Reply to Why don't you believe in God?

Forum Index » Religion

Reply to "Why don't you believe in God?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The cosmic fingerprints guy is a [b]crackpot[/b].  I can't get past his page on information theory because he cites Shannon and yet he totally contradicts Shannon.  This is not a matter of interpretation.  He fundamentally misrepresents information theory.  Given that, I don't even see why I would read the rest of his site.  His argument has already failed.[/quote]

Shannon may have begun information theory, but it is still just a theory, his theory.  He is not the only information theorist.  Why not expand your horizons and explore recent developments?  I recall the video rationalist saying that rationalists love to constantly refine their understanding of reality.

I have no personal affinity for Marshall.  But I do find it interesting that you deem him a crackpot.  Is he a crackpot because he believes in a Designer?  [/quote]

This is utterly ridiculous.  I defined him as a crackpot because of how completely he butchered a theory he prominently cites on his own web site.  Like if someone claimed that Einstein proved that the earth was only 10,000 years old.

1.  This "just a theory" was half of a two part justification for God just a day ago.  Now it is "only a theory".
2.  Shannon is not just any theorist.  He is the inventor of information theory.  He is as big as anyone gets in a field.
3.  The web site you cited specifically described Shannon's information theory in a way that is the complete opposite of his theory.  You might as well have said Einstein believed in a flat earth.
4.  Where exactly am I supposed to expand my horizons on information theory?  A Dan Brown novel?  Have you ever done a single entropy calculation in your entire life?  Would you know one if you saw it?   If I said "entropy" would you even know that we are talking about information theory.  Well some of us understand this field.  Some of us have.  Here is a very basic, low math introduction.  When you understand this, tell me if I need to expand my horizons: http://astarte.csustan.edu/~tom/SFI-CSSS/info-theory/info-lec.pdf

[/quote]

Saw your post as I posted:

WOW.  That was low math?  Impressive!  I never even took calculus.  Hated math.  Odd one out in my family.

Perhaps you could apply information theory to the example I mentioned earlier?  I would really like to understand these concepts (entropy redefined, double wow!) the best I can.  If you can keep it low math, that would be great:

"One mystery is how one virus has DNA which codes for more proteins than it has space to store the necessary coded information.

'The mystery arose when scientists counted the number of three-letter codons in the DNA of the virus, QX174. They found that the proteins produced by the virus required many more code words than the DNA in the chromosome contains. How could this be? Careful research revealed the amazing answer. A portion of a chain of code letters in the gene, say -A-C-T-G-T-C-C-A-G-, could contain three three-letter genetic words as follows: -A-C-T*G-T-C*C-A-G-. But if the reading frame is shifted to the right one or two letters, two other genetic words are found in the middle of this portion, as follows: -A*C-T-G*T-C-C*A-G- and -A-C*T-G-T*C-C-A*G-. And this is just what the virus does. A string of 390 code letters in its DNA is read in two different reading frames to get two different proteins from the same portion of DNA. Could this have happened by chance? Try to compose an English sentence of 390 letters from which you can get another good sentence by shifting the framing of the words one letter to the right. It simply can’t be done. The probability of getting sense is effectively zero.’"[/quote]

The response requires zero math.

First of all, you can't calculate the entropy rate of a hypothetical segment of DNA.  I can say that the entropy rate for human chromosomes is about 1.8 bits per base pair, vs. 1.9 for the coding sequences.  I can also say that the analogy to English is not a fair comparison because the entropy rate of the English language is exceedingly low.  You can read Shannon's calculations at the character level or modern word-level analysis, but you already know that English has low entropy because you have watched Wheel of Fortune.  However, while Q is rarely going to follow the letter W, the same cannot be said of adjacent base pairs in DNA.

Is it possible that two genes can overlap due to chance?  Your author says it's absurd.  In fact it is not absurd. Such a thing is likely to happen because genomes are large, even this particular bacteriophage. However, this overlapping gene pair is not unique.  And scientists have asked a really good question, which is whether the frequency of such overlapping genes is random or not.

And the answer is that it is not.

Does this vindicate your creationist essay writer?  No.  You already read Dawkins' weasel program.  So you know that selection pressure can result in non-random outcomes.  In order for these overlapping genes to occur more frequently than random, all that is required is that it makes the organism more fit.  Whether it makes the genome more compact and therefore less fragile, whether sometimes it results in the creation of related proteins, or whether there is some other cause, it does not matter.  If it confers fitness, it will be over-represented.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics