Adam and Information on the Hump

Ever anxious to mollify the voracious intellectual appetite of the peaceful scientists here,here’s a new Hump piece that manages to make a contribution to the Genealogical Adam case for placing Genesis 2ff in history, but also discusses the implications of information theory for design.

That’s probably the nearest I’ll get to a theory of everything…

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Pretty good article @jongarvey

http://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/randomness.jpg

The diagram, though, seems also to bear on the long and highly technical discussions Joshua Swamidass and others have had on Peaceful Science (and before that, on BioLogos ) with various Intelligent Design proponents, in relation to the information content, or lack of it, in DNA. In that context, what obviously drew my attention was the closeness on this slide of the line for (genomic) DNA to that for “uniform randomness.”

What is remarkably about this @jongarvey is that your discussion of Information Theory, coming from a physician-theologian, is just about entirely correct (have to caveat somewhat).

The nature and context of the illustration clearly leave a lot about its derivation unexplained. How large a chunk of genome was sampled, for instance? But whilst I can imagine some Epicurean gloating that the DNA line shows that random neutral changes can easily produce the human genome, that cannot be what it shows. The question had me downloading a few articles on “DNA compression” to see what light they could cast.

My articles showed (not surprisingly) how complex the question is. There is a practical interest in compressing DNA data, purely for economy of storage in databases, and some papers offered methods of doing that. On the other hand, mathematical papers emphasised the difficulties of compressing genomic data, therefore reflecting its high entropy.

One paper rightly reminded us that “randomness” is always contextual, not absolute – a point I’ve often made myself. For example, one way of compressing data on multiple human genomes is to compare their differences from a reference standard, individuals differing by only 0.1%. On this measure, the human genome is very highly organised and so compressible, by virtue of the efficiency of the human reproductive mechanisms in maintaining humans as humans. This, however, is a different context for assessment than comparing a genome with a random string of bases.

And:

What makes a sound file bigger and less compressible is that, as well as the information in the score, it contains all the variations in musical expression – time, volume, attack, vibrato and much more – together with much information from the acoustic environment itself, such as reverberation and echo. An actual orchestral performance, produced by dozens of intelligent interpreters of the score under a skilled conductor, contains much more “designed” information than the written score, and yet this paradoxically brings it closer to the “uniformly random” character of meaningless noise.

And here too:

What makes a sound file bigger and less compressible is that, as well as the information in the score, it contains all the variations in musical expression – time, volume, attack, vibrato and much more – together with much information from the acoustic environment itself, such as reverberation and echo. An actual orchestral performance, produced by dozens of intelligent interpreters of the score under a skilled conductor, contains much more “designed” information than the written score, and yet this paradoxically brings it closer to the “uniformly random” character of meaningless noise.

This the grand paradox of “information.” They highest information density objects are indistinguishable from random noise. Information theory is really not that difficult to grasp, unless one is pre-committed to an untutored intuition of it.

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@jongarvey, enjoyed your piece on the Hump. The TED video was great. Thanks for sharing.

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@mung Please take a look at this TED video. It explains entropy very well.

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It doesn’t explain entropy at all. His talk would have been no different had he not mentioned entropy at all. And his mention of it is so short I could not even find it when I went back to go over it again. Fortunately I took notes.

Random - High Entropy
Language - Intermediate Entropy
Rigid/Repeating - Low Entropy

I hope others don’t spend 17 minutes watching it hoping to find a good explanation of entropy.

Seriously @Patrick?

I found the TED talk to excellent. And the explanation of entropy was correct. Here they calculated entropy and used the calculated value to conclude it is similar to other languages. Very insightful and very good application of information theory.

As I’ve said before, the problem is ultimately the non-existence of a theory of information as information, as opposed to a theory of channel capacity, compressibility, noise and so on.

The reason ID information approaches are disputable is that they are attempts (unsuccessful) to extend information theory in that direction. In other words, they ought not to arise directly from Shannon… the question is whether they are compatible with him, and whether their information definitions hold water in their own right.

But when all is said and done, the fact that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony cannot be easily scientifically distinguished from random noise, though, ought to raise big question marks, since even my dog can tell the difference, and so can scientists when not trying to systematize it.

To me, the interesting philosophical question is exactly what makes it difficult to define and quantify the kind of information that information theory, or any other science, actually is (as opposed to what it describes). To me, the answer is the limited epistemology of science, not the opacity of meaningful information.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is EASILY distinguished from random noise. Take the FFT of the musical notes and you will see harmonics, repetition, and all the hallmarks of it not being random noise. Beethoven’s Fifith Symphony can be compressed with MP3 algorithms, random noise can’t. The entropy of random noise is very high whereas the entropy of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is very low.

That would require a good theory of human cognition, and a good theory of organism cognition for other organisms.

Perhaps I’m too much of a cynic. But I see them as attempts to obfuscate, as attempts to create doubt about evolution. I am not seeing any honest attempts to extend information theory.

But that’s a confusion.

When you look at the content of the communication channel, you cannot tell the difference, and neither could your dog. However, we usually connect the output of the Beethoven Fifth communication channel to our music playing systems, and we connect to output of the random number generator to our crypto-systems (or whatever else needs them). We have no difficulty telling them apart, because we have meta-data (sometimes called “out of band data”) available indicating what sort of information is on the communication channel.

That’s due to the failure of academic philosophy to even address the issue.

So it was Stockhausen they sampled for the graphic on the video, then?

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It means they probably didn’t use the ideal compression, or were measuring on compressed files. The same complexities apply to music as you aptly explained with DNA. Moreover, what ever the case, a midi file will be easier to compress than the audio.

Of note, mp3 compression is so effective because it is lossy. It throws a way the parts of the audio that are beyond human perception. It includes a model of human audio perception to figure out the information that can be thrown away. Non-lossy compression of audio is much less efficient.

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Wow, I am impressed. Are you sure you are not an electrical engineer?

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I always record at 96KHz and 24 bits. I may not be able to hear the difference, but my dog probably can. That gives you about 40Mb for a 4 minute track, compared to a couple of Kb for a midi file. But there all the music is actually in the synth it’s played on - the equivalent of a notated score.

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