insufficient to account for the actual measurement of information, because it can only measure the medium that the information is carried on.

Information is a measure of uncertainty, or entropy, in a situation. The greater the uncertainty, the more the information. When a situation is completely predictable, no information is present. Most people associate information with certainty or knowledge; consequently, this definition from information theory can be confusing. As used by the information theorist, the concept does not refer to a message, facts, or meaning. It is a concept bound only to the quantification of stimuli or signals in a situa*tion.
shkaminski.com/Classes/Handouts/Communication%20Models.htm#TheShannonWeaverMathematicalModel1949

Once again you fail to comprehend what you read. Notice that Stephen Littlejohn states that information theorists use a definition that is UNIQUE to the trasmission of information (“As used by the information theorist…”). Notice also that the definition does not apply to “…a message, facts, or meaning.”

In other words, the definition that information theorists use to denote information does not even deal with REAL information, because the definition that information theorists use for information “…is a concept bound only to the quantification of stimuli or signals in a situation.” In other words, it’s the MEDIUM, not the message.

PEPCIS:

The ONLY way that that statement could be rendered as “true” is in the specific context of the transmission of data, when the data points are analyzed for data loss.

"…Information theory is therefore a theory about biology, which makes Shannon a biologist."

From post #535: "…please show me ANY article where Claude Shannon published in a Biological, peer reviewed magazine, and he specifically dealt with a Biology subject.

I’ll be waiting, but not holding my breath…"

It’s one thing to say that Shannon’s theory is applicable to Biological systems where information is transferred, but quite another to insist beyond intelligence and reason that Shannon was a biologist, when his discipline was electrical engineering.
Barbarian:

That, from an engineer, mind you.

That was from a knucklehead.

 

[Ender]

Okay, you got me.

No, we just got tangled in terms the preciseness of which was not relevant to the real debate anyway.

do you want to admit that it has been amply demonstrated why such species would occur? How evolution can choose stability over change?

I don’t think Darwinism has answered this question yet. If you assume that I say this without meaning to imply that it somehow refutes Darwinism you might be less adamant about rejecting it. Here is Mayr again:

Stasis apparently indicates the possession of a genotype that is able to adjust to all changes in the environment without the need for changing its basic phenotype. To explain how this is done is the task of developmental genetics.

I take “to explain this” to mean that it has not yet been explained … not that Darwinism will forever be incapable of explaining it.

Still, my original question was somewhat different. According to Mayr’s definition of stasis - “A period in the history of a taxon during which evolution seemed to have been at a standstill.” - I still haven’t seen a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon. I accept that a changing environment may drive evolution at a higher rate but, based on the “three basic facts” that Rossum listed in post #500, I don’t find any explanation for why evolution might virtually stop simply because the environment is stable, as those “facts” are independent of the nature of the environment.

Ender