See this blog post I just wrote, that you’re reading right now? This blog article is proof of the existence of God.
| Before you read/watch/listen to “If You Can Read This I Can Prove God Exists,” read THIS first. (700 words – 2 minutes) – then come back and continue reading. Thanks. |
Yeah, I know, that sounds crazy. But I’m not asking you to believe anything just yet, until you see the evidence for yourself. All I ask is that you refrain from disbelieving while I show you my proof. It only takes a minute to convey, but it speaks to one of the most important questions of all time.
So how is this message proof of the existence of God?
This web page you’re reading contains letters, words and sentences. It contains a message that means something. As long as you can read English, you can understand what I’m saying.
You can do all kinds of things with this message. You can read it on your computer screen. You can print it out on your printer. You can read it out loud to a friend who’s in the same room as you are. You can call your friend and read it to her over the telephone. You can save it as a Microsoft WORD document. You can forward it to someone via email, or you can post it on some other website.
Regardless of how you copy it or where you send it, the information remains the same. My email contains a message. It contains information in the form of language. The message is independent of the medium it is sent in.
Messages are not matter, even though they can be carried by matter (like printing this email on a piece of paper).
Messages are not energy even though they can be carried by energy (like the sound of my voice.)
Messages are immaterial. Information is itself a unique kind of entity. It can be stored and transmitted and copied in many forms, but the meaning still stays the same.
Messages can be in English, French or Chinese. Or Morse Code. Or mating calls of birds. Or the Internet. Or radio or television. Or computer programs or architect blueprints or stone carvings. Every cell in your body contains a message encoded in DNA, representing a complete plan for you.
OK, so what does this have to do with God?
It’s very simple. Messages, languages, and coded information ONLY come from a mind. A mind that agrees on an alphabet and a meaning of words and sentences. A mind that expresses both desire and intent.
Whether I use the simplest possible explanation, such as the one I’m giving you here, or if we analyze language with advanced mathematics and engineering communication theory, we can say this with total confidence:
“Messages, languages and coded information never, ever come from anything else besides a mind. No one has ever produced a single example of a message that did not come from a mind.”
Nature can create fascinating patterns – snowflakes, sand dunes, crystals, stalagmites and stalactites. Tornadoes and turbulence and cloud formations.
But non-living things cannot create language. They *cannot* create codes. Rocks cannot think and they cannot talk. And they cannot create information.
It is believed by some that life on planet earth arose accidentally from the “primordial soup,” the early ocean which produced enzymes and eventually RNA, DNA, and primitive cells.
But there is still a problem with this theory: It fails to answer the question, ‘Where did the information come from?’
DNA is not merely a molecule. Nor is it simply a “pattern.” Yes, it contains chemicals and proteins, but those chemicals are arranged to form an intricate language, in the exact same way that English and Chinese and HTML are languages.
DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and structures very similar to words, sentences and paragraphs. With very precise instructions and systems that check for errors and correct them. It is formally and scientifically a code. All codes we know the origin of are designed.
To the person who says that life arose naturally, you need only ask: “Where did the information come from? Show me just ONE example of a language that didn’t come from a mind.”
As simple as this question is, I’ve personally presented it in public presentations and Internet discussion forums for more than four years. I’ve addressed more than 100,000 people, including hostile, skeptical audiences who insist that life arose without the assistance of God.
But to a person, none of them have ever been able to explain where the information came from. This riddle is “So simple any child can understand; so complex, no atheist can solve.”
You can hear or read my full presentation on this topic at
http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
Watch it on video:
http://evo2.org/perry-speaks/perryspeaks.html
Matter and energy have to come from somewhere. Everyone can agree on that. But information has to come from somewhere, too!
Information is separate entity, fully on par with matter and energy. And information can only come from a mind. If books and poems and TV shows come from human intelligence, then all living things inevitably came from a superintelligence.
Every word you hear, every sentence you speak, every dog that barks, every song you sing, every email you read, every packet of information that zings across the Internet, is proof of the existence of God. Because information and language always originate in a mind.
In the beginning were words and language.
In the Beginning was Information.
When we consider the mystery of life – where it came from and how this miracle is possible – do we not at the same time ask the question where it is going, and what its purpose is?
Respectfully Submitted,
Perry Marshall
Full Presentation and Technical Details (please review before posting questions or debates on the blog, almost every question and objection is addressed by these articles):
–“If you can read this, I can prove God exists” – listen to
my full presentation or read the Executive Summary here:
http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
–“OK, so then who made God?” and other questions about information and origins:
–Why DNA is formally and scientifically a code, and things like sunlight and starlight are not (Please read this before you attempt to debate this on the blog!!!):
http://evo2.org/blog/information-theory-made-simple and http://evo2.org/faq/#code
-The Atheist’s Riddle: Members of Infidels, the world’s largest atheist discussion board attempt to solve it
(for over 4 years now!), without success:
Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
Mr. Perry
I am not going to deny the existence of a superitenlligent being. It’s just that I find a flaw in your theory.
You say that messages come from mind. Let us not forget what a mind is and that mind needs a medium for it to function (in humans and animals case – brain). Now, I see it this way, your argument that the superingelligent being sent messages (DNA, RNA) it should have a mind. Mind originates from something, some medium, therefore I assume that the Superintelligent being you speak of has a brain or some other sort of medium for the mind.
My question is, if the superintelligent being has a mind i.e. a brain, where did it come from. What “message” made it the way it is. Do you suggest that also God has a creator. If God just existed, why can’t messages, that you presume that cannot just be, exist.
As I said before, I do not attack your theory. In fact I find it very interesting. Also I believe that personal belief should be, well “personal”.
Arian,
Information is immaterial; information so far as we know does not come from matter; matter has only existed since the big bang; therefore information does not come from matter but has a transcendent source. Therefore the only logical conclusion we can arrive at is that God is non physical.
Where did God come from – see https://evo2.org/faq/
Perry
I could not understand the sentence: “messages are not energy”
Well, we ONLY know how to create information with energy. It’s arranged within our minds. So energy creates information. Information is made of energy!
The simplest information we humans notice in nature is sound. Waves. Energy.
Lights, colors, sounds and whatever. They all travel around the universe, taking information (energy) from one spot to another.
If we did not exist, the events that happen on the sun would still be transmitted to the earth through it’s energy. THEY WOULD BE TRANSMITTED IN AN SPECIFIC ORDER, IN SPECIFIC INTENSITY. THROUGH ENERGY! THAT IS INFORMATION!!!
IF NATURE CANNOT CREATE, STORE AND TRANSMIT INFORMATION, THE SENTENCE ABOVE WOULD BE FALSE. AND AS LONG AS I LIVE IN EARTH, I KNOW IT’S TRUE.
The information arranged in the very first cell was probably much more simple than any cell that still exists. We cannot imagine that, but it was probably more simple than many of the extense inorganic molecules around the universe. The nature, through it’s energy, made it possible to exist. Isn’t that clear? Why is that so tough to accept?
All information is stored or transmitted using a medium of matter or energy. “Romeo and Juliet” could be in the form of ink and paper, or a computer file, or spoken words. But Romeo and Juliet itself is not matter and it is not energy. It is an abstract pattern.
Even though all information is stored as matter / energy doesn’t mean that all matter / energy is information. Sunlight is not coded information within the definition of Shannon’s system. See http://evo2.org/faq
You ask to be shown a language that (possibly) arose independently from mental processes, but you’re missing the most obvious candidates! nucleic acids themselves. It is not by any means scientific to take a set of data, most of which can be explained as man-made and then say that the rest of the data must also be made by a man-like entity (which in itself poses massively more significant scientific problems than the original question) simply because it’s convenient to you. Show me a language, aside from those which use nucleic acids as graphemes, that was created by minds (keep in mind that human languages are in fact communal, rather than individualistic, so only a plural form is appropriate) other than those of humans. The very fact that languages are so rare that only one species in the history of life is known to possess it is in itself an extremely significant scrap of evidence.
I also don’t quite feel that your grapheme level random mutation model is an accurate representation of the random mutation model utilized by evolutionary theory. While it is true that single base changes naively satisfy the requirement for random mutation within DNA it is also true that the resulting gene sequence must map to a useful protein and that the resulting organism must in fact survive. Your program is a relatively accurate model of the radiation experiment, but note that evolutionary theory never posits that useful mutations occur (exclusively, or even at all) due to radiation. Your assumption that this experiment satisfactorily models all possible mutation mechanisms is not something that I am remotely prepared to bow to because it is simply unfounded.
Also, humans have an inherent bug in their logical framework, and that is that they can simulate other minds far too easily. So easily that everyone, everywhere has a tendency to attribute natural mechanisms as intentional… originating from a mind. On the same token it is not necessarily a mistake to make such assumptions, but when dealing with SCIENCE that assumption must be avoided (or, at best held at a distance as an unsatisfying possibility), since it does not work with the scientific method itself and does not in fact provide any answers. Even within the realms of social sciences intentionality (which is itself a natural phenomenon) is often far from the only factor as other, (also) natural, mechanisms must always be considered and are very usually quite decisive in the design (yes, I am using this word on purpose in regard to natural occurrences) of the resultant system.
It is only through the application of circular logic (since all languages are the result of a mind, DNA is the result of a mind, thus all languages are the result of a mind) that you can be said to ‘prove’ anything at all.
I look forward to your response.
Mike,
I began with the origin of life as an open question. Agnostic if you will. Then I made some observations:
1. The pattern in DNA is a code
2. All codes we know the origin of are designed
3. Therefore we have 100% inference to the pattern in DNA being designed and 0% inference to any other conclusion.
The syllogism begins with a question, incorporates two scientific observations and concludes with an inference. Thus my logic is linear not circular.
If you wish to posit that the nucleic acids themselves created the pattern in DNA you will need to substantiate that.
I disagree that presuming design in science does not provide any satisfying answers. A presumption of underlying order in the universe is what led to the rise of modern science in the first place, and this was originally a theological proposition. It has its roots in Wisdom of Solomon 11:20 which says “Thou hast ordered all things in weight and number and measure.” Contrary to your statement, the entire enterprise of science was built on this proposition.
The observation that the genetic code is the central mechanism in biology poses the question: where did the code come from? It is not derivable from the laws of physics and random chance is an anti-scientific explanation, because it does not appeal to underlying order. I am observing that a local and specific set of rules is present in the genetic code (in contrast to universal laws of physics). And the most rational explanation for these rules is that they are designed. Conceptually the rules of the genetic code are identical in nature to the rules of any other digital language (ASCII, TCP/IP, etc.) – they are immaterial and implicit, even as they direct the operation of a physical mechanism. Design is the only known source of such rules.
I never said that all mutations come from radiation, please do not misquote me. I said that neo-darwinism posits that the source of helpful mutations is randomness and I am saying that no communication engineer can possibly accept this explanation. There is no direct evidence in the literature that it is true; it is anti-scientific; and there is a substantial amount of literature (Shapiro, McClintock) showing that the mutations in question are engineered internally by the genome in response to stress in the environment.
In the realm of social sciences, certainly physical and environmental factors are considered, but the intelligent willful activities of human beings are the primary forces in the game. That’s why they’re called “social sciences.”
Perry Marshall
With regard to the radiation experiments I don’t feel that I misquoted you at all. I said that you assumed the ‘experiment satisfactorily models all possible mutation mechanisms.’ Since it is not ratcheted along by the forces of the natural world like any realistic model would have to reasonably incorporate, I am forced to conclude that it doesn’t, and since it is really the only example you provide of random mutation affecting information integrity I am also forced to conclude that you genuinely assume it does.
I’m also struck by the conflation of writing system and language you make in your definition of code. The five nucleobases, adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine and uracil, are a writing system, their combination into genes and the interaction between those genes constitute a language. In this sense, ASCII and Morse code are writing systems and TCP/IP (at least as I understand it… which is poorly) is a language. So depending on what it is you actually want to predicate it can be important which you are comparing DNA to. Most significantly I think the question to the origins of the language are simpler to tackle than questions about the origins of the writing system, since the language is built upon the following factors:
1. Intent (reproduction):
– 1a. Once a molecule can successfully copy itself reproduction is satisfied, the writing system is irrelevant at this point, and may have originally been quite different from the current nucleobase system.
– 1b. Once reproductive capacity is present it becomes a fierce intent, as molecules which can more efficiently scavenge useful materials and use the least amount of energy doing so become more reproductively successful than their peers (this can easily lead to predation -if you can steal someone else’s hard work you don’t have to do as much-, generalization -if you can do anything you can live anywhere- or specialization -if you can do something nobody else can you don’t have any competition-)
2. Environmental factors:
– 2a. DNA can only use atoms that exist within its grasp to build itself with, and will prefer atoms which are relatively plentiful and have myriad chemical bonding potentials since this maximizes the reproductive capacity of the molecule and the usefulness of each piece of territory dominated by the molecule.
This brings us back to the chess example. Once a system is in place it must work within the natural realm. The rules of chess are naturally confined and so are the rules of DNA. It doesn’t matter how you describe chess, you can use algebraic notation, a computer program or physical pieces on a board, but the rules of physics combined with the few rules of the game govern gameplay. Similarly DNA can be modeled in myriad ways, but ultimately the information is subject to physics and chemistry. In both examples the intent is survival, but there is a very critical difference. In chess that intent is artificial, but with DNA that intent arises naturally due to basic causality.
As for the apparent deliberateness of genome modification I have to agree with you, even based on the little I really know on the subject. Just looking at the species which occupy the globe and the brilliant adaptations they embody it seems like merely falling back on chaos theory is an easy out, but I would argue that falling back on a supernatural intelligence shirks the issue just the same, if not moreso, since chaos theory is at least a scientific theory. It seems that really what you’re arguing for is reinstatement of Lamarckian mechanisms.
You said
with DNA that intent arises naturally due to basic causality.
I need you to explain what you mean by that.
I am arguing for a reinstatement of Lamarckian mechanisms. I think there is something very sophisticated going on there.
If a molecule capable of reproduction were to spontaneously arise (a situation which is very much outside the realm of Evolutionary Theory, BTW) it would become the case that reproduction would become a fierce intent given natural selection, as such molecules would eventually begin to compete for resources and those which yielded offspring capable of exploring new dimensions of existence would have a tremendous advantage and a near guarantee of a future. An ability to adapt to various open ecological niches would be so extremely advantageous that it would be a nearly inevitable evolutionary development, even if it depended fully on random mutation to become established.
Lamarckian mechanisms can be present in DNA without an intelligent designer. Since they would have such advantage to survival over multiple generations they would likely be ratcheted into existence even if their origin was random mutation. A nearly trivial example of such a mechanism that I can easily see being implemented by DNA would be to somehow highlight elements of the DNA molecule which are used very frequently and during reproduction concentrate on exchanging information between chromosome pairs at these sites specifically. This would have the cumulative effect of generating offspring with an enlarged range of traits controlled by the genes in those areas of the DNA, which combined with natural selection would have a net effect of relatively rapid, apparently guided evolution. It provides a minimalistic feed-back loop of exactly the sort you mention should apparently be present.
This involves a very big “IF”
Granted, but so does an assumption which posits intelligent control over all aspects of the origins of the universe.
Mike,
I will get to your posts when I can. I am extremely busy. Thanks
Perry
This is a bit ad hominem, and not really intended as a main line of discourse, but I’m curious why you’re so focused on the Judeo-Christian mythology. Why not quote from the Popol Vuh, or the Vedas? If you’re truly coming at this thing from an agnostic point of view, shouldn’t all mythologies be counted equally? If it’s an issue of familiarity I should think you’d like to remedy that by studying up on a few of your other options so that you can make more educated and fine tuned points about what it means to be a creator god.
In a similar vein, you seem to have ignored my comment that humans are inherently overzealous about ascribing agentivity when it’s not present (not that I’ve addressed every point you’ve made, but this one seems particularly important). This is observable even in the language of atheists who deny the possibility of an afterlife as exemplified in an example I recently read quoting such an individual as saying something like: He would KNOW he was DEAD. Given knowledge of this oversensitivity, any theory which posits that some specific aspect of the universe is driven by a supernatural intelligence but other aspects are not, is obviously in need of severe scrutiny.
Know that I’m not coming in saying you’re wrong, I’m just trying to shoot holes in your ideas so that you can improve them. That’s the essence of science. That’s why I say science, math and natural language aren’t designed, they’re discovered. They all three undergo this same type of development. And as such, you can’t insult me or scare me away (not that I think you’d try to) and I won’t be disappointed if and when you prove some of my points wrong.
Mike,
I think in many ways I’m espousing an ‘agnostic’ version of ID, certainly one that can be used by anybody, and I think the world needs a generic argument like that. I think that an ID perspective brings valuable assumptions to the table (that organisms are highly optimized for specific reasons and that having respect for what is there and making favorable assumptions about it accelerates scientific discovery; that assuming randomness and purposelessness only hinders scientific progress – case in point being Junk DNA).
Really really short answer for why I espouse the Judeo-Christian view is: If you assume that “day” is a period of time in Genesis 1 and that the story is written from a terrestrial vantage point, then Genesis 1 matches modern cosmology and the fossil record exactly. The Judeo Christian view is that time and space were created out of nothing at a point in time, that the universe is finite and subject wear and tear. All of this has been shown to be accurate particularly in the last 20 years. See https://evo2.org/hugh-ross-origin-of-the-universe/ including the FAQ at the end for more explanation.
Yes humans are overzealous in ascribing intent when it is not present but I think humans are right about this much more often than we’re wrong. And my argument is extremely simple: In its most basic form, it’s this: The fact that GGG codes for Glycine etc etc is PROOF of intent. We can look at cellular reproduction and ask: Was the DNA decoded properly or not? And get an objective black and white answer. Therefore the most elemental example of teleology is the genetic code. There is no such thing as a code without a purpose.
Perry
How does an account of all flying animals occurring before any land animals fit the fossil record exactly?
If you take the time to work with other myths you’ll see similar patterns. Why not attribute the generally accurate timeline to general human intelligence rather than divine inspiration?
I have some other issues which are more specifically in regard to the recording you have on your site of the physicist claiming the NT is the only traditional work which invokes a beginning of time, but I’d like to hear from you first if that would even be an appropriate tangent to this conversation (I think it can be).
Mike,
Thank you for your patience. I hope to get to all your questions today. People with complex questions outside my field of expertise normally have to wait longer for a reply :^>
You are definitely outside my field of expertise when we’re having a discussion about the appearance of birds in the fossil record vs. other animals and I’ll also confess I’m not extremely interested in all that either.
I do know this: When I go searching for various interpretations of the evolutionary time line, I generally find the following sequence:
* Cellular Life (Invertebrates)
* Fish
* Amphibians
* Reptiles
* Birds
* Mammals
* Primates
The New International Version uses the word “livestock” in its description of land animals, so if we take that to mean mammals – or specifically things like cows – then it’s accurate.
You talk about other myths having similar patterns. I’m not aware of any other creation stories that are anywhere close to this accurate.
Perry
Genesis posits the order (specifically starting from a watery realm, BTW):
a) light (as a contrast to the already existing darkness)
b) sky (as a contrast to the already existing water)
c) land, sea (as a contrast to land) and plants
d) stars, planets, sun and moon
e) swimming and flying animals
f) walking animals (including humans)
Numbering your sequence allows us to compare the lists more directly:
1) cellular life
2) fish
3) amphibians
4) reptiles
5) birds
6) mammals
7) primates
The only relevant elements of Genesis 1 to this discussion (since we’re ignoring plants, the solar system and the rest of the universe) are e and f. Into group e we can fit 2 and 5 and into group f we can fit 3, 4, 6 and 7. That ordering isn’t mutually chronological, either one or the other must be shuffled to get the other in order.
The Popol Vuh presents the following chronology (starting from a dark, watery realm with a plurality of gods, nearly identical to the initial context set up in Genesis 1):
* land
* light
* mountains, valleys and plants
* quadrupeds and birds
* sound
* monkeys
* humans
Aside from being vastly more complete and specific than the Genesis 1 account, it also fits the data we’re currently discussing to a higher degree: plants precede land animals and birds, land animals and birds precede primates, and they precede humans. No mention is made of the place of birds relative to land animals and nothing is said at all of fish, so there is nothing present to use to dispute or affirm the evolutionary time line from this glimpse at the ancient Mayan worldview.
Has this changed your view at all? You certainly can’t go around anymore claiming that the Bible has the most scientifically accurate chronology to the best of your knowledge. Does this then make you reconsider the origins of these sorts of traditions? IMO it should. That in turn should make you question the overall trustworthiness of the Bible, and the axioms which you derive from it. And from there you should begin to notice your personal biases.
Your description of the Popol Vuh sounds compelling until I actually read it:
“There was nothing brought together, nothing which could make a noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble, or could make noise in the sky. There was nothing standing; only the calm water, the placid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed. There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, in the night. Only the creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light. They were hidden under green and blue feathers, and were therefore called Gucumatz.”
“After that they began to talk about the creation and the making of our first mother and father; of yellow corn and of white corn they made their flesh; of cornmeal dough they made the arms and the legs of man. Only dough of corn meal went into the flesh of our first fathers, the four men, who were created.”
Note that the Popol Vuh says sound came after quadrupeds and birds. What’s up with that? This doesn’t appear more complete or more accurate. It’s fanciful.
Genesis 1:1 describes the big bang perfectly, especially if you check the meaning of the words in Hebrew which is one of the reasons the big bang was ridiculed at first.
If we assume day=period of time, animals = livestock and POV=terrestrial, then Genesis 1 describes the sequence of events perfectly.
I don’t see the merits of the Popol Vuh and I don’t see the problem with Genesis.
Your comment on the creation of sound is actually ad hominem to the specific point I was making, which was solely in regard to the chronology of evolution. In this specific the Popol Vuh is absolutely more accurate than Genesis 1. But to address your question I ask you consider what sound is. Like light it is a sensory experience. Neither the Popol Vuh nor the Bible nor any other traditional work is discussing electromagnetic wave-particles (photons) when discussing light, they are discussing the human experience of vision. Similarly the Popol Vuh isn’t discussing sound waves when it discusses sound, rather it is commenting on the experience of sound. As such, sound can only occur after animals are created, as previously there is nothing to experience it.
Also, when I say that the Popol Vuh is a more complete account of creation than Genesis 1 what I mean is that the entire Popol Vuh itself is devoted to explaining creation events, whereas only a minute fraction of the Bible deals with creation. Furthermore, the Bible has two conflicting accounts of creation, both obviously truncated from grander traditions and brought together for reasons unknown. The Popol Vuh bears no such scars.
My question to you regarding the simultaneous appearance of birds of fish in Genesis 1 still stands. If you can scoff at the appearance of sound after the appearance of animals in the Popol Vuh as fanciful then I absolutely expect you to have an airtight explanation for this discrepancy in your holy text with respect to science, and it should be one which you are able to dispense at a moment’s notice. Neither of these conditions appear to be met by your worldview, and as such your argument is in no way remotely compelling at this time. Further, you should note that my argument against the Bible is essentially that it’s fanciful, as such I require you to substantiate fully any argument in support of its veracity. You have not done this to any reasonable degree as of yet.
Agreed on your first paragraph.
You can judge my interpretation of the Bible as fanciful if you wish. But I’ve laid my interpretive filters on the table:
1. The story is told from a terrestrial point of view
2. Day is a long period of time
3. Animals are livestock
4. Some figurative language is used, for example “God formed Adam from the dust of the ground.” Well, we are made of dirt, are we not? Or God made Eve from Adam’s side, some texts say rib. I take that to be figurative language. Others would scorch me for saying that.
Them are my assumptions. They are simple and they are few. If I apply them to Genesis 1 it matches modern science. Right down to Genesis 1:1 (and other passages) asserting that time itself has a beginning.
If someone has an equally coherent interpretation of the Popol Vuh I’m open to hearing it.
How can you possibly argue that this very sentence, ‘I don’t see the merits of the Popol Vuh and I don’t see the problem with Genesis,’ doesn’t betray the character and depth of your bias? Particularly since I’ve pointed out inconsistencies that you’ve utterly failed to address at all other than to dismiss them out of hand as not being of interest to you personally. I’ll say it again. If you are making the sorts of arguments that you are making then it is your responsibility to be interested. If you don’t take up that responsibility then you really don’t have ground to stand on.
I’m now extremely curious what your take on the spread of Christianity through the Americas is. In your opinion, why did Christianity more or less win out over indigenous philosophies throughout the Americas? Also, how thoroughly do you believe its invasion was? That is, how completely do you think indigenous worldviews were supplanted by a Christian one?
Mike,
We can ask an even larger question. Why has Christianity prevailed over almost ALL ancient religions?
Why is the Jewish culture the ONLY intact civilization after 4000 years – with the same beliefs, traditions, holidays and even language? It has no equal.
Why are Jewish people 50X more likely to be successful in any intellectual profession (science, politics, law, academia) than the average citizen in the world?
I often ask people:
“Name 5 protestant Christian countries that have rampant poverty, illiteracy and human rights abuses.”
And:
“Name 5 Buddhist countries… or 5 Hindu countries… or 5 Muslim countries… or 5 Atheist countries… that do NOT have rampant poverty, illiteracy and human rights abuses.”
I don’t know a great deal about how thorough the “Christian invasion” was. I would only suggest that belief systems prevail because they work.
Now you may object that Christianity was won by the sword and this was wrong. I agree. Jesus never told anybody to do that, as most people well know. But in any case you are making a moral statement in which we implicitly agree that people should be allowed to make their own choices and not forced to believe one thing or the other. Where does such a moral value come from?
Why are you allowed to make those assumptions when you attack others for making equally baseless ones? I know this view of the Biblical account of creation is not unique to you, not your brainchild, and I am thus puzzled as to why you accept it so readily in a manner so contrary to the scientific method and to the core of your argument against opposing accounts. You claim to employ a scientifically based reasoning system but from what I’ve observed I honestly don’t see it manifest in any of your oft repeated arguments. You repeatedly criticize others for making a specific error but then you turn around and make precisely the same mistake whilst claiming that your argument remains unchallenged simply b/c you’re not willing or able to bother with stepping outside your personal philosophical bubble for even a fraction of a second. That is by definition absolutely the most unscientific behaviour anyone could possibly express. It is also where the circularity of your logic arises. Until you’re able to perceive other traditions as potentially equally valid as your Genesis account your logic will always be circular. You have trapped yourself in a self fulfilling infinite loop by not being able to understand anyone’s thoughts but your own.
Mike, if you want to make a full-tilt case for the Popol Vuh being a historically accurate account of evolution you are welcome to do so.
‘We can ask an even larger question. Why has Christianity prevailed over almost ALL ancient religions?’
All in all, it really hasn’t. The Christian invasion into indigenous cultures was quite incomplete all over the world. Typically it was only embraced as much as it was simply b/c it is an incomplete worldview, and as such it is capable of being incorporated rather elegantly into complete ones w/o genuinely disturbing them too terribly from the point of view of the average practitioner. Those who really took issue with Christianity were aboriginal religious leaders who clearly saw all the conflicting issues between the two choices.
‘Why is the Jewish culture the ONLY intact civilization after 4000 years – with the same beliefs, traditions, holidays and even language? It has no equal.’
You might want to check into your history. Hebrew had been relegated to a liturgical language among the wealthier sects of Judaism well before the time of Christ. The traditional Jewish culture by this time had also been quite disturbed by many wars and technological innovations since its conception. After the fall of the second temple the diaspora began and Jewish culture as a whole was generally lost. Hebrew really only survived among this community as a liturgical language and the culture continued to change drastically under the influence of the European Middle Ages. Holiday dates, traditions and beliefs were all dramatically effected by these changes in environment.
‘Why are Jewish people 50X more likely to be successful in any intellectual profession (science, politics, law, academia) than the average citizen in the world?’
You’re referencing stats for Ashkenazi Jews exclusively, no other Jewish lineage has this advantage and most of those lineages have a more traditional lifestyle than Ashkenazim. In fact, those groups which have the least modern lifestyles are by far the most impoverished and are not well accepted by the State of Israel as being satisfactorily Jewish.
‘I often ask people:
“Name 5 protestant Christian countries that have rampant poverty, illiteracy and human rights abuses.”
And:
“Name 5 Buddhist countries… or 5 Hindu countries… or 5 Muslim countries… or 5 Atheist countries… that do NOT have rampant poverty, illiteracy and human rights abuses.”’
Remove your peculiar condition of protestantism and I’m willing to play along. Your logic seems again geared to ignore facts that don’t support you, since before you were talking about the continuity of Judaism and Christianity but are here referencing only the most divergent sects of Christianity. For your logic to hold shouldn’t you focus on the most conservative sects or on all sects as a whole?
‘I don’t know a great deal about how thorough the “Christian invasion” was. I would only suggest that belief systems prevail because they work.’
Logical suggestion, but it’s not quite accurate.
‘Now you may object that Christianity was won by the sword and this was wrong. I agree. Jesus never told anybody to do that, as most people well know.’
Actually that’s not my argument. Christianity was not won by the sword. Generally aboriginal warriors were in a superior tactical and technological position than invading Christian warriors were. Consider the Aztec, for instance, their stone age atlatl were powerful enough to pierce Spanish armour, a feat that Spanish weapons could not replicate at the time, and the points on the darts were barbed, requiring extraction through the other side of the body. This invariably caused great physiological trauma to victims and often death. What the Spaniards had on their side was disease. A weapon they didn’t even know they possessed. Now imagine the scene, the Aztecs are winning the tactical war hands down but suddenly their entire army falls ill, unable to fight the Conquistadores are now guaranteed victory even though only a small number remain. If that doesn’t look like the hand of G-d I don’t know what would. Scenarios like that are the real reason Christianity spread as far as it did. It had nothing to do with the functionality of the system, but with random chance. If it had been the Chinese who were seeking a world empire first then Chinese religion philosophies would abound around the globe as they introduced the same diseases into their new territories.
‘But in any case you are making a moral statement in which we implicitly agree that people should be allowed to make their own choices and not forced to believe one thing or the other. Where does such a moral value come from?’
I think that specific moral value comes from the independent will of every human being. When such independent individuals get together in societies they invariably clash and the only way to resolve that conflict is to establish a cultural imperative to respect individuality as far as can be done reasonably while maintaining the integrity of the culture and the society.
You said, ‘You are definitely outside my field of expertise when we’re having a discussion about the appearance of birds in the fossil record vs. other animals and I’ll also confess I’m not extremely interested in all that either.’ But since you also made this assertion, ‘…then Genesis 1 matches modern cosmology and the fossil record exactly.’ It seems like interested or not it’s your responsibility to make sure what you’re saying is consistent. In this instance it very frankly isn’t.
You also say, ‘You talk about other myths having similar patterns. I’m not aware of any other creation stories that are anywhere close to this accurate.’ In my experience, which isn’t too terribly extensive but is of a respectable depth and breadth, patterning creation of the cosmos, world, plants, animals and humans this way is actually nearly universal in thoroughly documented traditions. It appears in Polynesia, throughout the Americas, in Australia, Africa and throughout Europe and Asia. I’m not certain, but I suspect that the organization is at least partially based on the animacy hierarchy employed by the authors’ language. This would yield a self reinforcing fundamental philosophy which appears usefully in the structure of the language and descriptively in the religious tradition. This pairing is often noted, particularly in religions which associate with languages with large, complex animacy hierarchies like Navajo. The reason that creation myths would progress so frequently in this basic pattern then would be to explain the animacy hierarchy, since the cosmos and the world don’t really do anything they come first, plants, wind, mountains and water do a few things so they come next, animals do yet more so they’re next and humans can do almost anything so they’re last in a progression of agentivity from least to most, only the eternal creator (who is required logically) is more agentive than humans, but since they are necessarily the origin of creation they must come first, with each subsequent creation having ever more refined and extended abilities. The relationship this has to language is that there are paradigms of verbal morphology in all languages which map to these levels (not necessarily the exact division I’m using for illustration, but this one is a good representative of the general idea) in the animacy hierarchy. All languages have intransitive verbs (to run) and transitive verbs (to enjoy) the way this contrast is handled by a language is related to the language’s animacy hierarchy, all languages have experiential verbs (to see) and agentive verbs (to watch) this contrast is also related to animacy, as more animate subjects can be more agentive. Plants can’t usually be agentive, neither can rocks or the moon, but animals can, similarly animals can’t speak or make tools or plant crops and domesticate other animals to do useful work, but humans can. So I suspect that the language ability plays a fairly important role in developing our worldviews as it forces us to constantly be conscious of certain aspects of the natural world that we might otherwise have little occasion to contemplate, one of those aspects is probably degrees of animacy and agentivity. It seems to me that positing a creator god might actually be a result of this phenomenon. To further explore this possibility consider the distribution of atheists relative to theists. Atheists only occur in contrast to theists, never in total isolation from them. You don’t see long isolated island dwellers lacking theistic religions anywhere in the world. You also don’t see long isolated island dwellers lacking languages, and in their languages you always find animacy hierarchies which bear a resemblance to the organizational structure of their creation myths. Isolate a community for a long time and apparently they will end up with a language and a theistic religion. It is only in opposition to theism that animacy hierarchies can be turned to other purposes. And by curious coincidence, animacy hierarchies always map relatively accurately to evolutionary progression from least agentive to most.
Take another look at Genesis 1. This time, instead of trying to anachronistically map it to modern cosmology try fitting it into a traditional culture with an oral history and a time-keeping system built around lunar cycles. What purpose would a 7 day week serve such a community? Is it purely coincidence that 7 days is the integer component of the moon’s synodic period (~29.53 days) divided by four? Is it purely coincidence that the pattern, ‘and-[predicate] G-d’ appears 29 times in Genesis 1? Is it purely coincidence that if you move Genesis 1:29 – 31 from its current position into a position between Genesis 1:13 and 1:14 (a position which is just as logical as its current one, since it is merely commentary which can either prepose or postpose it’s argument) that you get a perfect system of 4 sets of ‘and-[predicate] G-d’ groups (3 with 7 occurrences, 1 with 8) which are semantically linked and which also always include two creation events (group 1: day 1 + day 2, group 2: day 3 + Genesis 2:29 – 31, group 3: day 4 + day 5, group 4: day 6 minus Genesis 2:29 – 31)?
It’s also significant that you’re entirely ignoring Genesis 2, which uses a totally different chronology for the creation of life, starting rather than ending, with humans.
What’s your position on Genesis 2?
It’s not strictly chronological the way Genesis 1 is. In my view the most important statement in that chapter is that God breathes his spirit into man and man becomes a living being, made in God’s image.
Let’s tackle more specifically now the question of intelligent willful activities of human beings being the primary forces driving the structure, mutation and propagation of language. First let’s take a look at structure, by this I mean dominantly syntax but phonology and semantics should probably be included as well. It’s interesting to note that all the languages that have ever been studied and documented share very deep commonalities, so deep in fact that once a person has worked with just a handful of typologically distinct languages in any detail they become almost magically capable of teasing out the secrets of virtually any other language they encounter. And, it also appears to be the case that for the most part anything you can say in one language you can also say in any other language. These two points are critical, as combined they begin to reveal the actual shallowness of the differences between languages and the incredible depth of the similarities. These are namely that syntactic patterns emerge in the communication systems of humans wherever they are, these syntactic patterns govern a communication system that is cognitively inflexible (difficult, if not impossible, to actually tinker with on purpose in such a way that would render a conversation in one language impossible to translate into another) and they are actually limited in their variety, that is to say some possible patterns almost never occur despite the readily observable fact that these patterns are no less complicated (empirically) to disentangle. What this suggests is that syntax itself is actually a genetically governed behaviour in humans, not an intellectual pastime or rich man’s luxury, and in fact it is employed by speakers subconsciously, on a level where intelligence is an extremely slippery subject. Similarly, the rules that govern phonology are learned and employed subconsciously and are no less vexing in their complexity, regularity and beauty than syntax is.
On to mutation… Languages seem to change over time in rather regular, almost predictable ways. It is extremely common for plosive and fricative sounds at the ends of words (b, p, v, f, d, t, z, s, g, k, etc.) to all become voiceless (b -> p, v -> f, d -> t, z -> s, g -> k, etc.) and once this has set in it also common to see this pattern spread to all syllable endings within a relatively short time (maybe a generation or two, maybe a little longer). Another, related phenomenon that is extremely common is the reduction of these coda consonants to just nasals (m, n, ng) and alveolars (d, t, z, s). It would not be reasonable to argue that this pattern is intelligently controlled, for one thing it often occurs over several generations with older generations typically discouraging the shift, for another it is impossibly common cross-linguistically, and not to mention, it can actually cause a reduction in expression of distinctions. I’m much less familiar with the paradigms common to syntactic change, but I do know that the two basic subject initial word orders (SVO – I see you- and SOV -I you see) are by far the most common you’ll encounter in the world’s languages and they actually very regularly, spontaneously arise (one or the other) in creoles (quite regardless of the syntax of the parents languages) and occur in instances of language genesis (I’m pretty certain Nicaraguan Sign Language tends to be subject initial, for instance). If syntax were intelligently designed you would expect to see more variety, since no one ordering of constituents is inherently superior over another on a intellectual level. That this isn’t the case suggests that syntax is driven by an innate mechanism in humans and is for the most part not subject to intellectual concerns.
Now for propagation. It has been noted many times that everywhere in the world that there are human populations, every single person with sound senses and sound mind is capable and indeed quite adept at speaking. There is no requirement that language be taught to children in a formal way for them to learn it, there is actually no requirement that the models of the language give young children many examples of grammatical speech at all. Exposure alone seems to be more than sufficient for children to reconstruct a language and employ it themselves. Of course, they will think about the language and work out many problems logically, but they are really working out the semantics, the core, defining components of human language, syntax, morphology and phonology, they will acquire largely without thinking about it. In fact, pointing out errors to very young children in these three categories will have no effect on them, at best they’ll simply repeat what they said originally, at worst they’ll grow frustrated and stop the discourse right there. The only thing you can actually teach young children is semantics, and even here the amount which is teachable is quite limited.
Do you now see the circularity in your argument? You say:
1. DNA is a code
2. All codes we know the origin of are designed.
3. Therefore we have 100% inference to the pattern in DNA being designed and 0% inference to any other conclusion.
But 2 is observably false, as I knew coming in to the discussion. Thus I assume you’re falling back on an assumption which you later actually demonstrated you make in the course of speaking with me, that is, the naturalness of a cause is inherited by the effect. From this the circularity becomes apparent:
1. DNA is a code.
2. All codes we know the origin of are designed iff (if and only if) DNA is designed b/c iff DNA is designed we can say that natural language is designed b/c the unnaturalness resulting from ID is inherited by its effects.
3. Therefore we have 100% inference to the pattern in DNA being designed and 0% inference to any other conclusion, unless DNA is not designed.
4. Naturalness of cause is not inherited by its effect, if this were the case then we wouldn’t be able to call much of anything in the natural world natural b/c any human induced effect is equivalent in its artificiality to the effects caused by any other animal, particularly if we accept ID.
5. Thus 2 yields a false result for the universality of intelligent origin of codes with known origin, thus 3 yields a false result for the intelligent origin of DNA.
I rather suspect that’s checkmate, but I look forward to a reply which might prove me wrong.
Mike,
I *think* you are arguing that natural language is not really designed, it’s really more like hard-wired into humans, because of the similarities between languages etc. Which is sort of like saying English and Chinese are really derivatives of DNA. Which is, in a sense true.
But you are failing to isolate any actual instance of the origin of a code. Morse code: A – dot dash. B – dash dot dot dot. ASCII: A – 1000001, B – 1000010.
You can’t derive this from DNA and you can’t derive it from the laws of physics. Someone made a conscious choice to establish these relationships. In the case of ASCII it’s hard wired into your keyboard for example.
DNA: GGG and GGA = Glycine and so on. A mapping between symbol and referent. This is an encoding/decoding system and all encoding/decoding systems we know the origin of are designed.
Your #2 is contingent on somehow knowing whether DNA is designed or not. But you do not know the origin of DNA in advance. Your argument is therefore circular. Mine is not. Mine starts with an open question, it observes that codes like ASCII and TCP/IP are designed and concludes that since DNA is like ASCII and TCP/IP then DNA is designed. My argument is linear.
Perry
Was I not clear? This argument is an expansion of your argument which takes into account more of the real world. Thus demonstrating the circularity of your argument, which assumes that DNA is intelligently designed and thus circumvents 4 and 5.
Notice that if DNA is designed the argument becomes identical to yours, and if we take an agnostic view of the origin of DNA the argument goes nowhere, which is what I was attempting to comment on initially. The problem with most arguments that you encounter (at least, if those I’ve seen are a good representative cross section) is that they assume DNA is not designed, which also yields a problematic solution that is more axiomatic than scientific.
Basically, your argument is only linear because it is incomplete.
Which is also the case with the arguments of the majority of your ideological opponents.
Mike,
You are not being clear. I am not clear on what grounds you say that human language is not designed. I asked you, how did the term “PDA” come to stand for “Personal Digital Assistant”? What natural, unintelligent process caused this?
I am also not clear on where my argument is circular. But I don’t think you can be clear on my argument if you think that there’s a whole bunch of codes out there that are not designed. I suspect this is where the confusion is arising.
Every file format on your computer – .doc, .jpg, .pdf, .html, .dll is designed, not naturally occurring and none can be derived from the laws of physics.
Perry
Computer file formats, portmanteaus and acronyms don’t carry much weight in my opinion b/c any one of them could fail to exist and the overall system of which they are a part would not fail. Before pdf existed computers functioned just fine, English was no less English before the introduction of ‘PDA’ or ‘Blog’ into some of its dialects. The forces that created English, as a set of syntactic, morphological and phonetic rules on the other hand cannot be separated from English, just as the interactions of logic gates in a computer processor cannot be separated from the actual behaviour of a computer (if they could then there would be no reason to have more than one type of computer). When you consider language you only see ‘words’, when I consider language I see so much more than that it becomes obvious that language is well beyond the capacity of anyone to intelligently manipulate in a significant way. I also see the relationship between the innate human capacity for language and the other types of codes which you’re talking about, and I strongly question the validity of claiming that that relationship can be ignored to the point that ‘intelligence’ is really such a dominant factor in their origins as you believe it to be.
Getting to your question about ‘PDA’ specifically, what I’ve been saying about language all along implies the solution. Basically, since language is an innate behaviour in humans there is a natural tendency for significant elements of the social consciousness to manifest in language. This step explains the phrase, ‘Personal Digital Assistant,’ as this noun-phrase is the name given a specific consumer electronic technology which developed much later than the basic lexicon. Note that this name is not at all compact, but is in fact a phrase, which is a direct consequence of the fact that the technology was invented recently, as the only other alternative is to make up a name, but this risks unfavourable judgement by the community, which is rather dangerous for a profit-seeking corporation, particularly in a field so fiercely competitive as consumer electronics. However, the phrase is also rather inelegant and unwieldy, as one of the most universal philosophical elements of language is a preference for brevity. As Modern English, and particularly the dialects spoken by the users of this technology, is a literary language, with a rather vast and rich history of writing, and so it becomes fairly natural for phrase names like this to be abbreviated by means of initializing the words in the phrase into a much more manageable noun, ‘PDA’. So while intelligent processes are undeniably present they’re not actually measurably relevant, b/c if this choice wasn’t made then some other choice would have been because of the nature of the referent, and that choice would very likely also be an abbreviated form of a longer, meaningful phrase. Popular forms of this sort of abbreviation include portmanteaus and acronyms (which also come in forms accessible to languages w/o a written form -such as using only the first syllable of a string of words, or the first consonant sounds regularly paired with a dummy vowel-). So if UG itself is innate and natural then I find it difficult to say that these mechanisms are not innate and natural, and as this is an effective account of the generative, infant stages of all man-made codes I see the question as quite fully addressed without any satisfactory rebuttal so far provided or possible, hence -Checkmate-
Mike,
What you just finished saying was “OK, PDA is an abbreviation for Personal Digital Assistant which is unwieldy and for companies to compete they had to come up with an easier term and if they didn’t someone else would have prevailed in the marketplace with some other acronym.” But you have not removed intelligence from the equation. Even the profit motive itself is driven by intelligence.
You’re arguing from necessity, but your necessity always requires the action of intelligent agents.
You didn’t bother to mention that the term “Personal Digital Assistant” was also a specific choice of words, when someone could just have well called it a “Micro Scheduling Device” and abbreviated it MSD. The fact that other choices are possible does not negate the fact that a unique choice was in fact made and if we talked to the people who were in the industry at the time we could probably find out who coined the term and when. To say that this was not an act of intelligence is to insult that person.
You are arguing that all this stuff is innate and derivable from universal laws but even your own explanation is your specific choice.
And then you say “checkmate” at the end of your explanation. This just baffles me.
The mechanism which yielded ‘PDA’ works regardless of the words that are being initialized. The word choice is irrelevant, thus the intelligent processes behind the word choice are also irrelevant. Creating acronyms is also not specifically an intelligent process since it’s a predictable one-to-one mapping based on the linguistic culture, very much like the ASCII mapping which simply pairs two incremental binary sequences to the majuscule and miniscule forms of the English alphabet. My point about ASCII was that it is largely predictable given the ordering of the English alphabet and Arabic numerals, so it’s not really so intelligent as it is purely functional.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily saying that everything we’re discussing is predictably derivable from universal laws, I’m just pointing out that most of it almost certainly is at one level or another, and for me that introduces sufficient reasonable doubt to mistrust your analysis.
Mike,
I make my living as a marketer and I can state unequivocally that the word choice “PDA” is not irrelevant. In fact the word choices are critical. I’ve done experiments where people change one word or a URL in a Google ad and the response changes 300%. When people test such things, the test variables are specific choices. The words you used in the above blog post were your choices. UG’s did not dictate those choices to you. There are all kinds of ways you could have said what you meant and you chose to say what we see here.
Mike, please show me one example of a computer code that exists without conscious beings making some kind of choice.
By saying that ASCII is predictable you’re trivializing the entire ASCII code and ignoring the fact that there are other codes that perform essentially the same function which employ vastly different choices.
Convince me that I’m not handling the actual mechanisms behind the origins of natural languages. I’m giving you an outline of the restrictions put upon language, which constrain it so tightly that 1) the actual interpretation level is largely defined and 2) it must occur in any given human society. The only component of language which can be said to be created is a level which is of trivial importance, because it is incapable of fully preventing translation. While this may seem to toss out the code level of language entirely I feel it actually does the exact opposite by illuminating what is and is not important about it, as it demonstrates that the particular details of any one language’s lexicon do not define the language’s expressive capacity, which in turn means that the encoding/decoding process is not actually contingent upon the tangible ‘code’ (the bits you can document in a dictionary or grammar) but is a self sustaining mechanism not bounded by the ‘code’ itself. This simultaneously explains the origins of the code level, it’s ability to be nearly 100% arbitrary in many respects and demonstrates it’s irrelevance to the actual issue at hand, namely, that languages are not intelligently designed in any substantial way or at any level which actually effects the expressive capacity of a language. This in turn undermines any attempt at claiming that intelligent design is either required or really even present in the development of any other encoding system. Rather, it seems to me that the examples you bring up of codes are simply tiny, arbitrarily standardized subsets of language which were randomly discovered (as opposed to invented, because they are subsets of an existing natural phenomenon… claiming the geometry of ASCII to be an invention is akin to claiming that the relationship between electricity and magnetism is an invention) to have useful characteristics and structure simple enough to work with more or less logically and coherently without the arisal of contradictions of the sort which plague natural language based attempts at communication.
The elements present in systems which we say we intelligently design simply aren’t present in natural systems like natural language. To argue otherwise requires redefining intelligence in such a way that no human is capable of it, which in turn makes all artificial codes the result of something other than intelligent design, which destroys your initial argument from a totally different direction.
If you’re still not convinced then consider this:
If language is intelligently designed, rather than naturally occurring then shouldn’t it behave like other intelligently designed systems?
Mathematics is an intelligently designed system that is often (even unknowingly) compared to natural language and apparently quite analogous in very many ways. Both use syntax to organize nouns and verbs which are manipulated into a simplified form (aka meaning). But there is a drastic flaw with this comparison. Mathematics is not a system that humans can innately handle, and it very quickly escalates into structures complex enough that nobody can even begin to work with them. Natural languages really don’t experience this and yet they’re capable of complexity that we can’t begin to analyze mathematically, b/c we honestly don’t have a clue what we even need to analyze. In contrast, mathematics is nearly trivial to analyze, even insane equations are comparatively elementary in this regard. Yet, somehow, 3 year old children are always fully capable of utilizing their native language quite fully and at great length, describing things in impeccable detail and determining whether or not a totally new verb should be intransitive or transitive and what sort of morphological changes it should be subject given all sorts of situations, yet they are quite unable to perform even some of the most basic mathematical operations, such as multiplication, division or even repeated incrementation by any interval other than one. Further, this disparity is not a mere result of biased input, but it appears to genuinely be of an innate nature.
Mike,
You can say that language is innate, which is another way of saying it’s just hard coded into DNA.
You can even say, if you wish, that when you run a red light it’s not you who consciously made that choice but that you were a product of your genes and your environment and you really had no choice in the matter.
And the policeman will reply that he has no choice but to issue you a ticket.
If you run a red light and kill a 7 year old girl you can say that your decision was hard-wired but that is no consolation to her mother and it won’t keep you out of jail. And when you’re in jail you’ll know that it was your choice to run the red light.
No matter how you argue this, choice is what finally determines what is said by a person and what they write on a piece of paper and what language they use to do it. There is no such thing as a language that exists independently of conscious agents and choices.
Not exactly. English is not innate, neither is Yiddish or Tamil. But the way we use negation is, the way we distinguish between statements and questions is, etc. That’s nowhere near as powerful as the innateness you’re claiming I attribute to linguistic mechanisms. Of course choice is a relevant component at some levels, but my point is that at others it really isn’t, and the origin of language is of this second sort as far as anyone can tell (and this is very critically based on scientific analysis of languages which were actually observed to have spontaneously arisen, such as Nicaraguan Sign Language).
Mike,
If choice is relevant at some levels, then I have sufficiently made my point. None of these things exist without someone making a conscious choice somewhere in the chain of events.
Mike,
Please forgive me and correct me if I am misunderstanding you; here’s what I think you are saying.
You’re saying that human languages of whatever variety occur within a very narrow range of patterns and follow very similar trends, to the extent that one can argue that conscious individuals have very little choice in deciding what those languages consist of. And that we can quibble about the details of those languages but the broad patterns never change. So you are saying that language isn’t really designed, it’s closer to hard-coded into human beings. We have choices about the fine details but the larger patterns are locked in. Language is not so much created as it is discovered.
That’s what I think you’re saying.
I’m not sure I have any huge disagreement with that and it’s surely a helpful paradigm when trying to see the whole of human language within one model.
But there are some basic things I’d like to point out:
Language uses symbols.
Symbols exist in the conscious world. They do not exist in the purely material world. Outside the world of living things there are NO symbolic relationships.
Symbolic relationships are arbitrary. Yes, if we are going to use symbols at all there are certain ways of using those symbols that are inevitable. But the details are necessary, not optional, and at the detail level a CHOICE is in fact made. In ASCII, A is 1000001. It could just as well been 0111110. But the CHOICE was made and AGREEMENT is reached to use that table. ASCII is not possible and did not exist prior to that CHOICE being made.
This is NOT like the discovery of electricity and magnetism because the relationship between E and B in physics is fixed, not arbitrary.
DNA similarly reflects a very specific CHOICE. GGG = Glycine. Could have been done some other way, and ostensibly it would have HAD to be done in SOME way. But it was done in a very specific way, just like ASCII.
Secondly, the creation all languages require the involvement of conscious beings. There are no known exceptions to this. You cannot derive any specific language from a general principle of linguistics without first making a choice. And you cannot derive the principles of linguistics from the laws of physics.
Perry
Whether ASCII was discovered or designed is actually contingent on your point of view. It is perfectly valid to view the process of developing an encoding like ASCII as the winnowing of a block of logical space, in which case saying it’s discovered is more appropriate than saying it’s designed. This is in fact much more akin to the process of invention that I use and that I’ve heard artists and scientists alike describe using in their pursuits than anything which could be more appropriately termed ‘intelligent design’.
It’s important to keep in mind however that not all intelligent, apparently conscious willful beings are capable of producing language or codes, only humans are. So intelligence, consciousness and willful intent are not sufficient conditions for language. As such you are at no less of a loss to fully explain encoding mechanisms than anyone else by merely positing a supernatural intelligence. More must be present than simply that, and shaping that ‘more’ in the image of man simply out of necessity is difficult to view as an objective move. Much more difficult in fact than explaining the human language instinct as a naturally occurring mechanism which is in virtually all ways analogous to other instincts found in both humans and other species. This is a critical point in my opinion.
Mike,
You are welcome to see the developing of an encoding like DNA as a winnowing of a block of logical space, and as a discovery rather than a design. I don’t really agree with you on this but I’m certainly willing to go along with it for the sake of discussion.
Please show me an example of this kind of winnowing being done by anything other than a conscious intelligent being.
I have never seen inert matter do this kind of winnowing. I have never seen inert matter make scientific discoveries, or create art either.
You do understand the irony of your behaviour, right? In deliberately filtering out comments that undermine your viewpoint you demonstrate what so many people have been trying to tell you for so long, that the information content of a structure is not solely the subject of entropy, but is ratcheted along, forced into peculiar patterns… and organized. In failing to let through my comments, which I can only assume you realize completely destroy your claim that DNA can be scientifically proven to be intelligently designed, you prove that reliance on randomness is sufficient for an ordered system to arise. You are growing yourself a product of Darwinian Evolution right here on your website, an organized system built upon filtering randomness. No rhetoric can negate that, and I know you know that. Seriously, Man, I’m Jewish. I chose Judaism for G-d… and NOBODY chooses Judaism for G-d! I don’t remotely doubt that G-d exists, but faking proofs of his existence is bull, and so is bullying people who see through them. Feel free to do what you like with this post, but at least hear what I’m saying and know that I’m saying it not as your enemy but as your friend and brother.
Shalom
Mike,
I apologize for letting this go 2 weeks. Punishing work schedule and 200+ comments stacked up here.
Let’s point out that all of the comments on this site are intelligently designed, not randomly created. Supposing I were doing some form of “natural selection” this whole process would still be an example of ID not Darwinian evolution. Because Darwinism assumes that randomness drives the mutations. But all evolution that we experience on a daily basis (evolution of language or ipods or political ideas or jazz) is driven by intelligence not randomness.
Perry
The comments don’t need to be randomly created since in as much as their appearance and content cannot be foreseen they are effectively random in non-negligible ways. It seems like discussing what exactly ‘random’ means may be important to the future of this debate. The definition I use is more or less as follows:
Something which can be said to be random is anything which cannot be fully predicted to occur at a point in space-time given available information. As far as science is concerned these events are still always triggered and predictable if every aspect of the universe could be known, but it’s demonstrably the case that such knowledge is impossible to acquire from within the universe. Thus, even intelligently designed elements are in one sense or another always random.
I’ll use the dictionary definition:
Having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective: random movements. See synonyms at chance.
So anything I do without an objective is random? Even if I as an intelligent human being do it?
I do not agree with the statement “anything I do without an objective is random.” I’m not sure a human being can do anything without some kind of objective, however trivial.
Your counter-argument is not working within the axiomatic framework of the question.
Doesn’t that imply a form of fatalism? If nothing can be done without an objective then where do objectives come from? It seems yours is a purely causal account, which in turn negates the option of choice. The significance of this being that choice has been your crutch all throughout this discussion.
“If nothing can be done without an objective then where do objectives come from?”
Notice how similar this is to saying:
“The principle of biogenesis says that all living things come from living things. If nothing can be born without living things then where did living things come from?”
Note that the principle of biogenesis is 100% scientific and derived from observation.
The notion of abiogenesis is not scientific at all, because it hasn’t been observed. However we know that somewhere there had to be a first living thing.
All living things require codes and all codes begin with objectives. Inert matter doesn’t have objectives. Conscious beings do.
Everything we’re talking about reinforces the chasm between matter and consciousness.
I’m curious to know how close my interpretation of what you’re saying is to your actual worldview. Please comment:
1) eternal uncaused G-d causes causality
2) within causality G-d magically causes the universe
3) at a random point in time G-d magically causes reproductively capable life
4) the reproductive mechanism is subject to massive failure and regular intervals of change but there is still somehow a final intent which is us
5) G-d magically records for us a single, unique account of his creation and gives it exclusively to a band of shepherds in the middle of nowhere, no other traditional accounts of creation are even worth considering b/c they are obviously nothing more than fanciful bed time stories
Assuming this is a reasonable breakdown of what you’re saying I take new issue with several points, the most critical being the need to introduce magic at so many steps that it becomes obvious we’re not talking about science here at all but in fact, magic and fanciful ideas. I’d also like to reiterate that as 4) demonstrates, you’ve yet to provide any sort of convincing argument for the intent aspect of genetic evolution. Of course a given strand of DNA intends to code for specific amino acids, but what I’m skeptical about is the long term intent you so strongly imply, the intent of creating humans several billion years into the evolutionary process. This is what I was earlier discussing in regard to Microsoft and programming and language… there are no long term intents there. Nobody sat down at the planning stages of Windows 3.0 and mapped out the path to Windows 7, nobody intelligently controlled the evolution of Latin into Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian. There is no inference whatsoever to long term intents like these and I think you’ve been conflating my argument against ID as an argument against short term intent when it has always been in fact an argument against long term intent.
There’s more, but I have to run now. Peace.
Mike,
You use the word “magic” in a pejorative way but you have not stepped forward and offered any explanations of your own. Every explanation that I’ve ever seen involves some kind of magic. I’m being straight about it. Most others aren’t.
Before I go into this I would like to once again ask you what is your belief about the origin of life? What is the origin of UG’s? Can you demonstrate a physico-chemical process that creates universal grammars?
On this website I deal with two “magical” events: The Big Bang and the Origin of Life. I assert that both of these are singularity events.
The Big Bang rate of expansion is tuned to at least 120 decimal places of precision, just for stars to even form.
The smallest known microorganism has 0.5 megabytes of highly precise instructions and there is no known simpler self-replicating machine. The 2nd singularity is the introduction of not only nanomachines but Universal Grammars. Information is not a property of matter and energy. It’s a product of consciousness.
I have proposed both a “Strong Anthropic” and a “Weak Anthropic” genomic equivalent of the Anthropic Principle. http://evo2.org/testable-hypothesis-id-4/ The former has humans as a distinct goal; the latter envisions evolution as finding its own way as species try to evolve.
So what’s the objective behind DNA? If random mutation never results in useful information then what’s the objective of our intelligent designer in modifying bacteria into anti-biotic resistant strains? Why is HIV constantly changing its genetic profile and what’s the deal with influenza developing into new, deadly strains every now and then? If the objective is merely survival then Darwinian mechanisms suffice.
Mike,
I answer this question in a conversation with Bill Morrison: http://evo2.org/prove-god-exists/comment-page-6/#comment-1502 – follow the thread as it goes down, I think I addressed that here.
Perry
So I spent some of my free time today doing some statistical analysis of some actual RNA. In my opinion the results speak rather strongly in opposition to your hypothesis:
working with the E. coli O175:H7 plasmid pO157:
nucleotide breakdown:
total = 92077 bases
A = 24693 (26.8%)
T = 23523 (25.5%)
C = 20133 (21.9%)
G = 23728 (25.8%)
At first glance this looks like a non-random distribution, since adenine is dominating the sequence with 26.8% of the positions, but if you do a statistical analysis on the standard genetic code to get the percentages of relevance each nucleobase has in terms of actually carrying information you get a remarkably similar breakdown:
s = A or G (heavy)
z = T or C (light)
x = any nucleobase (fourfold degenerate location)
TTz – phenylalanine
TTs / CTx – leucine
ATz / ATA – isoleucine
ATG – methionine / start
GTx – valine
TCx / AGz – serine
CCx – proline
ACx – threonine
GCx – alanine
TAz – tyrosine
TAs / TGA – stop
CAz – histidine
CAs – glutamine
AAz – asparagine
AAs – lysine
GAz – aspartic acid
GAs – glutamic acid
TGz – cysteine
TGG – tryptophan
CGx / AGs – arginine
GGx – glycine
Analyzed as follows: Any single nucleobase which does not fall in a fourfold degenerate location is ranked 1 (this means that a z adds 1 to both T and C, and s adds 1 to both A and G).
A = 24693 (26.8%); 22 (27.2%) very close
T = 23523 (25.5%); 22 (27.2%) close
C = 20133 (21.9%); 17 (21.0%) close
G = 23728 (25.8%); 20 (24.7%) close
total = 81 (22 + 22 + 17 + 20) meaningful bases/location in the standard genetic code
This geometry is interesting because the similarity between the E. coli plasmid breakdown and the standard genetic code breakdown indicates that amino acid mapping is likely an important force on DNA. Curiously, however, the genes within the plasmid still translate for amino acids as if the codons are in a nearly random distribution:
F = 978 (3.91%); 2 (3.28%) close
L = 2613 (10.4%); 6 (9.84%) close
I = 1511 (6.03%); 3 (4.92%) okay
M = 571 (2.28%); 1 (1.64%) close
V = 1748 (6.98%); 4 (6.56%) close
S = 1885 (7.53%); 6 (9.84%) not too bad
P = 1135 (4.53%); 4 (6.56%) not too bad
T = 1459 (5.83%); 4 (6.56%) close
A = 2061 (8.23%); 4 (6.56%) not too bad
Y = 863 (3.45%); 2 (3.28%) very close
H = 658 (2.63%); 2 (3.28%) close
Q = 1131 (4.52%); 2 (3.28%) close
N = 1225 (4.89%); 2 (3.28%) okay
K = 1353 (5.41%); 2 (3.28%) not too bad
D = 1439 (5.75%); 2 (3.28%) not too bad
E = 1598 (6.38%); 2 (3.28%) what happened here?
C = 319 (1.27%); 2 (3.28%) not too bad
W = 450 (1.80%); 1 (1.64%) very close
R = 1860 (7.43%); 6 (9.84%) not too bad
G = 1773 (7.08%); 4 (6.56%) close
25032 codons in the plasmid; 61 mappings in the standard genetic code
But we already know that the codons themselves can’t be randomly distributed, because that would require the nucleobases to have a similar random distribution, so we’re left with a curious result. Both meaning and meaninglessness appear to have random distribution in this example, and somehow they’re not in competition. How can this be possible if intent is so important and randomness always results in destructive noise? What exactly all this means eludes me at the moment, but it does assure me that skepticism regarding an intelligent creator for DNA/RNA is still well warranted.
About the only thing I can come up with to explain the above stats is that this particular sequence must have been optimized for information content in all 3 reading frames. Since only one reading frame appears to be used currently that suggests that the sequence has been shifting around in relatively recent times between all three reading frames, which thus implies at least point mutations which are of an essentially random frequency and location.
I’m also curious about how you would explain away the multiple dialects of the genetic code which appear in nature. Due to logical restrictions you’ve put in place on other peoples’ arguments you can’t attempt to claim that mutually unintelligible dialects emerge due to specific restrictions put in place by the logic required for the survival of any specific organism (since this is essentially just another version of, ‘that’s obviously what it takes’), so I’m curious what your solution is, b/c I don’t see a reasonable third alternative at the moment. I’m hard pressed to trust that a supernatural intelligent designer of the universe would be forced to develop multiple genetic codes simply b/c they didn’t have enough foresight to develop the code fully in the first place.
Mike,
Why would I need to explain away multiple dialects in the genetic code? Isn’t that what we find in the languages of intelligent humans as well? Please read Shapiro’s paper BTW. Dialects evolve through a combination of deliberate choices and natural selection.
I was assuming you were speaking of a singular intelligence. The reason human languages are so diverse is entirely due to the fact that there are more than one speaker. Isolated from other speakers an individual’s language will fail to change (except for loss of rare lexical items and syntactic structures over long periods of time, but the important thing is that new words and new syntactic structures won’t arise in this environment). Present other speakers and it will, 100% of the time, change (much less so in adults than children, but changes are still quite observable clinically). If you’re utilizing multiple supernatural intelligences then I understand why you scoff, otherwise it’s puzzling why divergent dialects should be obvious, particularly since the only naturalistic mechanism that could introduce this divergence is precisely the same mechanism natural selection uses to introduce information into DNA sequences, which is of course the point of contention here in the first place.
Mike,
I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say here but I think I get the drift. Allow me to guess, by making an analogy.
Let’s say we took all your emails and documents in your computer and converted them to ASCII.
We would probably find 50% 1’s and 50% 0’s.
We would probably find 25% occurrences of the digits 11, 25% 10, 25% 01, 25% 00.
However if we knew ASCII and we knew how the data was organized on that level, we would find that certain sequences appear much more often than others. a e i and t appear much more often than x and q and z. Chance alone would never explain this, in fact chance would negate this over time.
We would find certain patterns again and again like i before e except after c. Again, chance would negate this over time.
We would find that the Statistically Improbable Phrase “Mike Minnich” appears quite often. As does the names of other particular people. There is no possible way “Mike Minnich” could appear in your hard drive 1,287 times by accident.
And we can make the same statement about DNA. There are bits of DNA that are common to almost ALL creatures from single celled organisms to humans and that alone is all the evidence anyone should need that evolution itself is not random. See James A. Shapiro, “A 21st Century View of Evolution”: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.2005.Gene.pdf
If you haven’t fully decoded a message some things in it will appear to be random which in fact are not. My hypothesis is, the more we discover about the genetic code the less room there will be for any randomness at all. Case in point: the 97% “junk DNA” as was believed for years mostly by atheistic / materialistic scientists – a creationist would never believe that BTW – and the junk DNA theory has now become more laughable with each passing day.
Can you provide any sort of proof for 2? As far as I can tell, natural languages aren’t designed in the sense you’re talking about, but arise through social interaction. Intelligent willful forces appear to actually be rather unimportant to their structure, mutation and propagation. And since I am rather convinced that natural languages are the ultimate source, at least tenuously, for all other coding systems humans use it seems this is an important assumption to explore.
Yes, morse code was designed, but it’s not a language, yes C++ was designed but it is based on a mixture of English and mathematics, neither of which were designed.
That’s all I have time to address at the moment. Thanks for the prompt reply.
Mike,
All languages, all instances of one communicating to another, are situations of sender and receiver arbitrarily agreeing on the meaning of specific symbols. Languages are extremely complex, multi-layered codes.
But note that my argument does not rely on a nuanced definition of language (I see from your very impressive CV that you have a degree in linguistics) but my argument is based on the very simple definition of a code.
I am more than a little bit surprised that a linguist would ever say that intelligent willful forces appear to be unimportant to the structure, mutation and propagation of languages. Every single human being who speaks the language is an intelligent willful force and I don’t know of any unintelligent, non-willful forces that have any direct impact on human language.
Take any word recently added to the English language, like “blog” – we can trace its origin and we know that someone intentionally started using that word and in many situations early on, defined what they meant by it. We find many instances of that specific example all over the Internet. So now everyone knows what is meant by the word “blog.” Someone introduced the word deliberately and others accepted it. A willful and intelligent process.
You’ll have a hard time convincing me that intelligent, willful forces were rather unimportant to the development of the word “blog”. I am no linguist but I am quite willing to argue that there is very little in human language that does NOT have to do with intelligent willful forces.
I define information as “communication between encoder and decoder using agreed-upon symbols.”
Morse code is a code and it’s designed.
TCP/IP is a code and it’s designed.
ASCII is a code and it’s designed.
DNA is a code in exactly the same sense that TCP/IP, Morse Code and ASCII are codes (Yockey, 2005, see http://evo2.org/information-theory-made-simple). It is of course fabulously more sophisticated than any of these, but at the lowest level, it’s still a code. By inference, it too has every appearance of being designed. Shapiro, in his papers, speaks of similarities between the genome and modern computer operating systems.
I need to point out that your argument appears to me, to have circularity. You seem to be stating that DNA is naturally occurring (i.e. arising simply from the laws of physics and chemistry), therefore humans are naturally occurring, therefore human languages are naturally occurring.
But you do not know that DNA is naturally occurring in the first place, you are assuming that in advance. Then you are reinforcing that statement by saying human codes are not designed. Until someone can demonstrate a naturally occurring example of a code, you do not have the luxury of assuming that.
Perry Marshall
In saying that natural languages are naturally occurring I’m merely invoking the same inference system you are:
1. language is a species specific behaviour which occurs independent of environment in humans.
2. species specific behaviours which occur independent of environment are innate/natural (whether intelligently planted or not is irrelevant at this point, since all we can really observe and meaningfully comment on is the natural and not the supernatural).
3. human language is innate/natural, and thus independent of other individual characteristics, including intelligence (which is a rather vacuous term, but hopefully I’m at least conveying the basic idea).
The second part of 3 is actually observably true in individuals with specific types of brain damage or specific disorders.
The innateness of language can also be indirectly observed in the universals and near universals of languages. Communication and intentionality are actually not among them, but more frequently overlooked aspects like syntax, morphology and phonology are. I’m in fact not convinced that natural language as an innate component of human behaviour arose as a communication system at all, as it is an extremely inefficient and lossy example of one all in all. Deliberately designed systems, which are in fact designed for communication by humans are invariably more efficient, even when the creator is attempting to make their system appear naturalistic. DNA looks more like natural language than these designed systems to me as it does appear to have comparable inefficiencies.
I’m also not convinced that it’s in fact possible to distinguish ‘intelligently designed’ from ‘naturally occurring’ just by examining the philosophy of a unique system without parallel of known origin (human made coding systems and natural languages aren’t quite satisfactory correlates in my opinion to draw such strong conclusions w/o supporting evidence). Given that, combined with the fact that science itself is a system for analyzing the natural and not the supernatural, you are not in the least bit incorrect to say that I assume DNA is naturally occurring. I absolutely do, and I’d like to think that I do so based on rational grounds:
1. DNA utilizes natural processes to carry information.
2. Only DNA that carries information which can successfully create an organism capable of reproduction will survive more than a single generation.
3. DNA which changes from one generation to the next can satisfy 1 and 2. This sort of change constitutes a change in the information carried by the DNA.
4. The change described in 3 may on (probably quite rare if we’re restricted to Darwinian mechanisms) occasions contribute to the addition of meaningful information in the DNA as there is no reason to assume that natural forcing combined with random mutation does not positively reinforce beneficial mutations… quite the opposite, in fact.
5. 2 thru 4 can rely only on natural phenomena or on divine intervention, but it seems much more satisfying from a scientific point of view to work with natural phenomena. At any rate, this seems a reasonably satisfying naturalistic account of information being added to and/or beneficially modified in DNA.
The fact that carcinogens exist is actually observable evidence that DNA is not difficult to modify with simple chemical processes available in nature. I see no reason why some such processes might not be driven by the DNA itself (such a mechanism could actually be beneficial to the reproductive process, and thus, once randomly incorporated should have a tendency to be preserved), but this is pure speculation.
Just to clarify, I don’t for a second believe that Evolution in itself is a satisfactory model of the development of life on earth, I personally suspect that an additional system comparable to Lamarckism based on the observation that evolutionarily developed traits appear in many cases to aim in the same direction as plastically developed traits in individuals based on environment. But it also seems obvious that this mechanism must be relatively weak (possibly even dampened by sexual reproduction itself) if it even exists at all, based on the typical time-scales required for speciation to occur.
BTW, the wording ‘agreed-upon symbols’ is actually quite misleading, as it implies agentivity when none in fact exists. The fact is that languages are forced upon us against our will, just as our DNA is. As an infant you weren’t given a choice of which language you would grow up to speak, what the name for ‘chair’ is in your community, what would qualify as a chair as opposed to an ottoman, couch or bench or even if any such distinctions would be present in your language. This observation in itself demonstrates that language is not designed, but is an entity independent of human thought, culture and individuality. Minute, individually driven modifications to a language’s lexicon does not qualify in a meaningful way as ‘design’ in my opinion. Further evidence in this direction comes from languages like Icelandic and French, which are supposedly controlled or regulated, but often in fact develop ‘randomly’ in directions quite against the will of the regulating agency. In short, attempts to deliberately design natural languages tend to fail miserably, even with government support.
I forgot to point out that in my discussion of the naturalness of natural languages there was nothing contingent upon the naturalness of DNA. I originally worded it in such a way that I hoped you would notice that, but that’s okay.
Even if DNA is divinely inspired I see no line of scientific argumentation that can argue against the natural origins of human languages themselves.
Mike,
You said:
1. DNA utilizes natural processes to carry information.
I agree.
2. Only DNA that carries information which can successfully create an organism capable of reproduction will survive more than a single generation.
True.
3. DNA which changes from one generation to the next can satisfy 1 and 2. This sort of change constitutes a change in the information carried by the DNA.
OK.
4. The change described in 3 may on (probably quite rare if we’re restricted to Darwinian mechanisms) occasions contribute to the addition of meaningful information in the DNA as there is no reason to assume that natural forcing combined with random mutation does not positively reinforce beneficial mutations… quite the opposite, in fact.
Mike, nowhere in any literature I have seen in 5 years actually demonstrates that random mutation does anything other than destroy information and create birth defects. Shapiro has documented extensively the error correction mechanisms in DNA – DNA militantly guards against random mutation to the point of killing a cell when a copying error is made. The assumption that random mutation drives evolution is, bluntly, an urban legend. If you disagree then go on a hunt and see if you can find any peer reviewed literature that PROVES (rather than merely assumes) this is so.
5. 2 thru 4 can rely only on natural phenomena or on divine intervention, but it seems much more satisfying from a scientific point of view to work with natural phenomena. At any rate, this seems a reasonably satisfying naturalistic account of information being added to and/or beneficially modified in DNA.
Random mutation is noise. Noise ALWAYS destroys a signal. You can come up with extremely trivial counterexamples but they’re useless. The only possible natural source of evolution is an algorithm that evaluates possible combinations. McClintock observed just such a mechanism back in the 1940’s and eventually won the Nobel prize for her work. This mechanism is still poorly understood.
And it begs the question, where did this mechanism come from. Which is no different than asking where the pattern in DNA came from. Which brings us back to:
1. The pattern in DNA is a code.
2. All codes we know the origin of are designed.
3. Therefore we have 100% inference that DNA is designed and 0% inference that it is not.
Regarding “Agreed-upon symbols” – effective communication doesn’t take place unless sender and receiver agree on the meaning of a symbol.
The fact that human language is influenced by thousands of factors and evolves over time has no real bearing on the above fact. Nor does the fact that some governments fail miserably when they try to direct the evolution / use of a language. The fact remains that someone coined the word “chair” or its antecedent. Someone decided that PDA was going to stand for Personal Digital Assistant, when before that it meant “Public Display of Affection.” The creation and adoption of all those symbols was an intelligent willful process.
Perry
I beg to differ with one one of apparent axioms. You appear to believe that when randomness is invoked it is never filtered, and thus random input always yields random output, which will always appear as destructive noise. In fact it is easy to demonstrate that only lightly filtering random input always generates structured output, which is not noise. A great example comes from research done by one of my former instructors at the UA. What he did was write a little program that roughly simulated vowel quality shifts in language over time using only a few simple mechanisms which are undeniably analogous to realworld phenomena, including a simple digital mapping of the vowel space, random error, cumulative memory formation and a pair of speakers who attempt to imitate each other. What occurred in the data was striking. After only a few hundred cycles the vowel space always self organized into the familiar (to any linguist) i, u, a vowel system. Over thousands of iterations it would occasionally diverge for short periods but would always come back, in a manner very directly corresponding to the Great Vowel Shift in English. The essence of the mechanism is random input plus environmental forcing. In fact, if you take notice, that is the mechanism behind everything that can be said to be structured in the universe that we know of, not the least of which are human invented machines. If random input always lead to noise then it would be impossible for sunlight to power discrete weather phenomena, like cloud formation or lightning bolts, it would similarly be impossible for an internal combustion engine to convert explosion events with non-accelerating centers of gravity into a thrust vector.
It’s also notable that when you discuss DNA militantly guarding against defects you fail to mention that it only does so in certain situations. As far as I’m aware this only occurs in multicellular organisms with respect to daughter cells formed during mitosis, and even then the system is rather imperfect. It does not come into play with respect to gametes which form during meiosis and are employed directly in reproduction and not in single celled organisms at all. This is part of the reason why I don’t believe the radiation experiments on flies that you cite are entirely a case in point.
If you’re going to make claims like your last one, ‘The fact that human language is influenced by thousands of factors and evolves over time has no real bearing on the above fact.’ Then it is impossible to argue with you rationally, because you are doing nothing but blatantly throwing out data which contradicts your personal opinion. What I was positing was that it is actually irrelevant that specific lexemes were at any point in history intelligently designed for incorporation into a language, because regardless of the nature of any such specific event the language would still be present due to innate characteristics of human beings. Language itself is not intelligently designed any more than spider webs or bird songs are. Even a particular language can only be said to contain intelligently designed elements (as much as that’s even meaningful), overall it is still an artefact of innate, naturally occurring (as much as anything else) mechanisms interacting with the natural environment.
What I’ve done is shown you thousands of examples of codes which are not intelligently designed, a situation which you openly admit debunks your entire argument, and you refuse to accept it without providing compelling evidence. All you have to fall back on is the axiom that ‘random noise is always destructive’, an axiom which you aren’t even arguing in favour of, you’re simply invoking it. Demonstrate to me that it’s true and then I’ll concede your argument is advancing, until then I still believe you’re in checkmate.
Mike,
In your instructor’s program there are all kinds of intelligent processes in place – like his program itself. You’re filtering something that is said to be “random” but it doesn’t sound random at all. It sounds like it’s filtering a pre-selected collection of inputs, not pure random noise. I don’t see how this experiment supports the idea that we can take coded messages of whatever kind and subject them to random mutation at the lowest level, and then through some filtering get a bona fide evolution of language.
In my talks I discuss what randomness can do – it can produce cloud formations and stalactites and sand dunes. But it doesn’t create codes.
As for DNA guarding against defects, I refer you to Shapiro’s research which focuses on protozoa. James A. Shapiro, Evolution in the 21st Century:
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.2009.EvolutionIn21stCentury.pdf
Somehow we are missing each other on the discussion of human language being intelligently designed. I agree that language overall shifts according to complex factors that are far beyond the control of any single individual. But given that every single speaker of language is intelligent and participates willfully in every instance of communication with another human being, I cannot see how you can avoid the conclusion that it is intelligent. It seems to me that the very fact that you are typing a considered response to me on your computer and choosing your words as you go contradicts what you are saying. Every word you have used here was used by your conscious choice. Even the fact that you are typing them in English instead of Spanish is your choice. We could choose to have this conversation in Spanish and that would be a mutual decision that we arrive at, intelligently.
Which is to say I don’t see how you’ve debunked anything I’ve said.
Where did the word “Blog” come from? Are you saying it was naturally occurring?
Seriously, I don’t get it. Please explain.
Perry
Of course there are intelligent processes in place in the program, you can’t do science experiments without introducing intelligent processes. Assuming that that fact about the experiment has bearing on the validity of the observation that the program demonstrated that random input is filtered into random output given a simplified, well justified model of the development of human language is difficult to consider as anything other than utter fallacy. Just because the model was intelligently designed does not mean the naturally occurring, real-world basis for it was anymoreso than the CCCP developing a supersonic passenger jet in conjunction with a nearly identical project in Western Europe makes both planes Soviet.
The program actually did filter pure random noise. Based on how I’ve used random numbers in my own software I assume he did something like the following (most of it I know to be what he did, only a few details like using multipliers I’m uncertain about): the random number generator employed was seeded (probably with the date and time), and output values between zero and one, the result was multiplied by a useful constant, a second number was generated and similarly multiplied to yield a random location in a scaled, two-dimensional plane, that location was then interpreted by the ‘listening’ agent as being more or less similar to stored memories of past inputs, and based on that was assigned a value. These values arise naturally and are not hard-coded as they are interpreted based on experience not based on a static division of the 2-space. What invariably happened as the interactions were drawn out to thousands of exchanges was that the naturally arising phonology of the two agents repeatedly converged and settled on a three-vowel system which mapped geometrically to the same three-vowel system which occurs with otherwise inexplicable frequency in natural languages.
sorry, there’s a typo in last post:
‘…that the program demonstrated that random input is filtered into [non-]random output given a simplified…’
If you notice, protozoa are unicellular, so citing Shapiro doesn’t really counter my point that DNA is only good at monitoring itself in unicellular organisms. Consider cancer in multicellular organisms.
I am sorry for misunderstanding your question. I thought you meant single-cell. Cellular genetic engineering in multicellular organisms: See Barbara McClintock’s experiments with Corn Maize starting in the 1940’s. She damaged Chromosomes and the plants would repair the damage with segments of other chromosomes.
As for the other aspects of our discussion, your statements that Microsoft Windows, various computer programs and English and other languages are not designed just baffles me. Last I checked, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer employ thousands of programmers and I doubt they’d keep them on the payroll if they weren’t necessary.
I think we are just going to have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Perry
I’m not saying that programs aren’t designed, I’m saying that designed programs can be designed to explore naturally occurring geometries, one important class of which filter random input into structured output.
In regard to M$ Windows what I’m pointing out is that its design is largely predictable based on the history, culture and technology at the moment. It’s also very specifically false that Windows 3.0 was originally envisioned to develop into Windows 2000. Its development was not premeditated, but occurred in more-or-less real-time, and as such I wouldn’t call it ‘directed’ per se. And that development can be modeled very well as I mentioned before, the reason that it can’t be automated is because nobody’s yet capable of fully modeling human creativity and intuition (which is almost certainly built upon an vast array of axioms which is likely at least partially innate, but also partly cultural). Copying this set of axioms is not only unfeasible but at the moment impractical to the point that paying thousands of software engineers many thousands of dollars per year is in fact substantially easier and safer than seriously attempting to develop an automated system to write trustworthy code.
Mike,
Every example you’re using still relies on the intervention of conscious agents making specific deliberate choices. Your discussion of ASCII and electromagnetic fields is a great case in point. You say that ASCII was discovered. No, it was invented. The relationship between electric fields and magnetic fields was discovered. And it is rigidly fixed. ASCII is arbitrary. And the SPECIFIC choice that A = 1000001 is not derivable from any general principle.
Your statement “Windows development was not premeditated” is an insult to every project manager who carefully planned every step of the development of that product. You just seem like too smart a guy to make statements like that.
Your statement “its design is largely predictable based on the history, culture and technology at the moment” – then why didn’t someone else predict it and beat them in the marketplace? Mike, if this is true you should be able to make millions – maybe billions – of dollars, consulting with Steve Ballmer and telling him what Windows needs to look like in 2015. I am NOT trying to be disingenuous. I am pointing out the impracticality of your general theory. A general theory does not replace a specific designer consciously and purposefully writing specific code and devising specific rules that his specific program will execute.
Your last statement “paying thousands of software engineers many thousands of dollars per year is in fact substantially easier and safer than seriously attempting to develop an automated system to write trustworthy code” is an admission that in practicality a theory that general linguistic principles produce specific desirable outcomes doesn’t deliver results.
you say: Which is to say I don’t see how you’ve debunked anything I’ve said.
I’ve given you an outline of how language is innate in human beings to the point that it is an inevitable consequence of the interaction between any the individuals of any society larger than a single individual. As such the intelligently designed elements can be considered insignificant since they only lend a minute amount of information to a specific language and really have little or no effect on its general character, and certainly no effect on its status as a language in the first place. Further, given your definition of ‘random’ we can rule out most of your examples of ‘intelligent design’ within language as even being intelligently designed anyway. Since all other coding systems that humans use are without a doubt linked to the language instinct, and more specifically to the language(s) spoken by the individuals who develop them I’m not remotely convinced that even these codes are as intelligently designed as you claim. Yes conscious decisions are made in the process of developing them, but much more frequently patterns are discovered by chance and employed specifically because a more efficient pattern cannot be found through intelligent means at the time.
Mike,
The very words that you are typing (specific, conscious and deliberate) contradict everything you are trying say. You can’t derive A = 1000001 from the laws of physics or any particular linguistic principles. I cannot predict in advance the reply you will make to my post, or the specific meanings you will choose to assign to certain words you use. Whatever we discover as a result of this conversation will not come from blind chance either.
Q: Was ASCII intelligently designed?
A: Yes and no.
ASCII only has to be a little bit designed in order for my syllogism to hold.
What I’m trying to say is that the words I’m typing have no bearing whatsoever on what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to say is a largely unrelated entity to even the most complete logical reconstruction imaginable from the words I’m typing. The disparity is filled in by the UG of the listener/reader. We understand part of what UG must look like and do, but if you ever try using translation software you’ll quickly become aware of the problem I’m talking about. The words are nearly vacuous. They in fact convey almost nothing. The real code is in the human mind, hidden quite securely from our conscious ability to probe. Intelligence in itself has no bearing on language. Severely mentally retarded patients can have absolutely brilliant language skills and phenomenal geniuses can have virtually none. We know from many different sources that the two faculties are not related. Language is processed and managed and stored in entirely different areas of the brain than generic memories and analytical centres. Intelligence simply does not imply ability to encode, and the ability to encode does not imply intelligence. They are distinct functions.
OK, there’s a distinct difference between IQ and language facility. OK, they’re handled in different parts of the brain. OK, put two children together without teaching them anything and they’ll figure out how to talk to each other. But why does language happen? Because two conscious willful beings desire something from each other. Language is always associated with consciousness, desire and intent.
You say “the real code is the mind.” My whole thesis is, all codes come from minds.
In other words there is a giant chasm between inert matter and consciousness.
My assertion is: Consciousness and codes both only come from consciousness. Never from inert matter.
Let’s explore a syntactic example which demonstrates the innate characteristics of language as opposed to a supposed intelligently governed structure:
All natural languages in addition to all artificial languages with which I am familiar use discrete clauses to predicate something. This seems intuitive to anyone first considering the problem, but it’s actually not a requirement imposed by logic. For instance, all natural languages would a structure like the following to express two separate ideas, ‘John is walking and Jane is talking.’ but it would be perfectly logical to permit something like, ‘John and Jane are walking and talking’ to express the same pair of expressions. Instead this structure universally carries a very different meaning, which is that, ‘John is walking and John is talking and Jane is walking and Jane is talking.’ If humans are in intelligent control of their languages then why is this distributive reading universal?
Another example: EVERY language has an overt morpheme to express negation. This is just about the only logical operation that is universally conveyed by languages with an overt morpheme. Why? If languages are intelligently designed then why don’t some languages overtly mark the positive and make negative the unmarked option? There are some languages I know of that mark both positive and negative, but even in these languages there is an important difference as the positive form of the predicate is only marked if the predicate is of a certain part of speech (namely, a stative verb, which is usually a noun that is being used as an adjectival predicate. there may very well be languages that use a positive morpheme differently, but I’m not familiar with any). An example of this is O’odham:
Ma:gina ‘o s-cuk – [The car is/was black]
Ma:gina ‘o pi cuk – [The car is/was not black]
BUT
Gogs ‘o hink – [The dog is/was barking]
Gogs ‘o pi hink – [The dog is/was not barking]
Where [s-] is the stative verb marker (only used in the positive, thus also a functional positive morpheme) and [pi] marks negation, [s-cuk] is black and [hink] is barking (a rather direct translation since it is in an imperfective form).
There is literally an infinite number of examples of what natural languages cannot do and yet are logically feasible. In my opinion this alone is very strong evidence in favour of an innate universal grammar (UG) which all humans possess. This UG puts strong limitations on language, one of which is that it will find a way exist in any environment with the proper conditions. And this element of UG, I think, makes any argument regarding the intelligent design of specific lexical entries moot when discussing the intelligent design of language as a whole.
Are you beginning to understand what I’m saying?
Mike,
I think I understand what you are saying. That there is a universal grammar, that there are certain things that we always find in human languages. My response:
1) Are these things truly universal or almost universal? Are there any exceptions?
2) There is a huge difference between the general and the specific.
3) You seem to be arguing from necessity. That languages are necessarily the way they are. Well, OK, in certain instances I definitely could accept what you are saying. But that doesn’t make the existence of language itself necessary. Why does language exist instead of not existing at all? It doesn’t exist on Neptune. It’s not, so far as anyone can tell, a product of the purely material world.
4) Every language has things that are arbitrary. In English, “Stephanie is blonde” is a statement. “Is Stephanie blonde” is a question. The difference is based on a rule and the rule could just as well be reversed. I’m sure it is in some languages. So yes, we could define part of this issue as evidence of a Universal rule (ie there has to be a rule for differentiating questions from statements) but there is no law that says what protocol is used for that rule. The protocol at one point was CHOSEN by someone.
And even the universals cannot be derived from physical laws.
The things that I specifically mentioned are as far as anyone can determine that I’m aware of truly universal. There are a number of patterns in linguistics that were once thought to be universal but actually aren’t, but still with these the divergence from being 100% universal is usually as small as you can get, with only 1 or 2 languages out of the currently extant 6,000 going against the grain and often even here it’s not entirely clear that they do violate the pattern, particularly if the pattern is extended (something like explaining Kepler’s law with Newtonian Gavitation).
Mike,
This discussion is very interesting and I was not aware how universal some aspects of UG’s actually are. OK – significant aspects of linguistic structures are fixed. But I’m still not aware of any form of communication that contains UG’s that was not developed without the assistance of a conscious being.
Any way you slice it I see a nearly infinite statistical chasm between anything that uses any kind of code and purely material objects that do not.
You’ll actually never find a language that will use ‘Stephanie is blonde’ as a question and ‘Is Stephanie blonde’ as a statement, that violates a UG rule which only becomes apparent logically when you tree the sentence. As such it wasn’t chosen and it is a universal. There are two possible ways to make a yes/no question in languages, one is to introduce a yes/no morpheme into the complementizer position which is at one end or the other of the clause (which end is a language specific choice, but once made it applies to all complementizers) the other option is to take an existing inflectional morpheme and raise it into the complementizer location (this is the general tactic in English, in this example the inflectional morpheme which moves is [is], some y/n questions in English actually require an additional morpheme to make the raised morpheme pronounceable and this is why ‘She sees you’ turns into ‘Does she see you?’, here ‘do’ is required to make the [-s] morpheme pronounceable).
Nobody knows why humans have a language instinct, but the fact that we do is readily observable as is the fact that language will always arise if two children are thrown together and given time to develop one. So I’m not arguing from necessity, I’m arguing from observable fact. I’m actually specifically arguing against necessity, as many things that languages do aren’t necessarily restricted by logic or physics to be that way at all.
I think we’re in agreement about necessity. YES, language is a fact. Yes, consciousness is a fact. But you can’t derive language from physics or logic and you can’t derive consciousness from those things either. It’s a higher essence. One can ASSUME that it randomly evolved, bottom-up, but that assumption has never been validated with scientific experiments.
Just to clear up a potential point of confusion regarding the y/n question patterns, the rise in intonation that are used regionally in and around Europe to indicate y/n questions is in fact a purely prosodic morpheme which is located in a complementizer position. The reason it’s not bounded by the grammar to sit at the beginning of the clause in languages like English which put all their other complementizers in that position is possibly due to any combination of several factors:
– This morpheme is prosodic (supersegmental) rather than featural (segmental), thus the combined group doesn’t constitute a natural class on phonological grounds. This may be important during acquisition as the lack of any sort of phonological relationship at all between the morphemes can easily lead to the conclusion that they’re actually not related syntactically.
– The morpheme is used exactly the same way over an extended region and through several language families, thus it was likely borrowed into many of the languages that it currently appears in. Borrowed syntactic features are not strictly subject to native syntactic rules.
– It allows languages which prepose complementizers the option of turning a statement into a question on the fly without the requirement of fully restructuring and repeating the entire clause. Laziness is a powerful force in linguistics.
Thus we can fully explain all possible y/n question forms in English:
‘Stephanie is blonde’ yields ‘Is Stephanie blonde?’ if we raise the inflectional morpheme [is] into comp position or ‘Stephanie is blonde?’ if we raise the intonation at the end of the sentence.
‘Stephanie sees me’ yields ‘Does Stephanie see me?’ if we raise the inflectional morpheme [-s] into comp position, this further requires the addition of [do] to make the comp morpheme pronounceable, or ‘Stephanie sees me?’ if we raise the intonation at the end of the sentence.
We can also explain y/n questions in Mandarin:
‘ni gao’ (you’re tall) yields ‘ni gao ma?’ (are you tall?) if we use the y/n question particle [ma] in comp position. Alternatively you can say, ‘ni gao bu gao?’ (are you tall or not?). In English this option always involves a morpheme in comp position but in Mandarin it does not, this is because Mandarin is a wh- in situ language and in actuality this form of the question acts as a wh- question (who, what, where, when, why, how) more than a y/n question. To answer this sort of question negatively in Mandarin you actually have to include the predicate, ‘bu gao’ (not tall) rather simply saying ‘bu’ (no). Similarly the positive answer uses the predicate as well, ‘gao’ (tall) rather than ‘shi’ (yes).
You probably noticed that in Mandarin comp position is at the end of the clause. This has implications across the language, one of which is apparent in subordinate clauses:
‘ta zhidao ni shi wode pengyou ma?’ (does she know that you’re my friend?)
Here we can see that the subordinate clause is not preposed with a complementizer that introduces the clause as we have (sometimes optionally) in English. That is, there is no word which corresponds to ‘that’ in the English translation. Both ‘ta zhidao ma’ (does she know?) and ‘ni shi wode pengyou’ (you’re my friend) are viable main clauses. If you notice, the English sentence cannot be dissected so cleanly. From this we can see that while either position for comp is possible and the final setting is a choice of sorts there are UG implications which transcend any individual’s control, and often these implications are rather profound in an insidiously subtle way as they can lead to very deep misunderstandings that would not occur if language were governed by logic alone.
We certainly agree on your last point. The universals cannot be predictably derived from physics. But our interpretations of what this means seem to be radically different. You see signs of a creator in a completed ability while I see a suboptimal, evolutionarily transitionary language instinct which bears the scars of a tortured infancy likely plagued with numerous unpredictable changes in the instinct’s details which are quite akin to software patches in that they often address a problem by masking it rather than solving it. The difference in our interpretations is that mine is an educated one based on scientific research and years of personal experience and yours is quite lacking in any relevant grounding whatsoever. Just to put things in proper perspective.
Mike, you’re insulting me. You don’t need to stoop to that.
I compare DNA to TCP/IP and I see:
-Both are digital codes
-Both have highly optimized redundancy mechanism
-Both employ error correction mechanisms
-Both use addressing conventions for source/destination of messages
-Each operates on a physical layer
When I compare DNA to rocks or snowflakes or sand dunes or tornadoes or any other purely material thing, I can make no such comparisons.
Yet you tell me that DNA is naturally occurring.
Mike, where is this evidence and scientific research that you claim to have? Where is the documented scientific observation that things like DNA spontaneously occur in nature?
I can evaluate the quality of the design of the TCP/IP protocol by judging how efficiently it transports data with a given amount of bandwidth; how effectively it corrects errors and how often it gets the right message to the right place at the right time. I judge its designers based on those things.
So we evaluate DNA:
“As we learn more about the functions of the genetic code, it becomes ever clearer that the degeneracy in the genetic code is not exploited in such a way as to optimize one function, but rather to optimize a combination of several different functions simultaneously. Looking deeper into the structure of the code, we wonder what other remarkable properties it may bear. While our understanding of the genetic code has increased substantially over the last decades, it seems that exciting discoveries are waiting to be made.”
– T. Bollenbach, K. Vetsigian, R. Kishony, “Evolution and multilevel optimization of the genetic code,” Genome Research 17 (2007): 401-404.
This makes perfect sense to me because I’m an author of an Ethernet book. As an engineer I’m keenly aware of the role of choices in a design. Are you? Do you really think that terms like “PDA” and protocols like TCP/IP just occur naturally with no actual choice on the part of a designer? Seriously, you believe that?
I find such a thing hard to believe. But if you have evidence you’re invited to present it.
You said, ‘Noise ALWAYS destroys a signal. You can come up with extremely trivial counterexamples but they’re useless.’
This seems to be handwaving to me. Given an argument A and a counter-argument B, B only needs to address the most minute, insignificant case where A fails for A to be considered false. Thus, if I can come up with any counterexample to noise failing to destroy a signal I have disproven your assertion that ‘Noise ALWAYS destroys a signal.’
You also said, ‘I didn’t say the naturalness of a cause influences the naturalness of an effect.’
Curious that your argumentation supporting the previous quote is almost purely hinging on that precise predication (‘the naturalness of a cause influences the naturalness of an effect’). Throughout this entire conversation you’ve stated multiple times that the reason algorithms which constructively use noise to generate useful information are useless as counter-arguments to your postulate that noise always destroys a signal is b/c they are man-made rather than naturally occurring. That is exactly the same as saying that naturalness of a cause influences the naturalness of an effect.
Please review this discussion for evidence of what I’m saying: http://evo2.org/prove-god-exists/comment-page-8/#comment-2330
Mike,
Noise destroying a signal: Elsewhere on this website, I’ve said noise destroys a signal 99.999999999999% with as many 9’s as you care to name. One can come up with extremely trivial examples but they are so trivial they are not worth considering. Saying noise improves a signal is like saying scratches improve the music on a CD.
The prevailing Darwinian theory really states that noise added to signal filtered by natural selection creates a better signal. It’s not true and nobody’s ever demonstrated that it is.
Regarding the 2nd part of this I think this is getting muddled. Go back and re-state your original point, I may not be tracking.
Consider how a ratchet works, it takes random input and generates directed output. That’s precisely how Darwinian Evolution is supposed to work.
In your actual experience does a completely unintelligent, purely physical process of random mutation and natural selection create a ratchet that improves the functionality of Universal Grammars?
Your circularity argument (the argument that my argument is circular) seems to carry with it a flawed assumption, namely that the naturalness of a cause influences the naturalness of an effect. Chess is not a naturally occurring system, but the fact that the Ruy Lopez is a solid opening sequence which allows development of a good line is a natural result of the system due to the geometry of the board and the piece movements.
I didn’t say the naturalness of a cause influences the naturalness of an effect. I hope I am understanding what you are saying.
If your computer goes to the Microsoft website and downloads Windows updates automatically, that is a purely physical, mechanical process, and that process goes forward regardless of where it originated. It is just obeying the laws of physics.
But you can’t derive microsoft windows from the laws of physics.
But you can derive M$ Windows from an interaction of axioms (which are often not of intelligent origin, but based on mere observation of the universe and an application of pattern recognition to those observations), physics and a specific set of available hardware, and that’s in fact exactly how it developed.
Mike,
If that is true then why does Microsoft employ thousands of programmers? Why don’t they just derive it from axioms?
Perry
That’s actually exactly what programmers do. They collaborate to develop a formal set of axioms and then sit down and code them into functional software, actively employing myriad other axioms in the process, some they’re aware of, many others they’re not. The problem with automating it is that that requires either development of a massive axiom set, or an application of natural selection mechanisms. Both work, but are limited enough that they’re often not commercially viable for the development of a totally new product. Typically cutting edge software is built on novel concepts, so it’s difficult to anticipate an axiom set that will actually generate cutting edge software. If you take the natural selection approach then you are less limited in creativity but it can take a rather long time for anything cutting edge to arise. Both methods may also still require debugging, which is best done by hand. I know that for some applications where the requirements and limits are very well understood a natural selection approach is sometimes employed to maintain and update the software, and in these cases it can be extremely reliable. I’ve also written some hobby software that writes its own software based on limited axiom sets and it is rather impressive what that can result in, but as I said, the resulting software is always limited to ideas that have probably been thoroughly considered by humans already.
I anticipate you’ll see this argument as evidence against the viability of automated natural selection mechanisms since it appears to comment primarily on their limitations. However this actually isn’t the case. The primary reason that automated natural selection isn’t particularly attractive to software development is b/c it is unguided and the target product is always well defined. Given this scenario your oft expressed take on the utility of randomness is valid, but as soon as you remove the target definitions your take becomes invalid, as any executable software which arises and does not crash the system, generate memory leaks or cause other mischief is a successful product of the natural selection mechanism.
If you remove the assumption that we are here b/c we were intended to be here by a supernatural creator god then the logical landscape changes massively and the vast majority of your arguments become quite thoroughly invalid. Thus, once again, your line of argumentation is circular despite your specific inferences being linear. You assume intent and only from that stance can you prove it, remove that assumption and you’re suddenly not actually saying anything at all b/c your arguments become invalid. Your position is not agnostic, you are specifically a theist. This in itself is not a problem, the problem arises from your failure to acknowledge the fact. You approach everything I say as a theist proclaiming to analyze my arguments as an agnostic and the result is a failure to communicate, and that failure originates in you. You admit you assume G-d, so why not admit you’re a theist? You admit you haven’t actually studied any religious tradition besides Christianity in any detail, so why claim to be agnostic? You shoot down my arguments from the position that intelligent design at one level implies unnaturalness at another, so why not admit that fact? The reason I think that you believe your proof has never been debunked is b/c you don’t actually recognize all the axioms you employ. You haven’t successfully generated a list of all your assumptions and you certainly haven’t successfully evaluated their implications to your line of argumentation. In truth your proof is relatively trivial to debunk, I focused primarily on demonstrating that no codes with known origin are truly designed through and through (a point which you’ve still failed to address in the least, b/c you’re focusing on the wrong things. UG acts very powerfully to restrict protocol, that’s dominantly what UG is, in fact, a massive set of detailed, universal protocols), but there are many other valid lines of attack which demonstrate the frailty of the inference. You cannot unilaterally claim to prove things, that course is antiscientific, yet this is precisely the course you have taken. I don’t really see anyone here agreeing with you from a logical or scientific standpoint, only from a theistic one. The reason this doesn’t bother you, I think, is b/c you’re a theist, and as such the proof isn’t required to actually work. But b/c you’re a theist, conveniently it does anyway (this IS circularity).
That’s how I currently interpret the situation anyway. I could be off, but this is what all the evidence points to AFAICT.
Mike,
Rather than responding to your pejorative remarks let’s return to the basics:
1. The pattern in DNA is a code.
2. All codes we know the origin of are designed (i.e. at least one conscious choice is always made in the process of defining a code)
3. Therefore we have 100% inference that DNA is designed and 0% inference that it is not.
I have defined all of my assumptions and terminology here on this website. If you have a question about it then ask.
You’ve been going round and round talking about human languages, all of which involve decisions made by conscious agents. But you have not addressed my syllogism and you have resisted acknowledging the conscious choices involved in the development of all languages.
I’m still waiting for you to present an argument that supports your position. We’ve been at this for several months and to date you have not.
And the cherry on top has been your self-contradictory statement: “The truth is, there is no truth.”
Mike,
If your thesis is correct then software development would not have to have highly defined target products. We could have loose sloppy definitions and we’d still get useful software from unguided automated natural selection.
Please show me one example of an executable software which arises and does not crash the system, generate memory leaks or cause other mischief – which is a successful product of the natural selection mechanism.
Nowhere have I failed to acknowledge the fact that I am a theist. I have not hidden anything. But my syllogism does not in any way presuppose theism. It only presupposes the definitions of a code as I have outlined on the faq page http://evo2.org/faq
I’ve been going round and round talking about human languages b/c that directly addresses your second statement that all known codes are designed. And I’ve been ignoring the conscious choices involved in the development of languages b/c they are very specifically irrelevant to the languageness of any language. As I’ve talked about, removing individual words like, ‘the’, ‘often’, ‘PDA’ and ‘gingivitis’ from English will not make English any less of a language. I’ve discussed how UG governs not only protocol but that it is the innate instinct in humans to generate language and how that is entirely separate from human intelligence. I’ve posited that the human language instinct can not be demonstrably separated from ‘intelligently designed’ codes and you’ve provided no evidence whatsoever to the contrary.
Given UG it is theoretically possible to program a computer to randomly generate ‘words’ (not consciously choosing them) and randomly present them to small children (rather than consciously selecting them). If the children have no significant interference from another language they will automatically and instinctually turn that random noise into a fully functional natural language assigning meaning to words based on conditioning (not conscious choice) and UG mechanisms. This scenario eliminates all conscious choices related to language genesis and still results in a language and we have extremely strong evidence from decades of linguistic research that this is actually the way the language instinct works. If the results of such an experiment did not align with this hypothesis then it would mean that many, many things we know about psychology and linguistics, most of which we have 100% inference for are flat wrong.
If you don’t think that’s a solid argument in support of my position that your inference is shoddy due not to its internal structure but due to the lack of scope of its original reference (which thus still makes it circular regardless of your claims to the contrary, as is further evidenced by the infinite loop we appear to have entered into with this conversation) then I require a significantly more detailed explanation. Preferably one which does not include blatant false assumptions, like when you claimed that UG does not handle protocol. This all boils down to the fact that I’m still waiting for you to address in any way at all the question of how language can be designed if UG is an instinct. And what in fact UG is if it’s not naturally occurring.
Here’s the infinite loop I see your inference leading to from a slightly different angle, which might help you understand what I hear when I read your writing:
TCP/IP, Morse Code, ASCII, HTML, Java, Lisp, etc. are intelligently designed (since you’re not a linguist of any sort you’re not in a reasonable position to postulate anything about the origin of natural languages outright, so you wiggle out of it by next speaking only of codes with fully known origin) -> All codes of known origin are designed -> DNA is designed -> instincts are not naturally occurring but designed -> UG (as it is an instinct/innate mechanism) is not naturally occurring but designed -> language is designed, but only partially by humans at best -> All codes of known origin are designed -> DNA is designed -> ad infinitum
From what you’ve said to me over the past weeks I have a 100% inference that this is the actual result of your logic. Additionally I noticed this issue very early in our dealings and pointed it out to you, yet now you’re saying that I’ve never even addressed your syllogism at all… Am I the only one that thinks this lack of attentiveness on your part undermines your credibility and solidly demonstrates the massive scope of your subjectivity on the issue?
Mike,
For the sake of argument, let’s go with your statement that the things which generate human language are entirely separate from intelligence. Let’s say that language and UG’s are pure instinct.
Then my syllogism can be changed:
1. The pattern in DNA is a code.
2. All codes we know the origin of are products of Instinct and Universal Grammars.
3. Therefore we have 100% inference that DNA is a product of Instinct and Universal Grammars and 0% inference that it is not.
Maybe I’m somehow misunderstanding you but based on what I think you’re saying, I believe you would agree with the above syllogism?
Assuming you would, can we then assume that DNA is naturally occurring?
By “naturally occurring” I mean:
-Derivable from the laws of physics
-Happens automatically as a result of purely physical phenomena, much the same as snowflakes or ice crystals or hurricanes or sand dunes
-Does not require the involvement of any kind of intention or intelligence
My answer is an emphatic NO.
Because what we still see is an infinite chasm with rocks, snowflakes, crystals, sand dunes and hurricanes on one side and UG’s on the other.
http://evo2.org/infinite-chasm/
I think the above article explains the difference between these two things, please review it carefully. So if we map this question into your terminology, we are left with the question “Where do Universal Grammars come from?”
I’ve never seen a way for them to be derived from the laws of physics.
And you’re no closer to solving the problem. Because CONSCIOUSNESS and conscious beings are on the UG side of the chasm, not the inert matter side of the chasm.
So in the universe we have two things: matter and consciousness. Consciousness explains the origin of UG’s, matter does not. Therefore the source of UG’s is conscious.
BTW I would take exception to the word “instinct” in the above syllogism – that would require some qualification. But as for the “universal grammars” part of the revised syllogism, I agree with it too.
I hope I have understood what you are saying, it is my intent to do so.
Perry
Mr. Marshall,
having reviewed your Atheist’s Riddle and found myself in fundamental disagreement with your theory, I felt it necessary to formulate, against the most radical of your claims, a philosophically and conceptually oriented objection, which may be found in full on the FRDB board:
http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=272304
Were you to read through my post and honour it with a counter-argument, even a brief one, that addresses each of my central theses, I would be most obliged.
Gramme/H. Poutiainen, Finland
Gramme,
I believe the spirit of your question is addressed by this comment on my blog:
http://evo2.org/prove-god-exists/comment-page-6/#comment-1621
Your comment:
1) The intelligence of an information system, as opposed to its causal and evolutionary effectiveness, originates at the receiving, interpreting end. Only an intelligent system is able to interpret and mark, immediately and without selection, as uniquely repeatable, and therefore as uniquely semantic, even the most incomprehensible string of non-encoded signs – that is, noise. Indeed: what is the genetic equivalent of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? Of Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems? Of a volume of sourced poetry, say, A Day in the Life of the Random Mutation Generator? Of an entire music genre called “noise” whose name is to be taken quite literally?
Is completely irrelevant to this discussion because the ability of a human to assign some sort of meaning to noise has nothing at all to do with what we’re talking about. See http://evo2.org/information-theory-made-simple/ DNA is encoded into mRNA and decoded into proteins by the ribosomes. It is a communication system.
Your #2 is just a reiteration of the same point and again has nothing to do with my argument.
The process of DNA transcription is an encoding / decoding process. Read Yockey’s book.
Perry Marshall
Thanks for the reply
Please refer to name as werty i was not able to post reply on the page as it was full.
That is what i am trying to say-
Eg:- Consider you have two Amplitude modulated(AM) wave [information]. If by chance other way overlaps or interfers with the first AM wave the information in the waves gets corrupted.
Just as it would happend in the old radio when two station interfered and the information was corrupted. This shows that information cannot overlap or interfere with each other.
BUT this is what is happening at the time of fertilization, 23 paris of male chromosome and 23 pairs of female cromosome come together to form fetus.This means there is overlaping of information which cannot happen. This cannot happen because a soon as information overlaps or interfers it gets corrupted.
I am not talking about noise, The effects of noise on loss of information very less when compared with overlaping of informations which completes corruptes the information.
Yet this is happening this show it is not information.And majority children are are born with normal human structure.
As you qouted “Mendelian genetics shows that traits are randomly selected between the father’s genes and the mother’s genes.”
This cannot happen with information.
There is NOTHING called RANDOM in information or code (except random numers generators) , The mathematical functions can be applied and RESULT is obtained PRECISELY.
It doesn’t happen in DNA.
Perry
I think your argument is counterproductive since DNA is an example of a message that did not come from a mind. This fact does not prove the non-existence of a deity, however, it does remove the nessecity of one to explain complex life.
You know this and have therefore looked at the origin of life and the big bang to help your case, since, as you also know, science is a long way from having all the answers here. That doesn’t mean that we won’t have the answers sooner or later.
If science did provide answers to these questions, perhaps you would argue based on the next thing we did not know all about.
Adam,
Please prove that DNA is an example of a message that did not come from a mind.
Perry
It is not possible to prove something is not so – we are going to end up with teapot at this rate!
Please ask a better question.
Regards
Adam
Dr, Charles B. Thaxton wrote a paper called the “DNA, Design and the Origin of Life”
1986
See
http://www.origins.org/articles/thaxton_dnadesign.html#ref21
Questions about randomness.
Can any real world event be purely random. ( Discounting events which occur on the atomic scale … quantum theory )
If we add mutation to
“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”
then reset back to “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”
and then mutate again but with the exact same starting conditions as our first mutation , would we not get the same result?
Is there any absolute proof that computers can be programmed to generate true random numbers?
If no real life event can be considered as purely random does this mean random mutation is not really random?
Quincy,
There are whole books discussing the concepts of randomness, and the definition of it. As you say – discounting quantum events – is anything random?
I suspect not.
Computers cannot be programmed to generate true random numbers because programs are deterministic not random. They can only appear to be random. There’s whole books written on that too.
So in the most grand sense random mutation is not really random but for all practical purposes, from the standpoint of the organism, it most certainly is.
Perry
Perry,
How would you answer this odd objection?
**Yes, DNA contains [coded] information (the word “coded” here is moot, all information must by your definitions be coded) – by YOUR definition, that would mean that DNA requires intelligence, but THAT is according to your definition. I do not happen to agree with your definition of code, and I dont agree that coded information requires intelligence.
If you want me to give you an example of “code” that does not require “intelligence”, then you MUST supply a definition of “code”/”information” etc. that does not DEPEND on intelligence.**
I basically said that code by its very definition is something that has always been observed to be the product of intelligence. Not that the definition itself requires intelligence. Whats your thoughts?
God Bless,
JohnM
John,
A code is a system of symbols for communication.
There is nothing in that statement that circularly refers to intelligent beings. A garage door opener uses a code.
Perry
In your argument for creationism rather than evolution you use the example of codes. You explain that a tornado has no designer, neither does a snowflake, even though they are complicated they do not carry a code, but a computer programme does, it has a code. You define a code as a pattern that carries meaning, it has a plan, it was created to have this plan by a designer/creator. You then argue that as DNA has a “code” it must have a designer/creator, but I disagree with the way you make this argument. Your argument rests on your claim that a code must have a designer therefore DNA must have a designer. The truth however is that we have no evidence that a code requires a designer, we know it has a purpose but that does not presuppose it had a designer, that is only your belief. Evolutionists argue that the DNA code is as a result of evolution, that is their belief, so your argument proves absolutely nothing, it simply shows your favoured belief.
There can be no clear cut correct or incorrect outcome to this debate, but the logic used can be correct or incorrect, and I believe that the argument you use is wrong.
Keith,
I have mountains of evidence that codes require a designer. We have millions of codes and every single one of them are designed.
It doesn’t prove DNA is designed, but it infers it 100%. Which is as good as science ever does.
Perry
Perry,
If you can read this sentence, i can prove given the condition’s and elements available on earth DNA is the only possible way for information to occur naturally on earth.
If we agree with Perry’s conclusion that DNA constitutes information and that there are no other instances we know of where information has occurred naturally, then the only conclusion that can be drawn is that DNA is the only possible was for information to occur naturally given the conditions and elements available on earth.
The point of my above statements was not to offend you, and i apologize if they did. They are completely my opinion and i will take no offence if you disagree with them.
The point i was trying to make was that while I don’t necessarily disagree with the information on communication, information or DNA you have presented, largely because I don’t have the time or expertise to check or further it, I do disagree with the proof/conclusion you drew from this information. Since using the same logic you used to draw your conclusion, I was able to draw the conclusion that DNA is the only possible was for information to occur naturally.
I don’t expect you to agree with my proof/conclusion and the only reason i have responded to your post is because of your riddle, Where did the information in DNA com from? Quite simply it occurred naturally (i will admit that i can’t explain the exact process), and why is DNA the only naturally occurring form of information? Because it is the only possible way information could have occurred naturally as i stated and concluded above.
Thank you for taking the time to read my comment. I would just like to reiterate, it is not meant to offend you and it is in no way an attack on your conclusion/proof/opinion. It is just my opinion and the conclusion i drew using the same information and logic you did.
Regards
Brendon
Very well, here’s a little riddle for you:
If God created us, who created god.
The very logic of your argument backfires onto you.
Who designed the designer? See
http://evo2.org/faq/#designer
and
Who made God? http://evo2.org/infotheoryqa.htm
Any view you embrace requires an uncaused cause.
Is the Big Bang the beginning of time?
http://evo2.org/faq/#time
I want someone to define God. To me, He is the rhythmic vibration of the heart. No, I am not waxing lyrical. I genuinely feel it that way.
Is He a body of flesh? Does he breathe? Does he smile? Does he have emotions?
Or is He merely a whispering luminous metaphysical spirit existing before time existed and will exist after time has finally run its course?
So, as far as I can tell, all minds are generated by code — at least all minds we are aware of?
And some mind designed the code that gives rise to our minds. And we would like to know what code it was that gave rise to this mind that designed the code that produces our minds. Sounds reasonable. Sounds hard though.
This reminds me of how string theorists are slaving away attempting to make the theory spit out physical laws as a consequence of the theory. A noble calling.
Bill,
Really what you are stating is the theory of biogenesis. That living things only come from living things.
This is all that science knows. Science knows nothing of abiogenesis, life from non-life.
Logically life had to start somewhere.
I am showing 100% inference that it was created by intelligence.
Perry.
You are a God-send.
I have always thought that there was a rational explanation to the existence of God and you hit it home.
I came to realize at a young age that Creationism was a little too mythological for my liking and I knew from the bottom of my heart that God has a far better explanation than our human brains can ever try to comprehend and put into words until now.
As Christ once said, “Those who have ears, let them hear”. 🙂
And boy was I ever happy to have my ears open to anything.
Thanks for making me a stronger Christian. I’ll be watching this site closely.
Thanks again,
JR.
Wow!
This is a really passionate and long… discussion.
I’ll try to do my best complementing it.
First I would like to state that I do believe in a supreme “God”, but i do not belong to any of the established religions.
None of them.
Having said that:
I believe that “God” is omnipotent. He/she/it is a part of every religion and culture. Past, present, and future.
“God” doesn’t – really – care about human things like “first”, “last”, “best”, “only”… because “God” is everything, and everywhere. Since the beginning of time
“God” created the Universe and humans.
Humans invented “religion”, therefore is flawed. Why?
Because a vast “God” would never seattle or would – could – be reduce to a single Universe, a single planet, a single species, a single religion. That would be pathetic or mediocre at best. Is the kind of wave of mind that can only be represented by human angst, not by a omnipresent “God”.
Those who spend their lives trying to find the truth and share it, are great disciples of “God”.
Those who spend their lives trying to justify anything else but the truth, are flawed. False. Temporal. Poor. Hacks. Cheap. Fanatics. Blind. Human…
Be a result of godliness, not just a reflection of your innermost fears.
See you in pleroma!!
Every single human expression leads to “God”.
But not every human expression is godly.
ælx nexus
Dear Mr Perry Marshall , I studied some of your comments and intend to study all of them and enjoyed them very much. Meanwhile I would like to inform you that a scholar has proved that the theory of evolution by natural selection laid down by the late Charles Darwin is in complete harmony and compatibility with the teachings of the Old and New Testaments and more precisely with that of the Quran.His website is: http://www.shajaracodedecoded.com. Would you be kind enough to study the summary of his comments and let me know the result.
It is not that I do not believe in God, but is that God has always let me down. I do believe that there is some magic energy exists in this world, but not God. Like how come we all have premonition on things? Things that so normally happens everyday and in an energency.I have always been finding the convcing answer.
Hi Perry Marshall:
see to
http://www.55a.net/firas/en1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=191:gods-signs-in-the-dna&catid=38:human&Itemid=94
and
http://www.55a.net/firas/en1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=301:is-there-cure-for-senescence&catid=51:prophetical&Itemid=105
Hi! I’m a catholic by birth and by choice. I truly believe in the GOD my religion espouses. But somehow, something in me wants to find an explanation to base my belief, concrete enough for a mere housewife to understand. By watching the presentations and reading through the arguments, its as though i can touch in almost tangible way, the TRUTH of His existence. Thanks to all who took time to express their disbelief, because they make me see the other side of the coin. Most of all, thanks to people like Mr. Perry Marshall, who, like Mother Mary, listened to the promptings of his heart for him to share his gifts to anyone willing or unwilling to absorb the message. I don’t have the eloquence to argue, but i have savored the joy of a silent prayer. Peace be to all…