{"id":623,"date":"2008-04-03T15:21:26","date_gmt":"2008-04-03T15:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/04\/03\/liars-no-information-allowed\/"},"modified":"2008-04-03T15:21:26","modified_gmt":"2008-04-03T15:21:26","slug":"liars-no-information-allowed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/04\/03\/liars-no-information-allowed\/","title":{"rendered":"Liars: No Information Allowed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bad from the Bad Ideas Blog<\/a> sent me a link to some clips<\/a> from Ben Stein’s new Magnum Opus, “Expelled”. I went and took a look. Randomly, I picked one that looked like a clip from the movie rather than a trailer – it’s the one titled “Genetic Mutation”.<\/p>\n

Care to guess how long it took me to find an insane, idiotic error?<\/p>\n

4 seconds. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s the old “evolution can’t create information” scam.<\/p>\n

The clip is Ben Stein interviewing a guy named “Maceij Giertych”,
\nwho is allegedly a population geneticist. (I say allegedly because looking
\nthe guy up, he appears to be an agricultural biologist studying tree-growth
\npatterns in forests.) Said gentleman is not currently a working scientist,
\nbut a policitian. He’s a leader of a right-wing nationalist political party
\nin Poland, and currently is a member of the European parliament representing Poland.)<\/p>\n

What Giertych has to say is the usual dishonest claptrap:<\/p>\n

\n

Giertych<\/b>: “Evolution does not produce new genetic information. and for evolution …”<\/p>\n

Stein<\/b>: “there has to be new genetic information. And where is the new genetic information going to come from?”<\/p>\n

Giertych<\/b>:”Well, that is the big question. Darwin(ists?) assume that the
\ninformation comes from natural selection. But natural selection reduces genetic
\ninformation, and we know this from all of the genetic population studies that we
\nhave.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It continues in the same vein for the remainder of the interview. I’ve written
\nabout this particular line of bullshit so many times that I’m downright bored with
\nit. But it’s pure rubbish.<\/p>\n

Before I get to the math part, there’s one obvious and obnoxious scam
\nin the above that it doesn’t take much to notice. “Darwinists assume that
\nthe information comes from natural selection”. No, Darwinists don’t assume that.
\nNatural selection is<\/em> an information reducer: because not all
\nindividuals survive, and individuals with less adaptive traits don’t<\/em>
\nsurvive, you’re pruning the information for the non-adaptive traits out of the
\npopulation.<\/p>\n

But evolution is not just<\/em> natural selection. Evolution is change<\/em> plus natural selection. Natural selection chooses from the
\nvarieties that exist; change produces the new varieties. Change comes
\nfrom many places – basic mutations can be the result of copying errors,
\nof radiation or chemical agents altering the genetic code, of recombination,
\netc. That’s the change – and that does<\/em> introduce new information.<\/p>\n

And that brings us to the mathematical part.<\/p>\n

Never do they bother to define<\/em> information. There’s a good reason
\nfor that: because every scientific definition of information absolutely
\ndefeats their argument. Copy something? You’ve got more information because
\nyou copied it. Change something? The changed version is different information
\nthan the original. So if you’ve got a population, and you measure the amount of
\ninformation in its genome; and then a new individual is born with a change
\nin one gene – there’s now more<\/em> information in that population’s
\ngenome.<\/p>\n

They rely on a simple confusion: information versus meaning. As human
\nbeings, we’re naturally quite obsessed with meaning. And there’s nothing wrong
\nwith that. But we tend to attribute our intuitive notion of meaning<\/em>
\nto things. Our intuitive idea of meaning doesn’t have any necessary relationship
\nto information – or even to an actual definition of meaning! Our intuitive notion of meaning is based on language and writing – on the way that we communicate with one another, and the properties of what we’re trying to express using that
\ninformation.<\/p>\n

One good way of thinking about meaning is Shannon information. Shannon’s
\ndefinition of information is based on the idea of reduction in uncertainty<\/em>. That is, you pass a message to someone over some medium: the
\nquantity of information is the amount of uncertainty that you’ve eliminated
\nby sending the message. The meaning<\/em> is the set of possibilities
\nthat have been eliminated.<\/p>\n

Anything can have information. Anything can ultimately have meaning. But recognizing whether something has meaning can be extremely difficult. For
\nexample… Look at the two strings below.<\/p>\n

\nM'XL(\"!0@]4<``V9O;RYT>'0`=53+;MLP$+SK*[8G7Q+GGAHIVMZ;0W+I<26M\nMY$4E4N$CJOZ^LY0,RTT+&+!-S,,]34_T0]XE4.LIG66AVN,K4\/)TDO&I\n<\/pre>\n
\nQTOX;*H\/J(.2[\/2[Q'?80DaQ+A4\/\"*1HPC#%2AR\/JC_3=3P#SHZ2SNOX+_?3Y\nM*N@XQRT06[@-@;5XaC4U?E)I2WBS*Z7\/0A:H::LM@2VT8HU4JM=AQY=VJ-6\n<\/pre>\n
 One of those two strings is an except from the the result of
\ncompressing this post up to the word “below”. The other is random. Which
\none has meaning? How can you tell?<\/p>\n
 I can tell you that by one very naive view of information, they’ve
\ngot exactly the same amount of information. (That’s using compressibility
\nvia the LZW-2 encoding as the measure of information.) But one of them
\nhas meaning as english text, and the other is random noise.<\/p>\n
 What people like Ben Stein want you to do is assume that
\nyour intuition about information and meaning is correct. And then
\nthey want to play on that – using scare tactics about mutation –
\nto make you think that mutations can’t generate new information – because
\nit doesn’t look<\/em> like information from your intuitive perspective.<\/p>\n
 But then, neither does the genetic code of a living thing. How
\nmuch meaning does “CCA GCA TGC TGA GGT TCA” have to you? Does it look like
\na meaningful string? How about “GAA GTT GTC ATT TTA TAA ACC TTT”?<\/p>\n
 One of the two strings right up there is an actual excerpt from
\na human gene. The other is random stuff that I made up. Which one has
\nmore meaning? Which one has more information?<\/p>\n
 Stein and Giertych won’t answer those questions. They can’t. And
\nthey really don’t want you to know that they can’t. Because their argument
\nis a fraud. And if they answered questions like the ones I posed above, or
\nif they even bothered to actually articulate a definition<\/em> of what
\nthey mean by “genetic information”, they’d have to admit that it’s all
\na fraud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bad from the Bad Ideas Blog sent me a link to some clips from Ben Stein’s new Magnum Opus, “Expelled”. I went and took a look. Randomly, I picked one that looked like a clip from the movie rather than a trailer – it’s the one titled “Genetic Mutation”. Care to guess how long it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intelligent-design"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-a3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}