Царь Славян's Take on The Theory of Evolution

[Царь Славян]

[Mod note]

As requested, I've split off the Creationist Cannards thread so not to derail it. All discussion with regard to Царь Славян and his views on evolution should be directed here.

Play nice.

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[19.1] That there exists a detailed, rigorous, robust methodology for segregating entities into the "designed" and "not designed" classes ("It looks designed, therefore magic man" isn't good enough);

William Dembski has presented just such a method. If we have no known natural law to explain a certain pattern and the said pattern conforms to an independently given pattern and is improbable enough to have happened by chance, it exhibits specified complexity. And then we are reasonably justified in infering design. Because there are no other known explanations, and we know from experience that intelligent agents can produce specified complexity, that makes intelligence the best current explanation.

http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf

[19.2] That the methodology cited in [19.1] above has been tested upon entities of known provenance, and found to be reliable via said direct empirical test;

In the above link, we have an example of how to test random sequences from non-random sequences. The example is a known non-random sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, specifically the one designed for the movie The Da Vince Code.

[19.3] That the methodology cited in [19.1] above, and determined to be reliable in [19.2] above, is accompanied by a rigorous demonstration of its applicability to specific classes of entity of interest;

It's a generalized version of Fisher's approach to hypothesis testing. It is made to apply to all patterns, thus to all patterns that matter can exhibit in the universe.

[19.4] That the methodology cited in [19.1] above, determined to be reliable in [19.2] above, and determined to be applicable to the requisite class of entities in [19.3] above, yields an unambiguous answer of "designed" for the entities to which it is applied.

This also holds true. A pattern that is both complex and specified is best explained as designed. The probabilistic threshold is set to ,½. If the event that exhibits the pattern has the probability more than ,½ we do not infer design, if the probability is less than ,½, we infer design.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

William Dembski has presented just such a method. If we have no known natural law to explain a certain pattern and the said pattern conforms to an independently given pattern and is improbable enough to have happened by chance, it exhibits specified complexity. And then we are reasonably justified in infering design. Because there are no other known explanations, and we know from experience that intelligent agents can produce specified complexity, that makes intelligence the best current explanation.

http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf

Can you give an example of something in nature, a structure in an organism, which fits this definition of specified complexity? Forget the fact that we have known natural laws that explain life has we see it today.

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Can you give an example of something in nature, a structure in an organism, which fits this definition of specified complexity? Forget the fact that we have known natural laws that explain life has we see it today.

Its in teh article I cited. It's called the bacterial flagellum. There is no natural law to account for it, its too improbable to have come about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern, namely: "bidirectional", "rotary", "motor-driven" and "propeller". Thus, it's Specified Complexity.

 

[SagansHeroes]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Can you give an example of something in nature, a structure in an organism, which fits this definition of specified complexity? Forget the fact that we have known natural laws that explain life has we see it today.

Its in teh article I cited. It's called the bacterial flagellum. There is no natural law to account for it, its too improbable to have come about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern, namely: "bidirectional", "rotary", "motor-driven" and "propeller". Thus, it's Specified Complexity.

The fact that he gave bacterium an easier means of movement is proof of his love of his beings created in his image? That's a large false inference.

Also, "it is too improbable to have come about by chance"... You clearly don't understand how evolution works then.

 

[AdmiralPeacock]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Its in teh article I cited. It's called the bacterial flagellum. There is no natural law to account for it, its too improbable to have come about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern, namely: "bidirectional", "rotary", "motor-driven" and "propeller". Thus, it's Specified Complexity.

The fact that he gave bacterium an easier means of movement is proof of his love of his beings created in his image? That's a large false inference.

Also, "it is too improbable to have come about by chance"... You clearly don't understand how evolution works then.

http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html#intro

Summary of the evolutionary model for the origin of the flagellum, showing the six major stages and key intermediates. White components have identified or reasonably probable nonflagellar homologs; grey components have either suggested but unsupported homologs, or no specific identified homologs, although ancestral functions can be postulated. The model begins with a passive, somewhat general inner membrane pore (1a) that is converted to a more substrate-specific pore (1b) by binding of proto-FlhA and/or FlhB to FliF. Interaction of an F1F0-ATP synthetase with FlhA/B produces an active transporter, a primitive type III export apparatus (1c). Addition of a secretin which associates with the cytoplasmic ring converts this to a type III secretion system (2). A mutated secretion substrate becomes a secreted adhesin (or alternatively an adhesin is coopted by transposition of the secretion recognition sequence), and a later mutation lets it bind to the outer side of the secretin (3a). Oligomerization of the adhesin produces a pentameric ring, allowing more surface adhesins without blocking other secretion substrates (3b). Polymerization of this ring produces a tube, a primitive type III pilus (4a; in the diagram, a white axial structure is substituted for the individual pilin subunits; all further axial proteins are descended from this common pilin ancestor). Oligomerization of a pilin produces the cap, increasing assembly speed and efficiency (4b). A duplicate pilin that loses its outer domains becomes the proto-rod protein, extending down through the secretin and strengthening pilus attachment by association with the base (4c). Further duplications of the proto-rod, filament, and cap proteins, occurring before and after the origin of the flagellum (6) produce the rest of the axial proteins; these repeated subfunctionalization events are not shown here. The protoflagellum (5a) is produced by cooption of TolQR homologs from a Tol-Pal-like system; perhaps a portion of a TolA homolog bound to FliF to produce proto-FliG. In order to improve rotation, the secretin loses its binding sites to the axial filament, becoming the proto-P-ring, and the role of outer membrane pore is taken over by the secretin's lipoprotein chaperone ring, which becomes the proto-L-ring (5b). Perfection of the L-ring and addition of the rod cap FlgJ muramidase domain (which removes the necessity of finding a natural gap in the cell wall) results in 5c. Finally, binding of a mutant proto-FliN (probably a CheC receptor) to FliG couples the signal transduction system to the protoflagellum, producing a chemotactic flagellum (6); fusion of proto-FliN and CheC produces FliM. Each stage would obviously be followed by gradual coevolutionary optimization of component interactions. The origin of the flagellum is thus reduced to a series of mutationally plausible steps.

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

The fact that he gave bacterium an easier means of movement is proof of his love of his beings created in his image? That's a large false inference.

What? Please be more specific.

Also, "it is too improbable to have come about by chance"... You clearly don't understand how evolution works then.

I haven't even mentioned evolution. Now, that's a false inference.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Its in teh article I cited. It's called the bacterial flagellum. There is no natural law to account for it, its too improbable to have come about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern, namely: "bidirectional", "rotary", "motor-driven" and "propeller". Thus, it's Specified Complexity.

Well besides what AdmiralPeacock posted (damn you for beating me to the punch) and since this "example" has been beaten like a dead horse, I will leave you with this video to watch. I am not sure why I thought you would provide something new.

​

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Its in teh article I cited. It's called the bacterial flagellum. There is no natural law to account for it, its too improbable to have come about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern, namely: "bidirectional", "rotary", "motor-driven" and "propeller". Thus, it's Specified Complexity.

Well besides what AdmiralPeacock posted (damn you for beating me to the punch) and since this "example" has been beaten like a dead horse, I will leave you with this video to watch. I am not sure why I thought you would provide something new.

​

I have no idea what he said since he is on my ignore list.

Anyway, you posted a link about irreducible complexity. I'm talking about specified complexity. That's Dembski's argument, not Behe's. Please address my arguments, teh video you posted does not.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Anyway, you posted a link about irreducible complexity. I'm talking about specified complexity. That's Dembski's argument, not Behe's. Please address my arguments, teh video you posted does not.

I do not see the point in coming to a public forum if you are simply going to ignore people that disagree with you. The sad thing about that is the person you ignored could debunk your whole argument, yet you will not be able to address it because you are unable to see it. This is sad because other people will see the debunking and no rebuttal and assume you could not rebuttal the argument.

However, I digress. Until you are able to define specified complexity, you are not saying anything. You can claim any statement to be true using terms that are undefined. Nevertheless, I guess I was wrong to assume specified complexity would be another way to say irreducibly complex.

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

I do not see the point in coming to a public forum if you are simply going to ignore people that disagree with you. The sad thing about that is the person you ignored could debunk your whole argument, yet you will not be able to address it because you are unable to see it. This is sad because other people will see the debunking and no rebuttal and assume you could not rebuttal the argument.

I didn't ignore him because I disagree with him, I ignored him because I didn't like his tone. You can use his arguments if you want to, I don't care.

However, I digress. Until you are able to define specified complexity, you are not saying anything. You can claim any statement to be true using terms that are undefined. Nevertheless, I guess I was wrong to assume specified complexity would be another way to say irreducibly complex.

I defined it already. A pattern that conforms to an independently given pattern and is too improbable to occur by chance. As you can see, it has nothing to do with irreducible complexity.

 

[ProcInc]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Specified complexity is a term without any definition which is attached to a number of fallacies:

1. Argument from retrospective probability.

As I understand has been explained to you multiple times, calculating the probability of a past event in any case is ridiculous. Once the event has happened the probability is one.

What's worse is that this is just the case with actual events determined statistically as a random event. Evolution is not random, it is deterministic. Natural forces and mechanisms can and do account for all of the novelty and variety we see in biological organisms.

2. Argument from subjective definition

Specified Complexity is often defined as something that is "too complex to have been evolved".

This is ignoring the very simple point that there is no way of determining what is too complex to have been evolved or indeed if in principle if anything is too complex to have been evolved.

Dembski has claimed that a system containing 500 bits of information (or presumably more) is the quantified limit of evolution's ability.

Where did he get that number? Not from anywhere I can talk about in polite conversation.

and yes, it is also wrong or at least dubious

a. Even experiencing this limitation, evolution could produce over 500 bits by as little as two incremental changes equivalent to 250 bits or more. Problem solves

b. Increases of information greater than 500 bits are well documented (The evolution of Nylonase was equivalent to an increase in 2352 bits!)

3. Argument from self-fulling claim/ argument from tautology

How do we know if something has Complex Specified Information? If it is too complex to have evolved....

How do we know it is too complex to have evolved? Because it contains Complex Specified Information

What is complex specified information? Information to complex to have evolved.

No definition, no explanation, no argument whatsoever.




Every aspect of the way you advertise yourself REEKS of religious bias and it is very clear through this that neither Behe nor Dembki's fallacies are convincing you in any way. You simply want to use them because you feel that the very notion they are presented is enough to give credence to your silly beliefs regarding an unscientific narrative of life on Earth.

The fact is that you don't even UNDERSTAND the content of these arguments which makes it all the more silly for a multitude of those who are well-read enough in the ideas to appropriately refute respond to your childish challenges to show you how everything is wrong with them.

 

[he_who_is_nobody]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

A pattern that conforms to an independently given pattern and is too improbable to occur by chance.

Given that this is the definition of specified complexity, how is one able to tell this apart from something that was designed through natural selection?

 

[ProcInc]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

A pattern that conforms to an independently given pattern

So you are saying a pattern was determined in advance BEFORE is was discovered?

When?

And seeing as how we can use (in fact RELY on) evolutionary theory to predict genetic sequences to a stunning degree of accuracy isn't it fair to say that this aspect of the definition is entirely useless in determining processes unique to evolutionary theory even if there had ever been a single example of the criteria you describe being observed?

is too improbable to occur by chance

Natural Selection allows for aspects that are too improbable to occur by chance. Are you saying that evolution alone can produce Complex Specified Information?

-If so, then what is the need for your silly additional mechanisms that lack any indication whatsoever to be essentially imagined out of nothing?

-If not, what disqualifies Natural Selection from this criteria when it produces exactly what you once again described? When you said "Chance" did you actually mean all naturalistic processes? How can that be when many, such as Natural Selection are the opposite of chance?

 

[AdmiralPeacock]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Anyway, you posted a link about irreducible complexity. I'm talking about specified complexity. That's Dembski's argument, not Behe's. Please address my arguments, teh video you posted does not.

I do not see the point in coming to a public forum if you are simply going to ignore people that disagree with you. The sad thing about that is the person you ignored could debunk your whole argument, yet you will not be able to address it because you are unable to see it. This is sad because other people will see the debunking and no rebuttal and assume you could not rebuttal the argument.

Cool that means I whooped Царь Славян ass because he is to intellectually dishonest to actually respond. Boom Baby

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Specified complexity is a term without any definition which is attached to a number of fallacies:

No definition? Which part of a pattern that conforms to an independently given pattern and is too improbable to occur by chance, do you have problem grasping? Which word in that sentence do you not comprehend? Which letter can you not read?

As I understand has been explained to you multiple times, calculating the probability of a past event in any case is ridiculous. Once the event has happened the probability is one.

Painfully false.

There is such a thing called Kolmogorov complexity that can tell us which sequences among the whole sequence space is more probable than others.

Here are two sequences.

1000010111101001011111001100001000011111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Both have the probability of 1: 2^40 to occur by chance, according to the standard probability distribution. But if we measure their compressibility we will see that this is what we get:

"1" * 1 + "0" *4 + "10" * 1 + "1" * 4 + "01" * 1 + "0" * 2 + "10" * 1 + "1" * 5 + "0" * 2 + "1" * 2 + "0" * 4 + "1" * 1 + "0" * 4 + "1" * 5
"1" * 40

As you can see, the second pattern can be described much easier. Therefore, it has a lot less entropy. Therefore it's much harder for it to be produced by chance. Not only that, but this also means that there are a lot more of the patterns that have the same complexity signature as the first sequence. And there are a lot less seqeunces from all possible sequences of 40 bits length that have a complexity signature like the second one. The only other sequence is all zeros, which is ~0" * 40. So the number of those sequences is 2, that is all ones, and all zeros. Which makes such low entropy sequences less probable apriori than other high entropy sequences.

The same thing goes for a coin tossing experiment. If someone told you he flipped a coin 40 times and told you he got a sequence of heads and tails that was the same as the first sequence you would have no reson not to believe him. But if he told you he got the second sequence, that is, all heads, you would either tell him he is lying or the coin was not fair. So yeah, we can calculate probabilities aposteriori.

Or imagine a box with 20 identical balls. The only difference is that 19 of them are white, and 1 is red. They are all identical and the chance of getting any ball by chance from the box is 1 : 20. Yet it is much more probable that it's going to be a white, than a red ball.

What's worse is that this is just the case with actual events determined statistically as a random event. Evolution is not random, it is deterministic. Natural forces and mechanisms can and do account for all of the novelty and variety we see in biological organisms.

Dear God no. I don't believe you said that. It's deterministic? Wow, just wow. Then you will have ZERO problem of presenting me with an equation for evolution since its deterministic. Go on, present it.

But since I know you won't since you can't, since evolution is not deterministic, I'll explain to you that evolution is a stochastic process. Which means that it's a mix of both deterministic forces like natural laws, and non-deterministic forces like chance.

Specified Complexity is often defined as something that is "too complex to have been evolved".

By people who don't know how to define CSI properly.

This is ignoring the very simple point that there is no way of determining what is too complex to have been evolved or indeed if in principle if anything is too complex to have been evolved.

There is. You just have to show that the probabilistic resources were not enough to bring about a pattern in question.

Dembski has claimed that a system containing 500 bits of information (or presumably more) is the quantified limit of evolution's ability.

I like to use teh new number of 400 bits, but yeah it's all teh same to me. 500 is close to 400 so there is no problem if you want to use 500.

Where did he get that number? Not from anywhere I can talk about in polite conversation.

He calculated it. You can find it in his book The Design Inference on page 309. Let me present you with the calculation since I have the book.
Estimate of the number ofparticles in the universe - 10^80 particles
Smallest amount of time for an action to take place, 10^-45 hz
Billion times more then the age of the universe, 10^25 seconds

So we get the UPB by multiplying all those numbers 10^80 * 10^45 * 10^25 = 10^150

And to convert this to bits, we do teh following,log2(1 : 10^150) = 500

and yes, it is also wrong or at least dubious

Care to explain why?

a. Even experiencing this limitation, evolution could produce over 500 bits by as little as two incremental changes equivalent to 250 bits or more. Problem solves

Umm... no. That's not production of 250 bits of information. That's 1 bit of information since you made 2 bit operations. To reasonably produce 3 bits of information you need to make 8 bit operations to fully search all the spaces that 3 bits consist of.

b. Increases of information greater than 500 bits are well documented (The evolution of Nylonase was equivalent to an increase in 2352 bits!)

Actually that was produced by a single frame shift mutation, not a 2^2352 shifts. So basicly that's half a bit.

How do we know if something has Complex Specified Information? If it is too complex to have evolved....

If it's to improbable to have came about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern.

How do we know it is too complex to have evolved? Because it contains Complex Specified Information

Because of the lack of probabilistic resources.

What is complex specified information? Information to complex to have evolved.

A pattern that is to improbable to come about by chance and that conformas to an independently given pattern.

No definition, no explanation, no argument whatsoever.

True, if we use your explanation.

 

[Gnug215]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Can you give an example of something in nature, a structure in an organism, which fits this definition of specified complexity? Forget the fact that we have known natural laws that explain life has we see it today.

Its in teh article I cited. It's called the bacterial flagellum. There is no natural law to account for it, its too improbable to have come about by chance and it conforms to an independently given pattern, namely: "bidirectional", "rotary", "motor-driven" and "propeller". Thus, it's Specified Complexity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specified_complexity

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

Given that this is the definition of specified complexity, how is one able to tell this apart from something that was designed through natural selection?

Why Natural Selection can't design anything. That's the title of this paper and it explains why that is so. Basicly, natural selection would need more information than it has at it's disposal. More information than a pure chance can give it. Yet it can't have that since that information would have to be accounted for in soem way. And you can't account it by chance since the highere search space is larger than the original one. Which means, you can't design anything with natural selection. If natural selection does actually produce something, it' because it's been designed to produce it.

The essential difficulty in generating specified complexity with an evolutionary algorithm can now be stated quite simply. An evolutionary algorithm is supposed to find a target within phase space. To do this successfully, however, it needs more information than is available to a blind search. But this additional information resides within a wider informational context. And locating that additional information within the wider context is no easier than locating the original target within the original phase space. Evolutionary algorithms therefore displace the problem of generating specified complexity but do not solve it. I call this the displacement problem.
Think of it this way. There is an island with buried treasure. You can scour the island trying to find the buried treasure. Alternatively, you can try to find a map that tells you where the treasure is buried. Once such a map is in hand, finding the treasure is no problem. But how to find such a map? Suppose such a map exists but resides among a huge assortment of other maps. Finding the right map within that huge assortment will then be no easier than simply searching the island directly. The huge assortment of maps is the informational context. In general, an informational context is no easier to search than the original phase space. Typically the problem gets much worse since informational contexts tend to be function spaces on the original phase spaces (fitness functions being the best known case). For such function spaces, searching the informational context is exponential in the original phase space.
There is no way around the displacement problem.

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/NATSELEC.pdf

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

So you are saying a pattern was determined in advance BEFORE is was discovered?

When?

No, I'm saying that a pattern that conforms to an independently given pattern, exhibits some other pattern that can not be derived from itself.

And seeing as how we can use (in fact RELY on) evolutionary theory to predict genetic sequences to a stunning degree of accuracy isn't it fair to say that this aspect of the definition is entirely useless in determining processes unique to evolutionary theory even if there had ever been a single example of the criteria you describe being observed?

You can't use evolution to predict anything. Please show me the equation that predicts people.

Natural Selection allows for aspects that are too improbable to occur by chance. Are you saying that evolution alone can produce Complex Specified Information?

-If so, then what is the need for your silly additional mechanisms that lack any indication whatsoever to be essentially imagined out of nothing?

-If not, what disqualifies Natural Selection from this criteria when it produces exactly what you once again described? When you said "Chance" did you actually mean all naturalistic processes? How can that be when many, such as Natural Selection are the opposite of chance?

Natural selection doesn't produce anything. So it does not make less probable events more probable. It's just going to keep some element over others. But it depends on how the fitness function is set up, meaning it depends on what selection will select and what get kept. The question is how it got set up that way in the first place.

 

[Царь Славян]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specified_complexity

Good for you Jimmy, today you learned how to link to web sites! Tommorow we'll learn how to draw with crayons!

 

[lrkun]

Re: ** STICKY ** Creationist Canards: The comprehensive guid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specified_complexity

Good for you Jimmy, today you learned how to link to web sites! Tommorow we'll learn how to draw with crayons!

The little website debunks your dembski, or atleast points out why it is fallacious.