Lawrence Krauss’ Monumental Blunder(s)

_{Cornelius Hunter

March 19, 2016

Cosmology, Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design}

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In tonight’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe,” debate, the topic of protein evolution induced a long sequence of blunders. Lawrence Krauss attempted to compare a protein to a snowflake. If snowflakes spontaneously arise, then why not protein-coding genes? When Stephen Meyer called him on his absurdity, Krauss doubled down, making the ludicrous claim that there is “a lot of information” in a snowflake, and that Shannon’s information theorem would tell you that. Read more

Comments

MT, water. KFkairosfocus_{March 22, 2016
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nkendall (from above): my claim is that any molecular machine is too complex to be created in the time allowed. Keefe & Szostak is a direct refutation of your claim. Moving the goalposts doesn't change that your original statement was incorrect. Few scientists doubt that, once a protein comes into existence, it can evolve into more complex forms. However, it can't begin this process until it has a selectable function. Keefe & Szostak answer this question, a hypothesis they formed based on theories of abiogenesis.Zachriel_{March 22, 2016
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nkendall: Of course dreams are precise. Think about the imagery…better than ultra HD which is very precise. Studies of dreams indicate that dreams are often strongly emotive, but people can usually only recall vague images. In any case, even at best, they are no more "precise" than ordinary experience. nkendall: ”But only 1 in 10^11 for proteins of length 80 or so.” Spliceosomes have nearly 300 proteins and several RNAs. I am going to guess that each protein is greater than 300 residues. So you are only about 1000 orders of magnitude shy of where you need to be for just this one molecular machine. What it means is that your maths are faulty. More particularly, once you have a working protein, they can evolve into longer forms.Zachriel_{March 22, 2016
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KF @ 42, So you agree that snowflake is improbable and requires designer intervention and should be included in ID Literature as something equivalent to protein folding?Me_Think_{March 21, 2016
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Zachriel, Of course dreams are precise. Think about the imagery...better than ultra HD which is very precise. Regarding molecular machines..."But only 1 in 10^11 for proteins of length 80 or so." Spliceosomes have nearly 300 proteins and several RNAs. I am going to guess that each protein is greater than 300 residues. So you are only about 1000 orders of magnitude shy of where you need to be for just this one molecular machine. That's not much to hang your hat on is it?nkendall_{March 21, 2016
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MT re 35: Ponder the cluster of unusual properties of water, the abundances of the first four most abundant elements (H, He, O, C), links to core cosmological parameters and the functionality of water in cell based life. Cosmological fine tuning and design issues will leap out at you. So, yes, the snowflake points to design and helps bridge the two major domains of design theory. KFkairosfocus_{March 21, 2016
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Zachriel: “It’s too complex to have evolved” is not an example of scientific skepticism. Mung: Compositional Evolution So you point to a book on how complexity evolves. nkendall: The best data available is that for a single 150 residue protein the odds are 1 X -10^74 against stumbling on any single protein (note that many proteins are composed of much greater than 150 residues). But only 1 in 10^11 for proteins of length 80 or so. nkendall: If materialism is true then it must be the case that there is a precise neural firing pattern that underwrites this imagery. Dreams are not known for their precision.Zachriel_{March 21, 2016
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Zachriel, Here is another one that I have mentioned a few times. Give this one a try. This one will not allow you to hide behind the fog of this or that research study or time or chance. I assume you are a materialist, correct? Okay so in your view then the brain must account for everything in our subjective conscious experience. I am not going to ask you how consciousness arose or how it works or how self-awareness arose or even how abstract thoughts are represented in the brain or how we even recognize the color red for that matter. I am going to give you something really straight forward. I assume you have dreams, right? And that you remember at least some of them. Now I am not going to ask you how the ability of the certain areas of brain tissue somehow acquired the ability to emulate the 5 senses which is what happens during a dream. Nor am I going to ask you how all the imagery and auditory and tactile content is integrated and synchronized together. These problems are hopeless intractable; can’t even get your brain/mind around them. But what I am going to ask you is how just the imagery content gets generated. So for now forget about the auditory and tactile and the thoughts that go along with a dream. And actually I am not even going to ask you to tell me how you can get multiple “frames” of imagery to account for the motion that we experience in dreams whether it be relative motion (because we move our viewing perspective), or absolute motion resulting from some object in the dream moving across our image plane. I am only going to ask you to tell me how the brain can produce just a single novel image frame of content—it is a variant of the information problem. Just one image frame; that’s all. If materialism is true then it must be the case that there is a precise neural firing pattern that underwrites this imagery. Now note that each distinct image element (analogous to a pixel in video) has to be precisely what it is (one in about 16 million colors at least) to produce any human artifact or natural thing that appears in our dreams. For example let’s take a dream where you are just sitting out on a picnic table with a cup of coffee and looking out at a forest. So there would be multiple neurons to produce all the little distinct elements that a coffee cup is comprised of. But the coffee cup is part of the larger context with a picnic table and that is in the foreground against a background of the forest. All this imagery has to be precisely what it is to produce this coherent image, right? How do the precise neural patterns arise to sketch out an image like this—even a static image? And finally note that dreams always produce novel images which would require that the underlying neural firings were novel and therefore could not be the result of some programmatic process. A rough and quite frankly charitable (charitable to you) calculation would be that there are at least 8 million distinct image elements and each image element could be one of at least 16 million color values for any image frame. And there would probably be oh, let's say 1000 image elements for the coffee cup alone. So just for the cup, the calculation would be something like 16,000,000^1000--just for one cup in one image frame of one dream, of one person, in one evening. Pretty amazing.nkendall_{March 21, 2016
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Zachriel, Okay, my friend...my claim is that any molecular machine is too complex to be created in the time allowed. Molecular machines are made up of protein complexes and in some cases, RNAs. The best data available is that for a single 150 residue protein the odds are 1 X -10^74 against stumbling on any single protein (note that many proteins are composed of much greater than 150 residues). Even if that figure is off by about 30 orders of magnitude you still can't come close to finding even one of the many dozens of proteins that makeup these molecular machines. This is the fundamental information problem that Meyer was asking and neither Krauss nor Lameroux addressed it head on. Instead we got snowflakes and nylon seasoned with a lot of obfuscation and hand waving but no substance. Show me the error of my ways. Sketch out a plausible pathway to get a molecular machine with supporting evidence.nkendall_{March 21, 2016
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“It’s too complex to have evolved” is not an example of scientific skepticism. Actually, it is. Compositional Evolution You're wrong again, Zachriel.Mung_{March 21, 2016
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nkendall: These folks are not serious ... Ah, for certain definitions of "serious". For certain definitions of leg, dogs have five legs. nkendall: Darwinists, never stop to consider that they may be wrong. Of course they do. Natural selection has been under constant scientific skepticism since Darwin. However, waving your hands in the direction of "It's too complex to have evolved" is not an example of scientific skepticism.Zachriel_{March 21, 2016
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there is “a lot of information” in a snowflake
There is a lot of information in a rock too. To completely describe a certain rock or rock formation would require a lot of data. The position of each type of molecule in the rock is not trivial. But it all happened as a result of the four basic forces of physics, primarily gravity. It is only natural to get some very complex entities solely with the four basic forces. The information in DNA is quite different. One could imagine an arrangement of a sequence of nucleotides that were constructed from the four basic forces but this particular type of information when in DNA points to something completely outside of itself. Nothing in a rock or snow flake does this. So Krauss's use of this example was an admission of intelligent design. If he had something better, he would have used it. So the conclusion is that Krauss must be a stealth ID supporter.jerry_{March 21, 2016
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Mapou @ 33
A snowflake has intelligent design written all over it.
Right.It should be included in the ID literature alongside improbability of Protien folds.Me_Think_{March 21, 2016
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This was a terrible debate. Krauss ruined it. You can't beat the evolutionist etc etc if he is not worrth beating. He was weirdly malicious. Long winded. Rambling . Making common trivial points. Why would he have any awards? I suspect he's usefull for fughting creationism and not about science education. What has, or could he, accomplished in real discovery/invention in science??? Posture and white shoes and jumping around looked absurd. Yes very arrogant and more to that. He is totally unpersuasive on every level. People like him help ID/yec talkers. Thousands of lower lever evolution teachers on the internet are so much better then him. I feel sorry for him. Something is wrong with this person. I do not easily question people on intelligence and character but he is someone to be fired by evolution incorporated. Why help them? I can't help but help and creationists need worthy opponents or the victory is not worthy.Robert Byers_{March 20, 2016
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@32, A snowflake has intelligent design written all over it. Heck, every particle of matter down to the lowly photon has intelligent design written all over it.Mapou_{March 20, 2016
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10^19 molecules of water has to be arranged precisely to form the snow flake design. For plate form, the temperature has to be near -2C, for columns and needles the temperature has to be -5C, For thinner plates the temperature has to be near -30C. The sharp edges are sharp up to a micron. The ratio of Crystal Size along 'a' axis/The size of plate (equal to plate thickness) has to be close to 100. The width of the facet surface on the edge of the plate should be 40a (a is the molecular step height).Snowflake mechanics is not simple. There are lots of paper puzzling over snow flake formation. You can't dismiss snowflake as simple physics.Me_Think_{March 20, 2016
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Splatter:
...using a decoding procedure that is chosen on the basis of a probability distribution over the snowflakes -there’s no point in raising the ghost of Shannon.
Someone who gets it.Mung_{March 20, 2016
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I haven't watched this yet but when people blithely say "Shannon information in a snowflake" I wish they'd clarify what they mean with a mathematical model otherwise it's just a word salad. The whole point of Shannon's contribution to mathematics was that it allows one to formalise such things and remove ambiguity! Unless someone talks in terms of a code - for example, posting bit-string bearing notes into a neighbouring room that allows the neighbour to reconstruct a partucular snowflake from the set of all snowflakes, using a decoding procedure that is chosen on the basis of a probability distribution over the snowflakes -there's no point in raising the ghost of Shannon. Given that there is a great number of unique snowflakes it stands to reason that the Shannon information is great, provided that they are relatively uniformly distributed. So taken in isolation, Krauss' statement is correct. But who cares? Snowflakes don't serve to code anything. If I understand anything about ID (and I think it's fair to say it shifts about a bit), there is at least one common thread: it's that the configuration has to be both rare and specified. An individual snowflake is a rare enough event, but it belongs to a very wide class of "all snowflakes". If a particular snowflake were decoded by a machine, which read the configuration of water crystals and decoded them into a blueprint from which it built a robot, and the robot was exquisitely functional (if not perfect), and it spoke to me and said, "Was the snowflake I was constructed from designed?" -- that would be a better analogy.Splatter_{March 20, 2016
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Zachriel, No contradiction in my comment, “Darwinists are not going to fold up the tent under any circumstances. These folks are not serious in the sense that they are not being intellectual honest or they are not familiar with the recent science. Shouldn’t it be the case that when you have so many new findings that directly contradict one’s theory (I will list them in a moment), that one would expect a bit of humility and reticence about any further pronouncements pertaining to their theory? I certainly would expect that. If they had any honor or respect for the truth at all, they would fall on their swords and quietly exit the public forum. But they don’t; they persist. Darwinists, never stop to consider that they may be wrong. No soul searching, no pause of thought when confronted with the steady bombardment of bad news for their theory: the fossil record, the understanding that life systems are far more complicated than ever imagined and yet arose over diminishing time intervals. The vast number of convergences of extraordinarily complex structures at all levels including things like molecular machines. The finding that there is a back channel for adaptation by enabling the environment to tag the genome for gene control in just the right way—epigenetics. The massive editing that goes on between transcription and translation. The failure to find a genetic algorithm to account for animal forms and instead evidence that the information resides somewhere else in the cell. The sudden appearance of new genes—orphan genes or de novo genes that exist in all organisms and appear out of the dark matter of the genome like magic. The occurrence of overlapping genes, where you have multiple levels and starting points for reading the DNA to produce different protein products. That there is a diminishing small set of DNA sequences that yield viable proteins—not a single protein of any molecular machine could reasonably be stumbled upon given the age of the earth. That of all the myriad ways in which a protein could fold, they just happen to fold in the proper fashion. That there are things called transposons that have the uncanny ability to ferry DNA fragments around the genome that just happen to produce new features. That viral fragments can be incorporated into the genome through an extraordinarily complex process and that these viral genes just happen to code for useful proteins. The ability of one cell to swallow up another and make a new cell that just happened to facilitate the entire animal kingdom and it goes on and on. All these things were unexpected surprises—a series of shocks really—for Neo-Darwinists and directly contradict their theory; yet they never stop to reconsider.nkendall_{March 20, 2016
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J-Mac, Your comment is interesting..."my favorite clown." Watching the debate and seeing Meyer in the middle, reminds me of a song by 70s band Steelers Wheel and specifically the line one of their songs that goes: "Clowns to the left of me jokers to the right, here I am..."nkendall_{March 20, 2016
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F/N: Information in senses relevant to ID should not be conflated with [physical] state. Functionally specific complex organisation reflecting high contingency and dependency on particular configs to achieve function is much more like it. The information can then be teased out as coded description or statement. Snowflakes in the star form have dendrites on arms that could work like prongs on a Yale type lock's key which would be informational in the relvant sense but would require a lot of design to get things to work. I notice a lot of resistance too to the issue of deeply isolated functional specificity of proteins as folding and functioning in particular bio contexts but there is evidence pointing not to 1 in 10^11 but more like 1 in 10^70 in the space of AA chains. As for snowflakes, try: http://www.angelfire.com/pro/kairosfocus/resources/Info_design_and_science.htm#strmsnow also http://www.icr.org/article/3555/ (note remarks in the first linked) KFkairosfocus_{March 20, 2016
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Krauss is my favorite clown; well next to Larry Moran. Both of them prove that blind faith can make people crazy. There is no more to say. Both have proven their blind faith to be exposed...J-Mac_{March 20, 2016
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nkendall: Darwinists are not going to fold up the tent under any circumstances. That directly contradicts your previous statement that no "serious evolutionary scientist who is familiar with the most recent research believes that natural selection plays much or any positive role in evolution at all."Zachriel_{March 20, 2016
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We must all note that Lawrence Krauss is the crackpot physicist who does not know that, as Karl Popper and others have noted, Einstein's spacetime is a block universe in which nothing happens. In this YouTube video, he claims that Einstein's physics allows time travel, even though every physicist worth his/her PhD should know by now that nothing can move in Einstein's spacetime: Is Time Travel Possible? Lawrence Krauss Tells all Go figure. Krauss is also the proud author of "The Physics of Star Trek". What we have now in the physics community is a bunch of high falutin crackpots like Krauss, Hawking and Co spending billions of the taxpayer's money on Star Trek voodoo physics. PS. In that YouTube video, Krauss claims that we are traveling in time toward the future all the time. This is the dumbest thing that a physicist can say. There is only the changing present. Time travel in any direction, forward or backward, is cretinous nonsense because it introduces an infinite self-referential regress.Mapou_{March 20, 2016
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Zachiel, Darwinists are not going to fold up the tent under any circumstances. The fact that you can cite some critics of Shapiro or anyone else means nothing. The point is, are those critiques valid in light of the evidence. You are mistaken about both Koonin and Noble. Here is a quote from Koonin: “Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. …. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic super-groups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.” Change driving by natural selection would not be abrupt nor would it produce fully formed organisms. Furthermore, he includes eukaryotic cells in his list which are known to have arisen as the result of multiple symbiogenesis events, none of which involve natural selection other than in the negative sense. Let’s cut to the chase here…pick one of the following topics and explain in detail how they could have arisen by Neo-Darwinian processes: Overlapping genes. Epigenetics – Let me make it easier for you…just focus on those aspects of epigenetics that were “upgraded” for humans. Here I am not referring to the now established fact that an animal’s form is not specified by genetic programs—it is epigenetic (another mortal blow to Neo-Darwinism). I am referring to how the environmental effects on the soma cells can work their way into the germ cells thus violating the Central Dogma and the Second Law (the Weisman barrier) both of which every biologist in every university around the globe, just 15 years ago, would have sworn up and down was an established fact (like they have been saying about natural selection by the way). So with regard to epigenetics… let’s refer to epigenetics as an “application”. That application would have had to have been upgraded to account for the new and different human features, would it not? Explain how all the new non-coding RNAs that implements epigenetics could have arisen in such a short time with so few individual samples to work with—you know, long breeding cycles and sparse populations of hominids . Feel free to use selection if you like but it would be of no help given the rapidity with which this upgrade must have occurred. Splicing – Explain how the spliceosome arose. Again let me make it easier…just focus on the upgrade that would be required of the spliceosome to produce the RNA modification capabilities suitable for the human genome. Dreams - Explain how the ability of the mind to emulate the five senses arose and how the mind, during a dream, produces novel, coherent imagery, auditory content and tactile sensations, then locates these content, synchronizes them, integrates them and associates them with the dialog that goes on and with the thoughts that occur. I will give you a pass on the obvious problem of how the “upgrade” of human consciousness arose and how abstract thoughts could even be represented in the physical brain let alone the “hard problem” of consciousness (which is really one of the easier problems) which relates to our recognition of sensory content. Again focus on those changes from ancestral ape to human. I will give you a pass for now on de novo genes, transposons, horizontal gene transfer, symbiogenesis, etc.nkendall_{March 20, 2016
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"Serious evolutionary scientist" is an oxymoron. All "evolutionary scientists" are con artists by nature.Mapou_{March 20, 2016
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The abject failure of Natural Selection on two levels of physical reality – video (2016) https://www.facebook.com/philip.cunningham.73/videos/vb.100000088262100/1135217836491148/?type=2&theaterbornagain77_{March 20, 2016
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nkendall: I don’t think any serious evolutionary scientist who is familiar with the most recent research believes that natural selection plays much or any positive role in evolution at all. nkendall: James Shapiro, Denis Noble, Eugene Koonin A cursory search shows that Shapiro's views on natural selection have been subject to extensive criticism from "serious evolutionary scientists". Noble and Koonin accept a significant role in evolution for natural selection.Zachriel_{March 20, 2016
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Natural selection is a joke for many reasons, one of which being that it is powerless against the combinatorial explosion. And, of course, it does not explain replication (OOL) and the observation of beauty in nature. It's crappy science from the minds of cretins.Mapou_{March 20, 2016
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UB @15, Thanks for the clarification on the difference between translatable information (as in genes), and physical information (as in snowflakes). You are right, of course.Mapou_{March 20, 2016
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