That’s a familiar affliction. It’s pretty hard to watch nonsense on stilts, especially when the subtext of most creationism is that (a) scientists are all liars, and (b) the entire basis of modern civilization should be tossed out. If they’d just keep this pseudointellectual porno decently private and stop trying to spread the contagion to children, I could probably ignore it.
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You have not really explained why the term “quasi” the authors attached to “universal grammer” does not represent a strong similarity between the two yet. But, I guess it’s not necessary since you are not suggesting this is metaphorically speaking, which would imply that the comparison is not a real one.
So this will probably be my last response here before I create a new topic:
There are two major objections railed onto my theory that call into question it’s ability to be meaningfully tested:
The first objection applies to certain aspects of the hypothesis that presently lacks ways to falsify the prediction that God continued to guide life after the creation of humans up to the present. For example, we cannot insert the observer into the experiment to potentially disprove God is presently guiding the mutations of organisms because we cannot rule out other contingent minds that exist today. This also includes artificially recreating a superior version of a naturally occurring design in the lab to demonstrate bad design because of the existence of design tradeoffs in nature. Instead, we have to use other methods to falsify this prediction, such as Roger Penrose’s experiment.
However, just because a few predictions can’t be falsified by these methods does NOT mean the hypothesis itself cannot be falsified with them. We can still use these methods to disprove the hypothesis.
The second major objection is much more profound and devastating if it is not adequately addressed. For instance, we cannot simply assume the intelligent designer that created life has a human nature like in the same fashion as other intelligent design sciences. This is because the designer in question must also have a divine nature. Instead, we have to provide additional evidence that establishes how this designer operates in almost the same manner as humans in order to provide confidence in our conclusions, which I have done already.
it’s not because we cannot rule out other contingent minds. It’s because no one can come up with a method of discriminating between supernaturally guided and unguided mutations. This applies to just about everything in nature, be it cloud formation or radioactive decay. In effect, the label “supernatural” is nothing more than “something I believe but cannot demonstrate”.
We would also have to ask why you think mutations are guided if you have no method for determining if mutations are guided.
Then we would have to ask why you think life is designed if you don’t know what it would look like if life were designed by a supernatural deity.
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As I stated above: they are talking about two different grammars, “one grammar that is universal to natural languages and another one that is quasi-universal to cellular life”.
Your obsession over the word “quasi” is just further indication that you have misunderstood the paper.
@Tim ‘acknowledges’ nothing except the fact that @Meerkat_SK5 completely misunderstands Lijia Yu et al.
Now, I am tired of trying to explain mindnumbingly obvious things to you. So will you please annoy somebody else.
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Mathethematics is a universal language and they are suggesting that they have almost (i.e. quasi) identical mathematical properties underlying the two different languages. So Yes, they are different languages but when you decipher them within the lens of mathematics, they end up having quasi-same mathethematical properties.
You…
So, you can neither understand the paper nor Tim’s comments? Bravo. Are there any other things you’d like to demonstrate that you can’t understand?
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Not quite, this is about discriminating between consciously guided mutations and unguided mutations.
No, it does not because my hypothesis and methods applies only to biological settings not the whole universe. Roger Penrose’s experiment does what you are saying here.
I never said this. Instead, I am saying we can’t use the same methods to determine whether God is guiding mutations RIGHT NOW or at least after humans were created.
Again, I never said this. Where are you getting this from? I was merely describing again the main objections on my theory and explaining how I addressed these past criticisms. I did this in order to make sure no one can complain about whether I addressed them or not going forward.
The main objections to your theory, are that it is vacuous. It does not actually say anything. There’s a lot of verbiage, but no actual content.
And no, you never actually address that. You just emit more vacuous verbiage.
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Right. That’s why I made a lot of changes since then that I am going to showcase in the next topic, so stay tuned.
Are you promising that your changes will not be vacuous?
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I think that there’s a sponsorship deal with Hoover in the works.
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I don’t know what you mean by vacuous. So I can’t say for sure, especially when I am going to be shooting for a clear and concise version of my theory this time. Can you give me an example of what my theory is lacking right now so I can make sure I include it next time?
No @Meerkat_SK5. That sentence is wrong at so many levels. Your misunderstanding appears to to be complete, eclipsing any comprehension.
Which is why I stated:
And Why Puck stated:
There are not two languages. There are two groups, one of natural languages (herafter “first group”) and one of “all divisions of cellular life” (“second group”). The paper’s use of the phrase “quasi-universal grammar” is only applied to the second group! Not the first.
The paper is not stating that the two groups “have almost (i.e. quasi) identical mathematical properties”. It is not in fact stating that anything is identical, or almost identical. The modifier “quasi” is only applied to the word “universal”, meaning “almost all” members of the second group share this grammar (which is only a single mathematical property, not a pervasive similarity in properties), NOT that anything is almost identical.
This should be blindingly obvious to anybody with even basic reading comprehension skills.
From this it should also be clear that when I stated that “the reason for this commonality is that they evolved from a common ancestral language” – the “they” I was referring to “natural languages”, the first group under discussion by the paper. As “all divisions of cellular life” (the second group) do not share a common ancestor with natural languages, it should be blindingly obvious that I was not referring to them as well.
Now @Meerkat_SK5 I must ask that you please take your hermetically sealed incomprehension somewhere else! I am tired of futilely attempting to penetrate it.
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Well, I’m sure you’re right about that. It’d be a shocker if you did.
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This is from Fuz Rana, a well-established expert who has read the study:
"Human languages all carry the same amount of information. That is to say, they all display the same entropy content. Information theorists interpret this observation as an indication that a universal grammar undergirds all human languages. It is intriguing that the researchers discovered that the protein “languages” across prokaryotes and eukaryotes all display the same level of entropy and, consequently, the same information content.
This relationship holds despite the diversity and differences in complexity of the organism in their data set. By analogy, this finding indicates that a universal grammar exists for proteins. Or to put it another way, the same set of physicochemical constraints dictate the way protein domains interact for all organisms.
This study also illustrates how fruitful it can be to treat biochemical systems as information systems."
The researchers conclude that “The similarities between natural languages and genomes are apparent when domains are treated as functional analogs of words in natural languages.”
So what experiments can we run to differentiate between the two?
Why doesn’t it apply equally to all of nature? How did you determine that a conscious mind is not guiding cloud formation?
Do you think God has or is guiding mutations? Yes or no?
From here:
“For instance, we cannot simply assume the intelligent designer that created life has a human nature like in the same fashion as other intelligent design sciences.”
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This is why computer screens need splatter shields.
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How did you determine that Rana is a “well-established expert,” and how did you determine that he has more expertise than we do?
I hypothesize that you only impute expertise to those who say/write what you wish to be true.
How did you determine that Rana both read and understood it?
Do you realize that reading a scientific paper is more about examining the figures/tables than about reading the text?
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As far as I know, his expertise is in biochemistry and apologetics. That does not make him an expert in linguistics.
That seems like an absurd thing to say. Information is carried by sentences within a language, not by the language as a whole.
Presumably, that has to do with the amount of entropy in proportion to the length of the sentence. But this can only be a statistical assessment.
I don’t know which information theorists this refers to. Chomsky does claim that there is a universal grammar. Personally, I am highly skeptical of that claim, which seems to come from essentialist thinking.
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No @Meerkat_SK5, Rana is not an expert (“well-established” or otherwise) in information theory.
Like most Apologists he is simply expert at appearing confident when spouting nonsense about a subject that he has no real understanding of. And yes, he appears “well-established” in that field of endeavor.
I would note that, unlike Rana, the paper’s conclusion also highlights the differences as well as similarities:
However, the characteristic values of the information gain are substantially different, namely, ∼1.2 bits in biology and ∼3.6 bits in linguistics. Thus, both the protein and the human (and formal) languages seem to be based on quasi-universal grammars, but the complexity (orderliness) of the latter is substantially greater than that of the former. This difference could be expected because, unlike human languages, all proteomes are rich in single-domain proteins (one-word sentences) (4, 25) and because the role of the stochastic component in the evolution of protein languages appears to be much greater than it is in the evolution of natural languages (9, 11).
Addendum:
On further reflection, I realised that I had already addressed Rana’s lack of relevant expertise here. That @Meerkat_SK5 would thereafter quote Rana to me is further evidence that (i) they are incapable of learning from criticism, and (ii) that it is therefore futile to engage them.
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