Not really. Pastor Enyart and co. might be wrongly overstating their case, but Alate is a full blown hypocrite.
Apparently it's OK for her to respond according to a summary without proper investigation, but it's not OK for others to do so. :idunno:
NIH: 100M Years to Change a Binding Site
- Thread starter Jefferson
- Start date
- Status
Not really. Pastor Enyart and co. might be wrongly overstating their case, but Alate is a full blown hypocrite.
Apparently it's OK for her to respond according to a summary without proper investigation, but it's not OK for others to do so. :idunno:
Pastor Bob holds himself out as a spokeman for Jesus and the Gospel. Overstating the case is therefore inappropriate. But that is what he does in order to support his otherwise untenable position.
Their problem is that they did not explicitly enough distinguish between "information" and "Shannon information".
Alate_One
Well-known member
Um, you really are quite confused if you think that the age of mitochondrial Eve is in any way constrained by when we shared a common ancestor with apes.
Mitochondrial Eve wouldn't be the first human by any stretch (you seem to have confused the scientific one with the biblical one). Mitochondrial eve is simply the hypothetical human female that is the oldest *direct* female ancestor we can quantify. Mitochondrial Eve isn't the ONLY human female involved. A literal "first human" would be much older than mitochondrial Eve.
No, their problem, as usual, is an almost total lack of basic scientific understanding and fear to acknowledge that their particular interpretation of the Bible may be faulty.
Alate_One
Well-known member
I know what Enyart's point is from the quote (heck I know that before reading the quote in his case). Much as I knew at least the point of the article from the abstract. But Bob didn't even get the complete story from the abstract, he ignored the lines that contradicted his point.
So my point stands either way. And if Bob's past behavior is any guide he is absolutely clueless about scientific information anyway. It's still *wrong* science Friday. He never admitted to being wrong about the ATP synthase.
And you're a hypocrite.
GuySmiley
Well-known member
Your first point was that Bob didn't even know that the paper was against Behe, since you assumed he only read the abstract and not even the whole abstract.
You couldn't be more wrong. If you listened to the show instead of just reading the OP you would know that Bob and Fred were well aware that the paper was against Behe. I think you see a Real Science Friday thread and you feel obligated to come comment and in your haste to attack Bob you don't do your homework.
Will you admit to being wrong about Bob not knowing the paper is against Behe? Careful, I might be making this up, you may want to listen to the show.
Frayed Knot
New member
They did explicitly specify Shannon information, again and again (starting about 13 minutes into the show). Then Fred said "you had a lot of evolutionists telling me that the increase in randomness is an increase in information." To which Bob responded "That is so... it's the opposite of reality!" They were chuckling and mocking at this point.
But if you're not going to use Shannon information, what definition do you like? Kolmogorov information? They all have the same basic properties - increasing the randomness of data is increasing mathematical information.
Frayed Knot
New member
This is true - they commented in the show that the paper was a response to Behe's work.
No ... they didn't. Though given Fred William's expressed interest in the subject one might expect him to make the distinction so you are justified in assuming it was Shannon information being spoken of if you were not otherwise informed.
When we talk of information in everyday language (as Pastor Enyart and Fred Williams obviously were) it is a vastly different concept from Shannon information. Your Wiki article even points this out.
Frayed Knot
New member
"Mitochondrial Eve" is the fanciful name that scientists have given to the female "latest common ancestor" of all humans. This does not mean that this woman was the only one alive at the time, or that she was the only woman with surviving offspring.
Think of it this way - let's say your extended family has a reunion, with you and all your fourth or fifth cousins. Each one of you has sixteen great-great-great grandmothers, but there is one of those women who was the common ancestor for everyone at your reunion. Of course, her mother was also a common ancestor to all of you, but there will be one who was the latest (most recent) common ancestor. Mitochondrial Eve was the latest common ancestor to all humans.
It's a little more complicated because mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from one's mother, not father, so you have to trace all this only looking at the females. Those other women alive at the time of M.E. could have had sons who are our ancestors, but there's not an unbroken chain of females back to those others. Based on looking at the similarities and differences between the mitochondrial DNA of humans around the planet, and knowing the rate that mutations propagate, they've figured out that this latest common ancestor was somewhere around 200,000 years ago.
Like someone else said, this has nothing to do with when humans and chimps last had a common ancestor. Like your great-great-great grandmother's mother, Mitochondrial Eve also was a descendant of the common ancestor between chimps and humans.
Notice that I didn't call it a common ancestor between apes and humans - humans are apes, so that would be meaningless.
Frayed Knot
New member
No, they specifically said "Shannon information" again and again. They even mentioned Claude Shannon himself.
Whoops again. That was something else I was reading.
Every example they brought up referred to information as we commonly understand it, but it sounds very much like there's more to the discussion than was explained in the show. I'd like to read the article they referred to of Tom Schneider's.
Hmmm .. it seems Fred Williams was specifically disagreeing with Wiki and you, I'm afraid.
Here is the article he was referring to.
Here is the article he was referring to.
Frayed Knot
New member
Hmmm .. it seems Fred Williams was specifically disagreeing with Wiki and you, I'm afraid.
Here is the article he was referring to.
Thanks for finding that article. It's mercifully short.
This stuff is confusing, but I think I understand the difference in what everyone is saying here. (I did take information theory in college as part of my BSEE degree, but that was almost 30 years ago. I've used it some since then but not formally.)
If I have a batch of information that I want to convey to you, and the system that I'm using to send you the data substitutes some of its own randomness (noise), then the amount of my information that you are getting is less than what I started with. In communications systems, that's what's important.
However, if you measure the information content of my data that I started with, the more "random" it is, the more information is there. And by "random" we mean unpredictable. This is the sense that we talk about the information contained in a string of DNA. Creationists often claim ("often" is an understatement) that there is a lot of information in our DNA, and this can't be the result of random mutations to it. That claim is demonstrably false. Random changes to DNA will frequently result in the DNA string having more mathematical information; now you just have to select which mutations to keep, and this is simple to do: which creatures can survive the best.
Another way to think of this is to consider a single amino acid change in a string of DNA. For example, change an 'A' to a 'G'. If you measure the mathematical information of both the before and after versions, one will have very slightly more information than the other. Creationists claim that the information always decreases, but it's easy to see that if an error can change an 'A' to a 'G', it could just as easily change a 'G' to an 'A'. Either of these is as likely, so every little change can either increase or decrease the amount of information in the DNA. Over time, you'll usually find that DNA acquires more information simply because it started with the least possible information, so there's only one way to go: up.
Yeah. That's good.
Yip.
So I'm gonna have to stick with the article and the radio show on this one. Information is defined by the reduction in uncertainty at the receiver's end. So the nature of the original signal is irrelevant.
That's if you increase the length of a DNA sequence. But here's where the distinction between Shannon information and layman's information becomes relevant. In order for evolution to proceed you need layman's information to increase.
Nope. The same amount of information is available to us as receivers.
Which kind of information do they say this of? And I don't say it cannot increase for either.
The only way to increase the Shannon information in DNA is to increase the genome length. The only way to increase layman's information is for the author to write more code (we aren't good enough forgers yet
).
- Status