For those who like to watch videos in addition to reading, a youtuber by the name of Tony Reed has a really good video series on how his investigations into creationist claims have helped him understand many different concepts in science related to everything from physics and cosmology, to evolution.
His two latest videos on Information and Intelligence in biology are really good in my opinion:
In the information video, his comparison of random stacked rocks to rocks put by human on trails fell really flat for me. The random rocks don’t share any information, and if you think of them that way you’ll get lost. I’ve been lost hiking on a trail where it’s hard to tell what’s the trail and what’s not. It’s not fun.
He also doesn’t have an explanation of the information in the genome to begin with. And GE is a real world application of intelligence behind information that is scientifically useful. I just watched his video review on that from two years ago (I’m not finished with the book but his review wasn’t thorough and he didn’t understand the arguments I’ve already read through.) That’s a topic for a different day though.
The intelligence video was interesting. The question that should be obvious then is - where does logic come from?
The answer that should be obvious – it is a human invention.
Whether random rocks happen to share information or not is besides the point. The point is that blind physical processes really can arrange rocks so they convey information.
Now on the question of whether that information can mislead you, of course it can, that doesn’t make it stop being information. Take Sanford’s book Genetic Entropy, it’s full of misleading information. It’s made you totally lost on the concept of natural selection.
The video isn’t supposed to explain specifically how genetic information comes to exist (but about what information is and why it doesn’t have to be “created by an intelligence”), though he does mention how evolution produces information at about 11:45 (it’s all the physical mechanisms of change in evolutionary biology, including mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, HGT and so on, which he has another video specifically about).
It has zero real-world practical application that isn’t already provided by contemporary evolutionary molecular genetics.
As has been made clear multiple times on this forum, you don’t understand Sanford’s arguments despite your endless infatuation with them, so you are not really in a position to judge whether someone else does.
Why would logic have to come from somewhere? What does that even mean? Are you somehow saying that it is possible that logic does not obtain? In what sense of possible, then?
Please explain how “sharing” and “conveying” information isn’t a distinction without a difference.
As far as I’ve seen, you just explain GE’s practical explanation away by saying natural selection just isn’t acting now and in history as we’ve overcome it. That aside, it has application to our approach to pathogen evolution (as that’s where we keep discussing it) and I think it would also have predictive power about animal extinction that would be helpful to know. I also think its practical application would be more intense focus on human mutations that lead to disease or susceptibility to disease.
For instance, in the past I’ve pointed to Donald Hoffman’s work - his research seems to indicate natural selection doesn’t favor logic.
I’m not really sure what your second and third questions are asking. Could you rephrase?
I’m pretty sure that @Rumraket hasn’t merely explained anything away and that he’s cited evidence that you aren’t examining.
Well, seeing as how there have been no creationist institutes or pharma companies created during the current pandemic, I have to say that there’s no indication that they see any practical application.
And again, if Sanford doesn’t even realize that virologists clone isolates and don’t go back to the freezer to mitigate the effects of GE on viral populations, his virological conclusions are worthless.
The focus is pretty intense already; nothing in human genetics even suggests that Sanford has a point.
Why has Sanford only produced rhetoric aimed at people like you instead of data, if Sanford believes all of those things?
I agree it isn’t, you can substitute in that word just fine. Doesn’t alter my point.
Remarkably there are at least two mistakes in that assertion.
First of all I’m not in the slightest trying to “explain away” any “practical explanation”(I assume you mean practical application), mostly because I don’t think GE has any. It helps with nothing.
It is of zero value in any actual research in genetics because it does succeed at describing reality in a way where contemporary evolutionary theory does not already have perfectly good explanations for the data. Deleterious mutations were known about and explained long before Sanford started imagining his unsubstantiated distributions of them.
Second is that I have given many good reasons in the numerous threads on GE not to accept Sanford’s imaginary DFE of mutations, so I’m not simply dismissing the concept merely by pointing out that NS in the current human population has been relaxed(though not completely eliminated) due to medicine and technology. It also needs to be stated that the relaxed NS in the human population has been pointed out by population geneticists for decades and the problems this can lead to, before Sanford ever wrote his book and yet you make it seem like this is somehow an ad-hoc response to Sanford’s idea. This is simply historically false.
It explains or helps understand nothing on these subjects that aren’t already well understood and explained by concepts such as genetic load, mutational load, mutational meltdown, genetic drift, population bottlenecks, and related concepts.
Sanford has added nothing to this that helps understand these processes, and they’re already well explained and understood by contemporary evolutionary biology.
This is the most exceptionally confused statement I have read in my life. I am not exaggerating. I have never before seen so misplaced and confused a sentence, and I don’t think I will again.
Nobody is claiming logic evolved. Can you even explain to me what you think logic is? I mean, just what the fork am I even reading here? Forget about evolution, forget about Donald Hoffman, forget about that video by Tony Reed.
Please explain to me what you think logic is. Not “where it came from”, or how human beings try to use it, or how computers do it. What is logic?
A huge difference.
Right now, illuminated pixels on my screen are conveying information. But those pixels aren’t sharing anything.
It is reasonable to say that you are sharing information, and using those pixels. But the pixels themselves aren’t sharing anything other than the light that they emit.
There is an intense focus on human mutations that lead to disease or susceptibility to disease. Personalized medicine has been heavily invested in for years, all well before GE. It is not like this has been overlooked.
It does, as one pile of rocks indicates a direction as it was put there by an intelligent agent. The other pile of rocks indicates nothing in particular about direction. If the information we’re discussing is information about direction, then the random rocks do not share or convey information.
That is a good distinction, but we know that screen was created by an intelligent agent, so whether it’s sharing or conveying information seems irrelevant to this particular discussion.
No that doesn’t alter my point, which was still
“Whether random rocks happen to shareconvey information or not is besides the point. The point is that blind physical processes really can arrange rocks so they convey information”.
Hi Mikkel,
Thanks for sharing this.
Hello Tony. You’re welcome, and welcome to the site. How did you end up here?