
Does information theory support design in nature? - yters
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/does-information-theory-support-design-in-nature/
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bediger4000
The title of the article seems... disingenuous. First, the article doesn't
answer that question. Second, the title and the article assume that "design"
appears in nature. The article doesn't support this claim.

~~~
yters
The referenced article has more details. Also the comments have more details.

[https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/does-information-theory-
suppo...](https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/does-information-theory-support-
design-in-nature/)

I'm happy to answer any questions you have.

~~~
bediger4000
Sure.

Why is the title of the article so disingenuous?

What design do people think they see in nature?

By what method can I, without referring to someone else's authority, decide
that a particular part of nature is "designed"? Without an explicit criteria
for "design", the whole thing is just arguing over opinions about what is
designed and what isn't. That is, it would become just like Behe's
"irreducible complexity". No definite criteria for "irreducible" and no
measurement for "complexity".

While you're at it, point me to some PDFs of refereed papers written by
Dembski. I'm a smart guy, I can read primary sources. The article doesn't
point to any, and a quick duckduckgo for "dembski no free lunch" gets me web
pages that provide a critique of Dembski's book (and not on information
theoretic grounds, either), and his book on Amazon, but nothing I can print
and read and digest. No PDFs.

How does Dembski wave off actual examples of artificial evolution? Tierra
([http://life.ou.edu/tierra/](http://life.ou.edu/tierra/)) seems to evolve
little digital pseudo-life that does a specific task. Here's another example:
[http://www.genetic-programming.com/jkpdf/alife1990.pdf](http://www.genetic-
programming.com/jkpdf/alife1990.pdf) There are more "folksy" reports, too:
[https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/293256](https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/293256)
. There's an entire field, genetic algorithms/genetic programming, that
actually ends up at least some of the time, evolving a solution to the
problem. Adrian Thompson's FPGA experiment
([https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Thompson5/public...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian_Thompson5/publication/285668389_Exploring_beyond_the_scope_of_human_design_Automatic_generation_of_FPGA_configurations_through_artificial_evolution/links/56f0a8bd08ae584badc9389e/Exploring-
beyond-the-scope-of-human-design-Automatic-generation-of-FPGA-configurations-
through-artificial-evolution.pdf)) is pretty famous. Here's a distillation of
the above paper with a few interesting editorial comments:
[https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/308/779/an_evolved_cir...](https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/308/779/an_evolved_circuit_intrinsic_in_silicon_entwined_with_physics.pdf)

How does Dembski explain how every system that attempts to "evolve" something
by successive generations that inherit and have minor changes
([https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453), which
is a summary of many experiments) end up doing something that's undeniably
evolution?

~~~
yters
Sorry about the title, I should have linked to the primary article instead of
the one with the discussion. I submitted again with a direct link this time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18449438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18449438)

The design detection is essentially a hypothesis test, and doesn't depend on
anyone's authority. I'm happy to answer questions on how this works.

The basic idea is Shannon information says all bitstrings of length N are
equally likely, but Kolmogorov complexity says the compressible bitstrings are
less likely than the incompressible bitstrings. Therefore, when we see a
highly compressible bitstring we infer some cause other than chance. E.g. if
someone flips 100 heads in a row, you would be justified in thinking the coin
is not fair.

Dembski's work is a generalization of this observation.

You can find a list of Dembski's refereed publications with google scholar.
Here is a list of some that I found. A couple address your question regarding
evolutionary algorithms.

\-
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5204206](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5204206)

\-
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5345941](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5345941)

\-
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01046100?LI=tr...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01046100?LI=true)

\-
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5442816](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5442816)

~~~
bediger4000
How do we go from some life thing, designed or not, to a bitstring? Don't say
use DNA: representations of it are notoriously compressible, starting with the
kind-of-error-correcting encoding
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_codon_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_codon_table))
of amino acid production.

And thank you for the Avida ref. I could not remember its name, nor could I
find it in google.

Based on the abstracts of the papers, I can safely say that Dembski is
mistaking "search with a goal" with evolution, which seems pretty un-directed
almost by definition. His papers are probably true, and may be worth reading,
but they're pretty obviously circular if you try to connect them to "design":
"Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of a proposed
problem solution. Information is extracted from the oracle using repeated
queries." That's true: evolutionary computing has a human-decided goal, and
therefore each generation is in essence a query of an oracle. Where's the
oracle in terrestrial biology? That "oracle" is the "designer", but if the
"oracle" is just whatever stays alive long enough to reproduce, his basic
assumption of search isn't true: there's no goal.

~~~
yters
The application of Dembski's ideas is a much more difficult subject, and not
one I have enough expertise in to comment, at least in the biological realm.
But, the fact that DNA is highly compressible, as you point out, would
indicate it is at least not due to a random process.

The article is meant to point out the overall framework is valid within
standard information theory. It is not a commentary on whether Dembski's work
has been correctly applied or not.

I think the goal in evolution is at least to survive and reproduce.

