For a lot of people, I seem to have become the go-to blogger for
information theory stuff. I really don’t deserve it: Jeff Shallit at
Recursivity knows a whole lot more than I do. But I do my best.
Anyway, several people pointed out that over at the Disco Institute,
resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part
series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of
intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong. In Kitzmiller, the
intelligent design folks didn’t just lose; they utterly humiliated themselves.
But Casey has taken it on himself to demonstrate why, not only did they
not make themselves look like a bunch of dumb-asses, but they
in fact should have won, had the judge not been horribly biased against them.
Casey’s basic argument is really pathetic. The idea behind it is that the
judge in the case allowed the ruling to be dictated by the National Center for
Science Education (NCSE), which filed an Amicus brief that was quoted
extensively in the decision.
Casey’s key piece of evidence?
In the NCSE brief and in testimony, the fact that mutations can add
information to genome was discussed. In both cases, the key citation was a
review article from a group led by Maunyuan Long of the University of Chicago,
which provides an overview of research that describes how new genes are
formed.
As a disco-creationist, Casey claims that random processes like mutation
cannot create information. If a random process can’t create
information, then the information in an organism’s genes must have some
non-random source – like the “intelligent designer”.
Given that, according to Casey and his fellow disco-dancers,
evolution can’t create information, there must be something
wrong with the work that was cited at the trial. And Casey,
true genius that he is, discovered the problem: words!
You see, in Long et al’s paper, they don’t use the word
“information”, much less the phrase “new genetic information”. Therefore, the
paper doesn’t discuss the origin of genetic information. Anyone who says
that it does is clearly lying!
Virtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones
came from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article,
co-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago. The article does
not even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic
information.”
The catch, of course, is that the paper does discuss the origin
of genetic information. But the authors are primarily biologists, not
mathematicians. Instead of talking about “new genetic information”, they talk
about “new genes”. What’s a new gene? It’s a gene that’s different
from any pre-existing gene. So what’s the content of the new gene? All
together now: “information”!
But simple reasoning like that isn’t exactly Casey’s strong suit. Being a
scientific illiterate, he can’t read the paper to understand what it says. All
he can do is look at the words. But that’s enough for Casey. Clearly,
a paper titled “The Origin of New Genes” doesn’t discuss the origin of new
genetic information – after all, it doesn’t have the words “new genetic
information” in it!
It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s so damned stupid that it’s hard to believe
that even a disco dude like Casey could possibly say it without being
embarrassed. You’d think that after this long, I’d have reached the point
where I couldn’t be surprised by these shmoes any more, but they keep lowering
the bar.
And it gets worse.
But are Judge Jones’s, Ken Miller’s, and the NCSE’s bold proclamations
supported? Does Long et al. actually reveal the origin of new biological
information? Is Explore Evolution wrong? A closer look shows that the NCSE is
equivocating over the meanings of the words “information” and “new,” and that
the NCSE’s citations are largely bluffs, revealing little about how new
genetic functional information could originate via unguided evolutionary
mechanisms. This bluff was accepted at face value by Judge Jones, who
incorporated it in his highly misguided legal ruling.
This argument is particularly silly coming from Disco. Many of disco’s
arguments go back to the stupidity of Dembski’s “complex specified
information”. In all of the years of arguments about CSI, Dembski has
never provided an unequivocal definition of CSI. While claiming that
it’s a specific, computable quantity, he has never defined it well
enough to allow anyone to compute the CSI in any system; and he has never
demonstrated a complete computation of CSI. In fact, he can’t possibly do
that, because to do it, he would need to stop fudging about what CSI actually
is, and the moment he did that, the whole CSI argument can be refuted. Dembski
constantly relies on the equivocation in the definition of CSI, so that
any time anyone tries to refute it, he can just wave his hands
and say “Oh no, you idiot, that isn’t CSI.”
For their arguments, the disco folks continually discuss CSI. They
constantly cite it as the primary reason that people should take
intelligent design seriously as science. And yet they’ve never managed to
actually compute it, or even to actually define it without hedging.
But it’s the other guys are trying to pull the wool over our eyes by
equivocating over the definition of information.
A very succinct but utter destruction of one of the Disco institutes favorite arguments.
The inability of cranks to understand the papers they so enthusiastically cite never ceases to amaze and appal me.
Nice work!
I have to say, I’m still super amused with the idea of calling it the Disco Institute. I can’t help but imagine men and women with terrible haircuts, their white labcoats splaying out to reveal their bell-bottoms, skating around a roller-rink to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive”.
You should really include a link to the post you are discussing somewhere in the blog, I wanted to read it before seeing what you have to say.
DSimon: It’s the Disco ‘Tute, baby. Institute has far too many syllables to be cool.
@3:
Normally, I do provide links. But the DI has demonstrated, repeatedly, that they’re a collection of miserable liars. I refuse to provide them with the traffic that a link would generate. If you really want to find it, it’s should be easy to do.
Inherited horizontal gene transfer wouldn’t count as new information either, I’m sure.
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/i_parasite_-_chagas_parasite_can_transfer_genes_to_humans_an.php
Anton – if you’re interested, Dr. Wesley Elsberry is also commenting on Casey’s post, and has a link (if you haven’t already found the original by google).
Who funds the DI? And why don’t they notice that they’re getting precious little for their money? You’d think that serious cash would have a way of focusing attention on things like results.
If they think the ruling was misguided, shouldn’t they be appealing it rather than whining about it in blog postings? If all they do is complain about it, it makes it look as if they just want to appear to be martyrs, rather than actually doing something to get the ruling reversed.
If they’re right about ID being a valid competing theory, then they should be trying to move legal heaven and earth to get it taught, otherwise they’re doing a great dis-service to all the children being taught ‘evolutionist lies’.
@8:
I don’t know. But the thing about the DI is that you need to put what they do into the correct context. The DI claims to be a scientific research institute. Of course, if you look at them that way, they’re an unmitigated disaster. They’ve produced absolutely no significant scientific output – they still haven’t even managed for formulate a theory of intelligent design.
What the DI really is is a front that allows people to claim that there is a scientific research institute, and to generate large volumes of stuff which can be used by christians to claim that there’s some kind of scientific support for their belief. From that perspective, the DI has been extremely successful: look at the number of copies of ID books that have been sold by DI people, like Dembski, Behe, Meyer, etc.
They’re a thinly masked front for christian apologetics – and the people who pay them to be that get their money’s worth.
See an article by Jodi Wilgoren in the NYTimes, August 21, 2005:
GuideStar provides access to public records on nonprofits. You have to sign up, and you have to pay if you want anything more than just basic tax information, however even that is revealing.
Every year, nonprofits must describe their “exempt purpose achievements” and say how much they spent on them. In the last reported year, 2007, the DI had four. None of them involved scientific research. The biggest, clocking in at half their budget, is “Production of public service reports…articles…and the Institutes own publications in the field of Science and Culture.” I’m intentionally eliding this and not giving the $ because of GuideStar’s terms of use; sign up for GuideStar if you want the full enchilada.
If we assume 2010 is going to be similar to 2007, we can gain two things from this factoid. One – they have no intention of spending money on scientific research. Its not even in their nonprofit mission. Two – what Casey is doing by writing these blogs is, in fact, fulfilling their mission. Public reports on science and culture is exactly what the DI is about. Nothing more.
Despite what they may claim, what they tell the IRS is that scientific research just isn’t their bag, baby.
I still don’t understand how this is still an issue.
1) A genetic sequence codes into a series of triplets that match the anti-codons attached to amino acids
2) The resulting sequence of amino acids will, through their natural chemical properties, cause the protein to “fold” in a certain way.
3) The way a protein folds determines how it functions.
If you can understand those three VERY BASIC biological concepts, the whole “no new information is created by a mutation” is just ridiculous.
Mutations happen. they have been documented and directly observed. If you change ANY part of a genetic seqeunce, the resulting sequence will likely differ by at LEAST one amino acid, which could (but usually doesn’t) result in a significant change in function. Whether it’s a “good” or “bad” mutation is entirely determined by whether or not the organism is better suited for its environment with this modification.
Even if you are deleting a BP, codon, or amino acid from a sequence, you are still technically “adding information” since the resulting sequence can vary greatly.
Original: THE RED DOG WAS NOT WET
Adding a single BP (S): THE RES DDO GWA SNO TWE T__
Deleting a single BP (D): THE RED OGW ASN OTW ET_
Transposing two (D,D): THE RE[D] [D]OG WAS NOT WET
Transposing two (D,N): THE REN DOG WAS DOT WET
You can end up with RADICALLY different sequences by changing a single base pair — so this whole notion of “adding information” as if it were a book or an encylopedia, that it somehow requires a new interpreter, is just stupid.
Aaron,
Yet another example is the tendency for gene duplicates to alter the amount of a chemical produced. To use a cooking example, if gene x says “add one cup of y” and it gets duplicated, its hard to see how anyone could say that the new instruction “add two cups of y” isn’t new information. The additional gene may not be any different from the old one, but the instruction provided by the genome is; the recipe has changed, perhaps profoundly.
“This argument is particularly silly coming from Disco. Many of disco’s arguments go back to the stupidity of Dembski’s “complex specified information”. In all of the years of arguments about CSI, Dembski has never provided an unequivocal definition of CSI.”
You’ll notice that Casey Luskin is playing the exact same game, studiously avoiding actually giving a definition of information. We don’t know whether he means something that codes for a new phenotype, some new genomic pattern, or something else. He just issues a blanket dismissal of everything in the paper because it doesn’t match this mysterious notion of “information”.
What I want to know is how could a genetic mutation not create new information? Look, say I start with a population of genetically identical E. Coli. A whole bunch of information exists as to what activities this code supports. A mutation comes along. Now there is either the new information as to what the new code supports, or the new information that the new code doesn’t support life. Either way, there is new information.
Damn, my son’s book of “arithmetic” problems is lying – the interior text doesn’t mention the word “arithmetic” at all.
Instead it’s full of numerals and operations, with a few diagrams.
I’m going to complain to his teacher that this ripoff of a numerals-and-operations book cannot stand, and I expect a proper “arithmetic problems” book that actually has the word “arithmetic” mentioned on every problem!
A definition (or two) of what WE mean by information in populations would have been welcome.
Which one? There is at least two; Shannon information and Kolmogorov information.
Real science allows for many definitions of information as long as each is useful. You could come up with another one if you wanted. Publish it, show why its novel and interesting, and bam! You’re on you’re way.
What characterizes creationist CSI is that after 10 (20?) years the concept is still so vague as to be useless. MarkCC would probably add – intentionally so.
“If they think the ruling was misguided, shouldn’t they be appealing it rather than whining about it in blog postings?”
They can’t, the only people who can appeal would be the school board that lost. This school board was thrown out on its ear after this case. The new school board agreed with the ruling and did not see a need to appeal.
Not to really compare them… 🙂 and definitely not to give any ideas to Dembski 🙁 but isn’t Chaitin’s algorithmic information measure sort of similar, in the sense that you can’t really give a definite value to it? (depends
on the programming language used to encode the
algorithm?). Maybe I’ve misunderstood Chaitin’s popular articles though.
I’m not sure if Mark C-C did it on purpose, but I like the idea of using a little “c” for the christian groups that support the DI; as an unorthodox (big C?) Christian, I completely approve. …Though the established usage for communist vs. Communist sort of runs the other way.
I’ve never understood the argument that mutations cannot add information.
Given just the mutation operators ADD and DELETE, you can change any sequence A into sequence B, easily provable by deleting all of A and adding all of B. Either all sequences contain the same amount of information or there exists some B with more information than some A. Note that this works for *any* definition of information.
If they can claim that some mutation reduces the information content, then the opposite mutation must increase it.
Given some definition of information, they could start arguing about the probability of adding new information, but saying you can’t add _any_ is just retarded.
@22:
The reason that you haven’t understood the argument is because you’re actually using a scientific definition of information. That’s not what the IDists use.
Though they do a lot of hedging, the IDist concept of information is ultimately dependent on intelligence. They basically define information in terms of semantics and intention: information is the meaning of a message sent by an intelligent agent. For one of the few pathetic attempts to formalize the notion, see http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/12/idiotic_gitt_aig_and_bad_infor.php.
If you define that way, as the contents of a message sent by an intelligent agent, then it’s obvious why mutations can’t add information content: because the intelligent agent is communicating a specific message – and while random processes can add noise to the message, they can’t add to the intentional contents send by the originating agent.
Of course, that’s not what information means in science; it’s not what we measure when we talk about the amount of information encoded in genes. It’s not a scientific notion at all: it really just an assertion that embeds the desired conclusion into the IDist definition of information.
I think the overused metaphor of DNA as a “blueprint” also gets in the way of understanding. Blueprints are obviously
“intelligently designed”, and very fragile w.r.t. changes.
Is there a better one? Maybe a cookbook? You can add and delete ingredients from recipes, and sometimes you get better results (adding cinammon) and mostly worse results (leaving out the baking powder). DNA is the whole cookbook.
This doesn’t get “designers” out of the metaphor, exactly, it does get at the fact that you don’t necessarily lose anything when you have a “mutation”.
MarkCC: If you define that way, as the contents of a message sent by an intelligent agent, then it’s obvious why mutations can’t add information content…
Hmmm…try this on for size. Satan sends me the message “E = mc^3” in my dream, but unfortunately some random spiritual intereference garbles it, leading me to receive “E = mc^2.”
What I received was not the intended message of the sender. However, the random mutation has had the effect of correcting misinformation. Doesn’t a correction of misinformation result in information? And thus, hasn’t a random mutation resulted in information?
As an extra detail, it is highly typical for judges to quote extensively from one side or the other in a case. One side won, the other lost, and he quotes the winning side’s reasons positively and the losing side’s reasons negatively. There have even been cases where the judge has asked both sides to write what they want his opinion to be, and then one of them essentially becomes his ruling. For a lawyer like Luskin to make conspiratorial inferences from standard legal practice just proves that he is consciously engaged in misleading propaganda.
But if you put all possible information in a tree, and then do trans-finite reversals, representationally enumerating all the information as integers (of which there are clearly twice as many as the naturals, and only a JEW would say otherwise…).
Hahh. I can’t do it. I miss John.
Hmm, that judge was biased against ID? I thought I saw on Nova or Frontline that the judge was an President Bush appointee. Wouldn’t that have a tendency to make him FAVOR ID? Oh, I forgot let us not let facts get in the way when supporting ID.
@27 haha. Yeah, at least JG would show up here so that we could pick on him. It’s too bad that Luskin and Dembski are too chickenshit to defend themselves in an open forum.
@28,
Now now, not everyone Bush appointed was a drooling idiot. Also, consider the possibility that an ambitious attorney might privately tell Bush that he was in favor of ID, in order to get a juicy lifetime appointment to the bench.
So Dembski’s Law basically boils down to “The only messages with informationintent are those created by intelligentintentional agents, and a message can’t contain more than a constant amount of informationintent than the intelligentintentional agent intended”. Seems rather tautological.
A random string will probably have a very high Shannon entropy and Kolmagorov complexity, but because it was generated randomly, there is no informationintent in it. A string from the language {‘a’}* has a relatively low Shannon entropy or Kolmagorov complexity, but if somebody wrote down a sequence of ‘a’s trying to encode the number of steps necessary to find the hidden treasure, say, it would have a lot more informationintent than if the same string had been generated by a random process.
I would argue that Casey is correct on this. What he is missing is that neo-Darwinian evolution is not simply mutation, it is mutation being acted upon by natural selection.
Let’s say I have a magical box that generates an electrical signal that is pure, unadulterated, idealized white noise. That box cannot generate information, of course. But now let’s say I run it through a band-pass filter. The output of the filtered white noise does contain information. Neither the white noise generator nor the band-pass filter generated this information on their own.
Casey is quite correct that, if there were no such thing as natural selection, then random mutation could not generate information. But of course, that’s a rather stupid argument to be making, isn’t it?
BTW, in 32 I am attempting to use the definition of “information” that the Creationists use. Using a strict mathematical definition of information such as Shannon entropy, my example doesn’t make sense.
I’m out of my element here. I know nothing of information theory (if that’s even what it’s called). The only experience I have with it is from Douglas Hofstader, in GEB, whence he describes information as being carried in ‘aperiodic crystals’ such as DNA or writing or record grooves.
It seems to me that aperiodic crystals would be something like necessary for information to be carried, but surely not sufficient. Afterall, one could easily record static on a record.
I guess my question is essentially this: who cares? When it comes to supernatural origins of life, the universe and everything, I was always taught that proof denies faith. I have some faith. I’m also a scientist (ok, an Engineer engaged in health systems research). My faith has no bearing on my investigations of the world. If the universe was created, it seems to be fairly obvious it was done in a way that does not allow empirical evidence of such, much less proof.
I am an atheist through-and-through, and quite vocal about it, but as it turns out I completely agree with you. As you say, “proof denies faith” (that’s a nice way of saying it by the way, thanks). By definition, it’s not faith if you can prove it. I don’t happen to see faith as a virtue, personally — quite the opposite, in fact — but if one does see faith as a virtue, as the Creationists claim to do, then the last thing they ought to be doing is trying to prove the literal truth of the Bible.
I’m actually much more okay with Creationists who say, “I don’t really care what the scientific evidence is — I have faith in the Bible, and the Bible says X, so it must be true, end of conversation.” I find that position to be philosophically vapid at best, and dangerous at worst — but at least it’s consistent. It’s an infantile epistemology, but it’s an epistemology nonetheless. What these IDiots like Dembski have, it’s not even an epistemology, it’s just hot air.
David Hilbert: “Before beginning I should put in three years of intensive study, and I haven’t that much time to squander on a probable failure.”
[On why he didn’t try to solve Fermat’s last theorem]
Quoted in Eric Temple Bell. Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science (New York 1951).
@James Sweet,
I suppose that I ought too to clarify: I have some spirituality. I don’t have any particular faith of the sort that one might point at a building and say: “AnyEdge’s faith is practiced there.”
I also tend in the majority of cases not to see faith as a virtue. I think that in order to be decent people in general, we all need to quit trying to convert people to our particular dogmas, or lack thereof. I think we need to quit mocking people who believe differently than we do. It is too easy for a person with faith to look at one of a different faith, or no faith, and either hate or pity them. Many atheists also seem to hate or pity those with faith.
Teach science in schools, faith in homes and in churches, and try to be kind to each other even if we don’t agree. Why has that eluded so many people to the point of nihilism? Am I doing what I espouse against right now? Is my own ‘faith’, such as it is, leading me to proselytise tolerance and multi-spiritualism to the detriment of a universalist Christian or Muslim? I don’t know.
Maybe the world would be a better place without all htese competing religions. But I doubt it. I think that we would just war over competing spiritualities of a different sort. I could be wrong.
Mark,
Great bit of “deconstruction” from you with regards to the latest agit-prop screed from Dishonesty Institute Numero Uno minister of propaganda Casey Luskin (whose bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geology from, of all places, California San Diego (a leading research center on plate tectonics) should be display prominently only on his bathroom wall IMHO.
Really gets to be a bit tedious trying to answer once more the breathtaking inanity of a DI mendacious intellectual pornographer like Luskin, but I do commend you for your valiant effort. Haven’t read Wesley’s posts yet, but I suppose I will have to now.
Appreciatively yours,
John
Duuude… it’s the Kwokmeister! Did PZ send you a camera yet?
william e emba writes:
Parsing this a bit finer, it’s standard practice for trial judges to ask both sides for their desired versions of the court’s Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law based on those findings. As you would suppose, the more one side carries the day, the more the court’s actual findings and conclusions will resemble the winning side’s submission.
Therefore, far from showing preexisting bias on the part of the judge, what the Kitzmiller court’s findings and conclusions actually show is the utterly thorough extent of the beating the reality-based side administered to the Minions of Their Lord and Savior.
It could hardly have been otherwise. As noted with some anger in the opinion of the court, one of the defendant school board members was shown to have lied in important aspects of his testimony. Was the court supposed to base factual findings and legal conclusions on lies, or on further testimony from the liar?
When the Disco Tute was given the chance to support the ID side **in court,** they took a pass. Now they are reduced to whining from the sidelines after the fact. Weak sauce, man, very weak sauce.
Jud –
It’s merely the latest bit of hypocrisy from the Disco Tute (I prefer Dishonesty Institute for reasons that ought to be clear to any discerning reader.) for its minister of propaganda (Luskin) to whine and to moan about how “inapproprate” Judge John Jones’s ruling was. This is especially so when it’s been shown repeatedly (For those who haven’t been following this, may I suggest reading Edward Humes’s “Monkey Girl”.) that the Dishonesty Institute opted to walk out of the judicial proceedings when they couldn’t get its attorneys in “on the action” so to speak, working alongside the Dover, PA School Board’s attorneys from the Thomas More Legal Center (with the sole exception of course of Behe, Minnich and a handful of others).
Wow a Kwok Sighting.
EVERYONE WATCH YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS LIST!
Hey Rev. BigDumbChimp –
Why don’t you stay on topic? Thought I could count on you for some intelligent commentary, but I suppose I was mistaken (As for my FB list, it is doing quite nicely…. without you.).
Just to get back on topic, I wonder if Casey Luskin will make ample commentary on Nick Matzke and Barbara Forrest’s elegant depiction of the “evolution” of Intelligent Design from “Creation Science”. Any reasonable person, like, for example, Judge John Jones, could see through the Dishonesty Institute’s chicanery (or rather, in this instance, that of the publisher of “Of Pandas and People”.).
John, I’ve got a used Leica M7 Rangefinder here with me. It’s labeled “John Kwok’s credibility,” and it’s been broken for quite a while now.
B&.
Damien, Rev:
Keep your squabbling off of here. I do *not* like people attacking other commenters here, particularly for things that happened somewhere else. I don’t know what your problem with John is, and I don’t care. It doesn’t belong here.
Here is the tendency for gene duplicates to alter the amount of a chemical produced. The aperiodic crystals would be something like necessary for information to be carried, but surely not sufficient. Afterall, one could easily record static on a record.
If they’re right about ID being a valid competing theory, then they should be trying to move legal heaven and earth to get it taught, otherwise they’re doing a great dis-service to all the children being taught ‘evolutionist lies’.
If the universe was created, it seems to be fairly obvious it was done in a way that does not allow empirical evidence of such, much less proof.
Instead of disco’tute, I suggest disco’toot.
qq