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Topic: Practical experiments for testing the concept of intelligent design
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RBH
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Member # 380
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posted 30. October 2004 01:47
I should expand a bit on this: quote:
The example (finding stuff like "intelligen" in an otherwise random-appearing string) does not represent the procedure described in the quote above.
The "intelligen" commonality has no special status absent an external dictionary. That's why I said what I did about Alu sequences. Without a dictionary, the instances of "intelligen" sequences are indistinguishable from Alu sequences, and neither is "specified."
RBH
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Scott
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Member # 1222
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posted 30. October 2004 16:37
quote:
By finding multiple instances in a context (genome) where we already know about how duplicates of segments come into being, the "complex" part is immediately lost: duplicate sequences are a high probability phenomenon in genomes. By pattern matching without an independent specification, the "specified" part is thrown away. The "specification" comes from the very phenomenon (genetic strings) that the alleged event that is specified comes from: there's no independent specification.
If you find an exact duplicate of an original, why is the original not an independent specification? How is it determined that a gene is a duplicate, or even a member of some gene family, without a specification? Why do you think that a a gene duplicate is based on a fabrication (is that the correct term?) rather than a specification? Is it just because there is some known mechanism for gene duplication? What would someone need to do or argue to convince you that the original is an independent specification, and not a fabrication?
quote:
By pattern matching without an independent specification, the "specified" part is thrown away.
In the case of looking for duplicates of a gene, the gene we are using as our 'pattern' is the independent specification.
quote:
...duplicate sequences are a high probability phenomenon in genomes.
This sounds like perhaps a useful area of study for some enterprising ID theorist ![[Wink]](wink.gif) .
Duplicate sequences of what? Just duplicate sequences in general?
Are you arguing that there is a high probability that somewhere in a genome there will be some sequence that is a duplicate of some other sequence, and that therefore no sequence can be 'complex'? I don't see how that follows at all.
quote:
But we already know a naturalistic mechanism for producing gene families: gene duplication. The "complexity" (improbability) of a specification hit (a sequence pattern that matches a known functional sequence) goes to (near) 1.0 when we know a naturalistic mechanism for producing such similarities, so finding a new sequence that is structurally similar to a known sequence does not detect complex specified information.
This reasoning also seems suspect to me. If we know a mechanism for producing similarities, and this improves the chances of a 'hit' on the specification, how does that do away with either complexity, independent specification, or both? Is this reasoning only applicable to 'naturalistic mechanisms'?
If I make a million copies of a manuscript, how does that make the original manuscript either less complex or not independent from the copies? What difference does it make if I make only one copy of the manuscript? You would agree, I hope, that the copies are equally as complex as the original, given that they are accurate reproductions?
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RBH
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Member # 380
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posted 30. October 2004 17:35
Scott wrote quote:
If you find an exact duplicate of an original, why is the original not an independent specification? How is it determined that a gene is a duplicate, or even a member of some gene family, without a specification? Why do you think that a a gene duplicate is based on a fabrication (is that the correct term?) rather than a specification? Is it just because there is some known mechanism for gene duplication? What would someone need to do or argue to convince you that the original is an independent specification, and not a fabrication?
and quote:
In the case of looking for duplicates of a gene, the gene we are using as our 'pattern' is the independent specification.
Which is the "original," given the purely adventitious order of finding them? There's no independence here.
Scott asked quote:
Duplicate sequences of what? Just duplicate sequences in general?
A PubMed search on "gene duplication" yields 3,657 hits. Scan through them. Everything from short sequences of base pairs to whole genes to whole chromosomes to whole genomes (mostly in plants) is duplicated.
Scott asked quote:
This reasoning also seems suspect to me. If we know a mechanism for producing similarities, and this improves the chances of a 'hit' on the specification, how does that do away with either complexity, independent specification, or both? Is this reasoning only applicable to 'naturalistic mechanisms'?
Recall that in Dembski's "specified complexity", the assignment of "specified" requires that the pattern being classified be independent of the pattern that provides the specification (the referent). Once again, if we know a naturalistic mechanism for producing events that match one another, as we do in the case of duplicated base pair sequences, then finding one base pair sequence that matches another base pair sequence violates the "independence" requirement for a specification.
Scott asked quote:
If I make a million copies of a manuscript, how does that make the original manuscript either less complex or not independent from the copies? What difference does it make if I make only one copy of the manuscript? You would agree, I hope, that the copies are equally as complex as the original, given that they are accurate reproductions?
But the question posed by the procedure Bruce proposed is not whether the original manuscript is "specified"; it is whether the copies are specified. In the manuscript example, does finding a copy imply that the copy is "specified," knowing that there is a way (Xerox machines) for producing copies? I don't think so. And finding a copy of the original manuscript tells us nothing about the specification, or lack thereof, of the original. Finally, the "complexity" of copies goes to 1.0 if we know that there is a mechanism that produces copies.
The task is to demonstrate that the original displays specified complexity, and that task is not addressed by a procedure that searches for copies in a context where we know how copies can be produced.
RBH
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