Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 56

At Mind Matters News: Human brain has many more language connections than chimp brain

That finding isn’t surprising in principle but the researchers pinned down specific areas of greater connectivity in the human brain:

arcuate fasciculus/Yeh, F.C. et al.

In a study of brain scans from 50 humans and 29 chimpanzees, researchers discovered an interesting difference: The connections between language areas in the human brain are much larger than previously thought and quite different from those of the chimpanzee brain. That’s, of course, consistent with the relative complexity of human thought and language but the question had not really been examined before with a focus on one specific area.

The researchers were interested in a nerve tract that connects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, the arcuate fasciculus

Chimpanzee brain connectivity seems to involve mainly the temporal lobe but in humans there is a connection towards the frontal and parietal lobes via the arcuate fasciculus.

News, “Human brain has many more language connections than chimp brain” at Mind Matters News (July 6, 2022)

Takehome: Among the many differences between the human brain and other animal brains is the role of the arcuate fasciculus that connects lobes of the brain. If we are really 99 percent chimpanzee, as some claim, it doesn’t appear to be showing up in the brain.

lobes of human brain/Sebastian 203

In recent years, researchers have discovered a number of other unique features of the human brain:

● Researchers: Humans are prewired to recognize words. Contrary to what psychologists had supposed, the ability to seek meaning is built in, not taught. Meaning is the “superpower” that wise scientists refrain from trying to “explain,” as if they controlled it.

● Human neurons and the human brain are much more efficient than chimpanzee ones. What was formerly thought to be “junk DNA” differs between humans and chimpanzees and plays a role in brain development. Researchers did not expect to find that human neurons have fewer — not more — ion channels than eight other mammal species do.

● Another new communications network has been discovered in the human brain. Our brains are smarter than we thought. Oscillations of over 100 Hertz synchronize across several brain regions. That may help us understand brain diseases better.

● The human brain has neural networks that are not found in lab mice. They are complex special networks whose purpose is silencing other neurons. Researchers theorize that these interneuron networks help us focus on complex tasks where we must keep many different factors in play.

As we’ve said before, there is a lot to study in the human brain. It is the most complex thing that we know of in the universe yet it has shrunk over the last 40,000 years, which have seen many technical advances. Its structure is similar to that of the universe. We will probably be studying it for a while

You may also wish to read: Your mind vs. your brain: Ten things to know

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Researchers argue that long human lifespan is due in part to the contributions of elders

UC Santa Barbara researchers report:

According to long-standing canon in evolutionary biology, natural selection is cruelly selfish, favoring traits that help promote reproductive success. This usually means that the so-called “force” of selection is well equipped to remove harmful mutations that appear during early life and throughout the reproductive years. However, by the age fertility ceases, the story goes that selection becomes blind to what happens to our bodies. After the age of menopause, our cells are more vulnerable to harmful mutations. In the vast majority of animals, this usually means that death follows shortly after fertility ends.

Which puts humans (and some species of whale) in a unique club: animals that continue to live long after their reproductive lives end. How is it that we can live decades in selection’s shadow?

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

“From the perspective of natural selection, long post-menopausal life is a puzzle,” said UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor Michael Gurven. In most animals, including chimpanzees—our closest primate brethren—this link between fertility and longevity is very pronounced, where survival drops in sync with the ability to reproduce. Meanwhile in humans, women can live for decades after their ability to have children ends. “We don’t just gain a few extra years—we have a true post-reproductive life stage,” Gurven said.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, senior author Gurven, with former UCSB postdoctoral fellow and population ecologist Raziel Davison, challenge the longstanding view that the force of natural selection in humans must decline to zero once reproduction is complete.

They assert that a long post-reproductive lifespan is not just due to recent advancements in health and medicine. “The potential for long life is part of who we are as humans, an evolved feature of the life course,” Gurven said.

The secret to our success? Our grandparents.

“Ideas about the potential value of older adults have been floating around for awhile,” Gurven said. “Our paper formalizes those ideas, and asks what the force of selection might be once you take into account the contributions of older adults.”

For example, one of the leading ideas for human longevity is called the Grandmother Hypothesis—the idea that, through their efforts, maternal grandmothers can increase their fitness by helping improve the survival of their grandchildren, thereby enabling their daughters to have more children. Such fitness effects help ensure that the grandmother’s DNA is passed down.

“And so that’s not reproduction, but it’s sort of an indirect reproduction. The ability to pool resources, and not just rely on your own efforts, is a game changer for highly social animals like humans,” Davison said.

In their paper, the researchers take the kernel of that idea—intergenerational transfers, or resource sharing between old and young—and show that it, too, has played a fundamental role in the force of selection at different ages. Food sharing in non-industrial societies is perhaps the most obvious example.

“We show that elders are valuable, but only up to a point,” contends Gurven. “Not all grandmothers are worth their weight. By about their mid-seventies, hunter-gatherers and farmers end up soaking up more resources than they provide. Plus, by their mid-seventies, most of their grandkids won’t be dependents anymore, and so the circle of close kin who stand to benefit from their help is small.”

But food isn’t everything. Beyond getting fed, children are also taught and socialized, trained in relevant skills and worldviews. This is where older adults can make their biggest contributions: While they don’t contribute as much to the food surplus, they have the accumulation of a lifetime of skills they can deploy to ease the burden of childcare on parents, as well as knowledge and training that they can pass on to their grandchildren.

In contrast, chimpanzees—who represent our best guess as to what humans’ last common ancestor may have been like—are able to forage for themselves by age 5. However, their foraging activities require less skill, and they produce minimal surplus. Even so, the authors show that if a chimpanzee-like ancestor would share their food more widely, they could still generate enough indirect fitness contributions to increase the force of selection in later adulthood.

“What this suggests is that human longevity is really a story about cooperation,” said Gurven. “Chimpanzee grandmothers are rarely observed doing anything for their grandkids.”

Full article available at Phys.Org.

Suggesting that grandmothers have worth only in helping raise grandchildren, to the end that this results in their DNA being passed down, reveals how the evolutionary paradigm has deadened its adherents to higher values that humans have held throughout history.

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At Big Think: The simulation hypothesis is a dangerous illusion

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The simulation hypothesis states that we are living in a simulation created by a technologically advanced species. If we are living in a simulation, so are our simulators. Only the First Simulator — namely, “God” — has any agency. The real problem we face is the reality we live in, which is reaching disastrous levels of self-destruction. It is our duty to address that reality — not escape from it.Credit: andrush / Adobe Stock

Marcelo Gleiser writes:

The matrix of our reality is glitching. At least it seems to be, given the absurdity of current events. It sometimes seems as if some joker from the future, or perhaps an alien kid, is fooling with the fabric of society to see where it will all break down. From politics to pandemics to war, it feels like nothing is going right.

Calvinism with a modern twist

So, yes, if we do live in a simulation, our puppet masters are truly evil creatures. What kind of rank social experiment is this? Perhaps we do not live in such a simulation, however. Maybe humanity just needs to overhaul its moral standards before it self-combusts in a puff of rage. 

To most people trying to make a living, pay bills, or fight an illness, it sounds ridiculous to spend time considering that our reality is not “real” but is instead a highly sophisticated simulation. Someone close to me recently told me on this topic, “I wish smart people would focus on real-world problems and not on this nonsense.” I sympathize with this view, even though I use simulations in my own scientific research. To blame the current mess on powers beyond us sounds like a major cop-out. It is not too different from the age-old aphorism, “it’s God’s will.” It is not our fault, it is not our responsibility; “they” are doing this to us. 

The key difference between God and a simulation (at least in this narrow context) is that God is presumably infallible, while simulations can have glitches. Well, the argument that we live in a simulation has some glitches of its own. 

Only the First Simulator is free

One such glitch is that there is no reason to stop the simulation at one super-advanced posthuman (or alien) species. It could very well be that our simulators are being simulated by even more advanced simulators, and those by even more advanced ones, ad infinitum. Who is the First Simulator? 

This reminds me of the “turtles all the way down” concept of Anavastha in Indian philosophy, where the world rests on an elephant that rests on a turtle that rests on a turtle, and so on. In the West, we might refer to this as infinite regression, or the problem of the First Cause. This offers at least some sort of comfort, given that the First Simulator must enslave all of our simulators. Only the First Simulator is truly free. Sound familiar?

A dangerous illusion

The simulation argument messes with our self-esteem. It concludes that we have no free will, that we are just puppets fooled into thinking we are free to make choices. To believe this is to give up our sense of autonomy. After all, if it’s all a big game that we cannot control, why bother? “Let the world go to hell, as it is now. We can’t change it anyway.” 

This is the danger with this kind of philosophical argument — it threatens to actually turn us into what it is claiming we are, so that we abdicate our right to fight for what we believe in and to change what must be changed. Let us make sure that we do not confuse philosophical arguments with our very real socio-political reality, especially not now. We need all the autonomy we can muster to protect our freedom of choice and to grow morally so we can salvage our project of civilization. Killing our own is the lowest kind of savagery we can sink to. Our reality is not a simulation. It simply reflects our failure to evolve morally as a species.

Big Think

If evolution is the answer, then we can’t be blamed. If God is the answer, then the stakes get higher: our choices matter in the end, with accompanying responsibility. But with God, hope also enters the picture, and meaningless non-existence need not be our end.

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The Trend is your Friend–Global Cooling

In today’s Phys.Org, we find an article giving the latest results from Deep Ocean temperature measurements of the North Atlantic. These measurements feature a new method of obtaining both temperature and CO2 levels.

What is the long term trend telling us about our future? What about the dramatic shifts in deep ocean temperatures? Were they man-made?

Just look at it and then you’ll know just how hysterical global warming–now known as “climate change,” really is.

A picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.

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Robert J. Marks on “machines with minds” vs. the real-life dweebs in his evolutionary programming:

( Non-Computable You  (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) by Robert J. Marks is available here.)

Computer engineering prof Marks notes in his new book, Non-Computable You, “The answers computer programs give sometimes surprise me too — but they always result from their programming.” He discusses his work in swarm intelligence:

The Office of Naval Research contracted Ben Thompson, of Penn State’s Applied Research Lab, and me and asked us to evolve swarm behavior. Simple swarm rules can result in unexpected swarm behavior like stacking Skittles. Given simple rules, finding the corresponding emergent behavior is easy. Just run a simulation. But the inverse design problem is a more difficult one. If you want a swarm to perform some task, what simple rules should the swarm bugs follow? To solve this problem, we applied an evolutionary computing AI. This process ended up looking at thousands of possible rules to find the set that gave the closest solution to the desired performance.

One problem we looked at involved a predator-prey swarm. All action took place in a closed square virtual room. Predators, called bullies, ran around chasing prey called dweebs. Bullies captured dweebs and killed them. We wondered what performance would be if the goal was maximizing the survival time of the dweeb swarm. The swarm’s survival time was measured up to when the last dweeb was killed.

After running the evolutionary search, we were surprised by the result: The dweebs submitted themselves to self-sacrifice in order to maximize the overall life of the swarm.

This is what we saw: A single dweeb captured the attention of all the bullies, who chased the dweeb in circles around the room. Around and around they went, adding seconds to the overall life of the swarm. During the chase, all the other dweebs huddled in the corner of the room, shaking with what appeared to be fear. Eventually, the pursuing bullies killed the sacrificial dweeb, and pandemonium broke out as the surviving dweebs scattered in fear. Eventually another sacrificial dweeb was identified, and the process repeated. The new sacrificial dweeb kept the bullies running around in circles while the remaining dweebs cowered in a corner.

The sacrificial dweeb result was unexpected, a complete surprise. There was nothing written in the evolutionary computer code explicitly calling for these sacrificial dweebs. Is this an example of AI doing something we had not programmed it to do? Did it pass the Lovelace test?

Absolutely Not

We had programmed the computer to sort through millions of strategies that would maximize the life of the dweeb swarm, and that’s what the computer did. It evaluated options and chose the best one. The result was a surprise, but does not pass the Lovelace test for creativity. The program did exactly what it was written to do. And the seemingly frightened dweebs were not, in reality, shaking with fear; humans tend to project human emotions onto non-sentient things. They were rapidly adjusting to stay as far away as possible from the closest bully. They were programmed to do this.

Robert J. Marks, “Machines with minds? The Lovelace test vs. the Turing test” at Mind Matters News (July 5, 2022)

Takehome: A machine mind didn’t “just evolve” in this experiment; it was programmed in — even if its output was a surprise. The same is likely true of the human mind.

Dr. Marks gives a seminar on swarm intelligence.

You may also wish to read the earlier published excerpts:

Why you are not — and cannot be — computable. A computer science prof explains in a new book that computer intelligence does not hold a candle to human intelligence. In this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Non-Computable You, Robert J. Marks shows why most human experience is not even computable.

The Software of the Gaps: An excerpt from Non-Computable You. In his just-published book, Robert J. Marks takes on claims that consciousness is emerging from AI and that we can upload our brains. He reminds us of the tale of the boy who dug through a pile of manure because he was sure that … underneath all that poop, there MUST surely be a pony!

Marks: Artificial intelligence is no more creative than a pencil.
You can use a pencil — but the creativity comes from you. With AI, clever programmers can conceal that fact for a while. In this short excerpt from his new book, Non-Computable You, Robert J. Marks discusses the tricks that make you think chatbots are people.

and

Machines with minds? The Lovelace test vs. the Turing test. The answers computer programs give sometimes surprise me too — but they always result from their programming. When it comes to assessing creativity (and therefore consciousness and humanness), the Lovelace test is much better than the Turing test.

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New university in Texas, aiming to restore scholarly debate, surviving so far

As a counter to Woke Uniquack U:

UATX’s forbidden courses program, which brought together undergraduates from leading colleges and universities, lived up to its name. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s course analyzed “key foundations of critical thinking, argumentation, reasoned debate, and freedom of expression, as these pertain to some of the most controversial issues of our day.” Students studied logical argumentation and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in preparation for exploring theses like “Islam is a religion of peace” and “transgender women are women” from opposing perspectives. Kathleen Stock’s course on varieties of feminism examined “what kind of metaphysical and political subject is being implicitly conjured in the background under the heading ‘woman,’ and whether it is a coherent one.” Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams introduced his class to the “pain, rage, and hope of America’s most loyal critics,” including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. McCloskey’s course asked whether capitalism has been a tragedy or a triumph. Historian Niall Ferguson led an examination of free and unfree societies in the twentieth century…

The disarming power of culture was palpable. Students who had learned to hold their tongues in college classrooms poured forth their souls once the cork of wariness was unstopped.

Jacob Howland, “Reach For Your Culture“ at City Journal (July 1, 2022)

Of course, the establishment can always just refuse to recognize UATX’s degrees, in order to protect its own mediocrities. But eventually, it may come down to, who do you want to listen to? The people who did the homework or approved tokens? ‘Twas often thus.

Meanwhile, another prof explains why he’s just retiring:

Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. far-left postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty recruited even more extremely militant graduate students to work with them.

Honestly, the “critical” profs may represent what the public really wants: In a world where a university degree is supposed to confer social status, they offer a way to get a degree by posturing for social justice without really learning a discipline. One effective tactic is to attack and destroy the standards that might be used to evaluate their performance.

The good effects will be felt now by the degree holders who get status jobs. The bad effects will be felt by others down the road, mostly by people who no longer matter or never did.

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Robert J. Marks: 4. How Almost All Numbers Can Encode the Library of Congress

( Non-Computable You  (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) by Robert J. Marks is available here.)

Robert J. Marks: That’s a weird, counterintuitive — but quite real — consequence of the concept of infinity in math. The Library can be encoded any number of times, including all slightly misspelled variants , in any irrational number:

All documents in English can be reduced to a sequence of ones and zeros. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) uses eight bits for each letter, character and punctuation mark in the English language. For example, the letter B is assigned the eight bit number 01000010. The name “Bob” in ASCII is 010000100110111101100010. In generating bits for the irrational number by coin flipping, will we eventually reproduce this ASCII code for “Bob”? It might take some time, but most assuredly the answer is yes. What about the ASCII version of this entire article? Eventually yes. The entire book Moby Dick? The King James version of the Bible? Yes and yes. The entire contents of the Library of Congress?

Yes.

Almost every number between zero and one randomly chosen by coin flipping will at some point contain the binary encoding of the Library of Congress. A math nerd would say this is assured with probability one.

What, though, about numbers like ½ =0.5? This doesn’t contain the Library of Congress. But randomly choosing 0.5, equal to 0.100000000000000000…in binary, has a zero chance of occurring. It requires an infinite number of zeros in a row after the first one. That has a zero chance of happening. This is also true of all the rational numbers between zero and one that don’t contain the entire Library of Congress.

The cause of our strange observation is infinity. When infinity is assumed to exist, weird things can happen. Most real numbers require infinite precision to define. And, as discussed, infinity does not exist.

Robert J. Marks, “4. How Almost All Numbers Can Encode the Library of Congress” at Mind Matters News

Takehome: Re math: Almost every number between zero and one, randomly chosen by coin flipping, will at some point contain the binary encoding of the Library of Congress. That’s why infinity is a concept in math but not in the real world. Note: You should ask, how do we come to have concepts that are not part of the real world?

Here are the earlier instalments in this series:

Part 1: Why infinity does not exist in reality. A few examples will show the absurd results that come from assuming that infinity exists in the world around us as it does in math. In a series of five posts, I explain the difference between what infinity means — and doesn’t mean — as a concept.

Part 2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning. The logical consequences of a literally infinite past are absurd, as a simple illustration will show. The absurdities that an infinite past time would create, while not a definitive mathematical proof, are solid evidence that our universe had a beginning.

and

Part 3.In infinity, lines and squares have an equal number of points Robert J. Marks: We can demonstrate this fact with simple diagram. This counterintuitive result, driven by Cantor’s theory of infinities is strange. Nevertheless, it is a valid property of the infinite.

You may also wish to read: Yes, you can manipulate infinity in math. The hyperreals are bigger (and smaller) than your average number — and better! (Jonathan Bartlett)

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At Eurekalert: Connectivity of language areas unique in the human brain

Neuroscientists have gained new insight into how our brain evolved into a language-ready brain. Compared to chimpanzee brains, the pattern of connections of language areas in our brain has expanded more than previously thought. The researchers at Radboud University and University of Oxford publish their findings in PNAS on July 4.

“At first glance, the brains of humans and chimpanzees look very much alike. The perplexing difference between them and us is that we humans communicate using language, whereas non-human primates do not”, says co-first author Joanna Sierpowska. Understanding what in the brain could have enabled this unique ability has inspired researchers for years. However, up to now, their attention was mainly drawn towards a particular nerve tract connecting frontal and temporal lobes called arcuate fasciculus, which besides showing significant differences between species, is well-known to be involved in language function.

”We wanted to shift our focus towards the connectivity of two cortical areas located in the temporal lobe, which are equally important for our ability to use language”, says Sierpowska. 

Imaging white matter

To study the differences between the human and chimpanzee brain, the researchers used scans of 50 human brains and 29 chimpanzee brains scanned in a similar way as humans, but under well-controlled anesthesia and as part of their routine veterinary check-ups.  More specifically, they used a technique called diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), which images white matter, the nerve pathways that connect brain areas. 

Using these images, they explored the connectivity of two language-related brain hubs (the anterior and posterior middle areas of the temporal lobe), comparing them between the species. “In humans, both of these areas are considered crucial for learning, using and understanding language and harbor numerous white matter pathways”, says Sierpowska. “It is also known that damage to these brain areas has detrimental consequences for language function. However, until now, the question of whether their pattern of connections is unique to humans remained unanswered.”

New connections in human brain

The researchers found that while the connectivity of the posterior middle temporal areas in chimpanzees is confined mainly to the temporal lobe, in humans a new connection towards the frontal and parietal lobes emerged using   the arcuate fasciculus  as an anatomical avenue. In fact, changes to both human language areas include a suite of expansions to connectivity within the temporal lobes. “The results of our study imply that the arcuate fasciculus surely is not the only driver of evolutionary changes preparing the brain for a full-fledged language capacity”, says co-author Vitoria Piai.

“Our findings are purely anatomical, so it is hard to say anything about brain function in this context”, says Piai. “But the fact that this pattern of connections is so unique for us humans suggests that it may be a crucial aspect of brain organization enabling our distinctive language abilities.”

EurekAlert

Discovering differences in the anatomical properties of human and chimpanzee brains is reasonable; ascribing the remarkable facility of human language mastery to random processes is not.

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At Evolution News: Conservation of Information — The Theorems

William Dembski writes:

I am reviewing Jason Rosenhouse’s new book, The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism (Cambridge University Press), serially. For the full series so far, go here.

Until about 2007, conservation of information functioned more like a forensic tool for discovering and analyzing surreptitious insertions of information: So and so says they got information for nothing. Let’s see what they actually did. Oh yeah, here’s where they snuck in the information. Around 2007, however, a fundamental shift occurred in my work on conservation of information. Bob Marks and I began to collaborate in earnest, and then two very bright students of his also came on board. Initially we were analyzing some of the artificial life simulations that Jason Rosenhouse mentions in his book, as well as some other simulations (such as Thomas Schneider’s ev). As noted, we found that the information emerging from these systems was always more than adequately accounted for in terms of the information initially inputted. 

Yet around 2007, we started proving theorems that precisely tracked the information in these systems, laying out their information costs, in exact quantitative terms, and showing that the information problem always became quantitatively no better, and often worse, the further one backtracked causally to explain it. Conservation of information therefore doesn’t so much say that information is conserved as that at best it could be conserved and that the amount of information to be accounted for, when causally backtracked, may actually increase. This is in stark contrast to Darwinism, which attempts to explain complexity from simplicity rather than from equal or greater complexity. Essentially, then, conservation of information theorems argue for an information regress. This regress could then be interpreted in one of two ways: (1) the information was always there, front-loaded from the beginning; or (2) the information was put in, exogenously, by an intelligence. 

And no, Darwinian evolution cannot, according to the conservation of information theorems, create information from scratch. The way out of this predicament for Darwinists (and I’ve seen this move repeatedly from them) is to say that conservation of information may characterize computer simulations of evolution, but that real-life evolution has some features not captured by the simulations. But if so, how can real-life evolution be subject to scientific theory if it resists all attempts to model it as a search? Conservation of information theorems are perfectly general, covering all search. 

Push Comes to Shove

Yet ironically, Rosenhouse is in no position to take this way out because, as noted in my last post in this series, he sees these computer programs as “not so much simulations of evolution [but as] instances of it.” (p. 209) Nonetheless, when push comes to shove, Rosenhouse has no choice, even at the cost of inconsistency, but to double down on natural selection as the key to creating biological information. The conservation of information theorems, however, show that natural selection, if it’s going to have any scientific basis, merely siphons from existing sources of information, and thus cannot ultimately explain it. 

We’ve seen active information before in the Dawkins Weasel example. The baseline search for METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL stands no hope of success. It requires a completely random set of keystrokes typing all the right letters and spaces of this phrase without error in one fell swoop. But given a fitness function that assigns higher fitness to phrases where letters match the target phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, we’ve now got a better search, one that will converge to the target phrase quickly and with high probability. Most fitness functions, however, don’t take you anywhere near this target phrase. So how did Dawkins find the right fitness function to evolve to the target phrase? For that, he needed active information.

My colleagues and I have proved several conservation of information theorems, which come in different forms depending on the type and structure of information needed to render a search successful.

Dembski concludes this regarding Rosenhouse’s evasion of the conservation of information theorems:

For [Rosenhouse] to forgo providing even the merest sketch of the mathematics underlying this work because “it would not further our agenda to do so” (p. 212–213) and for him to dismiss these theorems as “trivial musings” (p. 269) betrays an inability to grapple with the math and understand its implications, as much as it betrays his agenda to deep-six conservation of information irrespective of its merits.

Dembski’s approach to prove the conservation of information is complemented by a generalization of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics from quantum statistical physics. His theorems are also backed up by common sense and observation. No one has ever observed a closed system ratcheting up its information content with the passage of time.

It takes an intelligence to recognize information. Why does a live rabbit have more information than a bucket of mud? (I hope no one will insult the rabbit by insisting that it contains no more information than a bucket of mud.) The specific arrangement of atoms that make a rabbit is obviously unique. To see this, imagine stirring up the bucket of mud. The particular arrangement of atoms has changed, but it’s still a bucket of mud. On the contrary, stirring up a rabbit will destroy it, since the arrangement of atoms that make a rabbit are unique. Information is related to the comparison of how many arrangements of the rabbit’s atoms there are that don’t result in a rabbit (nearly countless) to how many arrangements there are that do yield a rabbit (a much smaller number). To claim that natural processes can land on the arrangement of atoms that result in a living system composed of even a single cell is to deny scientific understanding, evidence and proof to the contrary.

For further discussion of these ideas, my book, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, is a resource that speaks to this topic in more depth, specifically in chapter 9.

The full article by Dembski is available at Evolution News.

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At Mind Matters News: 2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning

( Non-Computable You  (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) by Robert J. Marks is available here.)

Robert J. Marks: The logical consequences of a literally infinite past are absurd, as a simple illustration will show:

The story starts with Slow Sam who is a very slow writer. Sam is writing his autobiography. But it takes Sam a week to write the account of a single day of his life. Poor Sam. He is falling further and further behind in his writing.

But in the world of infinities this need not be the case. If the universe has always been in existence and Slow Sam has been writing for this entire infinite time, then the number of days and number of weeks today — counting from an infinite time ago — are the same. The consequence of this is crazy. If he has been writing forever, Sam can have completed his autobiography if he dies today!

This conclusion is, of course, ludicrous. Although not a definitive mathematical proof that the universe was created a finite time ago, the observation is solid evidence that our universe had a beginning. Otherwise, we would have to deal with infinity weirdnesses like Slow Sam’s autobiography.

To avoid the ridiculousness of Slow Sam finishing his autobiography, we must conclude the universe had a beginning.

Robert J. Marks, “2. Infinity illustrates that the universe has a beginning” at Mind Matters News

 

Takehome: The absurdities that an infinite past time would create, while not a definitive mathematical proof, are solid evidence that our universe had a beginning.

Here’s Part 1: Why infinity does not exist in reality. A few examples will show the absurd results that come from assuming that infinity exists in the world around us as it does in math. In a series of five posts, I explain the difference between what infinity means — and doesn’t mean — as a concept.

You may also wish to read: Yes, you can manipulate infinity in math. The hyperreals are bigger (and smaller) than your average number — and better! (Jonathan Bartlett)

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