Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 545

Rob Sheldon: Did humans see the color blue before modern times?

The question is trickier than we might at first think. A philologist studied ancient texts and found no mention of the word “blue.” The Egyptians had a word for it but they could produce blue dyes. Could the others just not see the color?

One study found a tribe in Namibia who did not use a word for blue. Researchers determined, through testing, that they could only distinguish it with great difficulty and many mistakes. But they had more words for green than we do and they could spot very fine shades of difference that most people would not.

Another study by MIT scientists in 2007 showed that native Russian speakers, who don’t have one single word for blue, but instead have a word for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), can discriminate between light and dark shades of blue much faster than English speakers. This all suggests that, until they had a word from it, it’s likely that our ancestors didn’t actually see blue. Fiona MacDonald, “There’s Evidence Humans Didn’t Actually See Blue Until Modern Times” at Science Alert

Maybe it’s not quite that clear. People might not have words for what they don’t physically see but they also might not see what they don’t have words for because they don’t need to distinguish the characteristic. Thus they never acquire the habit of doing so. The critical question is, can they learn to distinguish a shade if it is important?

It’s not just people. For example, at one time, people believed that cats could not see the difference between red and green. It turns out, they can if they must. They will try other strategies to solve a food reward problem first. Most of the time cats don’t care—because they don’t need to care—about red vs. green, which is why people thought they couldn’t actually do it.

Our physics color commentator, Rob Sheldon, offers some thoughts:

Just an attempt to clarify the terms used here (from the top of my head):

See-1: to sense

See-2: to perceive

See-3: to distinguish, discriminate

See-4: to have an explanation/word

a) The triple-color “cones” in the retina include one for “blue”, so both ancient man and modern man can sense “blue.” We know this because of DNA genome studies on ancient man.

b) Even the subject in the study who lacked a word for blue can be taught to distinguish it. Thus the perception is available, but perhaps rudimentary.

Let me say this another way: The eye has 12 layers of neurons in the retina that perform image compression before sending signals down the very limited bandwidth, optic nerve.

I recently visited an optometrist because my accurate vision (needed for reading text) was filled with dancing black/white triangles. It wouldn’t be too far off the mark, if I said that “in layer #3 of my retina, the triangle-recognizing neurons” were spazzing out. The optometrist merely said I was having a “visual migraine”, and claimed a new reading glasses prescription would solve it.

Now mind you, this was not happening in the optic lobe of my brain, but in the retinal pre-processing. So if our neurons, which extend down to our toes, can do pre-processing, then we have distributed brains! Maybe the Hebrews weren’t too far off when they attributed emotions, not to the heart, but to the kidneys.

Back to the topic: Are there “blue cone” inputs to the pre-processing layer in the retina? Absolutely. So what does “training” the subjects to see blue actually do? The “meat-computer” folks would have us believe that rerouting happens only in the CPU, the brain’s optic lobe. But it appears that if we make it a priority, we can “train” the retina as well. Our modern culture has “trained” our brains/retinas to make distinctions that remain rudimentary in the study subjects.

Can we then infer that ancient people who lack a word for “blue” cannot perceive it? Absolutely not.

First of all, how certain are we that lexicographers have every word in their dictionaries? Modern dictionaries are adding words every year.

Secondly, as the explanatory text refutes the title of this article, the study subjects can perceive blue, just not very quickly.

Thirdly, the dye used for priestly garments prescribed in the Torah was “blue”, as in the blue of the Israeli flag. So at least by 1500 BC “blue” must have been a word in use.

So perhaps we should say, we cannot discriminate “blue” without a word for it? For sure. This is the property of language. As linguists will say, a word excludes more than it includes. And if we don’t have a word, we lack the ability to discriminate (or, as Aristotle shows us, we make up a word on the spot, we “categorize”.)

But since all of us have been inventing words since infancy, no ancient would be incapable of discriminating “blue”, he would simply have to be curious or driven by necessity. That is to say, the capability for discriminating “blue” was present in all ancients, as long as the capability for language was present.

Finally, should we find some method of determining that an ancient human was incapable of discriminating the color blue, we would actually have determined that he lacked the creative aspects of speech itself. That is an important point, which is why I argue that Neanderthals did not speak because they could not learn agriculture, which necessitated a new vocabulary.

Rob Sheldon is author of Genesis: The Long Ascent

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The Atlantic to the Rule of Law: Drop Dead

Some arguments are not merely wrong; they are evil.

Eric Orts is a professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He is a progressive, and like most progressives he chafes at the checks on the unbridled power of numerical majorities built into the United States Constitution.  On Wednesday Professor Orts took to the pages of The Atlantic to vent his spleen against the unfairness of one of those checks, the provision that gives each state equal representation in the Senate.  It is not fair, declares Orts, for Wyoming to have the same representation in Senate as California, because Wyoming’s population is a small fraction of California’s. 

Set aside for the moment the merits of Orts’ argument**
and consider his proposed solution.  According
to Orts, all that is necessary to fix this “problem” is for Congress to pass a
statute providing for proportional representation in the Senate.  There is an obvious problem with Orts’
proposal.  Any such statute would conflict
with Article I of the Constitution, which provides that that each state shall
have two Senators, and Article V which states that the two-senator rule cannot
be amended. 

No problem, says Orts. 

Article V applies only to amendments. Congress would adopt the Rule of One Hundred scheme as a statute; let’s call it the Senate Reform Act. Because it’s legislation rather than an amendment, Article V would—arguably—not apply.

Orts’ seems to believe Congress can “fix” the Constitution through legislation. That a professor of legal studies no less would make this argument is breathtaking. Moreover, his proposed solution skips over the fact that the Constitution explicitly states “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State.”  He has an answer to this too:

Constitutional originalists will surely argue that the Founders meant “equal suffrage” in Article V to mean one state, two senators, now and forever. But the Founders could never have imagined the immense expansion of the United States in terms of territory, population, and diversity of its citizens.

No, anyone who reads the document – not just constitutional
originalists – knows without the slightest doubt that it provides unambiguously
for one state, two senators.  Whether the
founders could have imagined future events has no bearing on the meaning of the
text.  There is no room for argument
about what the text means.

Here is where we get into the evil part.  Orts is not calling for a constitutional
amendment.  Nor is he calling for a
creative interpretation of the existing text. 
He argues that we should simply ignore the text because he and his friends
don’t like it.  The rule of law is built
upon a foundation of language.  Laws,
after all, can be expressed in nothing else. 
When professors call for us to ignore the express unambiguous text of
the Constitution, they are calling for us to abandon the rule of law.  And that is evil.

Of course, we should not be surprised.  As a progressive in good standing Orts believes that power is the only thing that matters.  Justice Brennan once said that he only thing that matters in Constitutional law is the ability to count to five.  Brennan meant that when the actual text of the document the court is purporting to be interpret (i.e., the Constitution) interferes with achieving the result progressives such as he want, well then, so much the worse for the Constitution, provided he was able to cobble together five votes for the progressive policy choice. Brennan’s approach to constitutional law is profoundly cynical, dishonest, and, yes, evil.

Orts is a Brennan-type progressive.  He believes if he can get five members of the Supreme Court to bite on his “two does not really mean two” argument, he can achieve in the courts what he could never hope to achieve in the political process. 

But attempts to undermine the rule of law carry the seeds of their own destruction.  Sooner or later the people begin to trip to the fact that it is all a big put up job.  And when that happens you get civil war.  We are already in a cold civil war. With progressives like Orts continuing to call for the exercise of raw power outside of legitimate constitutional processes, how long before the war heats up?

————–

**The first clause of Article I, Section 3, which states:  “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State.”  Anyone who has studied the constitutional convention for ten seconds knows the origin of this clause.  The small states were afraid they would be overwhelmed and powerless if representation in the Congress were based strictly on population.  They went so far as to threaten to bolt if this issue were not addressed to their satisfaction.  After much debate during which the convention teetered on the edge of failure, a compromise (the so-called “Connecticut Compromise”) was reached.  The delegates proposed a bi-cameral Congress with representation in the House of Representatives allocated according to population and representation in the Senate equal among the states.  Arguably, the “equal suffrage in the Senate” clause is the most important clause in the entire Constitution.  Of all the provisions in the document, it alone is shielded from amendment by Article V, which states:  “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”  Thus, as one commentator has already said, equal representation for small states in the Senate is an important feature, not a bug, of the Constitution.  Indeed, without this feature, there almost certaintly never would have been a Constitution to begin with. 

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Gull wing stability prompts talk of “design” in nature

Ring-billed Gull/Jiyang Chen (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Pos-darwinista, the big Portuguese-language ID blog, draws our attention to this paper about the way gulls stabilize their flight and—just for fun—flags the design language in the Introduction:

Abstract: A gliding bird’s ability to stabilize its flight path is as critical as its ability to produce sufficient lift. In flight, birds often morph the shape of their wings, but the consequences of avian wing morphing on flight stability are not well understood. Here, we investigate how morphing the gull elbow joint in gliding flight affects their static pitch stability. First, we combined observations of freely gliding gulls and measurements from gull wing cadavers to identify the wing configurations used during gliding flight. These measurements revealed that, as wind speed and gusts increased, gulls flexed their elbows to adopt wing shapes characterized by increased spanwise camber. To determine the static pitch stability characteristics of these wing shapes, we prepared gull wings over the anatomical elbow range and measured the developed pitching moments in a wind tunnel. Wings prepared with extended elbow angles had low spanwise camber and high passive stability, meaning that mild perturbations could be negated without active control. Wings with flexed elbow angles had increased spanwise camber and reduced static pitch stability. Collectively, these results demonstrate that gliding gulls can transition across a broad range of static pitch stability characteristics using the motion of a single joint angle. (open access) – Wing morphing allows gulls to modulate static pitch stability during gliding C. Harvey , V. B. Baliga , P. Lavoie and D. L. Altshuler Published:02 January 2019https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2018.0641

1. Introduction
The Wright brothers were not the first to design an aircraft that produced sufficient lift to fly, but they were the first to successfully control and stabilize a powered aircraft [1]. Similarly, it is not enough for birds to simply produce sufficient lift and thrust; birds must also control and stabilize their flight paths to be able to successfully forage and migrate [2,3]. Flight stability can be maintained passively due to the morphology of a flyer, actively by adjusting control inputs or by a combination of both passive and active stability [2]. It has been proposed that birds have lost their passive stability through evolution in favour of unstable morphologies that require active control [3]. However, recent theoretical and anatomical work has suggested that, like most modern aircraft, birds use a combination of passive and active stability [2]. Yet, unlike modern aircraft, birds do not have discrete control surfaces such as ailerons and flaps. Instead, birds actively change the shape of their wings, known as wing morphing (figure 1a). To date, there are relatively few data on avian flight stability, and there is no empirical evidence demonstrating how wing morphing affects avian stability characteristics. Understanding if, and how, avian wing morphing stabilizes their flight provides both a broader understanding of how birds fly and inspiration for novel controls for unmanned aerial vehicles.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2018.0641

One wonders how the proper authorities are coming with Darwinizing our language, so as to take out all suggestion of design or agency in nature and in humans. Not far, it seems. Maybe, instead of following Dawkins and insisting that design in nature is an illusion, researchers should just be agnostic about it for discussion purposes, given that that is how they routinely talk about it anyway.

See also: Researchers: An Anti-Cancer Kill Code Is Embedded In Every Cell

Cell behavior can show “purposeful inefficiency”? What next?

and

Do cells use passwords?

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Evolution or art? The chicken as a human artifact

Male red junglefowl/
Lip Kee Yap ( CC BY-SA 2.0 )

Today’s chicken is a far cry from the traditional jungle fow, for better or worse, as a bone study shows:

The quest for scale and efficacy has reimagined the chicken’s body as well as life. The pursuit of meat in a short period of time has resulted in breeds with rapidly growing muscle.

– In turn, resulting in a change in the center of gravity downwards

– Reduced pelvic and limb muscle mass (think thighs and drumsticks)

– Creating a low-slung, wide body chicken with decreasing steadiness and locomotion

– And an increase in bone-related diseases, osteopathies.

What might we learn from our long-standing relationship with chickens? There are simple lessons that both of us do better when adequately fed and housed. And more nuanced messages, that too much of a good thing, like chicken feed, can alter our body and both alleviate and promote disease. We have raised the broiler chicken to an unprecedented size, and while it is easy enough to see the changes we have brought to the chicken, should we not consider how the chicken and our quest for scale and efficiency may have changed us? Chuck Dinerstein, M.D., “Reading Chicken Bones: How Sapiens Changed The Planet” at American Council on Science and Health

We’ve probably had even more influence on the dog, of course. But here’s the interesting thing: When dogs run wild, they just go back to being wolfhounds after a few generations. Apparently, feral chickens just breed with still wild fowl and revert to ancestral types. Just how really significant irreversible changes occur remains unclear.

Abstract from the open-source paper.

Changing patterns of human resource use and food consumption have profoundly impacted the Earth’s biosphere. Until now, no individual taxa have been suggested as distinct and characteristic new morphospecies representing this change. Here we show that the domestic broiler chicken is one such potential marker. Human-directed changes in breeding, diet and farming practices demonstrate at least a doubling in body size from the late medieval period to the present in domesticated chickens, and an up to fivefold increase in body mass since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, the skeletal morphology, pathology, bone geochemistry and genetics of modern broilers are demonstrably different to those of their ancestors. Physical and numerical changes to chickens in the second half of the twentieth century, i.e. during the putative Anthropocene Epoch, have been the most dramatic, with large increases in individual bird growth rate and population sizes. Broiler chickens, now unable to survive without human intervention, have a combined mass exceeding that of all other birds on Earth; this novel morphotype symbolizes the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth’s biosphere. – The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere
Carys E. Bennett , Richard Thomas , Mark Williams , Jan Zalasiewicz , Matt Edgeworth , Holly Miller , Ben Coles , Alison Foster , Emily J. Burton and Upenyu Marume
Published:12 December 2018https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.180325

See also: Earlier Than Thought: Dogs Lived With Humans In The Americas 10 Kya

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Why artificial intelligence (AI) cannot produce a Universal Answers Machine

Okay, let’s start with Can an algorithm be racist? Well, the machine has no opinion. It processes vast tracts of data. But, as a result, the troubling hidden roots of some data are exposed

[Yonatan Zunger] offers the example of high school student Kabir Alli’s Google image search in 2016: for “three white teenagers” and “three black teenagers.” The request for white teens turned up stock photography for sale and the request for black teens turned up local media stories about arrests: The ensuing anger over deep-seated racism submerged the fact that the algorithm was not a decision someone made. It was an artifact of what people were looking for: “When people said ‘three black teenagers’ in media with high-quality images, they were almost always talking about them as criminals, and when they talked about ‘three white teenagers,’ they were almost always advertising stock photography.’”*

The machine only shows us what we ask for, it doesn’t tell us what we should wonder about. Zunger cautions that, of course, “Nowadays, either search mostly turns up news stories about this event.” That makes it difficult to determine whether anything has changed.

There is no simple way to automatically remove bias because much of it comes down to human judgment. Most Nobel Prize winners are men but a thoughtful human being will not assume that a winner “must be” a man. A machine learning system “knows” nothing other than the data input. It certainly doesn’t “know” that it might be creating prejudice or giving offense. If we want it to prevent that, we must constantly monitor its output. More.

In short, there will always be a job or a business for a person with good judgment. You can’t automate it.

* Stock photography: Those “faceless face” photos that adorn racks of pamphlets advocating good nutrition or volunteering are sold by stock photography houses. The fact that the face probably doesn’t look very much like the kid who lives across the road is part of the package that the publisher is buying. If it is a face at all, you naturally look at it, right? But you aren’t supposed to see anything that distracts you from the pamphlet’s message.

See also: Did AI teach itself to “not like” women?

and

Ethics for an Information Society

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A definition of consciousness: “The intentional power of the mind”

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers this definition by way of explaining that there is one sense in which consciousness IS an illusion: We are not aware of our consciousness; only of its objects.

I believe that the most satisfactory definition of consciousness is the intentional power of the mind — the ability of thought to be “about” something. Consciousness is always directed to an object, whether that object is physical, emotional, or conceptual. If there is no “aboutness,” there is no consciousness.

All intentionality entails two things: the process by which (1) we think about something, and the thing about which (2) we think. When I perceive a tree, I am perceiving (1) a tree (2). When I think about justice, I am contemplating (1) justice (2).

This understanding of the mind — that thought involves both that of which we think (2) and that by which we think (1) dates back to Aristotle (384–322 BCE). It was a cornerstone of Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) philosophy of mind.

St. Thomas, following Aristotle, observed that it is only the objects of thought that we are aware of. We are never aware of the process of thought. Thus, sensation, perception, memory, judgment, understanding, etc., are unconscious processes. They are the processes by which we sense bodily feelings, perceive objects, remember faces, judge opinions, and understand concepts. But it is the feelings, objects, faces, opinions, and concepts themselves of which we are conscious. We are never conscious of the sensations, perceptions, etc., by which we are conscious of these objects. Michael Egnor, “In one sense, consciousness IS an illusion…” at Mind Matters

Dr. Egnor thinks that philosopher Peter Carruthers probably means something like that when he writes about “The Illusion of Conscious Thought.”s Of course, in the age of the thinking electron, the conscious coffee mug, and human consciousness as an illusion, the philosopher would be wise to make quite clear that he, by contrast, is trying to stick to observable reality.

Also by Michael Egnor: Does Your Brain Construct Your Conscious Reality? Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk

and

Does Your Brain Construct Your Conscious Reality? Part II In a word, no. Your brain doesn’t “think”; YOU think, using your brain

See also: Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug

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Michael Shermer’s Case for Scientific Naturalism

And the Enlightenment. The celebrity skeptic calls it scientific humanism:

Human progress, which has been breathtaking over the past two centuries in nearly every realm of life, has principally been the result of the application of scientific naturalism to solving problems, from engineering bridges and eradicating diseases to extending life spans and establishing rights. This blending of scientific naturalism and Enlightenment humanism should have a name. Call it “scientific humanism.”

It wasn’t obvious that the earth goes around the sun, that blood circulates throughout the body, that vaccines inoculate against disease. But because these things are true and because Nicolaus Copernicus, William Harvey and Edward Jenner made careful measurements and observations, they could hardly have found something else. So it was inevitable that social scientists would discover that people universally seek freedom. Michael Shermer, “The Case for Scientific Humanism” at Scientific American

Shermer’s piece, in which he is looking back on his years as a Scientific American columnist, feels like an elegy.

The reality today is that, however people may universally seek freedom, China is dedicated to using the high tech born of science to stamp it out and enlisting many other natures to do the same.

And science, as opposed to technology, is coming under serious assault from those who demand that nature itself do their social justice bidding. More, the social justice warrior culture that is demanding that science incorporate their propaganda (social justice math and all) is descending into serious rot like anti-Semitism.

Maybe at some level Shermer senses the onslaught to come and knows that these are fond reminiscences of a way of thinking about science, true or not, that is utterly alien to those who feel left out by things like facts, evidence, and correct answers.

See also: Will AI liberate or enslave developing countries?

Which side will atheists choose in the war on science? They need to re-evaluate their alliance with progressivism, which is doing science no favours.

and

Maybe the “March for” fad will die out before the anti-Semitism hits science. The reason this subject interests us is that the social justice warriors (SJWs) have set their sights on science (remember the March for Science?). Which means that the science media and groups that are trying to accommodate them would be forced to accommodate the anti-Semitism as well. With any luck, the marching Woke (SJWs) will all break up quarreling before it gets that bad.

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Theoretical physicist takes on panpsychism. Bam! Pow!

Panpsychism? Oh, you know, everything is conscious. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, who can be counted on to be honest, tells us, “I know that physicists have a reputation of being narrow-minded. But the reason we have this reputation is that we tried the crazy shit long ago and just found it doesn’t work.”

Um, no. But who told Hossenfelder that things should “work”? Not just sound deep? Okay, okay, let’s let her go on:

Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change. It’s hard to have an inner life with only one thought. But if electrons could have thoughts, we’d long have seen this in particle collisions because it would change the number of particles produced in collisions.

The only element of physics that might work here, she thinks, would be a claim that the conscious state is so strongly bound within the particles that it has not been possible to discover them. But then,

With the third option [strongly bound particles] it is indeed possible to add internal states to elementary particles. But if your goal is to give consciousness to those particles so that we can inherit it from them, strongly bound composites do not help you. They do not help you exactly because you have hidden this consciousness so that it needs a lot of energy to access. This then means, of course, that you cannot use it at lower energies, like the ones typical for soft and wet thinking apparatuses like human brains. Sabine Hossenfelder, “Electrons don’t think” at BackRe(Action)

It’s the basic problem of the coffee mug. If naturalism (nature is all there is), often called “materialism,” is true, either you and the mug are both conscious or neither of you is. The comments at BackRe(Action) illustrate the difficulty many have grasping that that is a serious problem.

Overall, Hossenfelder is only just beginning to think about this problem so she underestimates the depth of the dilemma.

See also: From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities— of universal consciousness.”

Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug

Will the Large Hadron Collider doom particle physics? They’ll find the money to continue. Consider: The Standard Model begins with the hated Big Bang. Nothing that supports string theory, eternal cosmic inflation, or a multiverse has been found. Don’t many people just have to keep looking and keep quiet about what they find that wasn’t what they hoped for?

and

(A response to Hossenfelder:) Experimental physicist: Particle theory is “in a crisis” and a bigger collider IS the answer! So we should do it because we can, not because we really expect to learn very much? It may be that Dorigo is just not a good spokesperson for his position; he spends a good deal of time attacking Hossenfelder and her book. Anyway, somehow, naturalism (nature is all there is) isn’t providing the hoped-for return on investments.

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Maybe the “March for” fad will die out before the anti-Semitism hits science

In the gut. According to retired Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a number of local chapters of the Women’s March are disassociating themselves from it, in part on account of anti-Semitism:

For once Leftists have pushed back against a group of women who demonize Jews and Israel in favor of Palestinians, whose own government is oppressive against gays, women, apostates, and, well, you name it. The women who called for WM leaders Sarsour, Mallory, and Perez to step down (they won’t, of course), were saying that they needn’t condone anti-Semitism to be progressive: women can stand together against the oppression of all women, no matter their ethnicity, color, or faith. I find that heartening.

So the WM continues to fragment. Tablet already reported that “numerous state chapters have broken off from the national organization—notably Houston, Washington, D.C., Alabama, Rhode Island, Florida, Portland, Illinois, Barcelona, Canada, and Women’s March GLOBAL.” New York is going to have two Women’s Marches, apparently divided by pigmentation. Jerry Coyne, “The Women’s March Fragments Even More” at Why Evolution Is True

And they are also divided, in general, because of the natural tendency of groups based on identity politics to fragment, with the fragments turning on each other in a classic zero-sum game.

The reason this subject interests us is that the social justice warriors (SJWs) have set their sights on science (remember the March for Science?). Which means that the science media and groups that are trying to accommodate them might be forced to accommodate the anti-Semitism as well. With any luck, the marching Woke (SJWs) will all break up quarreling before it gets that bad.

See also: Jerry Coyne is learning, but not fast enough

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Steve Meyer on the information enigma in evolution

Steve Meyer, author of Darwin’s Doubt, offers a handy illustration of the sort of specified complexity that life forms show, which indicates design, in an April 2018 essay:

Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those carrying encoded messages, the latter indicating an intelligent source. Recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference. More importantly, [design theorist William] Dembski explicates criteria by which rational agents recognize or detect the effects of other rational agents, and distinguish them from the effects of natural causes. He demonstrates that systems or sequences with the joint properties of “high complexity” (or small probability) and “specification” invariably result from intelligent causes, not chance or physical-chemical laws.

Dembski noted that complex sequences exhibit an irregular and improbable arrangement that defies expression by a simple rule or algorithm, whereas specification involves a match or correspondence between a physical system or sequence and an independently recognizable pattern or set of functional requirements. By way of illustration, consider the following three sets of symbols:

nehya53nslbyw1`jejns7eopslanm46/J

TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN

ABABABABABABABABABABAB

The first two sequences are complex because both defy reduction to a simple rule. Each represents a highly irregular, aperiodic, improbable sequence.

The third sequence is not complex, but is instead highly ordered and repetitive. Of the two complex sequences, only the second, however, exemplifies a set of independent functional requirements — i.e., is specified.

English has many such functional requirements. For example, to convey meaning in English one must employ existing conventions of vocabulary (associations of symbol sequences with particular objects, concepts, or ideas) and existing conventions of syntax and grammar. When symbol arrangements “match” existing vocabulary and grammatical conventions (i.e., functional requirements), communication can occur. Such arrangements exhibit “specification.” The sequence “Time and tide wait for no man” clearly exhibits such a match, and thus performs a communication function.

Thus, of the three sequences only the second manifests both necessary indicators of a designed system. The third sequence lacks complexity, though it does exhibit a simple periodic pattern, a specification of sorts. The first sequence is complex, but not specified. Only the second sequence exhibits both complexity and specification.

Thus, according to Dembski’s theory of design detection, only the second sequence implicates an intelligent cause — as our uniform experience affirms. In my book Signature in the Cell, I show that Dembski’s joint criteria of complexity and specification are equivalent to “functional” or “specified information.”

I also show that the coding regions of DNA exemplify both high complexity and specification and, thus not surprisingly, also contain “specified information.” Consequently, Dembski’s scientific method of design detection reinforces the conclusion that the digital information in DNA indicates prior intelligent activity. Stephen C. Meyer, “Happy New Year! #1 of Our Top Stories of 2018: Yes, Intelligent Design Is Detectable by Science” at Evolution News and Science Today:

Darwinism is not really compatible with information theory but that doesn’t matter as long as most people don’t know information theory.

See also: Can cities serve as cauldrons of evolution (speciation)? For spiders, raccoons, and such? Big, high-tech cities are new and different. But you don’t get remarkable results from these independent theatres of evolution. That’s clear from a recent long article, well worth reading, mostly for the fascinating information but also for the need, so common these days, to assert that something is happening which obviously isn’t.

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