Information Theory and Intelligent Design.

The author of the first webpage (Flaws in the evolution theory by Reiko Yukawa) is just making things up concerning information theory. He makes two significant errors:

• "One important argument against evolution is the fact that information always requires an intelligent mind."
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  If you read the landmark paper by Shannon that began the science of Information Theory (A Mathematical Theory of Communication) you'll see that this definition is incorrect. The author is making the mistake of confusing meaning with information. In Information Theory, information is a merely mathematical construct unrelated to meaning. As Shannon himself says
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  Shannon writes:

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  "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem."
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  If you doubt this, just ask yourself where the information comes from for a star in the sky. Astronomers convert the information contained in the star's light (actually, all useful electromagnetic radiation we can receive from the star is analyzed, not just visible light) into information on a computer hard disk or words in technical papers they write. But the astronomers did not create that information. They merely translated it from one form to another.
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• "Linguistics shows that DNA is literally a language containing four letters, and comparisons to computer science show that DNA is the most compact form of information that we know of, more compact that any form of data storage that humans have made."
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  This is patently false. DNA is not the most compact form of the information it contains. A DNA codon could actually encode for 64 amino acids, but actually only encodes for 20. This is a good thing, because the excess codes are used to provide redundancy which reduces the probability of errors causing problems (by changing to a code for the wrong amino acid), and even allows some types of errors to be corrected.

The reply from Julio Johansen (Flaws in the evolution theory (Message 10)) is pretty much on the mark. He also mentions Shannon, and I think he's way to kind to Dembski. Dembski's information theory is made up. Gitt, who he doesn't mention, has done the same thing.--Percy

The important question concerns whether you've said anything meaningful in terms of information theory.A first principle in information theory is that concerns the communication of information. Information that is never communicated isn't very useful. Even an information storage device, which many people think of as storing rather than communicating information, is actually a means of communicating information across both time and space, though it does have the important additional quality of persistence.The common claim that information can only be created by an intelligence usually stems from a confusion of information with meaning. Information is mere bits. In fact, information is measured in terms of bits. Meaning is a human artifact and has nothing to do with information theory.Perhaps you have some photocell lights outside your house? They turn on when the sun sets? Where do the photocells get the information that the sun has set? Not from you or any intelligence. The whole purpose of photocell lights is to remove the need for an intelligence (us) to manually "tell" (by flicking a switch) the lights to turn on at sunset.Matter is manipulated by non-intelligent agents all the time. The composition of stars controls the light wavelengths that compose it's spectrum. We can observe this spectrum here on earth and deduce the star's composition. The star has communicated it's composition to us here on earth, and no intelligent agent was involved in this communication. The scientists take this information and recode it into numbers in tables and binary bits on computer disks, but they don't create this information. The star created this information.Imagine a tree that has been neatly cut down using a chainsaw leaving behind a tree trunk, and someone comes along and counts the tree rings of the tree trunk, and now he knows the age of the tree when it was cut down. The person didn't create that information, all he did was decipher it by counting tree rings. If later on a different person comes along and counts the tree rings he'll get the same answer. If he was creating the information himself he would get a different answer, since he would have no way of knowing what answer the first person created. But they both get the same answer because the information was contained in the tree rings and not just created by the people counting those rings.The universe is chock-full of information, and all scientists have to do to understand the universe is grasp onto some of that information so that they can record and analyze it.Transforming or translating information from one form to another is not "creating" information. A photocell turning on a light is not creating information, it is merely transforming information that the sun has set into information that the lightbulb is on. A scientist recording star spectra is not "creating" information, he is merely translating the information in the starlight into other representations that people can save and analyze.In a way it is analogous to translating a book from one language to another. A translator who is translating a technical article from German to English is not creating information, he is merely translating it. If it's a technical paper about star spectra, then the information in the light from stars was translated into numbers in tables by the original German scientists, and later into different numbers in tables (going from metric to English units) in the English translation. But nowhere in this process did someone "create" the star spectra information. The creation of this information happened way back at the star.--Percy

I'm not making any point at all about meaning, other than that it is not part of information theory. It is information theory that is the topic of this thread.The basic problem of information theory is one of communicating a single message from a set of messages. For example, when transmitting characters of a sentence, each character is a single message from a set of messages, where the message set is all the characters of the alphabet, including special characters like space, numbers, punctuation, etc. To transmit a sentence of 50 characters we would send 50 tiny messages of one character each. As it happens, each character is a single byte (8 bits) of information.Now once the characters are reassembled into a sentence then it is likely, or at least possible, that that sentence has meaning, but the meaning of the sentence has nothing at all to do with the basic engineering problem of communication, which is what information theory is all about.You see, the problem isn't that it is wrong to separate meaning from the formal concept of information as part of information theory. By definition, in information theory they *are* separate, and meaning isn't part of the theory. The problem is that you don't want to talk about the topic. This thread is about information theory and ID, not about meaning. Once you start talking about meaning you have left the realm of information theory and wandered outside the topic of this thread. Everything in my photocell lights example was designed, manufactured and installed by human beings, but that's not relevant to the example. The relevant question is where the information came from that the sun had set. Before replying, take a look at the top of the page again and note the topic. We're talking about information, not meaning, not consciousness, not motivation.If you'd like an example that doesn't involve people, then consider where flowers get the information that the sun has risen so they can open their petals.Ultimately information is just an encoding of what has happened. Whenever anything anywhere happens, information about that event scatters off into the ether in the form of matter and energy. Anything this matter or energy impinges upon is imparting information about what happened.In other words, information is created by anything that happens. What's unique about information and people is that we're very adept at translating information into alternative forms, and at analyzing it to identify patterns.--Percy

I don't think PaulK meant to say, "It isn't true to say that there is anything non-material about that disk." I think what he really meant to say is, "It isn't true to say that there is anything non-material about the information on that disk." Iceage makes this point very well when in Message 51 he calls your attention to physical properties like shape and magnetic polarity.Information can be represented in an infinite variety of ways. It is infinitely malleable. The fact that much of the information of this world can be represented as mere magnetic polarities in thin coatings of iron oxide on rapidly rotating disks is strong evidence that this is so. Whether it's words, sounds or pictures, they can all be translated into other forms. You can see pictures of sound waves on an oscilloscope. When we still used acoustic modems, pictures that you transmitted over the Internet were first translated into sound. Words can be bits or images of characters on a page or vibrations in the atmosphere carried to our ears.The point is that the specific manner in which any particular information is represented is not particularly relevant. When Meyer holds up two disks, one that's been recorded and one that hasn't, there *are* physical differences between the two disks. One has had magnetic polarities set onto it in a very precise manner, the other has not. Even though they have identical masses, these obvious physical differences can be easily detected by slipping the disks into a reader.If Meyer had instead held up two newspapers, one printed and one blank, there would now be a difference in information *and* mass, since the ink has mass. The newspaper with the printing has more mass than the newspaper without.And if Meyer had instead brought in two gravestones, one already carved with the decedent's information and the other still blank, then there would again be a difference in information *and* mass, except this time the gravestone with the information has less mass than the one with no information!So obviously mass is not particularly relevant to the representation of information and Meyer is wrong, clearly and unambiguously wrong. PaulK said nothing about these things, and you're drifting way off topic again.--Percy

Except for occasional molecules of iron oxide tearing away from the medium and the wear and tear on bearings and so forth, because the read/write heads never touch the surface of the rotating disk I don't think there's any change of mass associated with writing information onto rotating magnetic media. The same could not be said of magnetic tape, which experiences measurable wear every time it is played. But disregarding the wear and tear issues, I think you are right that because of mass/energy equivalence that changing the information on magnetic media might also change its mass, though very likely to an unmeasurable degree. It depends upon the balance of 1's and 0's, and whether a 1 or a 0 stores more energy.I'm not sure if the same is true of optical media since it involves an actual physical change (I believe a laser heats a tiny dot that somehow causes a physical change that affects reflectivity). Probably some physical potential energies are involved, since heating can erase the dot of information, implying an elastic property. In this case a minute change in mass would again be involved.--Percy

You're off by at least one. Rob and Meyer were wrong in so many different ways that there were a multiplicity of different directions rebuttal could, and did, take. Most of the rebuttals were correct. To repeat myself, information is infinitely malleable. It can be encoded in a limitless variety of ways. Everything that happens, whether or not a human being was involved, causes matter and energy to shoot off into the ether carrying information about the event.--Percy

Hi Subbie,I think I already said what you're trying to say. Let me elaborate and see if you agree.In my previous message I said, "Everything that happens, whether or not a human being was involved, causes matter and energy to shoot off into the ether carrying information about the event." In your reply you used the example of DNA. When DNA replicates, whatever happens during that replication causes matter and energy to shoot off into the surrounding environment with information about that event. Since DNA has persistence, a property I also mentioned in a previous message, an event such as a mutation can persistently affect the surrounding environment. In other words, the mutational change continuously informs the environment of its presence (as does everything else).So when I said that every event creates information I was of course referring to material events, so of course they can create information. The examples I provided for Rob, of photocell lights, of tree rings and of starlight, were all of materialistic processes creating information, and they all contradicted Meyer's claim that information cannot be created by material real-world processes.--Percy

Hi Rob,As a participant in this thread I cannot moderate it, but I'd like to add my voice to the others here saying the same thing: could you please confine yourself to addressing the topic?If you're looking for an avenue of rebuttal that may have potential, could I suggest questioning the assertion that meaning isn't part of information. Both Dembski and Gitt claim that it is. Why don't you look into that?Or you could investigate Dembski's concept of specified complexity.Whether or not theses avenues hold much promise, unlike Revelation 19:21 and unsupported assertions of "you're wrong", at least they're on topic and follow the Forum Guidelines.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Spelling.

Rob,I want to implore you one more time to please post on topic in this thread. Take up the issue of whether meaning should really be held separate from information. Discuss specified complexity. Read up on information theory at science sites around the Internet (see Information theory - Wikipedia for a start).--PercyEdited by Percy, : board => Internet