On 17/11/2025 06:31, MarkE wrote:
On 17/11/2025 4:55 pm, MarkE wrote:
A recent SCT (formerly EN) article* cites a core ID claim: "this type
of specified information always comes from a mind."
TO is probably an inadvisable place to ask (free hit, Ron), but does
anyone know of an ID definition of "mind"?
The ID position suggests that a mind is at least partially non-
material, which gives rise to issues of agency, causality, shifting
the problem, etc, as well as questions on the relationship and
interaction of our physical brain and "mind".
* https://scienceandculture.com/2025/11/lifes-informational-
discontinuities-where-unintelligent-processes-fail/
"Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have
presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life."
(Dembski, https://www.discovery.org/a/119/)
Given that I believe that humanity is within a few decades of achieving directed abiogenesis (or already has if one counts viruses as living)
the second half of Dembski's claims appears to be circular. >
"Information is a massless, immaterial entity rCo it has no weight, noHow does Meyer address the mass-energy-information equivalence
charge, no spatial dimension. Thus, the ultimate explanation for
information in DNA must involve a mind."
(Meyer, somewhere...)
principle? (Not accepted by all physicists, but if it's an open question
in physics Meyer can't legitimately assume its falsity and claim to have drawn a sound conclusion.)
I also fail to see how his conclusion follows from his premise, i.e. is
a valid conclusion. (I note that photons in quantum electrodynamics have
no mass, no charge and no spatial dimension. Meyer could repair that bit
by adding more physical quantities, such as energy and momentum, but he still has to make the link between the premise and the conclusion.)
Meyer's statement might be no more than an obfuscated version of the cosmological argument.
On 17/11/2025 10:10 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 17/11/2025 06:31, MarkE wrote:
On 17/11/2025 4:55 pm, MarkE wrote:
A recent SCT (formerly EN) article* cites a core ID claim: "this
type of specified information always comes from a mind."
TO is probably an inadvisable place to ask (free hit, Ron), but does
anyone know of an ID definition of "mind"?
The ID position suggests that a mind is at least partially non-
material, which gives rise to issues of agency, causality, shifting
the problem, etc, as well as questions on the relationship and
interaction of our physical brain and "mind".
* https://scienceandculture.com/2025/11/lifes-informational-
discontinuities-where-unintelligent-processes-fail/
"Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have
presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life."
(Dembski, https://www.discovery.org/a/119/)
Given that I believe that humanity is within a few decades of
achieving directed abiogenesis (or already has if one counts viruses
as living) the second half of Dembski's claims appears to be circular. >
"Information is a massless, immaterial entity rCo it has no weight, noHow does Meyer address the mass-energy-information equivalence
charge, no spatial dimension. Thus, the ultimate explanation for
information in DNA must involve a mind."
(Meyer, somewhere...)
principle? (Not accepted by all physicists, but if it's an open
question in physics Meyer can't legitimately assume its falsity and
claim to have drawn a sound conclusion.)
I also fail to see how his conclusion follows from his premise, i.e.
is a valid conclusion. (I note that photons in quantum electrodynamics
have no mass, no charge and no spatial dimension. Meyer could repair
that bit by adding more physical quantities, such as energy and
momentum, but he still has to make the link between the premise and
the conclusion.)
Meyer's statement might be no more than an obfuscated version of the
cosmological argument.
I've always been intrigued by LandauerrCOs principle, i.e. that erasing a bit of information requires a minimum energy of kT ln 2.
If I understand correctly, this defines a minimum thermodynamic cost of information processing (regardless of specific physical instantiation). Therefore, information is quantifiably linked to energy, i.e. "physical".
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA is
a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the
same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical"
in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if Meyer's assertion
that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity" is accepted, he
still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal) cannot be a source
of such information.
Is he begging the question, or does he expand on this elsewhere? I'm not sure.
And I should say, I'm generally supportive Meyer's position, but am questioning this claim.
A recent SCT (formerly EN) article* cites a core ID claim: "this type of specified information always comes from a mind."
TO is probably an inadvisable place to ask (free hit, Ron), but does
anyone know of an ID definition of "mind"?
The ID position suggests that a mind is at least partially non-material, which gives rise to issues of agency, causality, shifting the problem,
etc, as well as questions on the relationship and interaction of our physical brain and "mind".
* https://scienceandculture.com/2025/11/lifes-informational- discontinuities-where-unintelligent-processes-fail/
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA is
a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the
same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical"
in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if Meyer's assertion
that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity" is accepted, he
still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal) cannot be a source
of such information.
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair
sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA
is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In
the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have
essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical"
in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity"
is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal)
cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the
one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the
other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of
ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be used
to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,
habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change
the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny
the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of
being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue
that the information is imported from the environment and a mind was
needed to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand,
you assert this much and no more, you need to identify limits to how
much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you
have is an appeal to incredulity.
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:If "Darwinian process" refers to random mutation plus natural
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair
sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA
is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In
the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have
essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical"
in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity"
is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal)
cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the
one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov
complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the
other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection
impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of
ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the
information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be used
to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,
habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade
pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change
the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying the
need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one hand you
could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny
the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of
being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue
that the information is imported from the environment and a mind was
needed to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're
basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand,
you assert this much and no more, you need to identify limits to how
much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you
have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common >descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can
help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolution?damaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important,
he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain
the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down >sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional >systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?There are two proper meanings to "conservation of information". One
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of
the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-
pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s
on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and are
therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity"
is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal)
cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the
one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov
complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the
other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection
impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of
ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the
information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be
used to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,
habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade
pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change
the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying
the need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one
hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism)
and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez
(suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand
you could argue that the information is imported from the environment
and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of information, in
which case you're basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on
the gripping hand, you assert this much and no more, you need to
identify limits to how much can be achieved by evolutionary processes.
If you don't, all you have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can
help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important,
he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain
the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of
the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
On Sat, 6 Dec 2025 18:19:56 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair >>>> sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA
is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In
the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have >>>> essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical" >>>> in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity"
is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal)
cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the
one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov
complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the
other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection
impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of
ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the
information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be used >>> to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,
habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade
pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change
the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying the >>> need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one hand you >>> could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny
the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of
being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue
that the information is imported from the environment and a mind was
needed to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're
basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand,
you assert this much and no more, you need to identify limits to how
much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you
have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common
descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can
help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolution?damaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important,
he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain
the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down
sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional
systems,rCY he writes.'
If "Darwinian process" refers to random mutation plus natural
selection of extant life, then it's technically correct to say that it
can't explain the creation of life itself. But that's a disingenuous statement, as Darwinism technically refers to how life evolves, not
how life was created; that's called abiogenesis. ISTM
anti-evolutionists go out of their way to conflate these terms.
OTOH it's almost certainly true that *abiotic* processes followed
similar Darwinian patterns and rules to randomly sort out which
chemicals were involved in abiogenesis.
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of
the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
There are two proper meanings to "conservation of information". One
has to do with physics and doesn't apply at all to Darwinism. The
other is an axiom of algorithms, that the info coming out of processes
can't exceed the amount going into them.
It's not obvious what you mean by that phrase. My understanding is biological information is stored in patterns which require work/energy
to preserve, and become lost without it. That's called entropy, which
life is very good at increasing.
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-
pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s
on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and
are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-
principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On
the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that
natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical
environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and
this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic
bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's information
extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information.
On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist
determinism) and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray
Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the
other hand you could argue that the information is imported from the
environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of
information, in which case you're basically back at the Cosmological
Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert this much and no more,
you need to identify limits to how much can be achieved by
evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal to
incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common
descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution
can help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is
important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process
cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily
tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build
complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude
descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their designer
is recreating new species (some of them can still interbreed, so they
could be sub species) just a little different from the existing species.
-aThey want to claim de novo creation is involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle involved
breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He claimed that
selection for these broken genes would be what would be expected by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the broken genes are not
all that had to happen during the evolution back to an aquatic
lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to form like Baleen in the
place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It wasn't just losing things like
teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail had to bend and horizontal fluke's had
to evolve where nothing existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate that
these new structures did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms because he
notes that Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to select for the broken genes.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record
of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information, nothing
has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer.-a None of them have been able to demonstrate that any of their examples of information could not have
evolved by descent with modification.-a They aren't even dealing with the information that they need to deal with when they lie about the genetic code.-a The information required for life is not in the genetic code, but
in the 3 dimensional structures created by the string of amino acids produced using that code, and as the ID perps themselves admit life has
only had to explore a very small portion of possible protein space in
order to evolve the diversity that it has.-a It is just a fact that only
a very small bit of protein space has had to be tested in order to do everything that needs to be done.-a This seems to be due to the fact that the vast majority of protein genes have evolved from existing protein
genes, and that sequence has only had to be changed a little in order to create the new function.-a Your adaptive immune system would not work by mutation and selection if this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
On 6/12/2025 9:34 pm, jillery wrote:Why mention CSI here? "conservation of information" <> CSI.
On Sat, 6 Dec 2025 18:19:56 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair >>>>> sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA >>>>> is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In >>>>> the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have >>>>> essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical" >>>>> in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity" >>>>> is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal) >>>>> cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the >>>> one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov
complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the
other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection
impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of
ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the
information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be used >>>> to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,
habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade >>>> pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change >>>> the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying the >>>> need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one hand you >>>> could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny
the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of
being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue >>>> that the information is imported from the environment and a mind was
needed to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're >>>> basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand, >>>> you assert this much and no more, you need to identify limits to how
much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you
have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common
descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can
help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolution?damaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important, >>> he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain
the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down
sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional
systems,rCY he writes.'
If "Darwinian process" refers to random mutation plus natural
selection of extant life, then it's technically correct to say that it
can't explain the creation of life itself. But that's a disingenuous
statement, as Darwinism technically refers to how life evolves, not
how life was created; that's called abiogenesis. ISTM
anti-evolutionists go out of their way to conflate these terms.
OTOH it's almost certainly true that *abiotic* processes followed
similar Darwinian patterns and rules to randomly sort out which
chemicals were involved in abiogenesis.
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of
the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
There are two proper meanings to "conservation of information". One
has to do with physics and doesn't apply at all to Darwinism. The
other is an axiom of algorithms, that the info coming out of processes
can't exceed the amount going into them.
Yes, from a quick AI summary - physics: total information + entropy
remains constant, the black hole paradox etc, and algorithmic: >"randomness/information cannot be increased by a computable process".
It's not obvious what you mean by that phrase. My understanding is
biological information is stored in patterns which require work/energy
to preserve, and become lost without it. That's called entropy, which
life is very good at increasing.
Dembski illustrates the concept of CSI as:Dembski's CSI is one of the many "complexity, complexity, complexity"
- A long, random sequence of letters is complex but not specified.
- A short sequence spelling "the" is specified but not complex (it has a >high probability of occurring).
- A sequence corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and >specified.
A biological example of CSI would be a DNA sequence and its
corresponding protein, which to embody CSI must be both at least several >hundred units long and a functional combination among a very large
majority of nonfunctional sequences.
Even if this is accepted, related questions include:
- what actuial fraction of all possible combinations are functional?
- what is the topology of the fitness landscape to search for the
functional peaks? (e.g. incremental traversability)
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-
pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s >>>>> on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and
are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in- >>>>> principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On
the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that
natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical
environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and
this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic
bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's
information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then
one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common descent with
modification through the agency of natural selection and other
processes, that all genomes have the same information content, and
the claim that an intelligent designer is required to account for
the information evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a
residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information.
On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist
determinism) and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray
Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the
other hand you could argue that the information is imported from the
environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of
information, in which case you're basically back at the Cosmological
Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert this much and no
more, you need to identify limits to how much can be achieved by
evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal to
incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common
descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution
can help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is
important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process
cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily >>> tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build
complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude
descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their
designer is recreating new species (some of them can still interbreed,
so they could be sub species) just a little different from the
existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de novo creation is involved
and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He
claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle
involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He claimed
that selection for these broken genes would be what would be expected
by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the broken genes are
not all that had to happen during the evolution back to an aquatic
lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to form like Baleen in the
place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It wasn't just losing things like
teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail had to bend and horizontal fluke's
had to evolve where nothing existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate
that these new structures did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms
because he notes that Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to
select for the broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such that
progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic anscestor as a
primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record
of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information, nothing
has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted that natural
selection could be the designer.-a None of them have been able to
demonstrate that any of their examples of information could not have
evolved by descent with modification.-a They aren't even dealing with
the information that they need to deal with when they lie about the
genetic code.-a The information required for life is not in the genetic
code, but in the 3 dimensional structures created by the string of
amino acids produced using that code, and as the ID perps themselves
admit life has only had to explore a very small portion of possible
protein space in order to evolve the diversity that it has.-a It is
just a fact that only a very small bit of protein space has had to be
tested in order to do everything that needs to be done.-a This seems to
be due to the fact that the vast majority of protein genes have
evolved from existing protein genes, and that sequence has only had to
be changed a little in order to create the new function.-a Your
adaptive immune system would not work by mutation and selection if
this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" - do you have reference for that?
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein space life
has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is it sparse plains
with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged terrain of endless
valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima will be mostly
undiscoverable to incremental search relying on incremental improvements each conferring survival advantage sufficient to drive the associated mutation to fixation in the population.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely smooth
and monotonically increasing.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some instances a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g. https:// journals.plos.org/plosone/article? id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
On 12/7/2025 2:11 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base- >>>>>> pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and
1s on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy,
and are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even
in- principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On
the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that
natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical
environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species,
and this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic
bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's
information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be >>>>> added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa. >>>>>
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then
one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common descent with >>>>> modification through the agency of natural selection and other
processes, that all genomes have the same information content, and
the claim that an intelligent designer is required to account for
the information evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as
a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information. >>>>> On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist >>>>> determinism) and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray
Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the >>>>> other hand you could argue that the information is imported from
the environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of >>>>> information, in which case you're basically back at the
Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert this
much and no more, you need to identify limits to how much can be
achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is
an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of
common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his
recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution
can help make something look and act differently. But evolution
never creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism
actually works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in
order to create something new at the lowest biological levels. This
is important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process
cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so
easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will
build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude
descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their
designer is recreating new species (some of them can still
interbreed, so they could be sub species) just a little different
from the existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de novo creation is
involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He
claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle
involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He claimed
that selection for these broken genes would be what would be expected
by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the broken genes are
not all that had to happen during the evolution back to an aquatic
lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to form like Baleen in the
place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It wasn't just losing things like
teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail had to bend and horizontal fluke's
had to evolve where nothing existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate
that these new structures did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms
because he notes that Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to
select for the broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or
evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such that
progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic anscestor as a
primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record
of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information, nothing
has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted that natural
selection could be the designer.-a None of them have been able to
demonstrate that any of their examples of information could not have
evolved by descent with modification.-a They aren't even dealing with
the information that they need to deal with when they lie about the
genetic code.-a The information required for life is not in the
genetic code, but in the 3 dimensional structures created by the
string of amino acids produced using that code, and as the ID perps
themselves admit life has only had to explore a very small portion of
possible protein space in order to evolve the diversity that it has.
It is just a fact that only a very small bit of protein space has had
to be tested in order to do everything that needs to be done.-a This
seems to be due to the fact that the vast majority of protein genes
have evolved from existing protein genes, and that sequence has only
had to be changed a little in order to create the new function.-a Your
adaptive immune system would not work by mutation and selection if
this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" - do
you have reference for that?
It was after the bait and switch had started to go down and like
Dembski's claim that space aliens were the most scientific option for an intelligent designer Dembski was trying to note that the ID perps were
not designating what the designer was (they were not claiming that it
had to be a supernatural god-like being), and he was just pointing out
that natural selection could result in functional designs.-a My guess is that it is a stupid enough admission of reality that it likely has made
it into one of the Wiki's on the subject.-a It might even be in Dembski's wiki.-a He was making the point to claim that ID was science because they were lying about who their designer was, and it did not have to be a
god.-a All the ID perps would eventually admit that their designer was
the Biblical god, but they were and are still lying about what ID is to
them in order to keep using it as bait to fool the rubes.-a They are only fooling creationists like yourself that want to be lied to.
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein space
life has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is it sparse
plains with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged terrain of
endless valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima will be mostly
undiscoverable to incremental search relying on incremental
improvements each conferring survival advantage sufficient to drive
the associated mutation to fixation in the population.
Your adaptive immune system would not work if the search parameters were what you want them to be.-a Biological evolution by descent with modification works because the space that needs to be searched is
minimal and within what is possible.-a Really, new antibodies that bind specific antigens would not be routinely selected for by an immune
response if the search parameters were too distant from the existing
protein sequences.-a If you look up the abzyme work where they use the adaptive immune system to evolve new enzymatic activity you will find
that they have found that less than 10 changes in the antibody sequence
can produce the new enzymatic activity that was selected for.-a It wasn't just any enzymatic activity, but the one that they were selecting for.
The paper that you put up trying to claim that too many new genes needed
to be produced to evolve multicellular animals should have told you that very little protein space seems to have been needed to be searched.
Those thousands of new genes evolved after a basic set of genes had
already evolved, and they evolved over a billion year period before the Cambrian explosion.-a The initial gene set had been evolving for over 2 billion years to produce that Eukaryotic gene set.-a It looked like
nearly all the new genes that evolved within the billion year period
before the Cambrian explosion had evolved from an existing gene.-a You should have seen that in their tables of the origins of the new genes.
It just turns out that very little protein space has had to be tested to
get to where we are now.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely
smooth and monotonically increasing.
The mount improbables are only in your head.-a What exists are just additions to what had already existed.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some instances
a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g. https://
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
The likely reason that nearly all new genes have evolved from existing
genes is that just a random sequence of amino acids will fold up and
could have some function, but most random sequences do not efficiently produce the same structure.-a It can take time to fold up, and the
sequence might not fold up into the same structure every time.-a De novo coding sequence that produces a new protein has to go through a
selective process where the sequence needs to further evolve so that it
will efficiently fold up into its functional structure.-a Genes that have existed for billions of years already fold up efficiently, and it turns
out that just changing the sequence a little can produce a new function,
so we end up with related gene families.
There is even some stability issues with existing proteins, and
chaperone proteins have evolved to help them maintain the shape they
need to be in in order to function.
It is just how life has adapted to reality.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
On 8/12/2025 3:40 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 2:11 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the
base- pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, >>>>>>> but rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, >>>>>>> immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and >>>>>>> 1s on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, >>>>>>> and are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if >>>>>>> Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even >>>>>>> in- principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On >>>>>> the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that >>>>>> natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical >>>>>> environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species,
and this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic >>>>>> bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence >>>>>> ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's
information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't
be added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between >>>>>> taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then >>>>>> one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common descent
with modification through the agency of natural selection and
other processes, that all genomes have the same information
content, and the claim that an intelligent designer is required to >>>>>> account for the information evaporates. (There might be a circular >>>>>> argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of
information. On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism
(Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny the existence of natural
processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist >>>>>> evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue that the
information is imported from the environment and a mind was needed >>>>>> to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're
basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping
hand, you assert this much and no more, you need to identify
limits to how much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If
you don't, all you have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of
common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although
his recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution >>>>> can help make something look and act differently. But evolution
never creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism
actually works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in >>>>> order to create something new at the lowest biological levels. This >>>>> is important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian
process cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that >>>>> so easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will
build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude
descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their
designer is recreating new species (some of them can still
interbreed, so they could be sub species) just a little different
from the existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de novo creation is >>>> involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He
claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle
involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He claimed >>>> that selection for these broken genes would be what would be
expected by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the broken
genes are not all that had to happen during the evolution back to an
aquatic lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to form like
Baleen in the place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It wasn't just
losing things like teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail had to bend and >>>> horizontal fluke's had to evolve where nothing existed before.-a Behe >>>> can't demonstrate that these new structures did not evolve by
Darwinian mechanisms because he notes that Darwinian mechanisms were
obviously working to select for the broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or
evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such
that progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic anscestor as
a primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete
record of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information,
nothing has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted that
natural selection could be the designer.-a None of them have been
able to demonstrate that any of their examples of information could
not have evolved by descent with modification.-a They aren't even
dealing with the information that they need to deal with when they
lie about the genetic code.-a The information required for life is
not in the genetic code, but in the 3 dimensional structures created
by the string of amino acids produced using that code, and as the ID
perps themselves admit life has only had to explore a very small
portion of possible protein space in order to evolve the diversity
that it has. It is just a fact that only a very small bit of protein
space has had to be tested in order to do everything that needs to
be done.-a This seems to be due to the fact that the vast majority of >>>> protein genes have evolved from existing protein genes, and that
sequence has only had to be changed a little in order to create the
new function.-a Your adaptive immune system would not work by
mutation and selection if this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" - do
you have reference for that?
It was after the bait and switch had started to go down and like
Dembski's claim that space aliens were the most scientific option for
an intelligent designer Dembski was trying to note that the ID perps
were not designating what the designer was (they were not claiming
that it had to be a supernatural god-like being), and he was just
pointing out that natural selection could result in functional
designs.-a My guess is that it is a stupid enough admission of reality
that it likely has made it into one of the Wiki's on the subject.-a It
might even be in Dembski's wiki.-a He was making the point to claim
that ID was science because they were lying about who their designer
was, and it did not have to be a god.-a All the ID perps would
eventually admit that their designer was the Biblical god, but they
were and are still lying about what ID is to them in order to keep
using it as bait to fool the rubes.-a They are only fooling
creationists like yourself that want to be lied to.
Hang on, this is a big claim - cites please, not more bluster.
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein space
life has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is it sparse
plains with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged terrain of
endless valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima will be mostly
undiscoverable to incremental search relying on incremental
improvements each conferring survival advantage sufficient to drive
the associated mutation to fixation in the population.
Your adaptive immune system would not work if the search parameters
were what you want them to be.-a Biological evolution by descent with
modification works because the space that needs to be searched is
minimal and within what is possible.-a Really, new antibodies that bind
specific antigens would not be routinely selected for by an immune
response if the search parameters were too distant from the existing
protein sequences.-a If you look up the abzyme work where they use the
adaptive immune system to evolve new enzymatic activity you will find
that they have found that less than 10 changes in the antibody
sequence can produce the new enzymatic activity that was selected
for.-a It wasn't just any enzymatic activity, but the one that they
were selecting for.
The paper that you put up trying to claim that too many new genes
needed to be produced to evolve multicellular animals should have told
you that very little protein space seems to have been needed to be
searched. Those thousands of new genes evolved after a basic set of
genes had already evolved, and they evolved over a billion year period
before the Cambrian explosion.-a The initial gene set had been evolving
for over 2 billion years to produce that Eukaryotic gene set.-a It
looked like nearly all the new genes that evolved within the billion
year period before the Cambrian explosion had evolved from an existing
gene.-a You should have seen that in their tables of the origins of the
new genes.
It just turns out that very little protein space has had to be tested
to get to where we are now.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely
smooth and monotonically increasing.
The mount improbables are only in your head.-a What exists are just
additions to what had already existed.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some instances
a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g. https://
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
The likely reason that nearly all new genes have evolved from existing
genes is that just a random sequence of amino acids will fold up and
could have some function, but most random sequences do not efficiently
produce the same structure.-a It can take time to fold up, and the
sequence might not fold up into the same structure every time.-a De
novo coding sequence that produces a new protein has to go through a
selective process where the sequence needs to further evolve so that
it will efficiently fold up into its functional structure.-a Genes that
have existed for billions of years already fold up efficiently, and it
turns out that just changing the sequence a little can produce a new
function, so we end up with related gene families.
There is even some stability issues with existing proteins, and
chaperone proteins have evolved to help them maintain the shape they
need to be in in order to function.
It is just how life has adapted to reality.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define
this have yet to land it seems.
On 12/7/2025 10:35 PM, MarkE wrote:
On 8/12/2025 3:40 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 2:11 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the
base- pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically
determined, but rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an >>>>>>>> arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the same way, different
sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have essentially the >>>>>>>> same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical" in that >>>>>>>> sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if >>>>>>>> Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial >>>>>>>> entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even >>>>>>>> in- principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. >>>>>>> On the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the >>>>>>> Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information >>>>>>> present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue
that natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the
historical environment of ancestral populations on the genome of >>>>>>> a species, and this is the information in the genome. Similarly >>>>>>> phylogenetic bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees >>>>>>> of confidence ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - >>>>>>> that's information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't >>>>>>> be added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between >>>>>>> taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes,
then one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common
descent with modification through the agency of natural selection >>>>>>> and other processes, that all genomes have the same information >>>>>>> content, and the claim that an intelligent designer is required >>>>>>> to account for the information evaporates. (There might be a
circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do >>>>>>> change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in >>>>>>> justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of
information. On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism
(Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny the existence of natural >>>>>>> processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist >>>>>>> evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue that the
information is imported from the environment and a mind was
needed to create the initial pool of information, in which case >>>>>>> you're basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the
gripping hand, you assert this much and no more, you need to
identify limits to how much can be achieved by evolutionary
processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal to incredulity. >>>>>>>
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of
common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although
his recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation,
evolution can help make something look and act differently. But
evolution never creates something organically. Behe contends that >>>>>> Darwinism actually works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells >>>>>> in DNA in order to create something new at the lowest biological
levels. This is important, he makes clear, because it shows the
Darwinian process cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA >>>>>> process that so easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not
one which will build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude
descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their
designer is recreating new species (some of them can still
interbreed, so they could be sub species) just a little different
from the existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de novo creation is >>>>> involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He
claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle
involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He
claimed that selection for these broken genes would be what would
be expected by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the
broken genes are not all that had to happen during the evolution
back to an aquatic lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to
form like Baleen in the place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It
wasn't just losing things like teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail
had to bend and horizontal fluke's had to evolve where nothing
existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate that these new structures
did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms because he notes that
Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to select for the
broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or
evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such
that progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic anscestor
as a primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete
record of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information,
nothing has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted that >>>>> natural selection could be the designer.-a None of them have been
able to demonstrate that any of their examples of information could >>>>> not have evolved by descent with modification.-a They aren't even
dealing with the information that they need to deal with when they
lie about the genetic code.-a The information required for life is
not in the genetic code, but in the 3 dimensional structures
created by the string of amino acids produced using that code, and
as the ID perps themselves admit life has only had to explore a
very small portion of possible protein space in order to evolve the >>>>> diversity that it has. It is just a fact that only a very small bit >>>>> of protein space has had to be tested in order to do everything
that needs to be done.-a This seems to be due to the fact that the
vast majority of protein genes have evolved from existing protein
genes, and that sequence has only had to be changed a little in
order to create the new function.-a Your adaptive immune system
would not work by mutation and selection if this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" - do
you have reference for that?
It was after the bait and switch had started to go down and like
Dembski's claim that space aliens were the most scientific option for
an intelligent designer Dembski was trying to note that the ID perps
were not designating what the designer was (they were not claiming
that it had to be a supernatural god-like being), and he was just
pointing out that natural selection could result in functional
designs.-a My guess is that it is a stupid enough admission of reality
that it likely has made it into one of the Wiki's on the subject.-a It
might even be in Dembski's wiki.-a He was making the point to claim
that ID was science because they were lying about who their designer
was, and it did not have to be a god.-a All the ID perps would
eventually admit that their designer was the Biblical god, but they
were and are still lying about what ID is to them in order to keep
using it as bait to fool the rubes.-a They are only fooling
creationists like yourself that want to be lied to.
Hang on, this is a big claim - cites please, not more bluster.
It isn't bluster.-a Dembski really made the admission.-a It is just the
same as when Behe admitted that some IC systems could have evolved by natural means at the turn of the century.-a Behe had to admit that irreducible complexity did not mean could not have evolved.-a He had to start claiming that his type of IC could not have evolved and he started making claims about the number of parts and "well matched", but he has
never been able to define well matched so that he could say that his
systems had enough of it for them to be his type of IC, and he never
could determine how many parts were enough to make a system his type of IC.-a He gave up and started his waiting time and 3 neutral mutation shtick.-a Both ID perps were only admitting that some of what they were calling design was possible for biological evolution.-a Dembski resorted
to his notion of high specified complexity to differentiate low level specified complexity (that could evolve) from his systems that had more specified complexity that could not evolve.-a There is no doubt that
natural selection can select sequence changes that occur in an existing
gene for new functions that can develop.-a Multiple examples exist, and
like your new gene paper nearly all the new genes had evolved from
existing genes.-a This type of specified complexity is obviously possible
by natural mechanisms.-a It is the specification of the entire gene that Dembski has issues with and not the new genes that evolved from
preexisting genes.-a Behe admits the same thing when he acknowledges that
2 neutral mutations occurring before natural selection could act are possible for creating new functions but 3 are too many.-a Behe
understands that there is no limit for the number of mutations occurring that each can be selected for in terms of specification of the design.
The limit is for what can't be selected for.
Just look at Demski's examples of complex specified information.-a His claims are that it is improbable to evolve all the steps in his
examples, but it is obviously possible to evolve systems with less steps even by Dembski's tornado through a junkyard probability estimates.-a The fact is systems with a larger number of parts just seem to be several systems with fewer parts getting together.-a That is always why the
tornado through a junkyard stupidity has always failed creationists.
Just like your sequence space stupidity falls apart because life has
never had to search very much of sequence space to accomplish what it
has accomplished.-a Random sequence can account for what Dembski calls specification.
This is a quote from Google:
William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design (ID), acknowledges that natural selection is a real process that can produce micro-evolutionary changes or adaptations within species. However, he
argues it cannot explain the origin of complex biological systems or the diversity of life (macro-evolution), which he attributes to an
intelligent designer.
END QUOTE:
Macro evolution is just a lot of micro evolution.-a We just had a
discussion as to whether Neanderthals were a different species.-a There
are physical differences, but it is a matter of opinion as to how much
is enough to make that claim.-a Most of their DNA split off from modern humans 800,000 years ago.-a They were more closely related to modern
humans than that because some Homo left Africa around 500,000 years ago
and got absorbed by the Neanderthals, so it makes Neanderthals more
closely related to modern humans than are Denisovans.-a When has enough micro evolution occurred in order to call it macro evolution?
Ron Okimoto
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein space
life has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is it
sparse plains with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged
terrain of endless valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima
will be mostly undiscoverable to incremental search relying on
incremental improvements each conferring survival advantage
sufficient to drive the associated mutation to fixation in the
population.
Your adaptive immune system would not work if the search parameters
were what you want them to be.-a Biological evolution by descent with
modification works because the space that needs to be searched is
minimal and within what is possible.-a Really, new antibodies that
bind specific antigens would not be routinely selected for by an
immune response if the search parameters were too distant from the
existing protein sequences.-a If you look up the abzyme work where
they use the adaptive immune system to evolve new enzymatic activity
you will find that they have found that less than 10 changes in the
antibody sequence can produce the new enzymatic activity that was
selected for.-a It wasn't just any enzymatic activity, but the one
that they were selecting for.
The paper that you put up trying to claim that too many new genes
needed to be produced to evolve multicellular animals should have
told you that very little protein space seems to have been needed to
be searched. Those thousands of new genes evolved after a basic set
of genes had already evolved, and they evolved over a billion year
period before the Cambrian explosion.-a The initial gene set had been
evolving for over 2 billion years to produce that Eukaryotic gene
set.-a It looked like nearly all the new genes that evolved within the
billion year period before the Cambrian explosion had evolved from an
existing gene.-a You should have seen that in their tables of the
origins of the new genes.
It just turns out that very little protein space has had to be tested
to get to where we are now.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely
smooth and monotonically increasing.
The mount improbables are only in your head.-a What exists are just
additions to what had already existed.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some
instances a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g.
https:// journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
The likely reason that nearly all new genes have evolved from
existing genes is that just a random sequence of amino acids will
fold up and could have some function, but most random sequences do
not efficiently produce the same structure.-a It can take time to fold
up, and the sequence might not fold up into the same structure every
time.-a De novo coding sequence that produces a new protein has to go
through a selective process where the sequence needs to further
evolve so that it will efficiently fold up into its functional
structure.-a Genes that have existed for billions of years already
fold up efficiently, and it turns out that just changing the sequence
a little can produce a new function, so we end up with related gene
families.
There is even some stability issues with existing proteins, and
chaperone proteins have evolved to help them maintain the shape they
need to be in in order to function.
It is just how life has adapted to reality.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define
this have yet to land it seems.
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-
pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s
on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and are
therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity"
is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal)
cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the
one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov
complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the
other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection
impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of
ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the
information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be
used to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,
habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade
pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change
the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying
the need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one
hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism)
and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez
(suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand
you could argue that the information is imported from the environment
and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of information, in
which case you're basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on
the gripping hand, you assert this much and no more, you need to
identify limits to how much can be achieved by evolutionary processes.
If you don't, all you have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can
help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important,
he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain
the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of
the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
On 9/12/2025 3:35 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 10:35 PM, MarkE wrote:
On 8/12/2025 3:40 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 2:11 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the >>>>>>>>> base- pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically
determined, but rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing >>>>>>>>> an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the same way, different
sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have essentially the >>>>>>>>> same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical" in that >>>>>>>>> sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that >>>>>>>>> accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even >>>>>>>>> if Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless,
immaterial entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why
evolution (even in- principal) cannot be a source of such
information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. >>>>>>>> On the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the >>>>>>>> Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information >>>>>>>> present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue >>>>>>>> that natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the
historical environment of ancestral populations on the genome of >>>>>>>> a species, and this is the information in the genome. Similarly >>>>>>>> phylogenetic bracketing can be used to infer with various
degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes, habitats and
distributions - that's information extractable from clade pan- >>>>>>>> genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't >>>>>>>> be added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs
between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the >>>>>>>> information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, >>>>>>>> then one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common
descent with modification through the agency of natural
selection and other processes, that all genomes have the same >>>>>>>> information content, and the claim that an intelligent designer >>>>>>>> is required to account for the information evaporates. (There >>>>>>>> might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do >>>>>>>> change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in >>>>>>>> justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of
information. On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism >>>>>>>> (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny the existence of natural >>>>>>>> processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of being an
occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue >>>>>>>> that the information is imported from the environment and a mind >>>>>>>> was needed to create the initial pool of information, in which >>>>>>>> case you're basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on >>>>>>>> the gripping hand, you assert this much and no more, you need to >>>>>>>> identify limits to how much can be achieved by evolutionary
processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal to incredulity. >>>>>>>>
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of
common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although >>>>>>> his recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation,
evolution can help make something look and act differently. But >>>>>>> evolution never creates something organically. Behe contends that >>>>>>> Darwinism actually works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging
cells in DNA in order to create something new at the lowest
biological levels. This is important, he makes clear, because it >>>>>>> shows the Darwinian process cannot explain the creation of life >>>>>>> itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down sophisticated
machinery is not one which will build complex, functional
systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude >>>>>> descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their
designer is recreating new species (some of them can still
interbreed, so they could be sub species) just a little different >>>>>> from the existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de novo creation >>>>>> is involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He >>>>>> claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle
involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He
claimed that selection for these broken genes would be what would >>>>>> be expected by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the
broken genes are not all that had to happen during the evolution
back to an aquatic lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to >>>>>> form like Baleen in the place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It
wasn't just losing things like teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail >>>>>> had to bend and horizontal fluke's had to evolve where nothing
existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate that these new structures >>>>>> did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms because he notes that
Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to select for the
broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or
evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such
that progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic anscestor
as a primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you >>>>>>> mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete
record of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information,
nothing has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted
that natural selection could be the designer.-a None of them have >>>>>> been able to demonstrate that any of their examples of information >>>>>> could not have evolved by descent with modification.-a They aren't >>>>>> even dealing with the information that they need to deal with when >>>>>> they lie about the genetic code.-a The information required for
life is not in the genetic code, but in the 3 dimensional
structures created by the string of amino acids produced using
that code, and as the ID perps themselves admit life has only had >>>>>> to explore a very small portion of possible protein space in order >>>>>> to evolve the diversity that it has. It is just a fact that only a >>>>>> very small bit of protein space has had to be tested in order to
do everything that needs to be done.-a This seems to be due to the >>>>>> fact that the vast majority of protein genes have evolved from
existing protein genes, and that sequence has only had to be
changed a little in order to create the new function.-a Your
adaptive immune system would not work by mutation and selection if >>>>>> this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" -
do you have reference for that?
It was after the bait and switch had started to go down and like
Dembski's claim that space aliens were the most scientific option
for an intelligent designer Dembski was trying to note that the ID
perps were not designating what the designer was (they were not
claiming that it had to be a supernatural god-like being), and he
was just pointing out that natural selection could result in
functional designs.-a My guess is that it is a stupid enough
admission of reality that it likely has made it into one of the
Wiki's on the subject.-a It might even be in Dembski's wiki.-a He was >>>> making the point to claim that ID was science because they were
lying about who their designer was, and it did not have to be a
god.-a All the ID perps would eventually admit that their designer
was the Biblical god, but they were and are still lying about what
ID is to them in order to keep using it as bait to fool the rubes.
They are only fooling creationists like yourself that want to be
lied to.
Hang on, this is a big claim - cites please, not more bluster.
It isn't bluster.-a Dembski really made the admission.-a It is just the
same as when Behe admitted that some IC systems could have evolved by
natural means at the turn of the century.-a Behe had to admit that
irreducible complexity did not mean could not have evolved.-a He had to
start claiming that his type of IC could not have evolved and he
started making claims about the number of parts and "well matched",
but he has never been able to define well matched so that he could say
that his systems had enough of it for them to be his type of IC, and
he never could determine how many parts were enough to make a system
his type of IC.-a He gave up and started his waiting time and 3 neutral
mutation shtick.-a Both ID perps were only admitting that some of what
they were calling design was possible for biological evolution.
Dembski resorted to his notion of high specified complexity to
differentiate low level specified complexity (that could evolve) from
his systems that had more specified complexity that could not evolve.
There is no doubt that natural selection can select sequence changes
that occur in an existing gene for new functions that can develop.
Multiple examples exist, and like your new gene paper nearly all the
new genes had evolved from existing genes.-a This type of specified
complexity is obviously possible by natural mechanisms.-a It is the
specification of the entire gene that Dembski has issues with and not
the new genes that evolved from preexisting genes.-a Behe admits the
same thing when he acknowledges that 2 neutral mutations occurring
before natural selection could act are possible for creating new
functions but 3 are too many.-a Behe understands that there is no limit
for the number of mutations occurring that each can be selected for in
terms of specification of the design. The limit is for what can't be
selected for.
Just look at Demski's examples of complex specified information.-a His
claims are that it is improbable to evolve all the steps in his
examples, but it is obviously possible to evolve systems with less
steps even by Dembski's tornado through a junkyard probability
estimates.-a The fact is systems with a larger number of parts just
seem to be several systems with fewer parts getting together.-a That is
always why the tornado through a junkyard stupidity has always failed
creationists.
Just like your sequence space stupidity falls apart because life has
never had to search very much of sequence space to accomplish what it
has accomplished.-a Random sequence can account for what Dembski calls
specification.
This is a quote from Google:
William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design (ID),
acknowledges that natural selection is a real process that can produce
micro-evolutionary changes or adaptations within species. However, he
argues it cannot explain the origin of complex biological systems or
the diversity of life (macro-evolution), which he attributes to an
intelligent designer.
END QUOTE:
Macro evolution is just a lot of micro evolution.-a We just had a
discussion as to whether Neanderthals were a different species.-a There
are physical differences, but it is a matter of opinion as to how much
is enough to make that claim.-a Most of their DNA split off from modern
humans 800,000 years ago.-a They were more closely related to modern
humans than that because some Homo left Africa around 500,000 years
ago and got absorbed by the Neanderthals, so it makes Neanderthals
more closely related to modern humans than are Denisovans.-a When has
enough micro evolution occurred in order to call it macro evolution?
Many creationists accept microevolution (probably a majority?), e.g. Darwin's finches. This is the standard ID position.
Therefore, you're begging the question by asserting as fact that macroevolution is essentially microevolution + time.
Nothing to see here folks.
Ron Okimoto
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein space >>>>> life has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is it
sparse plains with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged
terrain of endless valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima
will be mostly undiscoverable to incremental search relying on
incremental improvements each conferring survival advantage
sufficient to drive the associated mutation to fixation in the
population.
Your adaptive immune system would not work if the search parameters
were what you want them to be.-a Biological evolution by descent with >>>> modification works because the space that needs to be searched is
minimal and within what is possible.-a Really, new antibodies that
bind specific antigens would not be routinely selected for by an
immune response if the search parameters were too distant from the
existing protein sequences.-a If you look up the abzyme work where
they use the adaptive immune system to evolve new enzymatic activity
you will find that they have found that less than 10 changes in the
antibody sequence can produce the new enzymatic activity that was
selected for.-a It wasn't just any enzymatic activity, but the one
that they were selecting for.
The paper that you put up trying to claim that too many new genes
needed to be produced to evolve multicellular animals should have
told you that very little protein space seems to have been needed to
be searched. Those thousands of new genes evolved after a basic set
of genes had already evolved, and they evolved over a billion year
period before the Cambrian explosion.-a The initial gene set had been >>>> evolving for over 2 billion years to produce that Eukaryotic gene
set.-a It looked like nearly all the new genes that evolved within
the billion year period before the Cambrian explosion had evolved
from an existing gene.-a You should have seen that in their tables of >>>> the origins of the new genes.
It just turns out that very little protein space has had to be
tested to get to where we are now.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely
smooth and monotonically increasing.
The mount improbables are only in your head.-a What exists are just
additions to what had already existed.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some
instances a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g.
https:// journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
The likely reason that nearly all new genes have evolved from
existing genes is that just a random sequence of amino acids will
fold up and could have some function, but most random sequences do
not efficiently produce the same structure.-a It can take time to
fold up, and the sequence might not fold up into the same structure
every time.-a De novo coding sequence that produces a new protein has >>>> to go through a selective process where the sequence needs to
further evolve so that it will efficiently fold up into its
functional structure.-a Genes that have existed for billions of years >>>> already fold up efficiently, and it turns out that just changing the
sequence a little can produce a new function, so we end up with
related gene families.
There is even some stability issues with existing proteins, and
chaperone proteins have evolved to help them maintain the shape they
need to be in in order to function.
It is just how life has adapted to reality.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define >>>>>>> this have yet to land it seems.
On 06/12/2025 07:19, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-
pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s
on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and
are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
The genetic code is arbitrary, in that any mapping from codon to
aminoacyl residue would work. Variant mappings exist in nature, mostly
in clades with small genomes (often mitochondria), and have been created experimentally. For more divergent mappings there is the strategy of swapping the mRNA and amino acid binding domains of tRNA.
But the genetic code is not random (it's more robust against base substitutions than the great majority of possible code) and may be in
part physio-chemically determined. There is a hypothesis that originally direct interactions between RNA and amino acids were involved in
template directed peptide synthesis, and that these interactions are fossilised in the genetic code.
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in-
principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On
the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that
natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical
environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and
this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic
bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's information
extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary
processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,
from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification
through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all
genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an
intelligent designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information.
On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist
determinism) and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray
Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the
other hand you could argue that the information is imported from the
environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of
information, in which case you're basically back at the Cosmological
Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert this much and no more,
you need to identify limits to how much can be achieved by
evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal to
incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common
descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution
can help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is
important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process
cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily
tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build
complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
No. Creationists sometimes try to argue that science excludes the supernatural as a matter of principle. Passing over the slippery nature
of what counts as supernatural, I disagree. The actual restriction is to phenomena which behave, at least statistically, in a regular way, or to
put it simply science assumes that "evidence means something", i.e. empirical observation is an epistemologically valid source of knowledge. Occasionalism is the position that there are no natural processes;
instead God does everything. Progressive creationism can grade into occasionalist evolutionism, but God, episodically or steadily, magicking
new species into existence is not occasionalist.
Philosophical naturalism is the position that nothing is supernatural; occasionalism is the position that everything is supernatural. Most religious views lie somewhere between those two extremes.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record
of the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators
create information out of "nothing".
If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal then information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-violation has not been observed, physicists believe that the laws of physics are CPT- invariant, and as CP-violation has been observed this implies that T- violation also occurs. There is also the black-hole information paradox, wherein black holes appear not to conserve information.
Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible
because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law does not preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist 2LOT was true,
life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if an analogous law of information existed it would not preclude evolution (and life); just as
life (and evolution) exports entropy into the environment, they could
import information from the environment. Dembski et al could retreat to
the question of the ultimate source of the information, but that is just
the cosmological argument redux, and not an argument against the
factuality of evolution.
For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections between neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as containing information. In most animals (C. elegans is an exception) this is not
fully defined by the genome. So a proportion of the information in the connectome must be imported from the environment (whether sensory inputs
or biochemical noise).
Turning again to the question of conservation of information. AlphaZero, starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped itself to
superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess. Did that process increase information? In that case where did the information come from?
(AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in that
case one could appeal to import from environment as the source of the information in the trained model.)
On 12/10/2025 3:40 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 9/12/2025 3:35 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 10:35 PM, MarkE wrote:
On 8/12/2025 3:40 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 2:11 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the >>>>>>>>>> base- pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically
determined, but rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing >>>>>>>>>> an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the same way, different >>>>>>>>>> sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have essentially the >>>>>>>>>> same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical" in that >>>>>>>>>> sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that >>>>>>>>>> accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even >>>>>>>>>> if Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless,
immaterial entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why >>>>>>>>>> evolution (even in- principal) cannot be a source of such >>>>>>>>>> information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. >>>>>>>>> On the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use >>>>>>>>> the Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of
information present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins >>>>>>>>> and argue that natural selection impresses an incomplete record >>>>>>>>> of the historical environment of ancestral populations on the >>>>>>>>> genome of a species, and this is the information in the genome. >>>>>>>>> Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be used to infer with >>>>>>>>> various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes, habitats >>>>>>>>> and distributions - that's information extractable from clade >>>>>>>>> pan- genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which
can't be added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs >>>>>>>>> between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the >>>>>>>>> information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, >>>>>>>>> then one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common >>>>>>>>> descent with modification through the agency of natural
selection and other processes, that all genomes have the same >>>>>>>>> information content, and the claim that an intelligent designer >>>>>>>>> is required to account for the information evaporates. (There >>>>>>>>> might be a circular argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do >>>>>>>>> change the information content of genomes then you difficulty >>>>>>>>> in justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of
information. On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism >>>>>>>>> (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny the existence of
natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of being an >>>>>>>>> occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue >>>>>>>>> that the information is imported from the environment and a >>>>>>>>> mind was needed to create the initial pool of information, in >>>>>>>>> which case you're basically back at the Cosmological Argument. >>>>>>>>> If, on the gripping hand, you assert this much and no more, you >>>>>>>>> need to identify limits to how much can be achieved by
evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal >>>>>>>>> to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of >>>>>>>> common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although >>>>>>>> his recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation,
evolution can help make something look and act differently. But >>>>>>>> evolution never creates something organically. Behe contends
that Darwinism actually works by a process of
devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to create something >>>>>>>> new at the lowest biological levels. This is important, he makes >>>>>>>> clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain the >>>>>>>> creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily tears down >>>>>>>> sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex,
functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to exclude >>>>>>> descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim that their >>>>>>> designer is recreating new species (some of them can still
interbreed, so they could be sub species) just a little different >>>>>>> from the existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de novo creation >>>>>>> is involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He >>>>>>> claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle >>>>>>> involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He
claimed that selection for these broken genes would be what would >>>>>>> be expected by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for Behe the >>>>>>> broken genes are not all that had to happen during the evolution >>>>>>> back to an aquatic lifestyle.-a The new structures that needed to >>>>>>> form like Baleen in the place of teeth had to also evolve.-a It >>>>>>> wasn't just losing things like teeth and hair.-a The whale's tail >>>>>>> had to bend and horizontal fluke's had to evolve where nothing
existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate that these new structures >>>>>>> did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms because he notes that
Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to select for the
broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or
evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such >>>>>> that progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic anscestor >>>>>> as a primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you >>>>>>>> mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete >>>>>>>> record of the historical environment", or something else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information,
nothing has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted >>>>>>> that natural selection could be the designer.-a None of them have >>>>>>> been able to demonstrate that any of their examples of
information could not have evolved by descent with modification. >>>>>>> They aren't even dealing with the information that they need to >>>>>>> deal with when they lie about the genetic code.-a The information >>>>>>> required for life is not in the genetic code, but in the 3
dimensional structures created by the string of amino acids
produced using that code, and as the ID perps themselves admit
life has only had to explore a very small portion of possible
protein space in order to evolve the diversity that it has. It is >>>>>>> just a fact that only a very small bit of protein space has had >>>>>>> to be tested in order to do everything that needs to be done.
This seems to be due to the fact that the vast majority of
protein genes have evolved from existing protein genes, and that >>>>>>> sequence has only had to be changed a little in order to create >>>>>>> the new function.-a Your adaptive immune system would not work by >>>>>>> mutation and selection if this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" - >>>>>> do you have reference for that?
It was after the bait and switch had started to go down and like
Dembski's claim that space aliens were the most scientific option
for an intelligent designer Dembski was trying to note that the ID
perps were not designating what the designer was (they were not
claiming that it had to be a supernatural god-like being), and he
was just pointing out that natural selection could result in
functional designs.-a My guess is that it is a stupid enough
admission of reality that it likely has made it into one of the
Wiki's on the subject.-a It might even be in Dembski's wiki.-a He was >>>>> making the point to claim that ID was science because they were
lying about who their designer was, and it did not have to be a
god.-a All the ID perps would eventually admit that their designer
was the Biblical god, but they were and are still lying about what
ID is to them in order to keep using it as bait to fool the rubes.
They are only fooling creationists like yourself that want to be
lied to.
Hang on, this is a big claim - cites please, not more bluster.
It isn't bluster.-a Dembski really made the admission.-a It is just the >>> same as when Behe admitted that some IC systems could have evolved by
natural means at the turn of the century.-a Behe had to admit that
irreducible complexity did not mean could not have evolved.-a He had
to start claiming that his type of IC could not have evolved and he
started making claims about the number of parts and "well matched",
but he has never been able to define well matched so that he could
say that his systems had enough of it for them to be his type of IC,
and he never could determine how many parts were enough to make a
system his type of IC.-a He gave up and started his waiting time and 3
neutral mutation shtick.-a Both ID perps were only admitting that some
of what they were calling design was possible for biological
evolution. Dembski resorted to his notion of high specified
complexity to differentiate low level specified complexity (that
could evolve) from his systems that had more specified complexity
that could not evolve. There is no doubt that natural selection can
select sequence changes that occur in an existing gene for new
functions that can develop. Multiple examples exist, and like your
new gene paper nearly all the new genes had evolved from existing
genes.-a This type of specified complexity is obviously possible by
natural mechanisms.-a It is the specification of the entire gene that
Dembski has issues with and not the new genes that evolved from
preexisting genes.-a Behe admits the same thing when he acknowledges
that 2 neutral mutations occurring before natural selection could act
are possible for creating new functions but 3 are too many.-a Behe
understands that there is no limit for the number of mutations
occurring that each can be selected for in terms of specification of
the design. The limit is for what can't be selected for.
Just look at Demski's examples of complex specified information.-a His
claims are that it is improbable to evolve all the steps in his
examples, but it is obviously possible to evolve systems with less
steps even by Dembski's tornado through a junkyard probability
estimates.-a The fact is systems with a larger number of parts just
seem to be several systems with fewer parts getting together.-a That
is always why the tornado through a junkyard stupidity has always
failed creationists.
Just like your sequence space stupidity falls apart because life has
never had to search very much of sequence space to accomplish what it
has accomplished.-a Random sequence can account for what Dembski calls
specification.
This is a quote from Google:
William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design (ID),
acknowledges that natural selection is a real process that can
produce micro-evolutionary changes or adaptations within species.
However, he argues it cannot explain the origin of complex biological
systems or the diversity of life (macro-evolution), which he
attributes to an intelligent designer.
END QUOTE:
Macro evolution is just a lot of micro evolution.-a We just had a
discussion as to whether Neanderthals were a different species.
There are physical differences, but it is a matter of opinion as to
how much is enough to make that claim.-a Most of their DNA split off
from modern humans 800,000 years ago.-a They were more closely related
to modern humans than that because some Homo left Africa around
500,000 years ago and got absorbed by the Neanderthals, so it makes
Neanderthals more closely related to modern humans than are
Denisovans.-a When has enough micro evolution occurred in order to
call it macro evolution?
Many creationists accept microevolution (probably a majority?), e.g.
Darwin's finches. This is the standard ID position.
The denial is just stupid at this time.-a Your continued support for the
ID scam creationist denial is just a dishonest manifestation of your
desire to support your religious beliefs with something that is never
going to support those religious beliefs.-a No matter how the diversity
of life came into being it was not Biblical.-a That is the end of that story.
The standard position goes way beyond Darwin's finches.-a The AIG has ambulocetus on their Ark.-a In their museum they claim that all cat kinds evolved from one original pair of cats that were on the Ark even the
sabre toothed monsters of the ice age that occurred after the flood.
These lineages of cats are as divergent as humans are to orangutans.
humans are in the great ape kind.-a Dog kind is just as divergent.
Biblical creationist have made their decision about how much micro
evolution can occur and it makes humans into the great ape kind.-a Just
as Behe has no issues with humans and chimps sharing a common ancestor.
The genetic distance between chimps and humans is well within the
genetic distance required for cat and dog kind.
How much micro evolution is too much?
Therefore, you're begging the question by asserting as fact that
macroevolution is essentially microevolution + time.
The cat and dog kinds requires macro evolution (species level) to just
be a lot of micro evolution.
All the existing species could not have fit onto the Ark and be fed and cared for, for a year by 8 people.-a The AIG even want extinct kinds on
the Ark, and they just claim that they did not survive or evolved into something else.-a Whales have the breath of life, but they did not make
it onto the Ark, but the AIG think that ambulocetus was on the Ark. Ambulocetus is the four legged cetacean (the walking whale).
Nothing to see here folks.
That describes your argument.-a It is the reason that you have to be so dishonest in your support for the ID scam.-a Decades of willful ignorance
is responsible in your case.-a You have no excuse.-a You watched all this happen, and you just refused to understand what was going on when it was happening.
Ron Okimoto
Ron Okimoto
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein
space life has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is >>>>>> it sparse plains with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged
terrain of endless valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima >>>>>> will be mostly undiscoverable to incremental search relying on
incremental improvements each conferring survival advantage
sufficient to drive the associated mutation to fixation in the
population.
Your adaptive immune system would not work if the search parameters >>>>> were what you want them to be.-a Biological evolution by descent
with modification works because the space that needs to be searched >>>>> is minimal and within what is possible.-a Really, new antibodies
that bind specific antigens would not be routinely selected for by
an immune response if the search parameters were too distant from
the existing protein sequences.-a If you look up the abzyme work
where they use the adaptive immune system to evolve new enzymatic
activity you will find that they have found that less than 10
changes in the antibody sequence can produce the new enzymatic
activity that was selected for.-a It wasn't just any enzymatic
activity, but the one that they were selecting for.
The paper that you put up trying to claim that too many new genes
needed to be produced to evolve multicellular animals should have
told you that very little protein space seems to have been needed
to be searched. Those thousands of new genes evolved after a basic
set of genes had already evolved, and they evolved over a billion
year period before the Cambrian explosion.-a The initial gene set
had been evolving for over 2 billion years to produce that
Eukaryotic gene set.-a It looked like nearly all the new genes that >>>>> evolved within the billion year period before the Cambrian
explosion had evolved from an existing gene.-a You should have seen >>>>> that in their tables of the origins of the new genes.
It just turns out that very little protein space has had to be
tested to get to where we are now.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely
smooth and monotonically increasing.
The mount improbables are only in your head.-a What exists are just >>>>> additions to what had already existed.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some
instances a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g.
https:// journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
The likely reason that nearly all new genes have evolved from
existing genes is that just a random sequence of amino acids will
fold up and could have some function, but most random sequences do
not efficiently produce the same structure.-a It can take time to
fold up, and the sequence might not fold up into the same structure >>>>> every time.-a De novo coding sequence that produces a new protein
has to go through a selective process where the sequence needs to
further evolve so that it will efficiently fold up into its
functional structure.-a Genes that have existed for billions of
years already fold up efficiently, and it turns out that just
changing the sequence a little can produce a new function, so we
end up with related gene families.
There is even some stability issues with existing proteins, and
chaperone proteins have evolved to help them maintain the shape
they need to be in in order to function.
It is just how life has adapted to reality.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find >>>>>>>> intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define >>>>>>>> this have yet to land it seems.
On 11/12/2025 3:23 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/10/2025 3:40 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 9/12/2025 3:35 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 10:35 PM, MarkE wrote:
On 8/12/2025 3:40 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/7/2025 2:11 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 7/12/2025 4:45 am, RonO wrote:
On 12/6/2025 1:19 AM, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the >>>>>>>>>>> base- pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically
determined, but rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing >>>>>>>>>>> an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the same way, different >>>>>>>>>>> sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have essentially >>>>>>>>>>> the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical" in >>>>>>>>>>> that sense.)
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that >>>>>>>>>>> accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even >>>>>>>>>>> if Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless,
immaterial entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why >>>>>>>>>>> evolution (even in- principal) cannot be a source of such >>>>>>>>>>> information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA >>>>>>>>>> is. On the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and >>>>>>>>>> use the Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of >>>>>>>>>> information present. On the other hand one could follow
Dawkins and argue that natural selection impresses an
incomplete record of the historical environment of ancestral >>>>>>>>>> populations on the genome of a species, and this is the
information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing >>>>>>>>>> can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's >>>>>>>>>> information extractable from clade pan- genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which >>>>>>>>>> can't be added by evolutionary processes, but yet still
differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the >>>>>>>>>> information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, >>>>>>>>>> then one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common >>>>>>>>>> descent with modification through the agency of natural
selection and other processes, that all genomes have the same >>>>>>>>>> information content, and the claim that an intelligent
designer is required to account for the information
evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.) >>>>>>>>>>
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes >>>>>>>>>> do change the information content of genomes then you
difficulty in justifying the need for a mind to act as the >>>>>>>>>> source of information. On the one hand you could resort to >>>>>>>>>> occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny the >>>>>>>>>> existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected >>>>>>>>>> of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you >>>>>>>>>> could argue that the information is imported from the
environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool >>>>>>>>>> of information, in which case you're basically back at the >>>>>>>>>> Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert >>>>>>>>>> this much and no more, you need to identify limits to how much >>>>>>>>>> can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all >>>>>>>>>> you have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of >>>>>>>>> common descent and therefore genome/information change.
Although his recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon: >>>>>>>>>
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation,
evolution can help make something look and act differently. But >>>>>>>>> evolution never creates something organically. Behe contends >>>>>>>>> that Darwinism actually works by a process of
devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to create something >>>>>>>>> new at the lowest biological levels. This is important, he
makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot
explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily >>>>>>>>> tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build >>>>>>>>> complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
Probably not.-a The Reason to Believe creationists want to
exclude descent with modification.-a In it's place they claim >>>>>>>> that their designer is recreating new species (some of them can >>>>>>>> still interbreed, so they could be sub species) just a little >>>>>>>> different from the existing species. -a-aThey want to claim de >>>>>>>> novo creation is involved and not descent with modification.
You should have seen Behe's claims about whale "devolution".-a He >>>>>>>> claimed that a lot of the evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle >>>>>>>> involved breaking genes to revert back to the phenotype.-a He >>>>>>>> claimed that selection for these broken genes would be what
would be expected by Darwinian evolution.-a Unfortunately for >>>>>>>> Behe the broken genes are not all that had to happen during the >>>>>>>> evolution back to an aquatic lifestyle.-a The new structures that >>>>>>>> needed to form like Baleen in the place of teeth had to also
evolve.-a It wasn't just losing things like teeth and hair.-a The >>>>>>>> whale's tail had to bend and horizontal fluke's had to evolve >>>>>>>> where nothing existed before.-a Behe can't demonstrate that these >>>>>>>> new structures did not evolve by Darwinian mechanisms because he >>>>>>>> notes that Darwinian mechanisms were obviously working to select >>>>>>>> for the broken genes.
I tend to agree. Whether one considers whales to be designed or >>>>>>> evolved, they are clearly highly suited to their environment such >>>>>>> that progressive functional subtractions from an aquatic
anscestor as a primary source of adpaptations is surely inadequate. >>>>>>>
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As >>>>>>>>> you mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's
"incomplete record of the historical environment", or something >>>>>>>>> else?
No matter how the ID perps have tried to measure information, >>>>>>>> nothing has panned out for them.-a At one time Dembski admitted >>>>>>>> that natural selection could be the designer.-a None of them have >>>>>>>> been able to demonstrate that any of their examples of
information could not have evolved by descent with modification. >>>>>>>> They aren't even dealing with the information that they need to >>>>>>>> deal with when they lie about the genetic code.-a The information >>>>>>>> required for life is not in the genetic code, but in the 3
dimensional structures created by the string of amino acids
produced using that code, and as the ID perps themselves admit >>>>>>>> life has only had to explore a very small portion of possible >>>>>>>> protein space in order to evolve the diversity that it has. It >>>>>>>> is just a fact that only a very small bit of protein space has >>>>>>>> had to be tested in order to do everything that needs to be
done. This seems to be due to the fact that the vast majority of >>>>>>>> protein genes have evolved from existing protein genes, and that >>>>>>>> sequence has only had to be changed a little in order to create >>>>>>>> the new function.-a Your adaptive immune system would not work by >>>>>>>> mutation and selection if this was not the case.
Ron Okimoto
"Dembski admitted that natural selection could be the designer" - >>>>>>> do you have reference for that?
It was after the bait and switch had started to go down and like
Dembski's claim that space aliens were the most scientific option >>>>>> for an intelligent designer Dembski was trying to note that the ID >>>>>> perps were not designating what the designer was (they were not
claiming that it had to be a supernatural god-like being), and he >>>>>> was just pointing out that natural selection could result in
functional designs.-a My guess is that it is a stupid enough
admission of reality that it likely has made it into one of the
Wiki's on the subject.-a It might even be in Dembski's wiki.-a He >>>>>> was making the point to claim that ID was science because they
were lying about who their designer was, and it did not have to be >>>>>> a god.-a All the ID perps would eventually admit that their
designer was the Biblical god, but they were and are still lying
about what ID is to them in order to keep using it as bait to fool >>>>>> the rubes. They are only fooling creationists like yourself that
want to be lied to.
Hang on, this is a big claim - cites please, not more bluster.
It isn't bluster.-a Dembski really made the admission.-a It is just
the same as when Behe admitted that some IC systems could have
evolved by natural means at the turn of the century.-a Behe had to
admit that irreducible complexity did not mean could not have
evolved.-a He had to start claiming that his type of IC could not
have evolved and he started making claims about the number of parts
and "well matched", but he has never been able to define well
matched so that he could say that his systems had enough of it for
them to be his type of IC, and he never could determine how many
parts were enough to make a system his type of IC.-a He gave up and
started his waiting time and 3 neutral mutation shtick.-a Both ID
perps were only admitting that some of what they were calling design
was possible for biological evolution. Dembski resorted to his
notion of high specified complexity to differentiate low level
specified complexity (that could evolve) from his systems that had
more specified complexity that could not evolve. There is no doubt
that natural selection can select sequence changes that occur in an
existing gene for new functions that can develop. Multiple examples
exist, and like your new gene paper nearly all the new genes had
evolved from existing genes.-a This type of specified complexity is
obviously possible by natural mechanisms.-a It is the specification
of the entire gene that Dembski has issues with and not the new
genes that evolved from preexisting genes.-a Behe admits the same
thing when he acknowledges that 2 neutral mutations occurring before
natural selection could act are possible for creating new functions
but 3 are too many.-a Behe understands that there is no limit for the >>>> number of mutations occurring that each can be selected for in terms
of specification of the design. The limit is for what can't be
selected for.
Just look at Demski's examples of complex specified information.
His claims are that it is improbable to evolve all the steps in his
examples, but it is obviously possible to evolve systems with less
steps even by Dembski's tornado through a junkyard probability
estimates.-a The fact is systems with a larger number of parts just
seem to be several systems with fewer parts getting together.-a That
is always why the tornado through a junkyard stupidity has always
failed creationists.
Just like your sequence space stupidity falls apart because life has
never had to search very much of sequence space to accomplish what
it has accomplished.-a Random sequence can account for what Dembski
calls specification.
This is a quote from Google:
William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design (ID),
acknowledges that natural selection is a real process that can
produce micro-evolutionary changes or adaptations within species.
However, he argues it cannot explain the origin of complex
biological systems or the diversity of life (macro-evolution), which
he attributes to an intelligent designer.
END QUOTE:
Macro evolution is just a lot of micro evolution.-a We just had a
discussion as to whether Neanderthals were a different species.
There are physical differences, but it is a matter of opinion as to
how much is enough to make that claim.-a Most of their DNA split off
from modern humans 800,000 years ago.-a They were more closely
related to modern humans than that because some Homo left Africa
around 500,000 years ago and got absorbed by the Neanderthals, so it
makes Neanderthals more closely related to modern humans than are
Denisovans.-a When has enough micro evolution occurred in order to
call it macro evolution?
Many creationists accept microevolution (probably a majority?), e.g.
Darwin's finches. This is the standard ID position.
The denial is just stupid at this time.-a Your continued support for
the ID scam creationist denial is just a dishonest manifestation of
your desire to support your religious beliefs with something that is
never going to support those religious beliefs.-a No matter how the
diversity of life came into being it was not Biblical.-a That is the
end of that story.
The standard position goes way beyond Darwin's finches.-a The AIG has
ambulocetus on their Ark.-a In their museum they claim that all cat
kinds evolved from one original pair of cats that were on the Ark even
the sabre toothed monsters of the ice age that occurred after the
flood. These lineages of cats are as divergent as humans are to
orangutans. humans are in the great ape kind.-a Dog kind is just as
divergent. Biblical creationist have made their decision about how
much micro evolution can occur and it makes humans into the great ape
kind.-a Just as Behe has no issues with humans and chimps sharing a
common ancestor. The genetic distance between chimps and humans is
well within the genetic distance required for cat and dog kind.
How much micro evolution is too much?
Therefore, you're begging the question by asserting as fact that
macroevolution is essentially microevolution + time.
The cat and dog kinds requires macro evolution (species level) to just
be a lot of micro evolution.
All the existing species could not have fit onto the Ark and be fed
and cared for, for a year by 8 people.-a The AIG even want extinct
kinds on the Ark, and they just claim that they did not survive or
evolved into something else.-a Whales have the breath of life, but they
did not make it onto the Ark, but the AIG think that ambulocetus was
on the Ark. Ambulocetus is the four legged cetacean (the walking whale).
This is a fundamental issue. For example, as you know, Behe (and other
ID proponents I think) accept some degree of common descent. So even
just within ID there's not a consensus position.
Taking a meta-view for a moment, it seems that someone on either side of
the origins debate (simplifying as binary positions) can regard the opposition as either:
1. Having some validity, given the nature and complexity of the science
and merit of some of the opposing claims and deductions
2. Having no validity, and instead regarding opponents as either
ignorant, stupid, or dishonest.
Dawkins opts for the latter. And you?
Nothing to see here folks.
That describes your argument.-a It is the reason that you have to be so
dishonest in your support for the ID scam.-a Decades of willful
ignorance is responsible in your case.-a You have no excuse.-a You
watched all this happen, and you just refused to understand what was
going on when it was happening.
Ron Okimoto
Ron Okimoto
The issue though is not what fraction of the possible protein
space life has explored, but rather how explorable is it? E.g. is >>>>>>> it sparse plains with occasional local maxima, or is it a rugged >>>>>>> terrain of endless valleys and ridges? In either case, the maxima >>>>>>> will be mostly undiscoverable to incremental search relying on
incremental improvements each conferring survival advantage
sufficient to drive the associated mutation to fixation in the
population.
Your adaptive immune system would not work if the search
parameters were what you want them to be.-a Biological evolution by >>>>>> descent with modification works because the space that needs to be >>>>>> searched is minimal and within what is possible.-a Really, new
antibodies that bind specific antigens would not be routinely
selected for by an immune response if the search parameters were
too distant from the existing protein sequences.-a If you look up >>>>>> the abzyme work where they use the adaptive immune system to
evolve new enzymatic activity you will find that they have found
that less than 10 changes in the antibody sequence can produce the >>>>>> new enzymatic activity that was selected for.-a It wasn't just any >>>>>> enzymatic activity, but the one that they were selecting for.
The paper that you put up trying to claim that too many new genes >>>>>> needed to be produced to evolve multicellular animals should have >>>>>> told you that very little protein space seems to have been needed >>>>>> to be searched. Those thousands of new genes evolved after a basic >>>>>> set of genes had already evolved, and they evolved over a billion >>>>>> year period before the Cambrian explosion.-a The initial gene set >>>>>> had been evolving for over 2 billion years to produce that
Eukaryotic gene set.-a It looked like nearly all the new genes that >>>>>> evolved within the billion year period before the Cambrian
explosion had evolved from an existing gene.-a You should have seen >>>>>> that in their tables of the origins of the new genes.
It just turns out that very little protein space has had to be
tested to get to where we are now.
The way to and up countless Mount Improbables need to be largely >>>>>>> smooth and monotonically increasing.
The mount improbables are only in your head.-a What exists are just >>>>>> additions to what had already existed.
I realise too that this not a settled question, and in some
instances a random polymer can be effecively to function, e.g.
https:// journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000096&utm_source=chatgpt.com
The likely reason that nearly all new genes have evolved from
existing genes is that just a random sequence of amino acids will >>>>>> fold up and could have some function, but most random sequences do >>>>>> not efficiently produce the same structure.-a It can take time to >>>>>> fold up, and the sequence might not fold up into the same
structure every time.-a De novo coding sequence that produces a new >>>>>> protein has to go through a selective process where the sequence
needs to further evolve so that it will efficiently fold up into
its functional structure.-a Genes that have existed for billions of >>>>>> years already fold up efficiently, and it turns out that just
changing the sequence a little can produce a new function, so we
end up with related gene families.
There is even some stability issues with existing proteins, and
chaperone proteins have evolved to help them maintain the shape
they need to be in in order to function.
It is just how life has adapted to reality.
Ron Okimoto
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find >>>>>>>>> intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define >>>>>>>>> this have yet to land it seems.
On 12/13/2025 8:07 AM, MarkE wrote:[]
Just look at how your origin of life gap fits in with what we know about life on earth. How could you believe that some god was responsible for
the origin of life on earth over 3 billion years ago and not understand
that biological evolution is just another fact of nature?
Eukaryotes (us) first evolved as microbes from bacterial origins over 2 billion years ago as the last of the three extant groups of life
Feel free to cite an authoritive definition of macroevolution whichMacro evolution is just a lot of micro evolution.-a We just had a
discussion as to whether Neanderthals were a different species.-a There
are physical differences, but it is a matter of opinion as to how much
is enough to make that claim.-a Most of their DNA split off from modern
humans 800,000 years ago.-a They were more closely related to modern
humans than that because some Homo left Africa around 500,000 years ago
and got absorbed by the Neanderthals, so it makes Neanderthals more
closely related to modern humans than are Denisovans.-a When has enough
micro evolution occurred in order to call it macro evolution?
Many creationists accept microevolution (probably a majority?), e.g. >Darwin's finches. This is the standard ID position.
Therefore, you're begging the question by asserting as fact that >macroevolution is essentially microevolution + time.
Nothing to see here folks.
On 11/12/2025 3:23 am, RonO wrote:<massive snip to get to the point>
What you describe above is *not* common descent as science uses theAll the existing species could not have fit onto the Ark and be fed and
cared for, for a year by 8 people.-a The AIG even want extinct kinds on
the Ark, and they just claim that they did not survive or evolved into
something else.-a Whales have the breath of life, but they did not make
it onto the Ark, but the AIG think that ambulocetus was on the Ark.
Ambulocetus is the four legged cetacean (the walking whale).
This is a fundamental issue. For example, as you know, Behe (and other
ID proponents I think) accept some degree of common descent. So even
just within ID there's not a consensus position.
Taking a meta-view for a moment, it seems that someone on either side ofISTM wnen your opponents objectively demonstrate they are either
the origins debate (simplifying as binary positions) can regard the >opposition as either:
1. Having some validity, given the nature and complexity of the science
and merit of some of the opposing claims and deductions
2. Having no validity, and instead regarding opponents as either
ignorant, stupid, or dishonest.
Dawkins opts for the latter. And you?
On 11/12/2025 12:03 am, Ernest Major wrote:
On 06/12/2025 07:19, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-
pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s >>>>> on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, and
are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
The genetic code is arbitrary, in that any mapping from codon to
aminoacyl residue would work. Variant mappings exist in nature, mostly
in clades with small genomes (often mitochondria), and have been
created experimentally. For more divergent mappings there is the
strategy of swapping the mRNA and amino acid binding domains of tRNA.
But the genetic code is not random (it's more robust against base
substitutions than the great majority of possible code) and may be in
part physio-chemically determined. There is a hypothesis that
originally direct interactions between RNA and amino acids were
involved in template directed peptide synthesis, and that these
interactions are fossilised in the genetic code.
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even in- >>>>> principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On
the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that
natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical
environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and
this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic
bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's
information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be
added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then
one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common descent with
modification through the agency of natural selection and other
processes, that all genomes have the same information content, and
the claim that an intelligent designer is required to account for
the information evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a
residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information.
On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist
determinism) and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray
Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the
other hand you could argue that the information is imported from the
environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of
information, in which case you're basically back at the Cosmological
Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert this much and no
more, you need to identify limits to how much can be achieved by
evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is an appeal to
incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common
descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent
book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution
can help make something look and act differently. But evolution never
creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually
works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in order to
create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is
important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process
cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so easily >>> tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will build
complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
No. Creationists sometimes try to argue that science excludes the
supernatural as a matter of principle. Passing over the slippery
nature of what counts as supernatural, I disagree. The actual
restriction is to phenomena which behave, at least statistically, in a
regular way, or to put it simply science assumes that "evidence means
something", i.e. empirical observation is an epistemologically valid
source of knowledge.
Occasionalism is the position that there are no natural processes;
instead God does everything. Progressive creationism can grade into
occasionalist evolutionism, but God, episodically or steadily,
magicking new species into existence is not occasionalist.
Philosophical naturalism is the position that nothing is supernatural;
occasionalism is the position that everything is supernatural. Most
religious views lie somewhere between those two extremes.
Most Christian views require at times irregularity (occasional occasionalism?), however they not antithetical to the pursuit of
science. As I've said here before, identifying and demonstrating that boundary would be where science itself points to a creator. bmmmm
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record
of the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators
create information out of "nothing".
But not information that is specified (as in CSI), which is the critical distinction, and why Dembski and others give this so much attention.
If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal
then information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-violation
has not been observed, physicists believe that the laws of physics are
CPT- invariant, and as CP-violation has been observed this implies
that T- violation also occurs. There is also the black-hole
information paradox, wherein black holes appear not to conserve
information.
Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible
because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law does
not preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist 2LOT was
true, life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if an analogous
law of information existed it would not preclude evolution (and life);
just as life (and evolution) exports entropy into the environment,
they could import information from the environment. Dembski et al
could retreat to the question of the ultimate source of the
information, but that is just the cosmological argument redux, and not
an argument against the factuality of evolution.
For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections
between neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as
containing information. In most animals (C. elegans is an exception)
this is not fully defined by the genome. So a proportion of the
information in the connectome must be imported from the environment
(whether sensory inputs or biochemical noise).
Turning again to the question of conservation of information.
AlphaZero, starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped
itself to superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess. Did
that process increase information? In that case where did the
information come from?
As IrCOve mentioned on t.o before, in the past I worked as an engineer programming Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). At the time, I read
an article which utilised a genetic algorithm to develop an FPGA circuit
for a clocked counter of some sort. It turned out to be a very efficient solution, but humanly incomprehensible because it appeared to utilise parasitic capacitances or some other secondary analogue effect. The
device used was programmed with a 2kbit configuration file, and so it appeared that 2,000 bits of information (presumably qualifying as
complex specific information) had been created de novo by an
evolutionary process. I wrote to William Dembski at the time, who
responded with an interest in investigating the example further, but
offered an initial assessment that information had been rCLsmuggled inrCY to the system by an intelligent designer (i.e. the creators of the
experimental set up).
My point being (without claiming anything definitive) the information
may be from sources such as the intelligent system/algorithm designers,
or from a brute force search of the entire soluition space (or enough of
it to outperform humans).
(AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in that
case one could appeal to import from environment as the source of the
information in the trained model.)
On 13/12/2025 13:46, MarkE wrote:
On 11/12/2025 12:03 am, Ernest Major wrote:
On 06/12/2025 07:19, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base- >>>>>> pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but
rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary,
immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and
1s on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy,
and are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
The genetic code is arbitrary, in that any mapping from codon to
aminoacyl residue would work. Variant mappings exist in nature,
mostly in clades with small genomes (often mitochondria), and have
been created experimentally. For more divergent mappings there is the
strategy of swapping the mRNA and amino acid binding domains of tRNA.
But the genetic code is not random (it's more robust against base
substitutions than the great majority of possible code) and may be in
part physio-chemically determined. There is a hypothesis that
originally direct interactions between RNA and amino acids were
involved in template directed peptide synthesis, and that these
interactions are fossilised in the genetic code.
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if
Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even
in- principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On
the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that
natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical
environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species,
and this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic
bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence
ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's
information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be >>>>> added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa. >>>>>
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then
one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common descent with >>>>> modification through the agency of natural selection and other
processes, that all genomes have the same information content, and
the claim that an intelligent designer is required to account for
the information evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as
a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of information. >>>>> On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist >>>>> determinism) and deny the existence of natural processes, a la Ray
Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the >>>>> other hand you could argue that the information is imported from
the environment and a mind was needed to create the initial pool of >>>>> information, in which case you're basically back at the
Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand, you assert this
much and no more, you need to identify limits to how much can be
achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you have is
an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of
common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his
recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution
can help make something look and act differently. But evolution
never creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism
actually works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in
order to create something new at the lowest biological levels. This
is important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process
cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that so
easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will
build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
No. Creationists sometimes try to argue that science excludes the
supernatural as a matter of principle. Passing over the slippery
nature of what counts as supernatural, I disagree. The actual
restriction is to phenomena which behave, at least statistically, in
a regular way, or to put it simply science assumes that "evidence
means something", i.e. empirical observation is an epistemologically
valid source of knowledge.
Occasionalism is the position that there are no natural processes;
instead God does everything. Progressive creationism can grade into
occasionalist evolutionism, but God, episodically or steadily,
magicking new species into existence is not occasionalist.
Philosophical naturalism is the position that nothing is
supernatural; occasionalism is the position that everything is
supernatural. Most religious views lie somewhere between those two
extremes.
Most Christian views require at times irregularity (occasional
occasionalism?), however they not antithetical to the pursuit of
science. As I've said here before, identifying and demonstrating that
boundary would be where science itself points to a creator. bmmmm
I believe that the usual phrasing would be "an interventionist god".
Did you intend to claim that the stochastic nature of radioactive decay
is points to a creator?
Your first problem is distinguishing unrecognised regularity from irregularity. Your second problem is in leaping from irregularity to creator. An unknown is not necessarily supernatural, and the
supernatural is not necessarily a creator god. Your third problem is
that this looks like an appeal to "the God of the gaps".
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record
of the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this
have yet to land it seems.
My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators
create information out of "nothing".
But not information that is specified (as in CSI), which is the
critical distinction, and why Dembski and others give this so much
attention.
That's a substantial retreat from conservation of information.
It seems to me that by claiming the genomes contain complex *specified* information you're assuming what you're trying to prove.
If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal
then information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-violation
has not been observed, physicists believe that the laws of physics
are CPT- invariant, and as CP-violation has been observed this
implies that T- violation also occurs. There is also the black-hole
information paradox, wherein black holes appear not to conserve
information.
Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible
because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law does
not preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist 2LOT was
true, life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if an analogous
law of information existed it would not preclude evolution (and
life); just as life (and evolution) exports entropy into the
environment, they could import information from the environment.
Dembski et al could retreat to the question of the ultimate source of
the information, but that is just the cosmological argument redux,
and not an argument against the factuality of evolution.
For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections
between neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as
containing information. In most animals (C. elegans is an exception)
this is not fully defined by the genome. So a proportion of the
information in the connectome must be imported from the environment
(whether sensory inputs or biochemical noise).
Turning again to the question of conservation of information.
AlphaZero, starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped
itself to superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess. Did
that process increase information? In that case where did the
information come from?
As IrCOve mentioned on t.o before, in the past I worked as an engineer
programming Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). At the time, I
read an article which utilised a genetic algorithm to develop an FPGA
circuit for a clocked counter of some sort. It turned out to be a very
efficient solution, but humanly incomprehensible because it appeared
to utilise parasitic capacitances or some other secondary analogue
effect. The device used was programmed with a 2kbit configuration
file, and so it appeared that 2,000 bits of information (presumably
qualifying as complex specific information) had been created de novo
by an evolutionary process. I wrote to William Dembski at the time,
who responded with an interest in investigating the example further,
but offered an initial assessment that information had been rCLsmuggled
inrCY to the system by an intelligent designer (i.e. the creators of the
experimental set up).
My point being (without claiming anything definitive) the information
may be from sources such as the intelligent system/algorithm
designers, or from a brute force search of the entire soluition space
(or enough of it to outperform humans).
The whole point of using genetic algorithms is that, in suitable
domains, they greatly outperform brute force searches. They are
vulnerable to hanging up on local maxima, but this can be in part
addressed by annealing.
I find the "smuggled information" response underwhelming. If a genetic algorithm can import information from an "artificial" environment set up
by human experimenters then why can't it import information from a
"natural" environment? At which point you're back at the cosmological argument again.
(AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in that
case one could appeal to import from environment as the source of the
information in the trained model.)
On 16/12/2025 10:24 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 13/12/2025 13:46, MarkE wrote:
On 11/12/2025 12:03 am, Ernest Major wrote:
On 06/12/2025 07:19, MarkE wrote:
On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:
On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:
However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the
base- pair sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, >>>>>>> but rather DNA is a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, >>>>>>> immaterial code. (In the same way, different sequences of 0s and >>>>>>> 1s on your hard drive have essentially the same mass and energy, >>>>>>> and are therefore not "physical" in that sense.)
The genetic code is arbitrary, in that any mapping from codon to
aminoacyl residue would work. Variant mappings exist in nature,
mostly in clades with small genomes (often mitochondria), and have
been created experimentally. For more divergent mappings there is
the strategy of swapping the mRNA and amino acid binding domains of
tRNA.
But the genetic code is not random (it's more robust against base
substitutions than the great majority of possible code) and may be
in part physio-chemically determined. There is a hypothesis that
originally direct interactions between RNA and amino acids were
involved in template directed peptide synthesis, and that these
interactions are fossilised in the genetic code.
However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that
accumulates particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if >>>>>>> Meyer's assertion that "Information is a massless, immaterial
entity" is accepted, he still needs to show why evolution (even >>>>>>> in- principal) cannot be a source of such information.
There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On >>>>>> the one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the
Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of the amount of information
present. On the other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that >>>>>> natural selection impresses an incomplete record of the historical >>>>>> environment of ancestral populations on the genome of a species,
and this is the information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic >>>>>> bracketing can be used to infer with various degrees of confidence >>>>>> ancestral phenotypes, habitats and distributions - that's
information extractable from clade pan-genomes.
Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't
be added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between >>>>>> taxa.
If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the
information content of genomes, then as it is clear that
evolutionary processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then >>>>>> one concludes, from the voluminous evidence for common descent
with modification through the agency of natural selection and
other processes, that all genomes have the same information
content, and the claim that an intelligent designer is required to >>>>>> account for the information evaporates. (There might be a circular >>>>>> argument as a residue.)
If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do
change the information content of genomes then you difficulty in
justifying the need for a mind to act as the source of
information. On the one hand you could resort to occasionalism
(Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny the existence of natural
processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of being an occasionalist >>>>>> evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue that the
information is imported from the environment and a mind was needed >>>>>> to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're
basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping
hand, you assert this much and no more, you need to identify
limits to how much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If
you don't, all you have is an appeal to incredulity.
Apologies for the delay in this response.
Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of
common descent and therefore genome/information change. Although
his recent book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:
'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution >>>>> can help make something look and act differently. But evolution
never creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism
actually works by a process of devolutionrCodamaging cells in DNA in >>>>> order to create something new at the lowest biological levels. This >>>>> is important, he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian
process cannot explain the creation of life itself. rCLA process that >>>>> so easily tears down sophisticated machinery is not one which will
build complex, functional systems,rCY he writes.'
Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?
No. Creationists sometimes try to argue that science excludes the
supernatural as a matter of principle. Passing over the slippery
nature of what counts as supernatural, I disagree. The actual
restriction is to phenomena which behave, at least statistically, in
a regular way, or to put it simply science assumes that "evidence
means something", i.e. empirical observation is an epistemologically
valid source of knowledge.
Occasionalism is the position that there are no natural processes;
instead God does everything. Progressive creationism can grade into
occasionalist evolutionism, but God, episodically or steadily,
magicking new species into existence is not occasionalist.
Philosophical naturalism is the position that nothing is
supernatural; occasionalism is the position that everything is
supernatural. Most religious views lie somewhere between those two
extremes.
Most Christian views require at times irregularity (occasional
occasionalism?), however they not antithetical to the pursuit of
science. As I've said here before, identifying and demonstrating that
boundary would be where science itself points to a creator. bmmmm
I believe that the usual phrasing would be "an interventionist god".
Did you intend to claim that the stochastic nature of radioactive
decay is points to a creator?
No. But the minimal necessary complexity of a sustainable, self-
replicating entity, yes.
Your first problem is distinguishing unrecognised regularity from
irregularity. Your second problem is in leaping from irregularity to
creator. An unknown is not necessarily supernatural, and the
supernatural is not necessarily a creator god. Your third problem is
that this looks like an appeal to "the God of the gaps".
Agreed, these are all problems/challenges, and should be acknowledged
and considered.
The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you
mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete
record of the historical environment", or something else?
ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find
intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define
this have yet to land it seems.
My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators
create information out of "nothing".
But not information that is specified (as in CSI), which is the
critical distinction, and why Dembski and others give this so much
attention.
That's a substantial retreat from conservation of information.
I'm not unreasonably unwilling to give a few yards.
It seems to me that by claiming the genomes contain complex
*specified* information you're assuming what you're trying to prove.
Genes are typically hundreds units long (i.e. complex) and code for functional proteins among a vast majority of nonfunctional combinations (i.e. specified). So no question-begging there.
As for the non-coding regions of the genome, that raises questions of
the functional proportion and degree of specificity.
If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal
then information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-
violation has not been observed, physicists believe that the laws of
physics are CPT- invariant, and as CP-violation has been observed
this implies that T- violation also occurs. There is also the black-
hole information paradox, wherein black holes appear not to conserve
information.
Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible
because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law does
not preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist 2LOT
was true, life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if an
analogous law of information existed it would not preclude evolution
(and life); just as life (and evolution) exports entropy into the
environment, they could import information from the environment.
Dembski et al could retreat to the question of the ultimate source
of the information, but that is just the cosmological argument
redux, and not an argument against the factuality of evolution.
For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections
between neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as
containing information. In most animals (C. elegans is an exception)
this is not fully defined by the genome. So a proportion of the
information in the connectome must be imported from the environment
(whether sensory inputs or biochemical noise).
Turning again to the question of conservation of information.
AlphaZero, starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped
itself to superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess.
Did that process increase information? In that case where did the
information come from?
As IrCOve mentioned on t.o before, in the past I worked as an engineer
programming Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). At the time, I
read an article which utilised a genetic algorithm to develop an FPGA
circuit for a clocked counter of some sort. It turned out to be a
very efficient solution, but humanly incomprehensible because it
appeared to utilise parasitic capacitances or some other secondary
analogue effect. The device used was programmed with a 2kbit
configuration file, and so it appeared that 2,000 bits of information
(presumably qualifying as complex specific information) had been
created de novo by an evolutionary process. I wrote to William
Dembski at the time, who responded with an interest in investigating
the example further, but offered an initial assessment that
information had been rCLsmuggled inrCY to the system by an intelligent
designer (i.e. the creators of the experimental set up).
My point being (without claiming anything definitive) the information
may be from sources such as the intelligent system/algorithm
designers, or from a brute force search of the entire soluition space
(or enough of it to outperform humans).
The whole point of using genetic algorithms is that, in suitable
domains, they greatly outperform brute force searches. They are
vulnerable to hanging up on local maxima, but this can be in part
addressed by annealing.
I find the "smuggled information" response underwhelming. If a genetic
algorithm can import information from an "artificial" environment set
up by human experimenters then why can't it import information from a
"natural" environment? At which point you're back at the cosmological
argument again.
In this case the device was programmed with (as I recall) 2 kilobits of data, starting with a random sequence and ending with the refined
sequence. That is, it appears that a quantifiable amount of information
has been created.
Hence my question to Dembski. I understand your underwhelm. It does seem
to warrant further study and explanation.
One way to look at this would be to ask, can RM+NS potentially produce
say just 2 bits of information (e.g. a single advantageous point
mutation)? Regardless of one's overall position, I think you'd have to concede that it could, even if you dismissed it as trivial. What about 4 bits? 8 bits? At what point would we discomfirm the ID assertion that information "can only come from a mind", or the "conservation of information"?
Is the resolution akin to entropy: entropy could potentially increase spontaneously in a closed system with a very small number of (say) gas molecules with different velocities, such that the hotter ones randomly moved to one region and the colder ones to another. However, as the
number of particles increases, the probability of this occurring
decreases exponentially.
Inference: macroevolution (a non-trivial increase in information) is
like entropy decrease in a stochastic ensemble (e.g. a spontaneous non- trivial temperature gradient).
The former is in an open system, but I'm not suggesting direct equivalence.
(AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in
that case one could appeal to import from environment as the source
of the information in the trained model.)
My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators
create information out of "nothing".
But not information that is specified (as in CSI), which is the
critical distinction, and why Dembski and others give this so much
attention.
That's a substantial retreat from conservation of information.
I'm not unreasonably unwilling to give a few yards.
That concession only lasted a few paragraphs.
It seems to me that by claiming the genomes contain complex
*specified* information you're assuming what you're trying to prove.
Genes are typically hundreds units long (i.e. complex) and code for
functional proteins among a vast majority of nonfunctional
combinations (i.e. specified). So no question-begging there.
That's not what specified means. Specified means that it confirms to a pre-existing specification. That's what makes it the argument circular.
But if you want to concede that CSI is nothing more than an appeal to incredulity, be my guest.
As for the non-coding regions of the genome, that raises questions of
the functional proportion and degree of specificity.
If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal
then information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-
violation has not been observed, physicists believe that the laws
of physics are CPT- invariant, and as CP-violation has been
observed this implies that T- violation also occurs. There is also
the black- hole information paradox, wherein black holes appear not >>>>> to conserve information.
Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible
because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law
does not preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist
2LOT was true, life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if
an analogous law of information existed it would not preclude
evolution (and life); just as life (and evolution) exports entropy
into the environment, they could import information from the
environment. Dembski et al could retreat to the question of the
ultimate source of the information, but that is just the
cosmological argument redux, and not an argument against the
factuality of evolution.
For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections
between neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as
containing information. In most animals (C. elegans is an
exception) this is not fully defined by the genome. So a proportion >>>>> of the information in the connectome must be imported from the
environment (whether sensory inputs or biochemical noise).
Turning again to the question of conservation of information.
AlphaZero, starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped
itself to superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess.
Did that process increase information? In that case where did the
information come from?
As IrCOve mentioned on t.o before, in the past I worked as an engineer >>>> programming Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). At the time, I
read an article which utilised a genetic algorithm to develop an
FPGA circuit for a clocked counter of some sort. It turned out to be
a very efficient solution, but humanly incomprehensible because it
appeared to utilise parasitic capacitances or some other secondary
analogue effect. The device used was programmed with a 2kbit
configuration file, and so it appeared that 2,000 bits of
information (presumably qualifying as complex specific information)
had been created de novo by an evolutionary process. I wrote to
William Dembski at the time, who responded with an interest in
investigating the example further, but offered an initial assessment
that information had been rCLsmuggled inrCY to the system by an
intelligent designer (i.e. the creators of the experimental set up).
My point being (without claiming anything definitive) the
information may be from sources such as the intelligent system/
algorithm designers, or from a brute force search of the entire
soluition space (or enough of it to outperform humans).
The whole point of using genetic algorithms is that, in suitable
domains, they greatly outperform brute force searches. They are
vulnerable to hanging up on local maxima, but this can be in part
addressed by annealing.
I find the "smuggled information" response underwhelming. If a
genetic algorithm can import information from an "artificial"
environment set up by human experimenters then why can't it import
information from a "natural" environment? At which point you're back
at the cosmological argument again.
In this case the device was programmed with (as I recall) 2 kilobits
of data, starting with a random sequence and ending with the refined
sequence. That is, it appears that a quantifiable amount of
information has been created.
Hence my question to Dembski. I understand your underwhelm. It does
seem to warrant further study and explanation.
One way to look at this would be to ask, can RM+NS potentially produce
say just 2 bits of information (e.g. a single advantageous point
mutation)? Regardless of one's overall position, I think you'd have to
concede that it could, even if you dismissed it as trivial. What about
4 bits? 8 bits? At what point would we discomfirm the ID assertion
that information "can only come from a mind", or the "conservation of
information"?
I find it self-evident that demonstrating that 1 bit comes from a source other than a mind that is be sufficient to disconfirm the ID assertion
that information "can only come from a mind". ("conservation of
information" is not equivalent, and is not sufficient to conclude design.)
Is the resolution akin to entropy: entropy could potentially increase
spontaneously in a closed system with a very small number of (say) gas
molecules with different velocities, such that the hotter ones
randomly moved to one region and the colder ones to another. However,
as the number of particles increases, the probability of this
occurring decreases exponentially.
Inference: macroevolution (a non-trivial increase in information) is
like entropy decrease in a stochastic ensemble (e.g. a spontaneous
non- trivial temperature gradient).
The former is in an open system, but I'm not suggesting direct
equivalence.
(AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in
that case one could appeal to import from environment as the source >>>>> of the information in the trained model.)
On 18/12/2025 6:20 am, Ernest Major wrote:
...
My intuition goes the other way. Hardware random number generators >>>>>> create information out of "nothing".
But not information that is specified (as in CSI), which is the
critical distinction, and why Dembski and others give this so much
attention.
That's a substantial retreat from conservation of information.
I'm not unreasonably unwilling to give a few yards.
That concession only lasted a few paragraphs.
It seems to me that by claiming the genomes contain complex
*specified* information you're assuming what you're trying to prove.
Genes are typically hundreds units long (i.e. complex) and code for
functional proteins among a vast majority of nonfunctional
combinations (i.e. specified). So no question-begging there.
That's not what specified means. Specified means that it confirms to a
pre-existing specification. That's what makes it the argument
circular. But if you want to concede that CSI is nothing more than an
appeal to incredulity, be my guest.
I disagree.
Here's how to think of it. According to some estimates, the functional fraction of proteins is between 10^-11 and 10^-77 (from foldable to
specific enzymatic behaviour). These numbers and their interpretation
are debated and qualified of course, but provide an indicative reference.
The total number of sequences evolution could realistically sample on
Earth over ~4 billion years is estimated to be 10^40 (all organisms, all generations, all mutations).
Therefore, any fraction less than maybe 10^-30 and certainly 10^-50 is,
in effect, specified. If it cannot be found by evolution, it must be conforming to a pre-existing specification.
As for the non-coding regions of the genome, that raises questions of
the functional proportion and degree of specificity.
If the laws of physics are invariant with respect to time-reversal >>>>>> then information (in some senses) is conserved. But while T-
violation has not been observed, physicists believe that the laws >>>>>> of physics are CPT- invariant, and as CP-violation has been
observed this implies that T- violation also occurs. There is also >>>>>> the black- hole information paradox, wherein black holes appear
not to conserve information.
Creationists have been known to argue that evolution is impossible >>>>>> because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, ignoring that the law
does not preclude local decreases in entropy. (If the creationist >>>>>> 2LOT was true, life would also be impossible.) Similarly, even if >>>>>> an analogous law of information existed it would not preclude
evolution (and life); just as life (and evolution) exports entropy >>>>>> into the environment, they could import information from the
environment. Dembski et al could retreat to the question of the
ultimate source of the information, but that is just the
cosmological argument redux, and not an argument against the
factuality of evolution.
For an analogy, consider the connectome - the set of connections
between neurons. In the same was as DNA this can been seen as
containing information. In most animals (C. elegans is an
exception) this is not fully defined by the genome. So a
proportion of the information in the connectome must be imported
from the environment (whether sensory inputs or biochemical noise). >>>>>>
Turning again to the question of conservation of information.
AlphaZero, starting with nothing more than the rules, bootstrapped >>>>>> itself to superhuman levels of play in, inter alia, Go and chess. >>>>>> Did that process increase information? In that case where did the >>>>>> information come from?
As IrCOve mentioned on t.o before, in the past I worked as an
engineer programming Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). At the >>>>> time, I read an article which utilised a genetic algorithm to
develop an FPGA circuit for a clocked counter of some sort. It
turned out to be a very efficient solution, but humanly
incomprehensible because it appeared to utilise parasitic
capacitances or some other secondary analogue effect. The device
used was programmed with a 2kbit configuration file, and so it
appeared that 2,000 bits of information (presumably qualifying as
complex specific information) had been created de novo by an
evolutionary process. I wrote to William Dembski at the time, who
responded with an interest in investigating the example further,
but offered an initial assessment that information had been
rCLsmuggled inrCY to the system by an intelligent designer (i.e. the >>>>> creators of the experimental set up).
My point being (without claiming anything definitive) the
information may be from sources such as the intelligent system/
algorithm designers, or from a brute force search of the entire
soluition space (or enough of it to outperform humans).
The whole point of using genetic algorithms is that, in suitable
domains, they greatly outperform brute force searches. They are
vulnerable to hanging up on local maxima, but this can be in part
addressed by annealing.
I find the "smuggled information" response underwhelming. If a
genetic algorithm can import information from an "artificial"
environment set up by human experimenters then why can't it import
information from a "natural" environment? At which point you're back
at the cosmological argument again.
In this case the device was programmed with (as I recall) 2 kilobits
of data, starting with a random sequence and ending with the refined
sequence. That is, it appears that a quantifiable amount of
information has been created.
Hence my question to Dembski. I understand your underwhelm. It does
seem to warrant further study and explanation.
One way to look at this would be to ask, can RM+NS potentially
produce say just 2 bits of information (e.g. a single advantageous
point mutation)? Regardless of one's overall position, I think you'd
have to concede that it could, even if you dismissed it as trivial.
What about 4 bits? 8 bits? At what point would we discomfirm the ID
assertion that information "can only come from a mind", or the
"conservation of information"?
I find it self-evident that demonstrating that 1 bit comes from a
source other than a mind that is be sufficient to disconfirm the ID
assertion that information "can only come from a mind". ("conservation
of information" is not equivalent, and is not sufficient to conclude
design.)
You didn't consider my explanation below, i.e. why we need to think stochastically.
Is the resolution akin to entropy: entropy could potentially increase
spontaneously in a closed system with a very small number of (say)
gas molecules with different velocities, such that the hotter ones
randomly moved to one region and the colder ones to another. However,
as the number of particles increases, the probability of this
occurring decreases exponentially.
Inference: macroevolution (a non-trivial increase in information) is
like entropy decrease in a stochastic ensemble (e.g. a spontaneous
non- trivial temperature gradient).
The former is in an open system, but I'm not suggesting direct
equivalence.
(AlphaFold broke the back of the protein folding problem, but in
that case one could appeal to import from environment as the
source of the information in the trained model.)
What is your association with the ID perps and the Discovery Institute's
ID scam unit?
Pretty much only someone deeply involved in the ID scam would still
think that these types of numbers mean anything, and you would have to
be an ID perp so delusional that you would go along with the bait and
switch scam and still think that there might be something worth
believing about the creationist scam.-a Even a hard core IDiot like Mike Gene quit the ID scam after the failure in Dover.-a I had always
considered the ID perps to be a bunch of dishonest scam artists that
never believed their stupid junk and were only into the bait and switch
scam because it was their only means of pushing their Wedge agenda forward.-a Really, what kind of dishonest creationist would continue to support the ID scam after the Bait and Switch started to go down?-a We
know that Nelson kept supporting the bait and switch when he understood
that the ID science had never existed, and I had always thought that the other ID perps were the same way, but if you are associated with the ID
scam that might mean that some of them are delusional true believers.
We already know that you are an IDiot so deluded that you wouldn't give
up when the ID perps rubbed your face in the fact that Biblical
creationists that are anti science because of their Biblical beliefs
would have never wanted the ID perps to accomplish any science with
respect to the Top Six.-a The designer of the Top Six is not the designer described in the Bible.-a It would just be more science for Biblical creationists to deny.-a Most of the other IDiots quit supporting the ID scam, but you started lying to yourself about one at a time so that you would not have to deal with reality.-a The scientific creationists had
used the Top Six as you started using them.-a They are only meant to be
used to deny reality and need to be forgotten before moving on to the
next one to lie to yourself about reality.-a They are used as single use fire and forget denial stupidity.-a Meyer in his book The God Hypothesis used them as independent bits of gap denial.-a He didn't try to develop a single god hypothesis and instead used them to create a bunch of god hypotheses.-a Meyer was only using them for individual gap denial, he
wasn't using them to develop a god hypothesis that would deal honestly
with reality, and that is how you are dealing with reality.
On 18/12/2025 2:55 pm, RonO wrote:
What is your association with the ID perps and the Discovery
Institute's ID scam unit?
None.
Have you listened to extended discussion or lecture by Stephen Meyer?
You may disagree with him, but if you dismiss him as a "delusional" "ID perp", an "IDiot" spouting only "stupid junk" and a "scam", then we may effectively and regrettably have nothing to talk about.
Pretty much only someone deeply involved in the ID scam would still
think that these types of numbers mean anything, and you would have to
be an ID perp so delusional that you would go along with the bait and
switch scam and still think that there might be something worth
believing about the creationist scam.-a Even a hard core IDiot like
Mike Gene quit the ID scam after the failure in Dover.-a I had always
considered the ID perps to be a bunch of dishonest scam artists that
never believed their stupid junk and were only into the bait and
switch scam because it was their only means of pushing their Wedge
agenda forward.-a Really, what kind of dishonest creationist would
continue to support the ID scam after the Bait and Switch started to
go down?-a We know that Nelson kept supporting the bait and switch when
he understood that the ID science had never existed, and I had always
thought that the other ID perps were the same way, but if you are
associated with the ID scam that might mean that some of them are
delusional true believers.
We already know that you are an IDiot so deluded that you wouldn't
give up when the ID perps rubbed your face in the fact that Biblical
creationists that are anti science because of their Biblical beliefs
would have never wanted the ID perps to accomplish any science with
respect to the Top Six.-a The designer of the Top Six is not the
designer described in the Bible.-a It would just be more science for
Biblical creationists to deny.-a Most of the other IDiots quit
supporting the ID scam, but you started lying to yourself about one at
a time so that you would not have to deal with reality.-a The
scientific creationists had used the Top Six as you started using
them.-a They are only meant to be used to deny reality and need to be
forgotten before moving on to the next one to lie to yourself about
reality.-a They are used as single use fire and forget denial
stupidity.-a Meyer in his book The God Hypothesis used them as
independent bits of gap denial.-a He didn't try to develop a single god
hypothesis and instead used them to create a bunch of god hypotheses.
Meyer was only using them for individual gap denial, he wasn't using
them to develop a god hypothesis that would deal honestly with
reality, and that is how you are dealing with reality.
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