* While information theory has been heavily used to attack modern evolutionary theory, an examination of these arguments shows them to be based on bogus assumptions. Ultimately, the attacks are derived from a prescientific line of reasoning, embodied as the "Paley fallacy". This chapter outlines the failings of the information theory argument against MET and its roots in the Paley fallacy.
* As discussed in the previous chapter, as far as contemporary information theory is concerned, the amount of information in a string depends only on how disorderly the string is. Given a bitmap image, the compression ratio only depends on the randomness of the image, it doesn't depend on what the image is -- the image could be of anything, even pure noise, and in fact noisy images have high information content. The compression algorithm is completely indifferent to the meaning of the image; information theory says nothing about it.
Creationists have realized that the definitions of information as provided by information theory don't provide a good basis for their criticisms of MET, and they have increasingly turned to concepts such as "functional information" or "complex specified information" that factor in what the information actually does -- as opposed to what might be called the "raw information" or "unspecified information" measured by conventional information theory. From the point of view of mainstream information theory, the idea that the "code" of the genome contains "information" while a snowflake does not is meaningless. When confronted with this fact, creationists reply: "We're not talking about raw information. We're talking about functional information."
The notion of "functional information" makes a certain amount of apparent sense, and it's certainly possible to provide measures of it -- but only for very specific cases and for narrowly specific purposes. It may not be impossible to come up with a generally applicable scheme of quantifying meaning that isn't arbitrary and mathematically useless, but people have tried hard and so far not had much luck. Without any real ability to quantify "functional information", it is difficult to show that it is lost or gained in various processes, and no way to show any basis for a "Law of Conservation of Information".
It might seem obviously true that the instruction sheet for putting together a model kit with a hundred parts contains more "functional information" than one for putting together a kit with ten parts. We can easily say that we should end up longer instructions, say ten times longer, for the more complicated kit, and in fact we could specify the "functional information" in the instructions for model kits as, say, the number of individual panels in the instructions.
However, the number of panels on the instruction sheet is just an ad-hoc statistic of interest only to model builders, and even at that it doesn't say anything about the relative elaboration of the individual panels or the clarity of the instructions. Does a brief instruction sheet that's clear have more or less "functional information" than a long instruction sheet that's incomprehensible? There's nothing in the number of panels to permit comparison to anything but the instructions for another model kit, much less anything that could be used in some fundamental rule of information theory. The only thing we can say for certain is that one's bigger than the other; there's no mathematically useful way to say that one has more "functional information" than the other.
* The same observations apply to other contexts. What sensible, broadly applicable scheme could be implemented to quantify the meaning of an image? Would a picture of the Mona Lisa get a high value and a pornographic cartoon get a low value? What about the "functional information" in of a book? Who hasn't read a book that talks a lot and says nothing? Would a book of fiction get a lower grade than a book of non-fiction? Does a really concise short book of non-fiction have less or more "functional information" than a long unreadable one?
Again, we can easily come up with any number of ad-hoc measures of "functional information", but they buy very little. We could say, for example, that the recipe for making a cake defines the "functional information" in the cake -- but who can say that a cake with a more elaborate recipe is necessarily a better cake than a simpler one? More importantly, in what way would this exercise leaves us a bit wiser than we were from the simple realization that we need a recipe to bake a cake? Recipes certainly don't provide any useful way to quantify the "functional information" of a cake, and few would think the idea of a "Law of Conservation of Recipes" as anything but silly.
* The difficulty in establishing the notion of "functional information" can be well illustrated by asking the question: "How can we quantify the amount of functional information in an arbitrary computer program?" It seems intuitively obvious that there is a certain amount of "functional information" in a computer program -- and if functional information can be calculated for anything, there should be some way to calculate it for a computer program. Just as with the model kit instructions, it seems apparent that the more complicated the task being performed by the program, the more functional information there is in the program.
However, once again this is extremely difficult to nail down. One problem is there's no known general way to assign a value to the functionality being implemented. We can certainly compare programs that, say, perform the same mathematical function to show which program is more compact and works faster, but how could we compare two programs that perform entirely different tasks? How could we assign values to the functionality implemented?
Even on an informal basis, it's very hard to determine any general relationship between the size of a program and what it accomplishes. A program that draws a real-world object of any particular elaboration tends to be long-winded, but elaborate iterative "fractal" patterns can be drawn by very simple programs, and the detail of elaboration of the fractal pattern can be multiplied by changing the number of iterations, without changing the size of the program in the slightest. Just adding random factors to the fractal program can increase the elaboration of the pattern still further -- and since a program with such random factors will generate different output with each run, its output features literally infinite variety. How could we factor infinite variety into assigning a value to the functional output?
To make matters worse, some programmers can write more compact code than others, and different computer languages and algorithms may be able to do a particular job much more easily than others. To be sure, computer scientists can perform analyses on the "efficiency of algorithms", showing that some algorithms can perform a given task more efficiently than others, but nobody performing such work would claim that implied any ability to do anything more than that, and nobody claims they can quantify the "functional information" in a computer program. Programmers tend to use "lines of code" as a measure of the size of a program, but this is much the same as the number of panels in model kit instructions: it says how big and cumbersome the program is and roughly measures the amount of labor needed to write it, but it says little about how much it actually does or how well it does it.
* It's tricky enough to define the "functional information" in a computer program; trying to do it for anything that doesn't have a digital basis is dubious -- for example what is the "functional information" in an elaborate clockwork device? To try to define "functional information" for a biosystem that has only the sketchiest resemblance to digital machinery is hopeless. Creationists sound confident when they speak of "functional information" or "complex specified information" or "biological information" or "complexity", but when asked:
-- the result is a blank stare, followed by evasions. If we could identify functional information in anything it would certainly be identifiable in a computer program, but the reality is that it's not.
The assertion of creationists that complex systems -- all complex systems, organisms, computer programs, clockwork devices, books -- have some well-defined physical attribute named "functional information" or "complex specified information" remains nonsensical for the time being, attempts to define such an attribute ending up being ad-hoc measures at best. At worst, they end up being nothing but bafflegab, verbiage made as confusing as possible as an exercise in muddying the waters.
Going back to the comparison of the genome with a snowflake, the notion that the genome has "functional information" seems plausible at first. On the basis of an analogy with a computer program, the genome clearly has "instructions" that represent "functional information", and it's certainly possible to come up with ad-hoc measures of the genome's "functional information". Unfortunately for such an argument, ad-hoc is all such measures are. In terms of making a fundamental distinction between life and nonlife, all such talk of "functional information" is a red herring. The exact same laws of physics and chemistry still apply in both cases, and there is no real dividing line, no property establishing a "magic barrier" between the two.
The real argument being advanced is that, reasoning by analogy with human-made computer programs, the genome had to be Designed by some vaguely-defined "Programmer". The genome certainly does look something like a program with lists of instructions, but this concept is nothing new, it's just part of the definition of "heredity". We know that heredity is one of the basic features of life, not seen in nonlife; we know that heredity is defined by the DNA sequences of the genome. However, if we then go further and starting talking about the "information" in the genome, we know nothing that we didn't before.
The question of whether there is "information" in the genome is irrelevant; whether the answer is YES or NO, we are not the slightest bit wiser. All the talk of "information" ends up being is a smokescreen to conceal a ham-fisted analogy between human computer programs -- or blueprints, or recipes, or any other human-created functional specification -- and the genome, arguing that since programs are designed by intelligent agents, the genome must be as well. This is very much the same as saying the eye must be Designed because it looks like a camera, or a bird must be Designed because it looks like an airplane, or a pig must be Designed because it looks like a piggy bank -- without providing any further reason to believe that they are Designed in any of these cases. In the end, the attempt to define a strong concept of "information" that distinguishes life from nonlife ends up suspiciously similar in its fuzzy appearance to a reinvention of "elan vital".
BACK_TO_TOP* Before proceeding to conclusions about information theory and evolution, it is worthwhile to consider a few "fine print" issues.
First, the discussion of information content so far has used compression of text files and bitmap image files as examples. Of course there are plenty of other examples, but a little examination shows they don't really bring much new to the party. For instance, consider the sort of imagery drawn by an action computer game. Such imagery generally consists of sets of lines (vectors), or more generally speaking polygons built up from vectors, used to construct "models" of objects in the game -- buildings, weapons, vehicles, characters. Those who work with such imagery actually do have a index of the complexity of the models: the number of vectors, or more usually polygons in the model.
However, the number of polygons is yet another ad-hoc measure, only useful for comparing one model to another, with little applicability to comparisons with anything else -- in fact the number of polygons really doesn't do much more than provide an indication of how much computing power is required to generate the model. The model amounts to just another data file, and once again the amount of information in it is, as far as information theory is concerned, effectively the number of bytes in the file after compression. We get the same results for any other sort of file, say a MIDI music file -- we might some sort of ad-hoc measure of information for the contents of any particular type of file, say the number of musical notes, but once again as far as information theory is concerned, the amount of information is the number of bytes in the compressed file.
* Second, since information theory can only really address the quantity of information in a file and not the meaning of the information, any linkage between the nature of the data in of one file and the data in another file is, as far as information theory is concerned, largely meaningless. Suppose we have a text file written in English; and suppose we have the equivalent text in a second file but written in Chinese. Can we say the two files have the same information? Intuitively, we might say YES, but the as far as information theory is concerned, the question doesn't even make sense. Since information theory isn't concerned with meaning, the only useful comparison that can be made between the two files is their compressed size in bytes.
Similarly, suppose we have a PNG bitmap image file and then make a copy shrunk down in size by half. Do the original and shrunken files contain the same information? Again, that doesn't make sense, the shrunken file contains fewer bytes and by that alone has less information than the original; if we doubled the size of the original file, it would have more information than the original.
The same goes for any case where two different files contain alternate representations of the same message. We could, for example, list a small text file on a PC display and save the text as a bitmap file; or we could similarly display a computer model and save the image of the model as a bitmap file. In either case, do we have the same information in each pair of files? Once again, the question is "not even wrong"; it just makes no sense. In each case, the two files are completely different messages that happen to describe the same item. After compression, the two files take up a certain amount of space on a hard disk, and that's all that information theory really says about the matter. The fact that the contents of the two files have some sort of logical connection is, as far as information theory is concerned, irrelevant.
* Third, the argument expressed here has assumed "lossless" compression, meaning that the compression doesn't lose any information. There's "lossy" methods that can obtain much higher compressions, but they do so by degrading the information, reducing the "noisiness" of the data: it's cheating, like trimming off parts of something so it fits into a cramped box. Any level of compression can be obtained as desired, but as the compression ratio is increased, the data becomes more and more degraded until it's completely useless.
Lossy compression works okay for things like photographic images, video, and audio, but not for things like text files -- nobody wants any part of their message to be thrown out, since losing even a single letter might render the message misleading or incomprehensible. In terms of mainstream information theory, lossless compression is more or less a red herring: it implies no real change in the argument.
* Fourth, there have also been attempts to undermine the idea that a file containing random strings like "XFNO2ZPAQB4Y" has high information content by pointing out that it would be very simple to create an algorithm to generate as many random strings as one likes, and so such a file actually has low information content. However, that's bogus, claiming in effect that one file full of gibberish text is equivalent to another. That may be true from a reader's point of view, but the problem is that this is sneaking in a consideration of "meaning" (or the lack thereof) that contemporary information theory doesn't have much to say about.
The objective is in effect to compress a file, and then decompress it exactly as it was before. The compression algorithm will get a text file and will compress it without concern for whether it contains readable text or sheer gibberish. The decompression will restore the text file, providing an exact duplicate, letter for letter, of the original. If the file contained what appeared to be sheer gibberish that was, unknown to everyone except the person sending it and the person receiving it, actually an encrypted message, simply providing another file of entirely different gibberish generated at random would be useless, throwing the encrypted message in the dumper. Even from a reader's point of view, one file full of gibberish text is not necessarily equivalent to another.
Carrying this thought a bit further, from the point of view of cryptography, a file full of purely random characters that everyone else would judge as sheer junk is crammed full of useful information, since it can be used as an encryption key, in effect a set of instructions on how to perform a scrambling of a "real" message. The more random and incomprehensible the file, the more impenetrable and useful an encryption key it is. Every such file of random characters is unique information: a codebreaker has to have the specific encryption key to crack the message. Attempting to decrypt using a different encryption key will produce gibberish for an output.
If a creationist is unimpressed by this reasoning and continues to insist that a file of gibberish characters is still gibberish, then we can ask: is a file full of a thousand numbers gibberish as well? Nobody would say that on the face of it the file was gibberish. However, if it was added that the numbers were randomly generated, then would the file become gibberish? It might be then argued, in an abrupt turnaround, that it is. However, files of randomly generated numbers are very useful for testing a program that crunches numbers to see if the program blows up for certain values. The more files of random numbers, the better the test, and each file has to be unique because otherwise it's just running the same test data twice, with the second run revealing nothing new. Do the numbers now stop being gibberish again? If we give the program a "real world" data set, would it be possible to distinguish between it and the random test data just by looking at them?
That leads straight back to the issue of "functional information", showing how fuzzy it is. As Shannon made it clear, the only difference between message and noise is that one is desired and the other not; there's nothing in the information itself that inherently defines it as message or noise, "functional" or "nonfunctional", "specified" or "unspecified". Certainly, given a specific function it may be possible to identify "functional information" driving it, but that's about as far as it goes. There's no way to clearly define "functional information", much less to quantify it in a useful fashion; there's no way to show that any such notions of "functional information" have any serious utility, much less that they represent any physical quantity.
* Fifth and absolutely last, some creationists have attempted to back up their "Law of Conservation of Information" by citations of physicists referring to "information conservation". This is an argument of desperation: all the physicists mean by the phrase is that, in principle if not in practice, the past history of a physical system can be traced back to all its previous states. That has absolutely nothing to do with the notion that "only an intelligence can create information". The two notions have as much in common with each other as Rome, Italy, has to do with Rome, New York: they have the same name.
BACK_TO_TOP* Having acquired definitions from information theory, we can now return to the supposed "Law of Conservation Of Information" in its various forms. One way that it is expressed is that there is no way for "information" to arise from "randomness". For example, as one creationist put it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Information theory states that "information" never arises out of randomness or chance events. Our human experience verifies this every day. How can the origin of the tremendous increase in information from simple organisms up to man be accounted for? Information is always introduced from the outside. It is impossible for natural processes to produce their own actual information, or meaning, which is what evolutionists [sic] claim has happened. Random typing might produce the string "dog", but it only means something to an intelligent observer who has applied a definition to this sequence of letters. The generation of information always requires intelligence, yet evolution claims that no intelligence was involved in the ultimate formation of a human being whose many systems contain vast amounts of information.
END QUOTE
This statement seems impressively authoritative, but it was just pulled out of the sky. If random changes are introduced into a string, the information content is likely to keep getting bigger and bigger. Suppose a data file gets corrupted; does it gain or lose information? It actually gains information by adding randomness to the string -- "GGdGXXTTTyT" has more information than "GGGGXXTTTTT" because it can't be compressed as much. As far as information theory is concerned, information absolutely arises out of randomness: the more random the information, the less "air" that can be squeezed out of it.
To the general public, the idea that information theory says that random changes introduce information may seem counterintuitive, since most people would think that random changes would amount to "noise" that would corrupt "information". For example, imagine the simple structured image file used as an example in the previous chapter; if it was corrupted, say with little colored speckles randomly sprinkled over the image:
-- it would seem plausible to say that there had been a loss of information. However, once again, the problem is that "meaning", in this case the picture contained in the file, isn't the issue addressed by contemporary information theory. The speckles mean more information to compress, with the compression algorithm needing to record where the speckles are so they can be reconstructed later, and so the compression ratio will not be as great. While the original file compressed to 1.12 KB, a half percent of its uncompressed size, this "degraded" file only compresses down to 47.4 KB, 18% of its uncompressed size. The random changes added information to the file. The fact that they have resulted in a less pleasing image is irrelevant.
A comment along the lines of "information theory states that information never arises out of randomness or chance events" is bogus; it says no such thing. Indeed, as Chaitin pointed out, generating a large amount of information requires either a very long-winded calculation or a source of randomness. In other words, the complexity of the genome is entirely consistent with its origins in random mutations. The attempt by creationists to "move the goalposts" and proclaim they actually mean "functional information" is crippled by the fact that they cannot provide anything resembling a clear definition of the concept, much less show how it supports a "Law of Conservation of Information".
* Another creationist went on in the same vein, attacking the idea that MET could account for, say, the transformation of a hemoglobin gene into an antibody gene:
BEGIN QUOTE:
There are two fallacies in this argument. The first is that random changes in existing information can create new information. Random changes to a computer program will not make it do more useful things. It doesn't matter if you make all the changes at once, or make one change at a time. It will never happen. Yet an evolutionist [sic] tells us that if one makes random changes to a hemoglobin gene that after many steps it will turn into an antibody gene. That's just plain wrong.
END QUOTE
Again, the argument is trying to leverage off an implied law of information theory -- "random changes in existing information cannot create new information" -- that doesn't exist, based on a fuzzy definition of the term "information". Once that red herring is thrown out, the creationist is merely making the classic "monkeys & typewriters" argument against MET, comparing evolution to the idea of monkeys pounding on typewriters and producing Shakespeare: "It doesn't matter if you make all the changes at once, or make one change at a time. It will never happen."
In reality, anybody who thinks MET is about monkeys blindly hammering on typewriters hasn't understood the essential point of the whole concept: the random changes matter a great deal, as long as each change is screened by selection. This particular example makes it plain what creationists are trying to say. In effect, given an image file, they're claiming that random changes of the picture dots are not going to result in a proper image of anything; by implication it requires intelligence to create a useful image. Random changes by themselves of course won't produce a useful image, but there are two fallacies in this argument:
Although the Law of Conservation of Information is trotted out at regular intervals, it's a zombie -- dead but still walking around, merely used as part of the creationist assertion that mindless evolution cannot account for the complexity of life. In broad terms, as one creationist insisted, MET "neither anticipates nor remembers. It gives no directions and it makes no choices."
Anybody familiar with MET is perfectly aware that evolution doesn't anticipate, which is why it comes up with things like flightless and defenseless dodo birds; and it is at least true to an extent that it gives no directions, except for improved fitness to the environment. To claim it makes no choices is ignorant, since it has the ultimate choice, between survival and extinction. If "the creation of information demands intelligence", the single-minded Grim Reaper provides all the "intelligence" necessary to do the job -- making a brutal, simple, clear, and decisive ON or OFF judgement to sort out what prospers and what dies out. Natural selection can say YES or NO to sort out a ONE from a ZERO and can, by repeating this process indefinitely over time, accumulate as much "information" as anyone would like.
It is just ignorant to claim it cannot remember. It clearly does, using the mechanism of heredity as embodied in the "memory tape" of the genome, and in fact if there was no heredity, no "memory", there would be no evolution. Creationists still demand to know where the information -- the "instructions", the "functional information" if we have to use that dubious term -- acquired by the "memory" embodied in the genome comes from. Biologist Richard Dawkins provided an eloquent answer:
BEGIN QUOTE:
If natural selection feeds information into gene pools, what is the information about? It is about how to survive. Strictly it is about how to survive and reproduce, in the conditions that prevailed when previous generations were alive. To the extent that present day conditions are different from ancestral conditions, the ancestral genetic advice will be wrong. In extreme cases, the species may then go extinct.
To the extent that conditions for the present generation are not too different from conditions for past generations, the information fed into present-day genomes from past generations is helpful information. Information from the ancestral past can be seen as a manual for surviving in the present: a family bible of ancestral "advice" on how to survive today. We need only a little poetic license to say that the information fed into modern genomes by natural selection is actually information about ancient environments in which ancestors survived.
END QUOTE
The instructions in the genome were acquired the hard way, through sheer trial-and-error experience. A jumble of "unspecified information" -- indiscriminately good, bad, or indifferent -- arose through genetic variation, with the "nonfunctional information" tossed out by the Grim Reaper and the "functional information" left behind to act as instructions. The instructions encode the past experience of an organism's ancestors in the form of adaptations, with no foresight to the future. This is essentially just the definition of evolution by natural selection. Where's the problem? What fantasy "conservation law" renders it impossible?
Information theory poses no real challenge to MET, and in fact the information-theory argument against MET has even less substance than the SLOT argument. Despite this, creationists press ahead regardless, hoping to muddy the waters using information-theory arguments characterized by fallacies:
Such exercises amount to starting a conclusion and then coming up with arguments to prop it up in hopes of muddying the waters. Creationist information theory is a verbal smokescreen to conceal under layers of misdirection what ultimately renders down to a simple unjustified assertion:
* Exactly who originally came up with the idea of using information theory to criticize MET is not entirely clear. It's not that important a question either, since the core argument -- "organized complexity is a clear trademark of Design" -- is very old, tracing back at least to the work of the 18th century British "natural philosopher" William Paley. Paley reasoned that the elaborations of nature indicated that they had been formed by a transcendental intelligence. He famously said that if one had found a watch, its orderliness and complexity would imply a watchmaker, and so if one finds, say, a butterfly, its greater orderliness and complexity elaboration would imply a greater "watchmaker", or in other words would imply a "Design" created by an "Intelligent Designer".
Paley appears to have been a decent and thoughtful man, and it's a bit of a pity that he has become well known for what has been recognized as the "Paley fallacy". His fallacy was not in suggesting that complexity might imply a Designer -- it might. His fallacy was that he was simply reasoning by analogy, believing that since humans design elaborate artificial objects, then elaborate natural objects like organisms had to have been Designed by a higher intelligence.
Reasoning by analogy can be treacherous. Analogies are comparisons, usually for illustrative purposes, between two things that are similar in some ways but not in others -- if the two things are either entirely different or exactly the same, there's no useful analogy between them. Simply because two different things are similar in some ways doesn't imply they are similar in others; for example, there are many similarities in subsystems and construction between a car and a private airplane, but that hardly proves that an ordinary car can fly in any useful sense of the word. The only way to determine what is the same and what is different about the two objects is to go check and see where they are the same and where they differ.
Paley's fallacy was that he didn't check. He had no way of doing so. Our intuition is a product of experience; if we have no experience in some matter, we have no valid basis for intuition of it, and all we can do is make unsupported guesses. Paley's guess didn't address the question of whether organisms could have arisen by some spontaneous natural process -- he simply leaped to an answer and proclaimed they had to have been Designed, relying strictly on an analogy with human artifice. Paley was playing with only one card in his hand, having absolutely no other basis for believing, no experience, no evidence to suggest that organisms necessarily reflect Design.
In addition, Paley simply assumed that organisms were static, that they had been more or less Designed in their present form, failing to consider the possibility that they could spontaneously evolve and adapt. However, it is evident that landscapes, planets, stars, galaxies, the Universe itself spontaneously evolve in various ways, their current forms not being the same as their earlier forms nor the same as the forms they will have in the future. Even the atoms themselves may evolve, with heavy elements synthesized in stars while elsewhere radioactive isotopes decay to daughter isotopes.
We would have no reason to assume if we found a rock that it had been created in its present form at the beginning of the world, and there is nothing that Paley said to suggest that we should assume so. Paley's assertion was that the Universe and its natural laws reflect Design; but even humoring that argument, there was nothing in his reasoning that asserted its elements could not spontaneously change. In short, as far as evolution is concerned, Paley's argument means nothing: if we so wished, we could amuse ourselves by saying evolution is part of the Design, and there's not a thing in his argument to contradict that assertion.
Although creationists do like to claim that nature reflects Design, they do not like the idea that evolution is part of the Design since they know perfectly well it renders creationism irrelevant. It is central to their beliefs that an Intelligent Designer must be fiddling with the Design on an ongoing basis -- and since MET doesn't provide any support for that idea, they are quick to trot out reasons why evolution can't actually be a Design. However, since it's very simple to write computer programs to perform evolutionary simulations, we can easily establish a link between human artifice and evolution that, on the basis of Paley's reasoning by analogy, is every bit as convincing, has as much basis in the facts, as any other attempts to declare Design in nature.
* The Paley fallacy does have a certain intuitive appeal, but it tends to lose its appeal on closer examination. It's a clumsily mechanistic way of thinking, comparing the workings of machinery to the workings of organisms, despite the fact that the resemblance between a biosystem and any machine ever built by humans is slight. Machines, unlike organisms, do not reproduce or grow or rebuild lost parts of themselves. No two organisms of the same species resemble each other as much as two examples of the same product, and by that same coin organisms work perfectly well with components featuring a range of variance that would be intolerable in a machine.
Machines that resemble biosystems even superficially are unusual, lacking the rectilinear and rigidly structured configurations of more typical manufactured items, and are often referred to as "organic" in appearance. Of course we can also build machines that look like organisms -- a windup toy to imitate a hopping kangaroo, for example -- but what does that prove? When we do build machines that are, inadvertently or by intent, similar in appearance to organisms, that hardly establishes that the organisms they resemble must also be Designed. If humans imitate nature, does that mean nature must imitate humans?
In addition, if organisms are compared to machines while acknowledging that unlike machines they grow and reproduce, then nothing in this line of reasoning rules out the idea that organisms also spontaneously adapt and evolve exactly as MET says they do. If, as creationists like to say, the ability of organisms to reproduce, grow, and repair themselves demonstrates that they are even better Designs than human-made machines, then an ability to spontaneously adapt and evolve makes them better Designed still, and creationism once again disappears in a poof of irrelevance.
Besides, why should complexity be thought of as a unique characteristic of Design? If we were to throw a ping-pong ball among a pile of smooth pebbles, we'd have no problem identifying what in the pile was artificial and what was natural. However, in that case the identifying feature of the artificial item, the ping-pong ball, is not complexity but actually simplicity. The ping-pong ball's dimensions and composition are much more uniform than those of the pebbles; would anyone sensibly claim that the relative elaboration of the pebbles, with their varied dimensions and much more complicated compositions, makes them more obviously Designed than the ping-pong ball?
Why isn't simplicity a sign of Design? We could build a wall of bricks, or of flat rocks we scavenge up from the landscape. Bricks resemble rocks far more closely than machines resemble organisms -- but nobody reasonably claims that suggests flat rocks were specially Designed, even though their similarity to a human-made artifact like a brick is much greater than that of organisms to machines.
* The ultimate problem with Paley's line of reasoning was that in claiming nature reflects Design, he could provide no details whatsoever of the Designer, such as who the Designer was, what the Designer did, why the Designer did it, or what sort of Designs we might expect from the Designer. All it says is that there's some Designer of some sort who did things by magic, or some mysterious unexplained process equivalent to it. As far as religion is concerned, all religions, even those created as a gag, can make exactly the same use of Paley's argument to argue for whatever Designer or Designers they prefer. As far as science is concerned, Paley's argument is simply useless; it provides no specifics, and no scientific theory works any differently whether we assume the Universe is Designed or not.
To the extent that Paley's argument is stretched to claim that the Universe can only continue in operation by ongoing interventions of intelligent agents, it's highly contrived. Even if Paley's argument is taken at face value, it doesn't suggest any such conclusion; in fact, such continuous tinkering implies a poor Design, one that will simply fall over if left unattended, and so Paley's argument works against it. More importantly there's no reason at all to invoke such interventions, they're just excess baggage. We know of no laws of nature that require the meddling of a Designer to work; all the laws of nature operate spontaneously, in fact it would be hard to think of them as predictable laws if they didn't. Nobody sensibly believes that thunder and lightning are caused by the pounding of Thor's hammer any longer, or more evasively claims they're due to some mysterious action of an "Intelligent Thunderer".
* Despite all the difficulties with Paley's reasoning by analogy, his argument persists. In modern times, just as Paley made a comparison between organisms and a watch, creationists similarly make comparisons between, say, the genome and computer programs -- but it's just the same argument, the watch being the 18th-century notion of high technology, computers not having been invented at the time.
The popularity of the information theory argument against MET appears to be based partly on the intuitive but misleading appeal of the Paley fallacy -- a reasoning by an analogy that appears so strong that its advocates fail to realize they're mesmerized by a scene in a mental mirror that imposes human ways on a Universe that, as all agree, isn't run by humans. Another one of its attractions is partly because everyone has some intuitive concept of the idea of "information", and it's no real effort to come up with plausible-sounding ad-hoc arguments whose lack of substance can be easily concealed in a fog of sophisticated-sounding bafflegab.
The reality is that the creationist information theory attack on MET is a joke, nothing more than meaningless doubletalk, designed only to confuse. Information theory may have a few useful applications in the biological sciences, but MET neither stands nor falls on it.
BACK_TO_TOP* This document started life as notes from an installment on Mark Chu-Carroll's blog, with more materials flowing in from comments by the very pleasant Jeff Shallit in his blog, along with comments taken from the writings of Richard Dawkins here and there. This is an informal document; sometimes I think it would be nice for information theory pros like Shallit to go over it, but the odds are they would tell me I needed to go buy an expensive textbook, drop other things on my plate, and spend a serious chunk of time trying to wade through it.
I don't think so. I have no real use for information theory beyond the fact that creationists like to misuse it, and no good reason to go through the time and effort to dig into the subject when I have better things to do. I only wrote this because there were so many creationists out there spreading bogus stories about information theory that I felt I had to do something to help set things straight. It was still a bore to wade through all those bogus creationist stories and show them for the hot air they are. Obviously most readers find it a bore as well, since in the years since this document was originally released, very few people have taken notice of it.
However, that's reassuring as well. The reason there's not much interest in this document is because there's obviously not much interest in the topic. Creationists haven't been able to get much mileage out of their information theory arguments; they parrot the same sound bites over and over again, but instead of tricking the audience, they simply put everyone to sleep. They certainly don't trick defenders of MET, who are now very familiar with such arguments and with relevant counterarguments. I can relax, knowing that anyone who suspects creationists are trying to put one over can easily find out the score.
That reality makes this document redundant, there being nothing in it not easily found elsewhere, and I considered withdrawing it. I decided to keep it; I believe it's worthwhile, and I certainly found thinking matters out as I wrote it useful for my own purposes. Who knows? Maybe it will get more readership one of these days -- though I wouldn't think of holding my breath waiting for it to happen.
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 apr 10 / Released as EVOLUTION & INFORMATION.
v1.1.0 / 01 jun 10 / Expanded, went from one to two chapters.
v1.2.0 / 01 aug 10 / General cleanup.
v1.2.1 / 01 sep 10 / Minor fixes.
v1.2.2 / 01 dec 10 / More minor fixes.
v1.2.3 / 01 apr 11 / Still more minor fixes.
v1.3.0 / 01 jan 12 / Retitled as EVOLUTION, ENTROPY, & EVOLUTION,
with expanded focus on thermodynamics.
v1.3.1 / 01 jun 12 / Replaced "critics" with "creationists".
BACK_TO_TOP
