Related to this, I've noticed a few logical errors all Darwinists make, and that are indeed core to the theory itself.
The first is that they invariably conflate a variation being "beneficial" in an organism’s immediate environment with it being beneficial in a broader long-term sense of building towards future integrated functional systems.
Indeed, this error is necessary for Darwinism to even SEEM to make sense. And yet, a beneficial mutation is no more likely to lead towards some future integrated functional system than is a neutral or negative mutation. Or, at least, it can be no more likely given the naturalistic premises of Darwinism.
The second, closely related, logical error is that Darwinists constantly conflate arguments for something being logically possible with arguments for it being plausible.
The point of Darwinian explanation is that it's supposed to improve on mere chance, and show that highly unlikely integrated functional systems WOULD happen, not merely that they could.
Examples of this abound. A common one is when Darwinists will point out possible precursors or ancestors of something under consideration and act as if this is the same thing as showing a pathway by it came about accidentally. Merely pointing out possible homologues of proteins in the bacterial flagellum and calling it a day would be one example of this.
Another specific example I recall is when Allen Orr suggested "scaffolding" as the solution to irreducible complexity, using Roman arches as his example. But scaffolding doesn't make Roman arches any more LIKELY to arise by chance. Rather, it makes it POSSIBLE for a builder to build a Roman arch on purpose. In terms of likelihood, scaffolding just represents one more thing that needs accounting for. A non-intentional explanation for a Roman arch would now need to account for BOTH the scaffolding AND the arch coming to exist accidentally. And the Roman arch remains irreducibly complex - it doesn't perform its function until all the parts are in place (and tge scaffolding is removed). Allen gave a solution to the wrong problem, conflating possibility with probability.
A third common error, closely related to the first two, is that the Darwinist conflates gradual with more likely. Darwinism is shot through with a line of thinking that says I am less likely to get 500 heads in a row if I toss 500 coins at once than if I wait an hour between tossing each coin.
All three of these errors are closely related and mutually reinforcing. Only if variations being beneficial in an immediate sense is conflated with them being beneficial towards long-term goals of creating integrated functional systems can the mere possibility of such systems existing be conflated with them plausibly being created by such a process.
And gradualism only makes a particular outcome more likely if one is taken to have been conceptually working towards a particular outcome in the first place, such as in the iterative way that human technology works.
In short, all the logical errors that are pervasive within the Darwinian mode of explanation have in common that they all arise from implicitly taking natural selection to be a literal intelligent designing agent with conscious goals and intentions, of the sort it was supposed to replacement for.
The underlying reason for this is that the the phenomenon that Darwinism is meant to account for - biological function or purpose - cannot in principle be reduced to naturalistic and mindless categories. To attempt to do so is implicitly to eliminate it rather than reduce it.
Hence when one is consistent in taking natural selection to be a mindless and naturalistic process devoid of agency, one finds not merely that it is insufficient to account for biological function, but that biological function doesn't exist, hence there is nothing for natural selection to explain in the first place.
This conclusion is absurd and literally unthinkable (particularly when taken to its further conclusion that the human intellect doesn't exist and that we never really reason) so Darwinists are forced to conceive of natural selection in terms of an intelligent agent in order to have an explanation that even SEEMS to make coherent sense.
In a very real sense, Darwinism is rescued from disconfirmation in the minds of Darwinists by its own absurdity. They never realize just how unintelligible their theory is because they are constantly swapping it in their minds for a theory that is more coherent (namely intelligent design) in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance of attempting to conceptualize an unintelligible claim.
This is AMAZINGLY said! Any mechanism of specification must itself be specified in order to do any specifying. Materialists are willing to explain away simple regularities like those of thermodynamics, or gravity, etc. as being not complex enough to merit a design inference. (e.g. these types of specified patterns can come about by some unintelligent ordering "principle") They believe that if they can grant those simple patterns, everything else can just bootstrap upwards. Conservation of Information is the recognition that this claim is a mathematical and logical absurdity. If Man evolved from a primordial soup and some basic laws of association, he must have been in there somewhere from the beginning. Somewhere, if you listen closely to that pre-biotic environment, you must hear the Prelude in C minor by Bach. If Man is not in that soup from the beginning, then where did he come from? To evolutionists, its as if time itself generates reality out of literal void. Natural selection (or any other analogous mechanism) is just modernist re-hashing of the demiurgic god garbed in scientific language and whimsical just-so stories.
I would add to your list of logical errors the issue of what is sometimes called "Sober's Paradox". The doctrine of transformism (evolution from one species to another) is based on the assumption that the emergence of biological form and structure is extremely improbable. This is because if it is improbable for a given biological structure to arise, the only rational explanation for the existence of multiple instances of that structure is to posit some kind of descendant-chain between them all, ultimately leading back to just ONE origin point. On the other hand, if it is not improbable, then there is no issue in the structure arising multiple times independently, in which case the proposition of a chain becomes redundant.
The first problem is that this is simply an assumption that cannot possibly be justified on any absolute grounds. There is no such thing as a final stamp of "randomness", "improbability", or "meaninglessness". The inability of us to see a pattern does not prove that a pattern does not exist, it just means we cannot yet see one. This alone debunks all atheistic "certainty" in the godlessness or mindlessness of evolution / creation.
The second (and amusing) problem is that nothing shuts down scientific inquiry like invocations of pure dumb luck. If biological form were truly so improbable, why would biologists waste their time trying to recreate it / demonstrate evolutionary pathways? They may as well be flipping coins with the goal of getting 1000 heads in a row. Once again, like you mentioned in your comment, evolutionists do not actually believe their theory. They act and talk in ways completely at odds with what their own theory implies. What kind of scientific theory requires the invocation of endless sequences of near-miraculous events in order to justify its logic? No "rational" one, that's for certain.
If biological form is not improbable, conservation of information kicks in, and the question arises: "Why is it not improbable? What accounts for this increase in probability?"
No matter which direction the materialists go, they cannot escape teleology.
Thanks for brilliantly elucidating some notions that I have had for a long time about the information shell game that is constantly played by defenders of the standard theory of evolution. Unfortunately, I think it will sail right over the heads of the few ID-deniers who actually read it. Most of them are clueless about combinatorics and probability.
Nothing about combinations and probability can render any version of a designer of biological life prior to our own intelligence as possible, much less plausible, much less likely, much less actual.
You are simply asserting standard dogma that no intelligence existed before mankind came along. We already know that is not true based on the amazing fine-tuning of the universe.
In discussions about evolution, the ID-deniers often fall back on the size and age of the universe. They claim that those who believe in ID simply don't understand the huge probabilistic "resources" of the universe, and they need to use their imagination more to understand how life could have started and evolved purely naturally. But that argument is hand-waving based on a lack of understanding of combinatorics. Stephen Meyer and others did an actual analysis that the evolutionist hand wavers never do and debunked that notion. I don't have time to get into the details here, but suffice it to say that, no, the monkey can't type Macbeth -- or even one page of it.
Combinations and probability are tertiary to the primary concern of the article: the origin of information. Conservation of information means natural processes can only redistribute information but never create it. But if that's true, then where did the information originate? If nature cannot create it, a mind must ultimately be behind it.
Natural processes create life, life creates brains, cognitive complexity creates metaphor, mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain. Minds combine data, facts about reality, into information by doing so with purpose. None of that is esoteric or transcendent. Information is combined data in a mind, it doesn't exist per-se, and and intentional combination of data at any level is the creation of information.
I don't understand the article because it's esoteric balderdash, but i understand data,, minds, and intent just fine and that's necessary and sufficient for understanding information.
Question: This article focuses on biological information, but conservation of information also applies in fundamental physics: quantum information can never be created or destroyed. However, inflationary theory holds that quantum particles formed moments after the Big Bang. So how do physicists account for the origin of quantum information (which cannot be created) if the carrier of that information -- the quanta themselves -- did not exist before the Big Bang?
This is a great summary of Conservation of Information! I might use this as a reference when talking to others about this topic…
It cannot be overstated how important this work is for refuting materialistic frameworks which require getting more from less; something from nothing. When combined with your insight that all information can be conceived of as “search”, I think CoI takes on even more significance.
I have recently been thinking about how materialistic evolutionary algorithms are oxymoronic in a way. On one level, they need to be identical to chance, and on another, more practical level, they need to be the opposite of chance. Dawkins captures this well with his “Blind Watchmaker”. But when is the last time anyone every met a blind watchmaker? But actually, not just blind - totally sensation-less and lobotomized too!
The Modern Synthesis is so far from being able to explain the evolution of new complex biological processes that, amazingly, so many scientists buy into it.
Related to this, I've noticed a few logical errors all Darwinists make, and that are indeed core to the theory itself.
The first is that they invariably conflate a variation being "beneficial" in an organism’s immediate environment with it being beneficial in a broader long-term sense of building towards future integrated functional systems.
Indeed, this error is necessary for Darwinism to even SEEM to make sense. And yet, a beneficial mutation is no more likely to lead towards some future integrated functional system than is a neutral or negative mutation. Or, at least, it can be no more likely given the naturalistic premises of Darwinism.
The second, closely related, logical error is that Darwinists constantly conflate arguments for something being logically possible with arguments for it being plausible.
The point of Darwinian explanation is that it's supposed to improve on mere chance, and show that highly unlikely integrated functional systems WOULD happen, not merely that they could.
Examples of this abound. A common one is when Darwinists will point out possible precursors or ancestors of something under consideration and act as if this is the same thing as showing a pathway by it came about accidentally. Merely pointing out possible homologues of proteins in the bacterial flagellum and calling it a day would be one example of this.
Another specific example I recall is when Allen Orr suggested "scaffolding" as the solution to irreducible complexity, using Roman arches as his example. But scaffolding doesn't make Roman arches any more LIKELY to arise by chance. Rather, it makes it POSSIBLE for a builder to build a Roman arch on purpose. In terms of likelihood, scaffolding just represents one more thing that needs accounting for. A non-intentional explanation for a Roman arch would now need to account for BOTH the scaffolding AND the arch coming to exist accidentally. And the Roman arch remains irreducibly complex - it doesn't perform its function until all the parts are in place (and tge scaffolding is removed). Allen gave a solution to the wrong problem, conflating possibility with probability.
A third common error, closely related to the first two, is that the Darwinist conflates gradual with more likely. Darwinism is shot through with a line of thinking that says I am less likely to get 500 heads in a row if I toss 500 coins at once than if I wait an hour between tossing each coin.
All three of these errors are closely related and mutually reinforcing. Only if variations being beneficial in an immediate sense is conflated with them being beneficial towards long-term goals of creating integrated functional systems can the mere possibility of such systems existing be conflated with them plausibly being created by such a process.
And gradualism only makes a particular outcome more likely if one is taken to have been conceptually working towards a particular outcome in the first place, such as in the iterative way that human technology works.
In short, all the logical errors that are pervasive within the Darwinian mode of explanation have in common that they all arise from implicitly taking natural selection to be a literal intelligent designing agent with conscious goals and intentions, of the sort it was supposed to replacement for.
The underlying reason for this is that the the phenomenon that Darwinism is meant to account for - biological function or purpose - cannot in principle be reduced to naturalistic and mindless categories. To attempt to do so is implicitly to eliminate it rather than reduce it.
Hence when one is consistent in taking natural selection to be a mindless and naturalistic process devoid of agency, one finds not merely that it is insufficient to account for biological function, but that biological function doesn't exist, hence there is nothing for natural selection to explain in the first place.
This conclusion is absurd and literally unthinkable (particularly when taken to its further conclusion that the human intellect doesn't exist and that we never really reason) so Darwinists are forced to conceive of natural selection in terms of an intelligent agent in order to have an explanation that even SEEMS to make coherent sense.
In a very real sense, Darwinism is rescued from disconfirmation in the minds of Darwinists by its own absurdity. They never realize just how unintelligible their theory is because they are constantly swapping it in their minds for a theory that is more coherent (namely intelligent design) in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance of attempting to conceptualize an unintelligible claim.
This is AMAZINGLY said! Any mechanism of specification must itself be specified in order to do any specifying. Materialists are willing to explain away simple regularities like those of thermodynamics, or gravity, etc. as being not complex enough to merit a design inference. (e.g. these types of specified patterns can come about by some unintelligent ordering "principle") They believe that if they can grant those simple patterns, everything else can just bootstrap upwards. Conservation of Information is the recognition that this claim is a mathematical and logical absurdity. If Man evolved from a primordial soup and some basic laws of association, he must have been in there somewhere from the beginning. Somewhere, if you listen closely to that pre-biotic environment, you must hear the Prelude in C minor by Bach. If Man is not in that soup from the beginning, then where did he come from? To evolutionists, its as if time itself generates reality out of literal void. Natural selection (or any other analogous mechanism) is just modernist re-hashing of the demiurgic god garbed in scientific language and whimsical just-so stories.
I would add to your list of logical errors the issue of what is sometimes called "Sober's Paradox". The doctrine of transformism (evolution from one species to another) is based on the assumption that the emergence of biological form and structure is extremely improbable. This is because if it is improbable for a given biological structure to arise, the only rational explanation for the existence of multiple instances of that structure is to posit some kind of descendant-chain between them all, ultimately leading back to just ONE origin point. On the other hand, if it is not improbable, then there is no issue in the structure arising multiple times independently, in which case the proposition of a chain becomes redundant.
The first problem is that this is simply an assumption that cannot possibly be justified on any absolute grounds. There is no such thing as a final stamp of "randomness", "improbability", or "meaninglessness". The inability of us to see a pattern does not prove that a pattern does not exist, it just means we cannot yet see one. This alone debunks all atheistic "certainty" in the godlessness or mindlessness of evolution / creation.
The second (and amusing) problem is that nothing shuts down scientific inquiry like invocations of pure dumb luck. If biological form were truly so improbable, why would biologists waste their time trying to recreate it / demonstrate evolutionary pathways? They may as well be flipping coins with the goal of getting 1000 heads in a row. Once again, like you mentioned in your comment, evolutionists do not actually believe their theory. They act and talk in ways completely at odds with what their own theory implies. What kind of scientific theory requires the invocation of endless sequences of near-miraculous events in order to justify its logic? No "rational" one, that's for certain.
If biological form is not improbable, conservation of information kicks in, and the question arises: "Why is it not improbable? What accounts for this increase in probability?"
No matter which direction the materialists go, they cannot escape teleology.
Thanks for brilliantly elucidating some notions that I have had for a long time about the information shell game that is constantly played by defenders of the standard theory of evolution. Unfortunately, I think it will sail right over the heads of the few ID-deniers who actually read it. Most of them are clueless about combinatorics and probability.
Nothing about combinations and probability can render any version of a designer of biological life prior to our own intelligence as possible, much less plausible, much less likely, much less actual.
You are simply asserting standard dogma that no intelligence existed before mankind came along. We already know that is not true based on the amazing fine-tuning of the universe.
In discussions about evolution, the ID-deniers often fall back on the size and age of the universe. They claim that those who believe in ID simply don't understand the huge probabilistic "resources" of the universe, and they need to use their imagination more to understand how life could have started and evolved purely naturally. But that argument is hand-waving based on a lack of understanding of combinatorics. Stephen Meyer and others did an actual analysis that the evolutionist hand wavers never do and debunked that notion. I don't have time to get into the details here, but suffice it to say that, no, the monkey can't type Macbeth -- or even one page of it.
Combinations and probability are tertiary to the primary concern of the article: the origin of information. Conservation of information means natural processes can only redistribute information but never create it. But if that's true, then where did the information originate? If nature cannot create it, a mind must ultimately be behind it.
Natural processes create life, life creates brains, cognitive complexity creates metaphor, mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain. Minds combine data, facts about reality, into information by doing so with purpose. None of that is esoteric or transcendent. Information is combined data in a mind, it doesn't exist per-se, and and intentional combination of data at any level is the creation of information.
I don't understand the article because it's esoteric balderdash, but i understand data,, minds, and intent just fine and that's necessary and sufficient for understanding information.
Question: This article focuses on biological information, but conservation of information also applies in fundamental physics: quantum information can never be created or destroyed. However, inflationary theory holds that quantum particles formed moments after the Big Bang. So how do physicists account for the origin of quantum information (which cannot be created) if the carrier of that information -- the quanta themselves -- did not exist before the Big Bang?
This is a great summary of Conservation of Information! I might use this as a reference when talking to others about this topic…
It cannot be overstated how important this work is for refuting materialistic frameworks which require getting more from less; something from nothing. When combined with your insight that all information can be conceived of as “search”, I think CoI takes on even more significance.
I have recently been thinking about how materialistic evolutionary algorithms are oxymoronic in a way. On one level, they need to be identical to chance, and on another, more practical level, they need to be the opposite of chance. Dawkins captures this well with his “Blind Watchmaker”. But when is the last time anyone every met a blind watchmaker? But actually, not just blind - totally sensation-less and lobotomized too!
The Modern Synthesis is so far from being able to explain the evolution of new complex biological processes that, amazingly, so many scientists buy into it.