Complex Specified Information – It’s not that hard to understand
| May 20, 2007 | Posted by Dave S. under Intelligent Design |
In another thread there’s a discussion about specified complexity. I think the problem with specification is it’s a subjective measure but it shouldn’t be hard to understand. Most people intuitively recognize it and draw conclusions from it. To explain I’ll use a deck of cards and a conclusion that just about any reasonable person, with or without knowing what specified complexity is, will recognize and draw the same conclusion based on it. Then I’ll present a like example from a living thing and ask you be the judge of whether there is specification.
Start with a standard deck of 52 playing cards. You are told that it has been shuffled thoroughly. Upon examination you find that the deck is perfectly ordered by suit and rank. Will you still believe it was shuffled? Probably not. Do you know you’ve based that conclusion on specified complexity? Probably not. Our brains are pattern recognition engines. You reach the conclusion intuitively.
Let’s dissect this with a bit of arithmetic. Any arrangement of 52 cards is as statistically likely as any other. A random shuffle has no preferred order as an outcome. One arrangement is just as likely as any other. My windows calculator says there are 8.0658175170943878571660636856404e+67 possible arrangements. That’s 8 followed by 67 zeroes and is calculated by entering 52 and then pressing the n! button which performs the calculation 52x51x50x49x48…x5x4x3x2. That is the complexity part – the number of possible arrangments is huge and there is no physical law that prefers one arrangement over another. Most people intuitively know the number of possible arrangements is a huge number without knowing precisely how huge.
If any one arrangement is as likely as any other why do we conclude the deck was not shuffled if we find it perfectly ordered by rank and suit? Because we intuitively employ the concept of specified complexity. The perfect ordering is a specification. Specification can be defined as an independently given pattern.
The problem with this is that specification is subjective. It is not a product of nature but rather a product of mind. We can’t, or at least I believe we can’t, come up with an objective formula that distinguishes specification from non-specification. But that doesn’t negate the fact that specification is tangible and can be practically employed to discriminate between chance and design as we can see with the deck of cards example above.
Now let us look at an example of specified complexity that exists in all living things. The video depicts the purpose and action of an enzyme called a topoisomerase. The enzyme is far more complex than a deck of cards. It is a sequence of hundreds of amino acids in a folded chain. Any link in the chain can be any one of 20 different amino acids. The order determines how it will fold and what biological activity (if any) it will possess. Does it have specification? You must be the judge of that.
33 Responses to Complex Specified Information – It’s not that hard to understand
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First of all, I commend you on recognizing this distinction. Too many fail to grasp that there is a special issue here regarding going beyond “literal” interactions.
I also commend the courteous and thoughtful manner in which you contribute, whether you agree or are skeptical.
You later wonder “I’m not certain I can call it symbology proper when working on the assumption of no mind being involved. Does symbology require mind by definition (I honestly don’t know.)”
No, it doesn’t require mind by definition. DNA coding sequences clearly qualify as coded symbol sequences regardless of whether unguided processes can create them. What matters is that the codons represent something other than themselves, i.e. an amino acid sequence. The retrieval and decoding mechanisms establish this association, regardless of their origin.
One good reason it could not happen without guidance is that unguided processes cannot pursue a goal whose benefits are only in the future (while intelligent agents regularly do this).
The distinct mechanisms required for a functioning symbolic message processing system are meaningless when considered in isolation. Why build storage, retrieval or decoding mechanisms in a universe where there is no symbolic information? Why build encoding mechanisms (to create the first messages) if the other machinery to process symbols does not exist?
A second good reason that unguided processes cannot accomlish this is that Before Language, only physical replication is available. There would be No help from symbolic reproduction to build the molecular machinery for the first symbolic processing. That is severely limiting.
I would say those people are confusing a question about how we think with an issue about the objective real world.
Since Orgel it has been clear that living organisms exhibit arrangements that are both complex, i.e. not regularly ordered (as crystals are) but yet specified, i.e. not randomly arranged.
IOW, the arrangement matters. If something happens so that the right arrangement is not present, things die. Clearly that dependency on proper yet irregular arrangement is not just in our minds.
great_ape, regarding post #4, I believe the evolutionists have another route (in principle) that is not an impasse.
While it would be question begging to just point to examples of living organisms as examples of the success of unguided processes, that does not exclude them from all consideration.
Evolutionists would need to show that starting from first principles and demonstrated properties of evolution — recognizing its inherent boundaries and limitations — that applying these provides us with an explanatory causal path to that organism or feature.
For example, recognizing the limitations of physical replication (no information yet) and of selection according to present function (not future benefit), does application of our understanding of evolutionary processes lead to an explanation for moving beyond literal to symbolic processing?
The issue is not proving that a particular scenario occurred, but rather whether evolutionary principles clearly and reasonably lead us to one or more detailed, supported unguided scenarios, as distinct from an ad hoc assumption taken on faith (e.g. “It happened, so evolution must be able and our lack of an answer is nothing more than a gap in our knowledge.”).