Evolution of complexity/information

Saviourmachine, It's very, very simple, mate. 3bn years ago ther were only unicellular prokaryotes. Today they still exist, but with the addition of MORE COMPLEX eukarotes, both unicellular & multicellular.Somewhere along the line complexity increased in order to achieve the eukarotic condition & multicellularity.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

Trying to understand complexity and give it a value has no meaning. It is the equivalent to asking, "How many infinities are there in infinity?".Complexity is a description of a system and the implication is that it is too complex to measure or understand. But, complexity theories aren't about measuring or understanding complexity, they are about making use of the fact that complex systems, however complex, settle into steady states. This is because they always tend towards states of minimum energy.This is somewhat analogous to the way water, under the influence of gravity, always runs down hill (towards a state of minimum potential energy).Just as water might get trapped into false minimums (dips in the ground), complex systems can become trapped in steady states known as "attractor basins". It is this phenomenon that makes complexity and chaos theories so valuable, because a system doesn't take up a state randomly from all possible states once it is disturbed - it takes up one of only a limited number of states dependent upon initial conditions.It is this phenomenon that is used by the brain to identify patterns of learned information that is contained in the billions of signals emanating continuously from our sense receptors. It is also the phenomenon that allows the brain to locate and combine a myriad of different neural networks in the brain for purposes of perception and cognition.As for a definition of information. Isn't it about "learned patterns of sensory inputs" that we talk about when we refer to information?Mary Catherine Bateson, talking about Greory Bateson's book "Steps to an ecology of mind" writes:

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Peter SmallAuthor of: Lingo
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Entrepreneurial Web,
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I’ve heard similar views expressed about neuroscience and the Internet. All are opinions based upon a bounded rationailty. To each, in their own personal worlds, other worlds can seem nonsense - irrespective of whether or not any of the worlds are based upon absolute facts.Knowledge Management may seem nonsense if you take it to mean subjective knowledge. But, as Charles Knight pointed out, most knowledge management systems are really dealing with information. Thus, Knowledge Management to a marketing company using a database to create customer profiles and categories would hardly consider Knowledge Management to be nonsense.

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Peter SmallAuthor of: Lingo
Sorcery, Magical A-Life
Avatars, The
Entrepreneurial Web,
The Ultimate Game of
Strategy and Web
Presence
http://www.stigmergicsystems.com

Then any sentences that say things like "Evolution can not increase complexity" are also meaningless. That is the point of the discussion. If we are unable to define and quantify "complexity" it is useless to continue the discussion on that topic.

You are playing semantic games with me CharlesNo not at all, I meant entirely what I said. Perhaps you should read my paper before commenting further. You'll find it is actually a criticism of current beliefs in knowledge management (which is why I mentioned that it went down like a lead balloon).I did read your paper and I asked a collegue of mine (One of most cited figures in the information sciences academic community) to have a look. We both came to the same conclusions - overly complex and of very limited practical value to most organizations.I will say, however, that it had a few interesting ideas in it.

It depends very much how you define complexity as it can mean different things to different people. The WORD IQ encyclopedia describes it as follows Some of these meanings can be quantified, but as is pointed out in the article:"Complexity is just a word" by Peter A. Corning, Ph.D. Institute for the Study of Complex Systems
http://www.complexsystems.org/commentaries/jan98.htmlquantifying complexity can have very little value if it refers to the complexity in non linear systems (i.e., biological systems).The issues relating to definition and quantifying complexity are brought out in an ISSS discussion at:
We've got some trouble | 404 - Resource not foundPerhaps the best attitude to have towards complexity is that described by Peter Coming, who wrote:

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Peter SmallAuthor of: Lingo
Sorcery, Magical A-Life
Avatars, The
Entrepreneurial Web,
The Ultimate Game of
Strategy and Web
Presence
http://www.stigmergicsystems.com

Thanks for the info, Loudmouth, I haven't overlooked it. So much to do, so little time...

Not a prob, bro. I will admit that it is a little strange to have such a polite creationist around. Take your time.

quote:

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It is this distinction that took me away from conventional ideas about knowledge/information management to look at how information and knowledge is handled by the human brain. It then becomes apparent that knowledge is something quite different to information and is a unique experience for every different person.

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It sounds to me like you guys are having a semantic difference.As I understand it, the Humanities distinguish between KNOWLEDGE and INFORMATION, in which information is the raw input, and knowledge the result of interpretation and processing.Information science makes exactly the same distinction except between DATA and INFORMATION.The commonality of the term information in two different senses trips people up a lot, it seems to me.

I'm am information sciences academic, I have no problem with the concept of
knowledge .I have a problem with knowledge management - because it's not possible. Like I said before it's just information management under a snakeoil front.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 07-22-2004 08:16 AM

Yes. This is very common in all forums. It is particularly interesting for me as an author because I have to write stuff that might be read by people with all kinds of technical (and non technical) backgrounds.When I'm preparing to write a new book, I visit a number of different forums to see how they react to different ways of explaining concepts. Semantic differences are a big problem, but an even greater problem is that people seem to use a heuristic method of reading information, whereby they reinterpret not only words but whole concepts into their own cognitive models. This can lead to total misunderstandings and can even promote extreme antagonism.Antagonisms usually come from people who have a particular cognitive model to defend. Any trespass - into their area of special interest that doesn't conform with their views - is attacked with vigor. This is particularly noticeable when a subject area has many different branches.The evolutionary psychology forum [evol psych] is a good example here. This subject area includes hundreds of different disciplines, where words and concepts can have all kinds of different meanings to the different groups.The extent of the diversity was described recently by one of the [evol psych] moderators, who wrote: Since the beginning of this year, I've been trying to understand semantic problems from the point of view of how the brain processes information. This has opened up a pandora's box because I had no idea how extensive this subject area is. But, what I have discovered is that brain imaging techniques is shedding a whole new light on this problem.

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Peter SmallAuthor of: Lingo
Sorcery, Magical A-Life
Avatars, The
Entrepreneurial Web,
The Ultimate Game of
Strategy and Web
Presence
http://www.stigmergicsystems.com

removed by author.This message has been edited by Charles Knight, 07-22-2004 01:46 PM

Sorry to take so long to get back to this (I've been away)my point was more that increased complexity does not necessarily result in a better design, in many cases something can be simplified to gain an advantage -- less weight, more efficient use of energy. size of genome is not enough if one has many repeated sequences and another has more varied sequences, and this gets into information theory to define the complexity based on "compressed information" similar to making a ZIP file of the code and the larger 'zipped genome' would be more complex.would telepathic amoebas be more complex than non-telepathic ones? depends on whether the result would be more of a 'hive mind' being than an assembly of individuals continuing to do same old tasks without specialization, for in one sense all multicell organisms are an assembly of single cell 'individuals' working together telepathically: the complexity comes from specialization.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

This seems as good a place as any to carry on discussing complexity.From: Message 140Here is a copy:
he one you get is actually a reminder of the one I've already cited someplace here in this thread. It is the human brain. I know other creatures have also complex brains, but I'm somewhat familiar with some stuff about our brains.

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1. What we observe in our daily lives is that complex things like computers, televisions, airplanes, etc is that in order to become complex to do what we want them to do, masterfully precisioned and designed by thousands of individuals go into making them the complex machines which function to serve us as they do.

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2. By the same token, scientists observe the brain, it is discovered that some 100 billion neurons, served by around a trillion service agents function with great precision to operate the nervous systems of each of billions of people. Each neuron interacts with at least 10 other neurons in the process. I believe the human mind is far more complex than anything man-made. No amount of co-operative human intelligence can make one from scratch.

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3. The thread title is "Ignorant Creationists vs. Knowledgeable Evolutionists. It is the notion of some of us more ignorant Biblical fundamental creationists that no amount of time nor natural selection nor random mutation with out a smidget of intelligence would be able to produce such a precisely designed and super-highly complex wonder as the human brain, no matter how you cook up your math and rig up your theories.

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Do you mean to say that complexity can only come about with God's intervention?

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PRECISELY! If all the kings wise men, with all their combined trillions of neuronic brains working together can't make a brain, imo, mindless Mr. Natual Selection and his cohort, dead headed Ms Radom Mutation never did it. And don't forget also that the kings wise men have models to observe and work from/copy, where NS and RM, had nothing atol to begin to put it all together, not even anything whatsoever to motivate them to do it. We have an example of something that we can probably all agree is complex: the human brain. What we don't have is any definition of what complex is. It appears that it is something with lots of parts. They also have to be organized in some "special" way.But instead of taking an extreme case could we ask about something simpler?How much less complex than a human brain is the brain of a cat? Is it too much to build with processes that have been demonstrated to be able to form complex results? If that is how about the brain of a flat worm? Is there a lower line where Buz would agree something can evolve?

The biggest problem one faces (beyond defining terms )
when considering information and complexity to biological
systems is to decide what we are applying them to.Many start with the DNA .... unfortunately it is not the
DNA that makes the organism so this is inapproriate. It is
the collection of proteins made from the DNA that makes
the organisms so information and complexity have to be considered
at least at this level.Not the proteins, but the INTERACTION of a collection of
proteins.I'm still not convinced that information and complexity are
useful concepts in biology let alone evolutionary theory.Evolution is about change.That's all. Change.It focusses on the relationship between a set of phenotypic
traits with an environment.That we appear to see an increase in complexity (if viewed as
number of interacting components of some kind) is suggestive
of an environmental need for such complexity to overcome the
shortcomings of organism.Like 'human intelligence', much valued and praised, is only
required because we are so puny as an organism.The more resilient and adaptable an organism is, the less
'intelligence' it requires to survive .... that's why there
are more bacteria and insects than mammals.More complex (however one considers it) doesn't mean better
if it did (even in terms of match to environment) there wouldn't
be any 'simple' organisms left after 3.5 billion years.