AE Public BB

Post by Erasmus, FCD
Reductionists Gone Wild...

Quote You can look on living things as some kind of software with kernel soft which binds different config files togeather and interpretates them. But each organism has different set of different config files where each element of organism has one or even more config files. You can tamper with different stuff in config files, some stuff is constants, some stuff are changanble, some stuff is dependent on other config file stuff, some may be is exterior things which change according to weather or week day!

At the end you get complex system celluaar automaton math into living things. ID does not excludes them in general, only we have to find it’s place overall life cycle of the organism. Behe prooved himself that there is even some place for random mutations and natural selection to produce SOME stuff. But I like to look onto organism as big big software with built in 3D printer with bunch of config files, for legs, ears, eyes, CPU etc.


Hilarious post precedes and follows this comment (pannenberg, you sly devil you ;) ).  These kind of tards have more in common with Dawkins than they could possibly imagine.  

I like to look onto organism as big big luminous being with connection portal centered somewhere between last and next to last chakra.

Post by slpage
Quote (dogdidit @ Aug. 27 2008,17:24)
Quote The OP spoke about using bits to encode the nucleotides:
  Quote (goalpost @ Aug. 27 2008,12:21)Both messages contain a human DNA sequence - ACGT etc etc, each letter coded as two bits, ie 00 = A, 01 = C, 10 = G, 11 = T.
...so I was responding to that. I would agree that compressing functional DNA does not seem possible. Perhaps a very large steam press...

Indeed.

This has always sort of bugged me in these discussions - talk of compressability and information and DNA.  
Quote Quote OK, so while we are discussing hypotheticals, how about this one.

Two DNA sequences, both 1000 bps long, both identical with one exception - one sequence starts with TAA instead of TAC.
The 'functional sequence' has a measured information content of (just tossing out a number here to make it simple) 1000.
Would the non-functional sequence have a content of 999 or 0?
1000. That assumes a C is as likely as an A. Functionality ("semantic content") is irrelevant.

@Turncoat: yep, I am using Shannon's definition (and thanks for not mentioning my errors).

Interesting.  Funny - when I present IDcretos with similar scenarios, then get themselves into a tizzy and can never seem to even try to address the question.

Post by Wesley R. Elsberry
Quote
2) Two to the six billionth power is such a shockingly huge number that no calculator can calculate it.  It is far, far greater than the total number of particles in the universe.  It spits on Dembski's Universal Probability Bound of 1 in 10 to the 150th power.


You apparently haven't met the Finite Improbability Calculator.

Quote
2 ^ 6000000000 = 10 ^ 1806179973.9839

Post by Wesley R. Elsberry
That reminds me... has anyone seen the Marks/Dembski collaborations appear in print anywhere yet?

Though I suppose that if they do, notice is likely to be given the IDC equivalent of a ticker-tape parade, appearing on the DI blog, the ID-the-Future blog, UD, TT, and however many DO'L blogs there are at the time.

Post by Wesley R. Elsberry
Quote (Turncoat @ Aug. 27 2008,21:44) Quote (Richardthughes @ Aug. 27 2008,20:52)All this experimenting is not very congruent with ID, folks. back to navel-gazing and hand-waving, please.
Have you forgotten how amazingly "creative" one can be with MatLab?
That was fun, though the creative folks just turned around and re-asserted everything just on their say-so rather than rely on the authority of their script.

I once actually had a program that worked properly (that is, the results were computed accurately), but I had failed to initialize pointers. Everything worked fine up until the program ended, at which point my computer would reboot itself. The uninitialized pointers apparently happily pointed into memory regions used by MS-DOS... worked fine while my program was doing its thing, but it hammered the in-memory parts of some system stuff, COMMAND.COM and MSDOS.SYS or similar bits. That, though, was enough of an inducement to track down the problem.

I would have thought that coming up with results so starkly inconsistent with decades of peer-reviewed research would have given the MATLAB programmer(s) pause, but apparently since the error went in a direction parallel to their prejudices, it seemed not to raise any alarm bells.

Post by Richardthughes
WRT punctaution rules, which become part of the codec in our examples - I guess this sort of thing works if:

1) The rule is lossless
2) Compressing the rule < compressing the examples?

Post by J-Dog
Quote (afarensis @ Aug. 27 2008,21:53) Quote (stevestory @ Aug. 25 2008,23:04)if you are a blogger like ERV or Afarensis feel free to put links to your stuff here. It'll give us more to do. The ID folks haven't been doing much lately.
Here is one...


Notice the dedication...
What a Beautiful dedication.
Excuse me while I go hurl....But Srsly - good stuff dude!  

In the big picture, it looks like Luskin is a True Beliver™ and it colors every post he makes.  

OR,

Is he just in it for the money, and if he doesn't make a fool out of himself 10 times a month for the DI, he's out on the street, and forced to get a real job?

Post by midwifetoad
I had in mind something a bit less drastic than all members of a population shifting their alleles like synchronized swimmers, but I see your point.

I guess my point is that a pseudo random algorithm would work as well as a theoretically perfect random one.

I'm pretty sure there are ID advocates hoping to demonstrate some day that some mutations anticipate need, or at least respond to environmental stress by producing targeted change. A non-theistic teleology, if you will.

Don't shoot me. I'm just trying to figure out what they're thinking about, if anything.

Post by Reciprocating Bill
Quote (deadman_932 @ Aug. 27 2008,21:38)I'm sure that's intended by Barry to indicate something relly, relly profound like " How can we be sure of anything, really?" or  "Are you a brain in a vat?"
I say Barry ought to have someone stop around and check his vat.

Post by Louis
Quote (Richardthughes @ Aug. 28 2008,04:34)It's the ID strategy of "twist your concepts against you" projection and rampant unselfreflective hypocrisy.

Science is a religion
Atheism is a religion
Darwin of the gaps
etc..
Fixerised it for yo^u.

Louis

Post by Ptaylor
Quote (Erasmus @ FCD,Aug. 27 2008,22:03)holy drooling fucktards this entire thread is one huge circle jerk of idiots trying to out-dumb-fuck the next.

easily the dumbest thing i have read in a while.  not even worth it.
Meanwhile Jerry and StephenB do their bit to keep the tard flowing on one of O'Leary's latest threads. Sample from Jerry (after Jack Krebs reminds him that the "vast majority of the world’s biologist[s] disagree with you"):
          Quote 99
jerry
08/27/2008
8:14 pm

Jack Krebs,

Could just one of that vast majority please provide some empirical data since you/we know that you cannot do so. You obviously know that you are making the fallacious argument from authority. You just admitted that there is no information otherwise you would be all over it. Is that any way to teach science to children and young adults. I would be embarrassed by your answer.

And Jack you have an educational background in evolutionary biology.
Ahh, that old combination of tard and arrogance that is the hallmark of UD. And I like the "just one of the vast majority" argument, so beloved of the creationists - "show me the one book, the one article, etc, that proves evolution". Imagine using it in a court setting:

There's been a murder - someone's been shot dead
The suspect was seen leaving the scene of the crime, gun in hand, after people nearby had heard the fatal shot
Forensics showed that the bullet had come from the suspect's gun and his DNA was in the room
The suspect had a motive for wanting the victim dead
Suspect's acquaintances say he admitted the murder to them
etc...

Fantasyland Judge Jerry: "Never mind all that - just show me the one piece of evidence that completely proves your case."

Post by CeilingCat
Young Barry puts his head in the noose: Quote 27 August 2008
Quote of the Day
BarryA
“The beliefs which we have the most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Burt, n.d.), pp. 38-39.
I'd say that's pretty well been acomplished as far as your religious beliefs are concerned.

Post by Turncoat
Here is a preprocessing script. Run Macbeth through this first, and then run the output through the filter (script) I gave above.
Code Sample #!/bin/sh

# Spell out punctuation marks. Leave apostrophe as part of word.
# Treat end-of-line as punctuation for processing of verse.
# This works well for Shakespeare from Gutenberg Project.
# Manually remove copyright notice prior to each act.

sed '/^ *$/d'   |
sed "
s/'/papostrophe/g
s/,/ pcomma /g
s/\./ pperiod /g
s/\!/ pbang /g
s/\?/ pquestion /g
s/-/ phyphen /g
s/\[/ plbracket /g
s/\]/ prbrackt /g
s/;/ psemicolon /g
s/:/ pcolon /g
s/(/ plparenthesis /g
s/)/ prparenthesis /g
s/$/ pendofline/"
I decided that end-of-line should be treated as punctuation in verse. I also noticed that there were copyright notifications prior to Acts II-V that I had not removed in my previous analysis. Now there are 25,307 "words," and the per-word entropy is 8.228 bits. Yes, the per-word entropy went down because the empirical distribution concentrates  a great deal of probability mass on punctuation pseudo-words. Here are the twenty most frequent words and pseudo-words:

2625 2625 pendofline
1873 4498 pperiod
1646 6144 pcomma
736 6880 the
567 7447 and
385 7832 to
356 8188 of
318 8506 i
284 8790 macbeth
253 9043 a
238 9281 pquestion
229 9510 that
208 9718 psemicolon
208 9926 pbang
207 10133 in
202 10335 you
192 10527 my
183 10710 is
164 10874 not
155 11029 with

Post by SoonerintheBluegrass
Well, I was a history major in college, so I would have loved to do that project, or any project really, on Rome.  

But knowing what I know now, I'd love to have done my Senior English paper (HS) on why ID is not science.  Soooo many resources, what with the interwebs and all.  We didn't have that back in those days, and instead I chose something horrifically stupid and embarrassing piece of fluff to do my paper on.  I've got a cousin who's getting ready to graduate from my tiny high school Alma Mater up here in semi-God crazy Eastern KY, and I'd love to try and persuade him to do his Sr. English paper on that.  

PS For a look at what life and school, etc. is like in my neck of the woods-- or one county over, anyway (I'm from Johnson county, the two kids on the show are from Floyd)-- check out the three part series from Frontline called "Country Boys."  I live in Lexington, now, but come back here often.

Post by Turncoat
Quote (Richardthughes @ Aug. 27 2008,22:32)   Quote It would have been nice to treat punctuation marks as words, but I don't happen to have a script on hand that does that.

I'm guessing they have low compressibility given their single character nature? You could perhaps make capitalization at the start of a sentence a rule and then compress that way?
Periods and commas have low self-information (are given short encodings) because they are of high probability. Most capitalization can be recovered from punctuation. My transformation to lowercase of words that are always capitalized (e.g., "Macbeth") has no effect on the entropy calculation.

My brain is fried, so I'm not good for any real work. Perhaps I'll diddle a bit with punctuation.

Post by CeilingCat
Let me go into this topic a little bit more because it always flummoxes anti-evolutionists and most evolutionists aren't too clear on some of the points.

1) There are about 3 billion base pairs in the human genome.  Since there are four possible base pairs, it takes two bits to describe which one is at any particular place.  Therefore, there are about six billion bits of information in human DNA.

2) Two to the six billionth power is such a shockingly huge number that no calculator can calculate it.  It is far, far greater than the total number of particles in the universe.  It spits on Dembski's Universal Probability Bound of 1 in 10 to the 150th power.

3) Because of this, many ID creationists and ordinary creationists believe that the odds of getting any particular human DNA string are one in two to the six billionth power.

4) People who listen to Dembski are especially liable to believe that #3 above is correct.

5) However, people who listen to Dembski are, generally, tards.

6) In real life, we don't try to construct the human genome from scratch in one try, so the 1 in two to the six billionth figure is wrong.

7) Real evolution works generally by zapping one tiny part of the genome*, leaving all of the rest of the DNA intact and thus presumably working, since it enabled the parent(s) to function well enough to reproduce.

8) This means that the one in two to the six billionth figure and Dembski's Universal Probability Bound are useless, along with any changes Dembski may make to his UPB.  (He's apparently been raising it lately.)

9) In accordance with #8 above, any enormous number ginned up by a creationist is crap.  This is certain to a degree way, way, way inside the UPB.  (Roughly about 1 in 1 to the 0th power.)

10) Instead, when a single point mutation occurs, we are concerned with how the five billion, 999 million, 999 thousand, 998 bits of known good DNA will work with the two bits that have changed.

11) Generally speaking, they will work pretty well.  Most mutations are neutral.

12) If they don't work well, the offspring dies, usually before it is even born.  Throughout human history, about 80-90 percent of all humans born have died before reproducing.  A baby born with a bad mutation is just one more.

13) When they do work well, shazam!  Evolution has occurred.

14) PAYLOAD: Instead of going through all the possible permutations of a six billion bit number, evolution changes one or two base pairs at a time.  Since there are three billion base pairs in the human genome and approximately 6.6 billion humans on earth as of July '08, on average every single base pair in the human genome gets tweaked at least twice every generation if humans average only a single mutation each time they reproduce.

15) So much for the Universal Probability Bound and all the other big numbers the creationists throw around.

* There are other mutations that work on groups of DNA, such as gene duplications, but we can ignore them here.  They just make our point a little more convincing.

Post by Richardthughes
It's the ID strategy of "twist your concepts against you"

Science is a religion
Atheism is a religion
Darwin of the gaps
etc..

Post by Richardthughes
Quote It would have been nice to treat punctuation marks as words, but I don't happen to have a script on hand that does that.

I'm guessing they have low compressibility given their single character nature? You could perhaps make capitalization at the start of a sentence a rule and then compress that way?

Post by Turncoat
Here's a little shell script for getting word counts (case insensitive) from a text:
Code Sample #!/bin/sh

tr -d "'"___|
tr -cs "[:alpha:]" "\n"__|
tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"_|
sort ____|
uniq -c____|
sort -rn___|
awk '{ cum += $1; print  $1, cum, $2; }'

It says that Macbeth contains 18596 instances of 3379 distinct words. Here are the ten most frequent words:

740 740 the
579 1319 and
385 1704 to
368 2072 of
335 2407 i
284 2691 macbeth
253 2944 a
233 3177 that
207 3384 in
202 3586 you

The first column is word frequency, and the second is cumulative frequency. Applying this command
Code Sample awk '{h += $1 / 18596 * -log($1/18596)/log(2)} END{print h}'
to the output, I get per-word entropy of about 9.357 bits. It would have been nice to treat punctuation marks as words, but I don't happen to have a script on hand that does that.

Post by Erasmus, FCD
holy drooling fucktards this entire thread is one huge circle jerk of idiots trying to out-dumb-fuck the next.

easily the dumbest thing i have read in a while.  not even worth it.