Category Archives: science

Teaching Cartoon – Systems are not in Nature, they are in the mind of humans.

teaching cartoon

h/t The Wizard of Id (used without permission)

“The fixity of the milieu supposes a perfection of the
organism such that the external variations are at each
instant compensated for and equilibrated…. All of the vital
mechanisms, however varied they may be, have always
one goal, to maintain the uniformity of the conditions of
life in the internal environment …. The stability of the
internal environment is the condition for the free
and independent life.” *

* Claude Bernard, from Lectures on the Phenomena Common to Animals and
Plants, 1978. Quoted in C Gross, “Claude Bernard and the constancy of the internal
environment”, The Neuroscientist, 4:380-5 1998

Claude Bernard 1813–1878

Bernard introduced the concept of the milieu intérieur – the regulatory function that the nervous system applies to the stability of internal secretions and tissues. It anticipated the notion of homeostasis, introduced by Walter Cannon (1871-1945) in 1932, which has been at the heart of many psychological theories of learning and motivation.

The range of Bernard’s experimental research was vast, being concerned initially with digestion and its nervous control, and extending to the whole of experimental physiology and its philosophical underpinnings. His influence on physiology, both through his teaching and his many textbooks, was far-reaching. His studies of control mechanisms in the vascular system led him to propose a more holistic view of physiology: he stated that “Systems do not exist in Nature, but only in men’s minds”. Bernard rejected the prevalent approach of comparative physiologists who emphasised species differences, proposing a general physiology which “does not seek to grasp the differences that separate beings, but the common points that unite them”. He was also skeptical about the use of averages in the study of complex systems, favoring the presentation of results from the “most perfect experiment” as a reflection of the true state of affairs. source: Portraits of European Neuroscientists

The Things We Do. Using the Lessons of Bernard and Darwin to Understand the What, How, and Why of Our Behavior Gary Cziko

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Sweetly Focused Nora Bateson

What a great two minutes!

Nora Bateson’s soulful approach to her father’s work, to his way of understanding, strikes me as being beautifully personal, ingratiating, and, most crucially, precisely formulated so as to provide a warm introductory gateway to his legacy.

The following videos help frame her brilliant film about her father, An Ecology of Mind. The interviewers are different, and there is some repetition, yet Ms. Bateson is so much deeply her father’s daughter that I find her views enchanting.

The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer. (Gregory Bateson)

According to the popular image of science, everything is, in principle, predictable and controllable; and if some event or process is not predictable and controllable in the present state of your knowledge, a little more knowledge and, especially, a little more know-how will enable us to predict and control the wild variables.

This view is wrong, not merely in detail, but in principle. It is even possible to define large classes or phenomena where prediction and control are simply impossible for very basic but quite understandable reasons. Perhaps the most familiar example of this class of phenomena is the breaking of any superficially homogeneous material, such as glass. The Brownian movement (see Glossary) of molecules in liquids and gases is similarly unpredictable.

If I throw a stone at a glass window, I shall, under appropriate circumstances, break of crack the glass in a star-shaped pattern. If my stone hits the glass as fast as a bullet, it is possible that it will detach from the glass a neat conical plug called a conic of percussion. If my stone is too slow and too small, I may fail to break the glass at all. Prediction and control will be quite possible at this level. I can easily make sure which of three results (the star, the percussion cone, or no breakage) I shall achieve, provided I avoid marginal strengths of throw.

But within the conditions which produce the star-shaped break, it will be impossible to predict or control the pathways and the positions of the arms of the stars.

Curiously enough, the more precise my laboratory methods, the more unpredictable the events will become. If I use the most homogeneous glass available, polish its surface to the most exact optical flatness, and control the motion of my stone as precisely as possible, ensuring an almost precisely vertical impact on the surface of the glass, all my efforts will only make the events more impossible to predict.

If, on the other hand, I scratch the surface of the glass or use a piece of glass that is already cracked (which would be cheating), I shall be able to make some approximate predictions. For some reason (unknown to me), the break in the glass will run parallel to the scratch and about 1/100 of an inch to the side, so that the scratch mark will appear on only one side of the break. Beyond the end of the scratch, the break will veer off unpredictably.

Under tension, a chain will break at its weakest link. That much is predictable. What is difficult is to identify the weakest link before it breaks. The generic we can know, but the specific eludes us. Some chains are designed to break at a certain tension and at a certain link. But a good chain is homogeneous, and no prediction is possible. And because we cannot know which link is weakest, we cannot know precisely how much tension will be needed to break the chain.

6. Divergent Sequences Are Unpredictable
II Every School Boy Knows
Mind & Nature (Gregory Bateson)

Any form of certainty we find along the way is probably transitional. (Nora Bateson)

Nora Bateson from AURA on Vimeo.

Nora Bateson’s film (Amazon DVD) An Ecology of Mind, A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson–it’s wonderful– Web Site | An Ecology of the Mind (on Facebook)

Department of Anthropology Indiana University: Gregory Bateson biography

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Periodic Table – a web side street

Periodic Videos

h/t Web 2.0 Tools Based on Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy

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chaosmosis: the emergence of order from chaos, engendering new autopoietic entities

Aesthetic paradigm
1. In Guattari’s work, as opposed to scientific paradigms, paradigms that are schizoanalytic, rhizomatic, and chaosmic, involving processes rather than structures.

psychoanalysis, which claimed to affirm itself as scientific, […] has everything to gain from putting itself under the aegis of this new type of aesthetic processual paradigm. [CM 106 CM=Chaosmosis]

2. A schizoanalytic approach to clinical treatment which, instead of describing the psyche in terms of structures or stages, views the production of subjectivity as a creative process.

Grafts of transference […] [issue] from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette. [CM 7]

3. The creative capacity of chaosmosis, the emergence of order from chaos, engendering new autopoietic entities; this ontological process is exemplified by but not limited to artistic creation.

art […] engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being. The decisive threshold constituting this new aesthetic paradigm lies in the aptitude of these processes of creation to auto-affirm themselves as existential nuclei, autopoietic machines. [CM 106; see also 112] – J. W.

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary


Tu v dome:
Ladislav Durko – piano
Ali Kobzova – voice, violin
Bronka Schragge – cello
Ozo Guttler – drums
Martin Sutovec – banjo
_______________________________
text original:
The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
And then – Excuse from Pain –
And then – those little Anodyness
That deaden suffering –
And then – to go to sleep –
And then – if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die –
Emily Dickinson 1830 — 1886

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100 trillion * 100 trillion

Jesus and science

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Master and Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

The last two paragraphs from Iain McGilchrist’s Introduction [pdf] to his book The Master and the Emissary

There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a
wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and
who was known for his sel?ess devotion to his people. As his people ?ourished
and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need
to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more
distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all
that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from,
and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully
his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his
cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began
to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and
in?uence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not
wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his
own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about
that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a
tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

The meaning of this story is as old as humanity, and resonates far from the
sphere of political history. I believe, in fact, that it helps us understand something
taking place inside ourselves, inside our very brains, and played out in the cultural
history of the West, particularly over the last 500 years or so. Why I believe so
forms the subject of this book. I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the
story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some
time been in a state of con?ict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded
in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise
the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – ?nds
itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious
regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one
whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The
Master is betrayed by his emissary.

(SC) My associate Kenneth Warren brought McGilchrist’s work to my attention. One of the first so-called turns a new publicized model goes through is for it to be stripped down and reattached to the folk estimations (or constructs,) which emerge when a representation of domain-specific research is loosed into the public source. Put differently: the representational concepts transform into hypotheses, and then people deploy these possible explanations in new, and untested areas and experiences.

This ad hoc meta-abduction pulls experiences and situations and potential matches and mappings back toward the explanation; and explanation held by human awareness. This entanglement could describe aspects of a social complex. It’s important to comprehend that it is first embodied, next emboldened, then reembodied; and that there is a parallel biosemiotic operation. A sense given by this view is that the transformation of domain-dependent concepts into something else altogether–where the concepts are made to visit new domains–is more complicated than the transforms caused by concepts being metaphoric or analogues.

A practical possibility, then, is that, for example, an ecological space such as a room or building, may be designed with the model in the designer’s mind.

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Nye(t) to the Single Observation of Any Type

Ham Scam

It finally happened: I was hanging around the tv late at night and channel surfing and ran across a CSPAN rebroadcast of the Nye vs Ham debate. It was just what I would have expected: a wipe out, but, after all, Ham is arguing on behalf of positive facts as ridiculous and unfounded as the assertion that the earth is flat.

Bible_cycle

I went online to be the voyeur of the troll fest inspired by the debate. I found the same dead-on-arrival creationist arguments, and shameless and tenacious ability to proudly argue against biological science without knowing anything about biological science.

God At Work

I wish Bill Nye knew enough basic philosophy of science to dispatch Ham’s blather about the difference between observational and historical science. If a creationist argues for the unfalsifiable veracity of the observer’s observed account, the principal vulnerability isn’t only that the assertion is ridiculous on its face, but that, in science, a single observation, even if taken as true, never counts as verification by itself.

toles-noah

To verify, you need lots of observations. That isn’t a requirement of methodological naturalism–scientists don’t need to be explicitly committed to any philosophy of science–it’s a requirement for the sake of confirming that what was true enough in one instance will also be true in a current instance and likely true in a future instance.

Ham, not to his credit, seem oblivious to his coming off as wanting it both ways too: instead of just asserting that the Bible is a record of truth and that equally true and necessary miracles do all the heavy lifting, he wants to promote a pseudo-regime of pseudo-science for the naturalistic sake of falsifying foundational knowledge in biology, geology, cosmology and relativity–all the while his inane version of (what to him) is a science assumes its best (supreme!) evidence is not able to be falsified because it immunizes itself from any and all inquiries that could be brought to bear on it by naturalistic science!

Hey, the Bible doesn’t say it can’t be proven false or improved upon, right?

wasittoday

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Time Requires Time

Flowing Data

Philosophy of Time:

A great many other “flowings” or “fluxes” or “relations” acquire
their privileged directionality (their asymmetry) from the arrow of
time. How then does time acquire its direction? This seems to be a
very puzzling question. (C.G. Weaver)

Lecture One handout – Debates About Time Oliver Pooley [pdf]

What is the extent of reality? Putnam (1967) suggests that the ‘man on the street’s’
view of the nature of time involves a commitment to the claim that “All (and
only) things that exist now are real”. This is presentism: all that exists is what
exists now. An alternative view is eternalism: all events, whether past, present
or future, are on the same ontological footing; they are all equally real. A third
possibility is that the past and present are real, while the future is not. This third
option is a component in a dynamic view of time championed by Broad (1923)
and Tooley (1997), often called the ‘growing block universe view’.

Metaphysics:

The A-Theory of Time, The B-Theory of Time, and ‘Taking Tense Seriously’ Dean W. Zimmerman [pdf]

Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective Steven F. Savitt [pdf]

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson-Bill Moyer

Very worthwhile…

‘Celebrity scientist’ has always rubbed me a bit oddly. Tyson’s research isn’t the highlight of his Wikipedia entry. He’s a communicator! About science!

The Perimeter of Ignorance

We need an army of communicators about science in a nation where something like only 20% of the populace understand that creationism and intelligent design are bunkum.

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Planet Tally!

keplers tally

Link to superb visualization at New York Times.

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Kentucky Drops Out of the Race

picked up via DeadState (from June 25, 2013) Kentucky’s ‘Creation Museum’ in Financial Trouble Due to Declining Attendance

from Slate
After walking us through the opening verses of Genesis, [Ken] Ham proclaims that “we can say 100%, absolutely for sure, that people lived with dinosaurs!” A series of surreal illustrations features Adam and Eve feeding grapes to vegetarian dinosaurs while lions and cheetahs canoodle with an avaceratops. This herbivorous paradise is wrecked after Cain murders Abel.* “Dinosaurs may have started eating other animals” at this point, Ham tells us, citing Genesis 6:13: “the earth was filled with violence.”

Great pictures are the result.

Jesus and Dinosaurs

Jesus and Dino

Meanwhile, Texas races to the bottom.

DeadState, from September 11, 2013, Textbook reviewers from the Texas State Board of Education are pushing to include creationism in the statewide teaching curriculums of high schools this year.

The Creation Museum hasn’t turned the tide in Kentucky.

In a stark rebuke of creationists and climate change deniers this Thursday, the Kentucky Board of Education voted to approve new science standards that enforce the teaching of evolution and climate science in the state’s schools.

For a lengthy period, opponents of the standards fought hard against the recent rulings, calling them “fascist” and “atheistic,” and that they promoted a “socialistic” way of thinking that leads to “genocide” and “murder.” But the board rejected those characterizations and argued that the standards are essential in ensuring that Kentuckians can compete with the rest of the nation.

However, overall, 70-80% American adults are unable to think clearly about human origins.

cognitive blind spot

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Majoritarian Reality Follies

Science-Poll

One of the creationist lobbying organizations in Texas is named Texans for Better Science Education!

Here Texas goes again.

Creationists May Be Helping To Choose Biology Textbooks In Texas
Rebecca Klein, Huffington Post

It seems as though creationists could have a sizable influence in the decision over what biology textbooks students in Texas will use in the coming years.

The Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit civil liberties group, posted on its website last week that it had discovered that six people chosen to review biology textbooks for the state had ties to creationism. Of the 28 invited to review textbooks, around a dozen went to Austin recently to make final textbook recommendations, the Texas Freedom Network wrote.

The Texas Freedom Network charged in a subsequent blog post that of that group of about 12, which approves the biology books used for at least the next eight years, four people had creationist backgrounds — a sizable proportion of the review team.

According to the Texas Freedom Network, some of the textbook panelists with a history of creationist beliefs include Raymond Bohlin, who is a research fellow at an institute that promotes intelligent design, and Walter Bradley, a retired professor who co-wrote a book about creationism. Bohlin and Bradley did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Texas A&M chemistry professor Daniel Romo –- who is listed as a “Darwin Skeptic” on the Creation Science Hall of Fame website — confirmed to The Huffington Post via email that he is a member of the panel, although he did not attend the final review in Austin. Romo, who said he served on a previous panel regarding science textbooks, noted that he got involved with the textbook review after being “initially invited to submit an application by someone who partnered with Liberty Legal Institute.” The Liberty Legal Institute is a right-wing, nonprofit organization with the mission of “[restoring] religious liberty across America — in our schools, for our churches and throughout the public arena,” according to its website.

Where I live, Ohio, the state science standards thankfully, don’t allow the “controversy” to be taught in biology classes, but, the “controversy” and creationism worm their way into science classes in some school systems.

6 percent of scientists identify as Republicans. (“It Feels Like A Personal Assault:” How the GOP Drives Away Scientists – Salon)


When I meet a Republican in the flesh, it’s always amusing to find out if he or she finds modern biology to be rooted in Darwin, or not. It’s another one of my handful of acid tests.

I’m confident that a substantial number of Louisiana Republicans believe in creationism AND assert that the slow response to Katrina was Mr. Obama’s fault.

Bonus:

Hurricane Katrina: It’s Obama’s Fault, by George
Rosemary and Walter Brasch 8/31/2013
OpEdNews.com

Almost one-third of Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for the slow and largely ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast, Aug. 31, 2005. More than 1,800 were killed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; estimates of property damage exceeded $100 billion.

Public Policy Polling reveals that 29 percent of the state’s Republicans blame Obama. Only 28 percent blame George W. Bush. The rest, according to the poll, don’t know who to blame.

The disaster occurred in the first year of George W. Bush’s second term. Barack Obama did not become president until more than three years later.

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Older and Better

How Old Is the Human Race? va News.Discovery

The National geographic Genographic Project 2.0

A fifty percent increase in the age of our race is gigantic swing in a primary historical quantification.

The Genographic Project is a multiyear research initiative led by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Spencer Wells. Dr. Wells and a team of renowned international scientists are using cutting-edge genetic and computational technologies to analyze historical patterns in DNA from participants around the world to better understand our human genetic roots. The three components of the project are:

To gather and analyze research data in collaboration with indigenous and traditional peoples around the world

To invite the general public to join this real-time scientific project and to learn about their own deep ancestry by purchasing a Genographic Project Participation and DNA Ancestry Kit, Geno 2.0

To use a portion of the proceeds from Geno 2.0 kit sales to further research and the Genographic Legacy Fund, which in turn supports community-led indigenous conservation and revitalization projects

The Genographic Project is anonymous, nonmedical, and nonprofit, and all results are placed in the public domain following scientific peer publication.

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Twenty Six Zeroes! The Oldest Sound

Via Mashable, in turn via technewsdaily, in turn referencing the source, Professor John G. Taylor, Department of Physics, University of Washington, the 2013 Planck Version of The Sound of the Big Bang.

Scroll down his page for explanation. Key point in my view:

The sound frequencies used in the simulation must be scaled upward by a huge factor (about 10 to the 26 power) to match the response of the human ear, because the actual Big Bang frequencies, which had wavelengths on the order of a fraction of the size of the universe, were far too low to be heard by humans (even had any been around).

10 to the 25th power is: one hundred million million million million

Bonus.

How many stars?

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Rep ‘n’ learnin’

Folk Psychology

Dependency relations between phenomena can be very complex. In much of life, dependencies are conditional and probabilistic: If I put a fresh worm on the hook, and if it is early afternoon, then very probably I will catch a trout here. As we learn more about the complexities of the world, we ‘upgrade’ our representations of dependency relations;10 we learn, for example, that trout are more likely to be caught when the water is cool, that shadowy pools are more promising fish havens than sunny pools, and that talking to the worm, entreating the trout, or wearing a ‘lucky’ hat makes no difference. Part of what we call intelligence in humans and other animals is the capacity to acquire an increasingly complex understanding of dependency relations. This allows us to distinguish fortuitous correlations that are not genuinely predictive in the long run (e.g., breaking a tooth on Friday the thirteenth) from causal correlations that are (e.g., breaking a tooth and chewing hard candy). This means that we can replace superstitious hypotheses with those that pass empirical muster.

Patricia Smith Churchland (Wikipedia) How Do Neurons Know?

Presentation: Philosophy In the Age of Neuroscience

Paul Churchland

Rep&Learning

I’m agnostic in so many ways! I’m not an advocate for the proposal that states: Brain = Mind. Still, I am really pleased the Churchland’s convictions have cascaded–as it would be–into the field of ‘The Mind.’ I remain suitably impressed by the evidence which certifies if the physical system of the brain is shockingly altered, the mind is altered too.

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Learn Physics, Get a Good Job, Yo-Yo

NASA Astronaut Don Pettit

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Curiosity

Great NASA portal for the Curiosity Mission

Five Stars!

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Those HOTS again

Creationist

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. (excerpted from current State of Texas Education Standards)

My presentation was titled “An Information-Theoretic Proof of God’s Existence,” in which I showed how the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes, so that if we backtrack this information in time, the amount of information that needs to be accounted for only intensifies. This leads to a regress of information that naturally points to some ultimate source of information. Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? From a naturalistic perspective, such a source remains a mystery. But from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God. (William Dembski, providing link between intelligent design and at least a nominally theistic entity.)

Creationists do not present arguments about the possible operational workings of supernatural intervention in natural mechanics. This has always surprised me because their other arguments, finally, are contingent on an intervention of some sort. Dembski writes with a straight face about information sourced in a domain ascertainable from the theistic perspective making its way to the domain in which its requisite informed operations occur and are ascertainable from a naturalistic perspective. He does not suggest how information ultimately arises in one domain and goes on to penetrate the other domain. He does suggest one could backtrack as if such information sets out a trail of crumbs!

so that if we backtrack this information in time

There’s a certain unintentional symmetry in Dembski hanging category errors on each side of this bridging idea, to backtrack.
GAllup 2010 Evo Poll

78% of American adults according to this poll have some substantial deficit in their Higher Order Thinking Skills.

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New Family

Sediba Hand

“Australopithecus sediba, a 1.98 million year old relative of humans, otherwise known as a hominin.” full article:The Verge of Human; Carl Zimmer. The Loom (blog) Discover Magazine

See also Science Magazine, September 9, 2011

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The Hard Problem

Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo.

Actually, the proposition here over-generalizes, but it is apparently true for biological life.

I don’t track the follies of Intelligent Design anywhere near as closely as I used to, yet I do maintain a tag search and every now and then I am moved to go check out the ‘action,’ always with the hope what I encounter will be amusing, and, rich as a qualitative data set about how people approach talking with each other.

Uncommon Descent, ‘serving the intelligent design community,’ is a dependable source of circularity and a time waster over many years. I got a nice positive at the end of March. I’ve let it, the comment thread, percolate since then. It is: worthy.

The set-up is a article, On the Computation of CSI, by Mathgrrl. Here is the equivalent of its abstract.

In the abstract of Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, William Demski asks “Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?” Many ID proponents answer this question emphatically in the affirmative, claiming that Complex Specified Information is a metric that clearly indicates intelligent agency.

As someone with a strong interest in computational biology, evolutionary algorithms, and genetic programming, this strikes me as the most readily testable claim made by ID proponents. For some time I’ve been trying to learn enough about CSI to be able to measure it objectively and to determine whether or not known evolutionary mechanisms are capable of generating it. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is quite a bit of confusion about the details of CSI, even among its strongest advocates.

Setting aside the effort to configure a worthwhile computational platform for ID, the post and its continuing offshoot oneand offshoot two, interest me because Mathgrrl, (who is seemingly Lauren Taalman of James Madison univesity,) has made her effort without also grinding any axe. My further interest, then, is to see what happens as a matter of the responses to her generous and sincere effort. How soon will bad will arise by design (!) to meet her good will?

The answer, of course, is: instantly. 11:17am. However, overall the discussion proceeds without much aggression. (It’s not besides the point that Dembski’s CSI has been discredited, but, in another sense the dialogs are seeking to discover a corrective or more correct estimate.) Alas, it turns out a moderator is riding the posts too, so some of the action only saw the light of day briefly.

As a Batesonian, I was amused to read this (#367):

I am saying, per my previous post, and interminable posts prior to this on other threads, that is it impossible, IN PRINCIPLE, i.e. it is logically impossible, to explain information in terms of algorithms and/or physical laws. This so obviously true that it is scarcely worth repeating. So I won’t. You will sooner be able to create a square circle as to generate information with time and physics. Information is impossible without reason, language, free will, and intentionality. That is, a mind. Or Mind in the case of life.

Having now created the square circle, what say you? Why would information require logic to be represented in any possible explanation of information, and this given too in any possible ‘terms?’ Oh look, my square circle just rolled up my stairs!

In the main the discussants don’t reconcile Mathgrrl’s urge to define CSI with greater specificity with the ID company line, that Dembski’s conclusions have already completed the endeavor. All in all, not very amusing, except for the usual category mashing, and this–as always–in the context of the unspoken problematic implied by some kind of computationally clever designer found somewhere beyond nature and biology. And, maybe this designer was/is, like, undesigned?

Then: pay dirt. Mathgrrl Lives Down to Expectations on April 14. The post’s subject remains calm. She should get a medal. Between this and the action over at the unintentionally very amusing comment spew at intelligentreasoning blog, I am suddenly delivered to the social psychological nirvana I was hunting for.

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