Picture from: Natural selection – News, Research and Analysis – The Conversation – page 1
The Earlier Parts
The three previous parts of this series can be found at the end of these links:
Part 3: Quantum Non-Linearity: Naive Intelligent Design: Part III (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)
***
Evolution's a-priori information
The following is based on a paper which can be accessed here
The unconditional probability of life evolving, Prob(Life), is extremely small: It is equal to the ratio of the number of possible organic configurations to the total number of all possible configurations. Because living configurations are highly organised then according to disorder theory, the number of possible organic configurations is a minute fraction of the total number of configurations thus implying a tiny unconditional probability of life.
If we now assume that standard evolution has actually taken place as a result of the right physical conditions being contrived, then the unconditional probability of life is given by this equation:
Prob (Life) = Prob (life, right conditions) x Prob (right conditions)
The first probability on the right-hand side of this equation is the conditional probability of life evolving, a probability calculated assuming the "right conditions" are in place. If evolution has occurred, this probability must be sufficiently large for there to be a reasonable chance of life evolving in a cosmos where its dimensions are considered to be part of the physical regime with the "right conditions". But because the value of the unconditional probability Prob(Life) is so miniscule this implies that a huge improbability must be embedded in the second factor on the righthand side of the above equation, namely the unconditional probability of the right conditions existing, Prob (right conditions).
If we turn the above equation into a Shannon information equation by taking the negated Log of both sides, we get:
I(Life) = I(life, right conditions) + I(right conditions)
Since we require that Prob(life, right conditions) is a realistic probability this implies that the information value of the first term on the right-hand side won't be enormous. Hence, it is clear that most of the information required for the emergence of life will be embedded in the term "I(right conditions)". Nevertheless, some information is embedded in I(life, right conditions) and this means that so-called "natural processes" do generate information if only a relatively small amount. This is contrary to what many Naive IDists and Biblical literalists try to push past us. I made this point about slow information creation by a physical regime in Part II ......but see the important qualifying footnote at the end about parallel processing vs expanding parallelism*.
But the main point is this: Conventional Evolution, if it is to work, must be the depository of huge amounts of a priori contingent information and this information is embodied in those "right conditions". Although a physical regime using parallel processing does generate some information (slowly) by far and away the greatest part is found in those given right conditions. In conventional evolution that information would be embedded in the "spongeam": See Part I for more on the spongeam. Conventional evolution, if indeed it is the process by which life has emerged, is necessarily an astonishingly sophisticated process in terms of its demand for information.
In times past I might have referred to the necessary a priori information required to get evolution to work as "front-loaded" information, but I believe that expression has an implicit error: This is because the a priori information required by evolution effectively constrains the behavior of the cosmic system everywhere and everywhen and therefore it is more appropriate to talk of the ongoing input of information rather than this information being "front loaded"; an expression which smacks of deism.
***
Joe Felsenstein
In my short contact with atheist and mathematical evolutionist Joe Felsenstein it was clear to me that he understood the implications of evolution; namely, that it must come with the necessary package of a-priori information in order to work and that this information is embodied in the smooth "fitness landscape" (i.e. the spongeam) that would allow evolutionary diffusion to find and settle on organic structures. Felsenstein's understanding here leaves us wondering whatever NAIDs Casey Luskin and Stephen Dilley are supposed to mean when they talk of "Evolution on its own" (See Part III). Cleary Felsenstein doesn't believe that there's such a thing as "Evolution on its own" because evolution necessarily comes packaged with a lot of information. Although, of course, Felsenstein doesn't believe that evolution's burden of a-priori information has its origins in Divine design. Instead, he decides to leave the conundrum of the origin of this information in the hands of physicists. Here's an extract from his comments on one of my blog posts ... (See here):
You said: "In my reading of Dembski all he seems to be saying is that the fitness surface required for evolution to work is a very rare object in the huge space of mathematically possible fitness surfaces. Given its rarity and assuming equal a-priori probabilities it follows that the required fitness surface has a huge amount of information." And you also said "The mathematical fact is that smooth fitness spaces are extremely rare beasts indeed when measured up against the totality of what is possible."
If the laws of physics are what is responsible for fitness surfaces having "a huge amount of information" and being "very rare object[s]" then Dembski has not proven a need for Intelligent Design to be involved. I have not of course proven that ordinary physics and chemistry is responsible for the details of life -- the point is that Dembski has not proven that they aren't.
Biologists want to know whether
normal evolutionary processes account for the adaptations we see in life. If
they are told that our universe's laws of physics are special, biologists will
probably decide to leave that debate to cosmologists, or maybe to theologians.
The issue for biologists is whether the physical laws we know, here, in our universe, account for evolution. The issue of where those laws came from is irrelevant to that.
...apparently Felsenstein sees the question of the origins of evolution's a-priori information as beyond his brief and in the realm of physics. This response by Felsenstein simply shelves the fact that the descriptive character of physics means we will always face the barrier of an absence of Aseity; that is, science is destined to remain in the domain of explanatory incompleteness. The "explanations" of physics ultimately present us with a "compressed information all the way down" barrier. Nevertheless, it is clear that NAID culture does no justice to evolutionists like Joe Felsenstein who are acutely aware of the question of evolution's a-priori information. And yet conversely it is also true to say that secular evolutionists have given no credit to the work of serious IDists like William Dembski who have been unfairly written-off as pseudo scientists; no wonder they've fallen into the embrace of the far-right! (See my next post on NAID's affair with the far-right)
***
Creation with a Vengeance
The question of whether a physical regime capable of evolution can exist and/or actually does exist presents some imponderables: Firstly, do physical regimes which set up the necessary conditions for evolution have at least a mathematical existence? Secondly, assuming this mathematical existence, how would one go about successfully finding and selecting these conditions? Such a question, if it is a computationally irreducible question, may be beyond human ability to answer: In which case evolution is creation with a vengeance.
Clearly, it is understood by competent commentators that evolution isn't some kind of random magic. Therefore, what theologian Rope Kojonen is saying (See previous parts) isn't news at all, as anyone who really understands evolution like Joe Felsenstein knows about the necessary conditions which must exist in the abstract landscape of configuration space for evolution to work. So, Casey Luskin, Stephen Dilley and Rope Kojonen seem to be barking up a tree that's been long since barked up before. Rope Kojonen is saying nothing new. What compounds the confusion, however, is that Casey Luskin and Stephen Dilley seem to be responding to Kojonen with incoherent nonsense as we have seen in the previous parts.
***
None of this is to imply that I'm in anyway culturally committed to a particular stance on conventional evolution, whether of NAID culture or the academic establishment. But in my opinion the waters of Intelligent Design have been thoroughly muddied by Naive ID and as with questions like Junk DNA they've prematurely nailed their colours to the mast. The irony is that once one understands just what a working evolutionary system demands in the way of a-priori information intelligent creationism itself puts evolution back on the agenda.
Footnote
* IMPORTANT QUALIFICATION
As I've said before the above considerations only apply in a cosmos whose processes work in parallel: They don't apply if the cosmos somehow employs the exponentials of expanding parallelism. There is, after all, a measure of expanding parallelism and even hints of declarative computation in quantum theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment