About Yockey and intelligent design: Glenn Morton sent me Yockey's
statements on attempting to mathematically model information theory in such
a way as to separate noise from intelligent information. My reactions,
after reading Yockey are:
(1) Yes, it would indeed be difficult to mathematically model the
statement that "intelligent information is encoded in a signal". Glenn is
right in challenging those attempts.
(2) Godel-like arguments and the unsolvability of diophantine
equations *suggest* that it would be *impossible* to do this. I don't,
however, believe one can get Godel's theorem to *prove* that it is
undecidable as to whether a signal is "random" or "organized".
An aside: the goal of modern cryptology is to take organized,
intelligent sequences and, via a deterministic process, make them *appear*
to be merely random bits. Naturally, if one reverses the process (in
decryption) one attempts to examine random sequences and recover organized
sequences from them. This is very hard and usually relies on some
underlying assumptions about the method of encryption.
In Christ,
Ken
PS. Welcome to the ASA list, Jim Turner!
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Ken W. Smith, Professor of Mathematics
Interim Director, Office of Institutional Research "In the future
Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 computers may weigh
Work phone: 517-774-7222, fax: 517-774-4250 as little as 1.5 tons."
Home phone & FAX: 517-772-5042 Popular Mechanics, 1949