Comments on Gpuccio: Functional Information Methodology

I would be very interested in seeing your explanation. Don’t be coy.

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I have the same question about foxes. As I recall nearly every species has a unique chromosome count, and outside of Arctic-Red fox hybrids, I believe all the species are reproductively isolated. And there appears to be the same reproductive barrier between foxes and Canids. Is this ID and if so is it at class or species level or both?

The reason I think this would be a good test case is because it is a less loaded question and it involves specimens easily relatable to the lay person. (If I had the money, i’d probably fund this ‘pet’ project.)

And maybe not. If he was going to, why hasn’t he?

We had another loooong discussion about the 500-bits-rule on theskepticalzone in this thread with almost 2000 comments: Does gpuccio’s argument that 500 bits of Functional Information implies Design work? | The Skeptical Zone

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Excellent. What journal? That at least should be no secret.

Likewise, any thermodynamic system will have the same sort of complexity.
I anticipate the claim that a thunderstorm has no function.

How about navigation? (@swamidass was headed that way already)

It was a long setup, but we finally got there. :slight_smile:

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But it has a clear, obvious specification. Which provides the function for the individual water molecules.

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There are a couple issues with Josh’s analogy. He is not looking at a translated sequence. He is also not looking at a changing or potentially changing configuration over time.

This change allows you to look at comparative data and make a judgement about cause of the configuration.

In much the same way the observation of 500 heads is significant in that we have something to compare it to. That is the normal statistical expectation of the quantity of heads and tails after tossing a coin 500 times.

It appears you do not understand the argument @gpuccio is trying to make.

I just posted my argument on UD let’s see the response. How do you understand his argument as being different?

Or with @gpuccio’s argument, which makes no reference to these claims about information. (I note that a google search for “physics of symbol systems”, quotation marks included, returns only three hits, two of them to Uncommon Descent. )

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I believe that if a protein family originates by translation of a piece of random DNA that previously had gone untranslated, the resulting protein sequences would be a family isolated in protein sequence space.

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So, from the ID perspective, wouldn’t that be a functional protein that arose de novo, the kind of thing they say can only happen by “design”?

6 posts were split to a new topic: Bill and Tim again

This seems quite a strange statement ! Can you explain?

I don’t think you can say that every human immune system FINDS a target with FI>500 bits in the case the target is a the set of antibodies for the genes coding for these antibodies are already there in every human being.

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You are guilty of « question begging » here.

ID theorists have shown that evolutionary algorithms that are able to produce high FI can do the trick only when active information is smuggled in the system by the algorithms’s designers.

This is not true. EAs give diminishing returns over time and stagnate over long periods of time. This is established in computer science.
Have you read the article linked you to?

If evolution is like EAs, then as far as we know, there is a limit to the innovation possible.

If it happens often, then, by definition, the probability isn’t small.

If we want to remain sane, we would rather dismiss out of hand that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747. If you dispute this point, there is nothing I can do.