No. I just have a problem with their Creator superstition.
No. I dismiss their superstition for being nothing but superstition.
Got any valid and verifiable evidence to back that up? Any valid logic?
Didn't think so.
Pretty much.
Do you realize how many of the things you believe are meaningless in reality, because your beliefs are faith? Probably not. The answer is that ALL of your beliefs that are faith are meaningless; many of them are--in fact of objective reality--just wrong.
Since scientists are, in fact of reality, currently testing, studying, and/or observing the origins of the universe, the origins of life, and macro-evolution despite your manifestly retarded denial of reality; no, I see nothing wrong with that. I find it to be a virtue of science and scientists, that with improving understanding of the origins of the universe, the origins of life, and macro-evolution consequent from the testing, studying, and/or observing performed by scientists leads them to revisions and/or adjustments of their conclusions.
The notion you are struggling to identify and grasp is the virtue of "integrity of intellectual honesty." The reason you are struggling Youwerecreated, is that you--just like your fellow Christian Creationists--just don't have it.
If you did have integrity of intellectual honesty, you'd be appalled at your insistence that your beliefs--your convictions in your (absolute) certainty of the reality of some thing(s)--are validated solely upon the meaningless basis that you believe your beliefs to be valid.
Nonsense. Basing one's beliefs upon verifiable evidence and valid logic; validating those beliefs against valid logic applied to the verifiable evidence; admitting to uncertainties and qualifying one's conclusions accordingly; admitting to errors when discovered in the light of better or more complete information, and adjusting one's beliefs in accord with valid logic and verifiable evidence so they conform more closely to objective reality, is in no manner disingenuous.
Let me explain to you what "disingenuous at the highest degree" really is. It is holding your preconceptions as unassailably valid without any basis or foundation in validly verifiable evidence and/or valid logic; it is validating your convictions of absolute certainty by through obtuse denials of any and all contradicting evidences and/or valid logic; it is validating your evidences against your conclusions, rather than validating you conclusions against valid logic applied to verifiable evidence; it is invalidating evidence and arguments solely on the basis that they contradict your baseless preconceived conclusions.
"
Disingenuous at the highest degree" is your insistence upon the validity of logical fallacies to "prove" your point; it is refusing to bring verifiable evidence AND valid logic to support your point, or refusing to admit that you cannot bring verifiable evidence AND valid logic to support your point; it is your denial of the reality of the appurtenances of an objectively real existence; it is your demand that "
nothing" is really "some(
objectively real)thing" that explains everything.
What "
disingenuous at the highest degree" really is, is your shameless misrepresentations of your opponent's positions, the claims and assertions of opposing experts, and the actual descriptions, claims and predictions made by the scientific theories you oppose. It is your adamant refusal to honestly provide the exact same specificity of explanation regarding the mechanisms of your Creation "theory" that you require evolution scientists to provide when they explain their claims--including the means by which you can test and verify the claims you make regarding your "theory."
The unrevised and/or unadjusted status of your Creationism has nothing to do with its eternal consistency with reality; rather, you Creationists have imbued--without valid basis--eternal consistency in this invented Creator of yours, and you reject the validity of any reason to adjust and/or revise your preconceived "explanations" and conclusions on the basis of that invalidly asserted eternal consistency with reality. The point here is that you and the Christian Creationism community, all in agreement on your preconceived "explanations" and conclusions, assert your preconceived "explanations" and conclusions as unassailable facts of reality without any regard to valid logic applied to verifiable evidence--most especially when valid logic applied to verifiable evidence demonstrates otherwise.
"
Disingenuous at the highest degree" really is
YOU.
I guess you have no answers to the questions asked nor a response for the actual scientists that disagree with your so called valid logic and evidence.
This is laughable. You are literally denying that I answered your questions as you blockquote the very answers you deny exist.
What a douche.
Right. Superstitiously anthropomorphizing retards might embrace a theory where a "cell created itself and then evolved it's way into what we see today", and you have certainly been laying that bullshit strawman at the feet of those who embrace the Theory of Evolution as if
they assert a belief that a "cell created itself and then evolved it's way into what we see today," but no real, valid scientist actually "accepts any theory that has been given that tries to explain how the first cell created itself and then evolved it's way into what we see today."
More importantly, no real scientist--no rational person with integrity of intellectual honesty--accepts your intellectually dishonest Christian Creationist
misrepresentations of Evolution proponents and the Theory of Evolution, to say they assert that a cell created itself and then evolved it's way into what we see today.
I don't accept your misrepresentations as valid or your gifts as genuine; I don't need any favors from the likes of you.
I'm pretty sure you are misrepresenting Francis Crick's actual belief, ... but even if you aren't,
SO WHAT? Francis Crick still accepted the validity of the Theory of Evolution:
And he found very little validity in the alternative you present:
It looks like he didn't express that he thought it was "just not possible," and it also looks like you're still full of shit.
How about that?
It seems his actual answer was that his position "... should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that [life] could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions."
Not at all surprising. I have pointed this out to you before, and i will point it out to you once again, without any fear that you will refuse to understand what is being explained to you.
Scientists--real scientists, practicing actual valid science--allow for the possibility that a creator is responsible for the existence of everything they observe; applying valid logic to the verifiable evidence simply does not currently point to that conclusion. However, there is no ontological barrier that would prevent a real scientist--practicing actual valid science--from concluding that a creator is responsible for the existence of everything he observes if applying valid logic to the verifiable evidence points to that conclusion.
Christian Creationists, on the other hand, having already presumed the absolute certainty of the existence of this invented Creator of theirs, simply dismiss any verifiable evidence that contradicts their baseless preconceptions, on the basis that such evidence does not support their baseless conclusions. Christian Creationists have imposed upon themselves an intellectually dishonest denial of the significant validity of select evidence and logically valid arguments that do not conform to, validate, or support their conclusions. Christian Creationists have sanctimoniously, without basis in any valid reasoning, for the purposes of promoting the illusion of their intellectual/spiritual/moral superiority, imposed upon themselves an ontological barrier preventing them from concluding that a Christian Creator is not necessary for the existence of everything they observe; especially if applying valid logic to the verifiable evidence points to that conclusion.
The reason Christian Creationists look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions is that Christian Creationists are intentionally intellectually dishonest superstitious retards.
SO WHAT?
Yes.
SO WHAT?
Can adding noise increase the information in a signal?
Yes, again. Again,
SO ******* WHAT?.
Look at the kind of rational scientist that rejects your theory the way it is taught.
Now catch up with the thread.
No rational person could accept the strawman version of Evolution you present. Certainly, rational scientists with integrity of intellectual honesty most certainly reject disingenuous misrepresentations of the Theory of Evolution offered by
intellectually dishonest Christian Creationists when they misrepresent rational scientists as rejecting the actual valid Theory of Evolution.
Actual, rational scientists (like
Crick and Shannon) most likely find the actual valid theory of Evolution taught and/or presented by rational folks with integrity of intellectual honesty to be easily and substantially acceptable on intellectually valid grounds.
Then you have no idea what the theory of abiogenesis is.
Crick was directly quoted from one of his books.
Prove adding noise to a signal adds information to a signal.
Prove adding noise to a signal can improve the signal .
Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Design
That is the “math” of evolution. Whether we’re considering the evolution of falcons or any other organism, the changes over time have to come from changes in the DNA. The entire plan for a falcon is contained in its DNA, a molecule with a 4-letter alphabet. A strand of DNA can have anywhere from 500 thousand letters (in the case of the smallest known parasite) to 3 billion letters (man and large animals).
Darwinism says that Random Mutation (copying errors in the DNA alphabet) produce modified falcons, and that natural selection (survival of the fittest as inferior falcons die out and superior falcons dominate) weeds out the losers. What remains is new innovations in falcon design.
That’s what Darwinism says. It’s elegantly simple. Almost intuitively obvious.
Can it be verified?
No, and yes.
One of the difficulties with Darwinism is that it evidently takes millions of years and many billions of falcons to produce significant change over time. This makes it very hard to empirically prove Darwinism in the short lifetime of a human being. Practically speaking, Darwinism doesn’t even provide us with very many testable hypotheses. Thus the vast majority of the evidence for evolution is anecdotal.
Anecdotal evidence is unreliable evidence based on personal experience that has not been empirically tested, and which is often used in an argument as if it had been scientifically or statistically proven. The person using anecdotal evidence may or may not be aware of the fact that, by doing so, they are generalizing. (–From Wikipedia) An example of anecdotal evidence would be “My grandma smoked and drank whiskey every day and she lived to be 95, so cigarettes and whiskey are good for you.” Not all anecdotal evidence is misleading, of course, but it’s not proof.
But with Darwin, the principle itself should be easy enough to demonstrate. I know as an engineer with a strong math background that in principle it should be easy enough to statistically answer the question:
Is the formula
Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Design
Mathematically true, or false?
Hey, if we’re going to get answers to these questions, we have to ask questions that actually have a possibility of being answered in the first place. Most arguments for and against evolution are argued at an intuitive level, with only anecdotal evidence. The way most questions are asked in the origins debate, they are unanswerable. The question as I posed it is much, much simpler and can certainly be verified.
Is Natural Selection Valid?
I shouldn’t have to spend much time defending the idea that Natural Selection is a perfectly valid concept that we see proven all the time. We all know and observe every day that winners win and losers lose. We know that babies with severe birth defects often do not survive, much less thrive. We know that Natural Selection weeds out losers. Natural Selection works.
The real question is, does Random Mutation produce winners? Does it create plans for new muscles in the eye of the falcon? Does it add information to the code of DNA? That’s the question I set out to answer.
Like I said, DNA is a blueprint for life. It’s a code and a language. It has an alphabet (A = Adenine, G = Guanine, T = Thymine, C = Cytosine) and that alphabet spells out the instructions for everything. So the question is:
Can Random Mutation add information to DNA?
I decided the best way to answer this question is to make it more general: Can random mutation add information to any code or language? Can it make it more meaningful, such that Natural Selection will weed out the garbage and leave us with better and better information?
My reasoning was this: Even if Darwinism couldn’t be empirically proven in the lab (since we don’t have millions of years available to conduct an experiment), we should still be able to investigate some other part of the world where languages and codes are used.
We should be able to experimentally determine if Random Mutations add information. This could come from any number of fields – linguistics, digital signal processing, computer networking, computer aided design, language translation.
Information Theory Sheds Light on this: 1948
The questions I’m asking here are answered in a field known as “Information theory” which really began with a paper written by Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon in 1948. His paper was called “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” and it’s one of the most important papers ever published in the history of Electrical Engineering and electronic communication. Shannon’s paper literally gave birth to the digital age we now live in – not because Shannon invented digital communication, but because he defined what it was capable of.
Claude Shannon’s paper tells you how much hi-fidelity music you can put on a CD (74 minutes), or how much data you can squeeze through a 56K computer modem (not much). It tells you how much information you can successfully transmit, given a certain amount of noise and a certain speed of sending your data. It discusses error correction schemes and even defines something called “Information entropy” which is the degradation that happens when you add noise to a signal.
Shannon’s book is not for the layman, but certain parts of it are understandable by anyone and it deals with things that most people are at least somewhat familiar with. He defines various “layers” of information – which in layman’s terms would be things like alphabet, spelling, grammar and meaning – and how the upper layers are built on top of the lower layers, and how we can use this knowledge to detect and correct errors.
And in my research into the origins question, I quickly discovered that everything Claude Shannon discusses in his paper applies to DNA. (I have not encountered any geneticist or bio-informatics researcher who disagrees with this.)
DNA is a molecule, a data storage medium and digital communication protocol all rolled into one. It has a certain amount of memory. Your own DNA, in every cell of your body, contains about the same amount of information as a compact disc.
But here’s where things get interesting: In Claude Shannon’s world, Random Mutation in DNA is exactly the same as “Noise” in an electrical communication system.
This really struck a chord with me because I already knew a great deal about digital communication systems. I spent six years of my life selling exotic networking equipment to factory engineers, I’ve published dozens and dozens of magazine articles about communication networks, and In 2002 I published the book Industrial Ethernet. Now in its 2nd edition, this book explains the operation of Ethernet networks, TCP/IP protocol (the language that runs the Internet), and various networking languages that are used in modern equipment installations.
The world of electronic communication is a world of languages and codes. Every different kind of file on your computer – a Microsoft WORD document, an Excel spreadsheet, a web page in HTML, a JPG or GIF image – the difference between all these things is the language they’re written in. Microsoft WORD isn’t just a brand, it’s a language that’s been defined by Microsoft, for writing and storing documents. Same with everything else on the list – it’s a language that’s been defined by someone for a specific purpose.
So another way of asking the question is this:
“Is there any instance in the field of computers, electrical engineering, radio, TV or any other aspect of communication where noise is added to a signal to increase its quality? Can adding noise increase the information in a signal?”
I searched and I searched and I searched.
And the answer to that question, oddly, is a qualified no.
There is no instance in the field of computers, electrical engineering, radio, TV or any other aspect of modern communication where noise is added to a signal to increase its quality. There is no example where noise increases the information in a signal.
None.
But remember, I said the answer is a qualified no. The answer is still yes, sometimes.
Let me explain.
Let’s take the sentence
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
I could randomly mutate this sentence, and if I got really lucky, the sentence could become
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
(I added a period.)
The period did add information to the sentence; it corrected a grammatical mistake.
Now this sentence is 45 characters long. With the possibility of 26 lower case letters, 26 upper case letters, spaces and periods (excluding numbers and any other characters), there are 54 possible characters.
So how many combinations of letters are possible in this sentence? A probability textbook tells us that there are 4554 possible combinations. If you punch that into your scientific calculator, you get 1.9 x 1089 possibilities. (In other words, a very big number with ninety (!) zeros. Bigger than any number anyone ever uses in everyday life.)
Which is to say that there is one chance in 1.9 x 1089 – one chance in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion or so – that a single random mutation could correct the grammar of this short sentence.
So yes, random mutation (noise) can add some information to a signal. Parts per trillion trillion trillion…
That is the qualification.
Obviously it is a very small qualification – so small as to be thoroughly trivial.
I thought this was way too simple.
I said to myself, “Geez, is the answer to the whole evolution question that cut-and-dried? Falcons can’t evolve because DNA mutations can only destroy information, not increase it? That seems too easy, too obvious.”
I spent several months hunting for answers all over the place, scouring more books and the Internet, looking for discussion on this topic. Surely there must be more to this question.
Claude Shannon does address it in his book. Not DNA specifically, but noise in general. Shannon says noise causes entropy. In physics, entropy is the process of useful energy becoming useless. Entropy is what happens when a candle burns down to nothing and you can’t light it anymore.
One of Shannon’s contributions to science was showing that the math equations for information entropy are exactly the same as for heat entropy. And in both cases, entropy is an irreversible process. In other words, once you add noise to a signal, it is permanently corrupted and cannot be recovered, much less improved.
Noise always degrades a signal. Always.
No exceptions.
Anybody who’s spent much time recording music knows what I mean. Cassette tapes are going out of vogue, but back in the day we used to record our CD’s onto cassettes so we could listen on our Walkman or in our car. Cassettes always add noise (tape hiss) to the music.
Companies like Dolby and DBX devised ingenious methods of noise reduction – Dolby B, Dolby C and so on – to combat this problem. They were fairly effective, but never perfect. Actually the way noise reduction works is this: The signal is boosted and equalized before it’s put on tape, then it’s equalized the opposite way and cut back to its original volume when you play it back. All it does is lessen the effects of the tape hiss; it doesn’t actually take it away.
And again, once the noise is there, it is absolutely impossible to get it back out.
And I’ve never met any engineer who ever said the signal could be better after you added noise to it. The only exception to this is something called dither which does add noise to the signal before it’s recorded, but that is done to neutralize distortions in the recording equipment. It’s “dither” in digital recording, and “bias” in analog recording. But it does not increase the information; it degrades the signal, albeit in a useful way.
So I’m hunting for a flaw in this theory. Can anyone show that noise increases the useful information in a signal?
Now I am far from the first person to discover or discuss this, and I did find people debating this topic. I found some interesting misconceptions.
For example, Claude Shannon discusses how the addition of noise increases the information in a signal. But you have to be very careful to understand what he means when he says this.
Let’s say you take your favorite CD and record it onto a cassette tape. Now you have added some noise to your favorite music. You can hear the tape hiss when you play it.
Well let’s say you get a CD burner and you play the tape back and copy the taped version back to a new CD. Now you have a CD of a tape of a CD. A copy of a copy, with tape hiss thrown in.
Well the new CD does actually have more information than the old one. It has not only the music, but the tape hiss too. Instead of silence between the songs, you’ve added tape hiss. Of course the CD player doesn’t care what it is, it just plays it. From the CD player’s point of view (CD players being totally dumb objects), yes, there is more information to send to the speakers.
But from a human point of view, there is obviously less useful information. The useful information has been compromised. Fine details you used to be able to hear are covered up by the tape hiss, never to be recovered.
All arguments you may find that cite Claude Shannon in saying that noise increases information are really saying that the tape hiss is an increase in information. Well obviously it’s an increase in useless information – at the expense of the useful information.
So What is Darwinism Really Saying?
If we go back to the falcon question, what Darwinian theory is saying is this:
Noise gets added to the signal in the DNA of billions of falcons.
Most of the time, it produces harmful mutations.
Some of the time, it adds useful information.
Natural selection weeds out the harmful mutations and only the useful ones are left.
The useful mutations make the new falcons more fit to survive.
They proliferate and then more mutations make their progeny better adapted, more competitive, with enhanced features and ability to survive.
And the evolutionary dance continues.
Sounds pretty plausible, right? I certainly thought it did.
But let’s use an analogy of something more familiar: Those cassette tapes.
You have a CD, and you make billions of cassette tape copies of it. Each copy is slightly different, because each one has different microscopic bits of tape hiss.
Most of the time the tape hiss is bad, but sometimes it is good.
People buy the good copies and return the bad ones to the music store, so only the good ones survive.
Billions more copies are made of the good ones, and the process repeats. Every few thousand generations of tapes and tape hiss, a new musical feature is added, so primitive tribal music evolves into modern jazz fusion.
Do you buy that?
I don’t.
We could make a very similar analogy with photocopies. We’ve all seen documents that were a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. They look horrible. After enough generations, they become unreadable. A copy of a copy of a copy of instructions on how to get to my house never evolve into a superior plan for getting to my house.
Information is only destroyed by noise, never enhanced by it. (Devolution, not evolution.)
So if noise is bad for music and photocopies and FM radio, how can it be good for falcon DNA?
DNA, Computers, Human Language Have Error Correction Built-In
You’d be interested to know that virtually all communication systems, including DNA, have error correction mechanisms built in. The English language is about 50% redundant – if half the words and letters are missing, you can still read it and figure out what is being said. Ethernet and TCP/IP have sophisticated error detection / correction mechanisms. If you’re downloading a file and some of the bits get corrupted, your computer detects that and tells the other computer on the Internet to re-send those bits. And DNA has sophisticated error correction mechanisms, too. Errors are always bad, never good. DNA is designed to detect mutations and correct them.
I Start Presenting This Challenge to Darwinists
There are still a whole bunch of questions we haven’t really discussed yet, but this in itself gets down to the bottom of what Darwinian evolution claims to be true. So has any advocate of Darwinian evolution ever proven that random mutation can increase information? I wanted to find out.
So in addition to extensive searching and reading, I started having email exchanges with proponents of Darwinism. I would say “Show me an example where random mutation actually increases information” and they would try. And Boy, would they ever try!
The conversation would go something like this:
They would say, “Richard Dawkins shows how evolution works in his ‘methinks it is like a weasel’ evolutionary computer program.” (Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, shows how a random letter generator can evolve a complete sentence, if the computer program rejects erroneous letters and accepts correct ones, and it only takes 30-40 steps to do so.)
I’d say “But the desired result is pre-programmed into the experiment in the first place. All he has demonstrated is that his computer works properly, that’s all.”
So the conversation would turn to all sorts of other “Genetic Programs” which is an entire category of software where random mutations generate variations which are then selected according to certain criteria and improvements are observed. Fascinating stuff.
But that’s not the Darwinian math formula. Remember, the Darwinian formula is
Random mutation + natural selection + time = Design
But genetic programs work on this formula:
Random mutation + deliberate selection + time = Design
Deliberate selection and natural selection are not the same thing. Look, if the falcons could say “Let’s randomly mutate only the small part of our DNA that designs our eyeball muscles and nothing else for a few million years, and let’s just keep the ones that pass a quality control test” then it would work. But that’s not how evolution is claimed to work. Mutations (noise) are not selective about where they occur.
Darwinism: The Math Just Doesn’t Work
In these debates we would go back and forth about this, and sometimes the conversations would get quite emotional as the person I was talking too kept hitting dead ends in their argument.
Sometimes they’d finally sigh and say “Just because we haven’t discovered the answer to this question doesn’t mean we won’t someday.”
My reply would be “Yes, that’s absolutely right, nobody can predict what science may discover tomorrow. But for right now I can’t see how the fundamental premise of Darwinian evolution can even be said to be scientific, because the math simply does not work.”
Most of the time I’d eventually get silence. Much as we tried to make these conversations factual and friendly (they were rarely hostile), eventually the person would just stop replying to my emails. They were stumped.
Dawkins Can’t Answer It, Either
It’s interesting to note that the fanatical atheist Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous living proponent of Evolutionary theory, has never answered this question either – in fact he has studiously avoided it. There’s an article
http://trueorigins.org/dawkinfo.asp where this question was posed to Dawkins, and even though six years have gone by, he never answers it. The answer he does give is a smoke-and-mirrors example at best.
There is a lot of material on this particular web page and there is a great deal of discussion about it. I did a bunch of backwards searching on Google to find every last reference to this article on the entire Internet, and nobody has successfully answered the question that it raises: “Can you produce an example of a mutation or evolutionary process that led to an increase in information?”
Many do claim to have answered it with genetic programs and the like, but if you examine their experiments carefully, you will see that none of these programs are actually examples of true Darwinian evolution. All of them without exception (including the much ballyhooed Avida softare program) use un-random mutation or un-natural selection in some way. Genetic programs are extremely useful, instructive, well worth studying. But all are examples of intelligent design, not evolution
http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/darwin-half-right/
