We Are Mystified by Eric Holloway

“DNA”. But given there are causal relationships between an organism’s DNA and how it performs in an environment in which the organism thrives, ‘organisms’ works too. And it was ‘mostly independent’, but that’s a stretch too. While 70+% of the DNA in humans might be ‘junk’, that leaves rather many base pairs that aren’t.

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More like 90% junk – but it’s the non-junk parts that do all the interesting things, the things that ID theories would propose a designer for.

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Here you go:

You think you can empirically disprove mathematical proofs. The proof in question is the LoING. You don’t know what you are talking about if you think you can empirically disprove mathematical proofs, which calls your expertise into question.

And here you move the goalposts.

So, the real problem is not that ID vacillates between calculable and algorithmic information theory, but that you do.

Great, then do it with good careful argumentation, and admit it when you are wrong, as I have. Currently, my respect for your argumentation is near zero.

You appear to misunderstand exactly what I conceded. I did not concede your cancer argument is correct, nor do I concede that intelligence is unnecessary to create MI (in the independent sense) in DNA. I eventually came up with a way where MI can be created through determinism and randomness that does not violate the LoING, but this is not applicable to a real world biological scenario, since it requires that all key elements are generated from fair coin flips.

At any rate, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand the ID literature. There is nothing wrong with the core CSI argument. I recommend you study it carefully, and only then start “ruthlessly demolishing arguments.” Otherwise, all you are doing is annoying people who know better, wasting our time, and misdirecting those who don’t. The latter is quite bad indeed.

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You you seem to fundamentally misunderstand real world evolutionary biology. There is nothing wrong with the core evolutionary arguments. I recommend you study them carefully, and only then start “ruthlessly demolishing arguments.” Otherwise, all you are doing is annoying people who know better, wasting our time, and misdirecting those who don’t. The latter is quite bad indeed.

Where do you see me addressing real world evolutionary biology? I stay away from that topic, because, like you say, I don’t know much about it. But, what I do know is the LoING applies to all real world processes, of which evolution is a subset.

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Then you admit when you make silly claims like “real world evolutionary processes can’t add information to a genome” you are talking out of your nether regions. You haven’t quite grasped yet that evolution includes interaction and information exchange with the environment despite having it explained to you multiple times.

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(Edited after some rethought.)
Eric, maybe there’s a disconnect between scientists and mathematicians or computer scientists here. When Josh said that he could “empirically disprove a mathematical proof,” how I read it is either one of two ways:

  1. Disprove the applicability of the mathematical model (assuming it’s sound) to nature. This is the goal of empirical science.
  2. Think of counter-examples to the purported mathematical proof that may disprove it. This could involve pen and paper, or programming a simulation on mathematical objects to see if what the theorem says actually holds. This implies that the mathematical proof wasn’t really a proof in the first place; there was a gap in the logic somewhere.

As I understand it, all of Josh’s simulations (or responses to your simulations) fit into one of the two forms above. Both are legitimate. But perhaps the first one could not be obvious to people not working in science.

You do not know that, Eric. You are not a scientist. And you have already admitted on other threads that you are still working to try to apply this to the real world. As a pure theoretician, you can’t say anything about real world processes. The question isn’t whether LoING is true or not, it’s whether we have any idea of how it applies to natural processes. We have spent the last few hundred years discovering that science cannot accomplish much by merely reasoning from first principles in an ivory tower. Science comes from empirical fact that guides the theory. Even theorists in my field concede that their theories are not considered true until they are vindicated by experiment.

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