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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. htt

by yters 8y ago

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=true https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01046100?LI=tr... - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5442816 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5442816

bediger4000 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

by yters 8y ago

bediger4000 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.