At 06:37 AM 09/14/2000, you wrote:
>Reflectorites
>
>On Thu, 7 Sep 2000 19:24:09 EDT, Bertvan@aol.com wrote:
>
>BV>(Schutzenberger M-P, "The
> >Miracles of Darwinism: Interview with Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger,"
> >Origins & Design, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring 1996, pp.10-15.
> >
> >http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od172/schutz172.htm
>
>[...]
>
>BV>The interview with Schutzenberger was excellent. Easy to understand. I am
> >relieved there are such scientists, although apparently few of them are
> >biologists.
I haven't had time yet to write up a full critique of Schutzenberger's
"interview" (i.e., apparently with himself as the interviewer, judging from
the "setup" nature of the questions), but I *do* hope that at least some of
the ID folks who read it will have noticed the major and fundamental
factual and theoretical flaws in his claims. I will deal with only one
here: The idea of a gene as a "unit" of information. We begin with a
harmless enough quote, which, taken out of context and interpreted in one
way, is even true, though there is some stretching to interpret it such a way:
Schematically, a gene is like a unit of information. It has simple
binary properties.
When active, it is an elementary information-theoretic unit, the
cascade of gene
instructions resembling the cascade involved in specifying a recipe.
So far, so good, if we allow some stretching for his statement that a gene
has binary properties. He *might* mean that, interpreted as a string of
information, it would have binary properties because strings of information
can be represented as strings of ones and zeros. But, watch what happens next:
Now let us return to the example of the eye. Darwinists imagine
that it requires what? A thousand or two thousand genes to
assemble an eye, the specification of the organ thus requiring one
or two thousand units of information?
This is absurd! Suppose that
a European firm proposes to manufacture an entirely new
household appliance in a Southeast Asian factory. And suppose
that for commercial reasons, the firm does not wish to
communicate to the factory any details of the appliance's function -
- how it works, what purposes it will serve. With only a few
thousand bits of information, the factory is not going to proceed
very far or very fast. A few thousand bits of information, after all,
yields only a single paragraph of text.
Okay, here's where things start to get wacky. What's happening here is a
grossly illogical slide from the idea that a gene is "like a unit of
information" (of *unspecified* size) to the idea that a gene is a *very*
small "unit" of information, apparently one bit per gene, if we take his
reference to thousands of genes and his reference to thousands of bits of
information as an implicit equating of the two.
Perhaps he should go back and study elementary genetics. A gene can be
anything from something like a couple hundred bytes to about 2 and a half
*million* bytes of information, in humans, at least. So, just *where* did
he get the ignorant (and *stupid*) idea that a gene is roughly one bit in
size? What raging *idiot*, even one on severely mentally deranging *drugs*,
would think that a typical gene would contain such a minuscule amount of
information? It makes *NO* sense at *all*, despite Bertvan's remark that
the interview made sense to her (how could she *possibly* have believed
this, after being on this list for almost two *years* (that I personally
know of)?
But Schutzenberger continues, in the same paragraph:
The appliance in question is
bound to be vastly simpler than the eye; charged with its
manufacture, the factory will yet need to know the significance of
the operations to which they have committed themselves in
engaging their machinery. This can be achieved only if they
already have some sense of the object's nature before they
undertake to manufacture it. A considerable body of knowledge,
held in common between the European firm and its Asian factory,
is necessary before manufacturing instructions may be executed.
Of course, this is *also* true of genetics, general cellular genetics
applies to eye cells as well as to the rest of the body. Only the *special*
features of eye cells have to be specified, not baseline information about
how human-body cells work. Furthermore, the eye is fairly simple in
important respects. Retinal light-receptors only come in four types,
repeated many times, so, once the "design" of each *type* is specified,
that *one* instance of each bundle of information can be repeatedly
*applied* for each individual cell of that type. The same is true of most
of the cells of the eyeball, the cornea, and the iris. There are plenty of
complications, but not nearly as many as Schutzenberger would apparently
have us believe.
For my final point relative to the information in genes, consider his next
paragraph:
Q: Would you argue that the genome does not contain the requisite
information for explaining organisms?
S:Not according to the understanding of the genome we now possess.
The
biological properties invoked by biologists are in this respect
quite insufficient;
while biologists may understand that a gene triggers the
production of a particular
protein, that knowledge -- that kind of knowledge -- does not
allow them to
comprehend how one or two thousand genes suffice to direct the
course of
embryonic development.
Here we see him explicitly claiming that genes do not carry enough
information for explaining organisms. This is implied by his lunatic
initial claim, but it is nevertheless worth noting. What he should have
said at the beginning of the paragraph is something like: "Not according
the understanding of the genome that I am permitting myself to have, in
order to maintain my nearly perfect ignorance of the topic."
Thus, he is wrong in at least two ways, within the first couple of paragraphs:
1. Claiming that genes contain minuscule amounts of information.
2. Claiming as established fact that the genome cannot contain enough
information for "explaining organisms."
Frankly, given the blatant obviousness of these errors, I find it hard to
believe that anyone could possibly take the interview seriously. Even
intelligent ID-supporters would know enough not to be able to swallow this
kind of crap.
So, just *who* is his intended audience? Apparently the same audience
Phillip Johnson caters to: The ignorant, the willfully blind, the
anti-scientific, the mindlessly religious.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 14 2000 - 00:44:54 EDT