Albert Cipriani

Dear Muad’Dib,
You ask,
Yes. Of course I’m stating my thought in a jocular fashion, for God cannot have thoughts that are energy based or detectable. We have a hell of a time even detecting neutrinos, so what I’m suggesting is that what is undetectable may be the cause of what is detectable.

I meant the earth. That’s why I put quote marks around the term, to indicate that I don’t see the earth (or the universe for that matter) as a closed system.

Chance, like zero, is a fiction. Nothing happens by chance. Rather, there’s a predictable cause for everything that happens but where our intelligence leaves off and our inability to predict begins, we ascribe the fiction of chance as having taken over.

Chance is at best an anthropomorphism, and at worst a false god. It’s the grammatical equivalent of a sentence that has its object as its subject, as in: “It is a nice day.” IT is a tautology for DAY. CHANCE is a tautology for UNPREDICTABILITY.

So when you guys say that genetic drift or genetic mutations take place by chance, you are saying that genetic drift and genetic mutations take place. I reject the concept of chance as being philosophically meaningful or as being biologically operational.

The generalized 2nd law of Thermodynamics applies the principle of thermal entropy to information entropy. Ergo, thermal energy is to heat death what information is to chance or randomness. I use the term chance and randomness interchangeably as the a colloquial expression for “information entropy.”

I’m a professional poet. But that doesn’t frustrate me when I discuss with my niece the lousy haiku she writes. I would hope the “professional biologists” here feel the same way about me. And why do you presume I’m not doing my homework? This thread has sparked me to read approximately 5 hours worth of mostly evolutionist articles. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Muad'Dib

A better analogy in my view would be your niece arguing that your poetry is awful. But I'd rather not get off-topic, so I won't continue on this subject.

I'm gratified that you're reading up on the subject. Let me answer the question of why I presumed that when I wrote it, without asserting that I still make that claim. Observe:

Exactly! "Random" doesn't mean "uncaused" at all, just "unpredictable".

Here's what I was talking about earlier. You're putting words in people's mouths. If any biologist says "genetic mutations take place by chance" (which I've not seen, by the way), they are "stating their thought in a jocular fashion." If you ask, they will tell you that chance is not the mechanism behind the changes. Rather, there are well-identified physical mechanisms behind the mutations. The role of "chance," if it's even meaningful to call it a role, is to express that these mutations--however they happen--cannot be perfectly predicted by scientists. This is in contrast to "non-random mutations," which would be something genetic engineers would like to play with.

Is this a claim that all mutations are predictable, or are you reiterating your observation that "chance" is not a physical mechanism?

Um, okay...but are you at least aware of the precise restrictions on the term "information" that the G2LoT applies to, that doesn't mesh at all with what you were saying earlier about the complexity of zygotes?

To finish off, I'm really glad you're reading on the subject, and I withdraw my earlier complaint about you not doing your homework--I acknowledge that your homework is safely in progress. I hope you find your explorations useful and informative.

Muad'Dib

Albert Cipriani

Nightshade asks:
Because God must be as confused as PZ over what constitutes complexity. PZ thinks that a mere numerical increase is an informational increase. PZ said:
That’s why, as all like-minded folks know, the NFL are intellectual giants, extraordinarily complex fellows compared to midgets, who are at least four times less complicated. That’s why a dump truck full of sand is more complicated than a single grain of sand.

Dummies like me don’t understand that. That’s why you can often find me listening to Bach.. whereby I appreciate how every note is DIFFERENT than and yet RELATED to the other notes in seemingly infinite variations. That’s why you might find PZ plinking middle C over and over again with the regularity of a metronome, for he can appreciate music that is far too complex for me.

To answer your question more specifically, the amount of DNA an organism carries is not tantamount to that organism’s complexity. (Complexity has to do with relationships, not numbers.) Indeed, to write a program with minimal lines of code demonstrates greater intelligence than to write the same program with many lines of code. Less is more. The same principle explains why poetry is superior to prose. More expressed in less words is qualitatively more expressive. So in that sense, you might say that by God expressing Man with less DNA than He used to express amoebas He was saying something more artfully.

But to be perfectly frank, I think a single cell of life is so impossibly complex, that it’s kinda silly to consider humans any more complicated than an amoeba. Like a Swiss Army knife compared to a jack knife, we’re more redundantly specialized, but essentially the same. Like a massive black hole compared to a small black hole, they’re still equally unfathomable impressive. So I don’t think man should feel he’s in competition with any other life form for the complexity prize. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Doubting Didymus

Thanks for showing me the light albert. Now I know to cancel all my human anatomy and environmental ecology lectures, as all I really need to focus on is the biology of the single cell.

Not quite.

The reason multicellular organisms are more complex than single cells is not because of a simple numerical increase, as you have managed to extract from pz's short comments. the cells in metazoans interact in highly complex and specific ways. Cells organised into tissues, tissues organised into organs, organs organised into systems and systems working in balance with one another to produce the metazoan. In your music analogy, multicellular organisms are bach, where unicellular organisms are middle C. We are concertos, comprised of notes but nonetheless more complex than a simple bundling together of a given quantity of notes. Thus, we increase greatly in complexity as we develop from a zygote, from a note to a short chord to a stanza to a full orchestral concert, each stage more complex and interrelated than the last.

pz

DD has already addressed this, but I'll say it again. That isn't my argument, it's yours. The proper analogy would be that you are claiming a single note has all the complexity of a Bach fugue. I'm trying to explain to you that the arrangement of the notes represents a significant piece of information.
Again, you are subverting your own argument. You've been trying to claim that a single human cell has all the complexity of a human being. If this were true, we'd have to argue that an amoeba is more complex than a human -- it would require a longer description to fully enumerate the contents of an amoeba than of a single human cell.
You are almost there. "Impossibly complex" is a silly statement, though -- obviously, they aren't impossibly complex.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Doubting,
Cool. I especially liked your extended music analogy. Now I understand completely your position and wish to drop my assertion that quantity has NOTHING to do with complexity. Quantity does have SOMETHING to do with complexity.

My mistake was trying too hard to emphasize the complexity of life itself and to de-emphasize the numerical or even organizational elaboration of that complexity.

In short, I overstated my point. I’d have to be an even bigger fool than PZ takes me for to disagree with ya’ll that we are MORE complex than single celled organisms. But let the record show that we are not MUCH MORE complex. The differential between the plankton and the whales that eat them is not much. Ergo, the following whimsical expression of my point. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic


You are what you eat -- Adelle Davis
Cathedral Doors Were Designed to Resemble the Mouths of Whales
The versatility of carbon
knows no bounds as big as this
blue whale born out of the high treason
of evolving backwards, that is,
from the land to ocean, to a
turncoat from a hairy mammal.

As if that were not enough,
it combs the ocean for the single-
celled embodiments of loyalty
to their original designs:
in short (in minuscule), it feeds
on plankton, strains them out of time
and their easeful infinitesimal
space upon the ocean’s surface
in the sun through its intestinal
tract, the fast track through which they’re thrust
beyond themselves and into whale,
repatriated as this whale.

Bypassing the genetic fuss
made through surviving as the fittest
mutant hiking up the trail
of evolutionary being,
eaten plankton are partaking
of the largest shortcut in the sea.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Muad’Dub,
Horror of horrors: I don’t think we’re that far apart on this matter.

With complete information, no process is unpredictable. So randomness or chance are just other words that mean the same thing as crying “Uncle” in the face of processes more complicated than we can hope to divine.

What I said earlier about zygotes being more complex than the multi-celled creature they develop into was predicated on the assumption that potential is a component of complexity. As you and PZ seem unwilling to accept such a qualification, let’s drop it.

The only thing you wrote that I am skeptical about is this:
Pray tell, what governs these physical mechanisms? It seems to me that information entropy does. That is, broken links, mistakes, failures to follow the rules, these breakdowns in the process are what is said to “govern” the buildup of new and improved processes. That is my stumbling block. That seems like saying that the principle of wetness can sometimes dry us off. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Happy Wonderer

Welcome, you are one funny guy. The universe as a whole is a closed system and has no external source of energy. All energy is accounted for in it. A battery-powered engine can be a closed system; although sunlight may fall on it, that doesn't add to the useable energy of the system. 2LOT explains why you can't use an engine to power a generator to power the engine.

On the other hand, the sun constantly inputs energy into living systems of the earth. (Sounds like a sentence from a middle-school textbook and may in fact be one. Sorry.) 2LOT doesn't apply to any such system, which is all life on earth (except possibly the thermal vent creatures who rely on energy input from the earth's core.)

Some minds are open systems, replenished by information from the outside. Others are closed to new information and are therefore doomed to chaos and thermodynamic death.


HW

Albert Cipriani

Dear HW,
Our disagreement over 2LoT involves information entropy, not thermal entropy. Ergo, this point of yours misses the mark:
Like you said earlier:
Ditto for information. All the energy in the universe only adds up to the Big Bang. I see information as something qualitatively different than energy.

In terms of raw energy, I can accept your view that for all intents and purposes we presently know about, the Earth orbiting its sun constitutes a closed system. But I’d say it must be an open system as far as information goes. The “thoughts” of God must get in to create the ever-increasing bio-diversity and complexity we see.

Stated another way, the sun is great and all and I like lazing around in it as much as anyone else, but intellectually, it’s no bright bulb. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic 2/27/03

Muad'Dib

Oh no! I think the universe is about to disappear in a puff of logic!

More or less, yep.

Sounds good. I won't presume to speak for pz, but my objection is that potential is awfully hard to quantify, especially if you take into account the restricted "potential" of the individual molecules and atoms actually forming the cell, that might otherwise be off doing other things. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's an uninteresting idea; it's just that the tools we've been using (G2LoT, etc.) don't have the resources to take that into account.

Here's an analogy that may or may not work. Please forgive me if I exceed my knowledge of poetry!

In literature generally and poetry specifically, there are rules. These are not absolute rules; they vary from generation to generation and sometimes from region to region, but people who know the field are aware of these rules and whether consciously or unconsciously, they abide by them the vast majority of the time.

Occasionally, good or great poets will break the rules--sometimes just one, somtimes more than one--and the result will take the literary community by storm. Indeed, their work may be so influential that their breaking of a rule may very well become the new norm.

Now, this observation might lead a clueless person like me to say, "Hey, to be a great poet, all you have to do is break the rules!" But as any high school english teacher will tell you, the vast majority of people who break the rules write crap. (Or you can call it "second-rate work" if you want to be polite.)

Here's how all this relates to biology.

Say that you would like your friend to e-mail you a copy of Faust. If there is any error in the transmission, what you receive is by definition worse than what she sent you: it is an inferior facsimile of Faust. If you were to propagate your copy to other people, their copies could not be any better than yours (and they may very well be worse). Breaking the rules is always detrimental in such a situation.

Evolution, though, is more like poetry than a straight-up information transfer. Most of the times an organism "breaks the rules" by acquiring a genetic mutation, either nothing happens or it's a bad thing (from the perspective of the organism's survival). But from time to time, a mutation will occur that helps the organism survive and thrive, sometimes so well that after a few (or many) generations that "broken rule" will become the new rule.

Hope that made sense!
Take care,
Muad'Dib