You can tell when you’ve encountered some gullible twit of a creationist who has swallowed the Discovery Institute line whole. Whenever they recite Stephen Meyer’s favorite line, that only intelligence can create information, you know you’re debating a fool.
It’s simply not true. Anyone who has studied genetics knows there are many natural processes that generate information, making the claim obviously false. It’s good to have Dr Dan present a short sweet refutation.
I’ve confronted people with this kind of explanation many times in the past. Just search PubMed for “random nucleotide sequences” (or amino acid sequences) and it’ll come back with page after page of articles on the subject — they’re fairly common tools for exploring the functional space. Notice that the first one on this list is from 1983.
The standard response I’ve gotten from creationists is that’s not complex information
, and if you ask them to define “complex” they will waffle around, and eventually declare something about complex specified information
, which just means information that was defined by a prior source, by which they mean “God”, because they sure as heck don’t have a primordial volume that dictates the modern sequences.
It’s really just a rabbit hole that they can lead you into. They don’t even have a grasp on the meaning of “information” — it just sounds sciencey to their ears.
I remember getting into long arguments with creationists about the meaning of information. My argument was it means, simply, “that which informs” which presupposes an intelligent agent capable of being informed. On that understanding, the universe is filled with masses of stuff by which we can be informed but there is nothing which requires us to posit a Creator. It might be the case nut there is no reason to think it must be the case. We simply don’t know, Meyer’s faith notwithstanding.
Yeah, this is the biggest issue I think. There is massive amounts of “data” out there. And, “intelligent agents” can produce idiotic amounts of “data” that is utter bullshit, very complex, and utterly useless. This doesn’t make its complexity “informative”. On the contrary, its often generated to misinform. So, by my definition of “information”, it doesn’t matter if its complex, what generated it, etc., it just has to be accurate and useful – i.e., it has to inform me, or someone else, in some useful way. Sadly, nearly 100% of all “intelligence sourced information” from creationists only tell me the exact same thing, over and over again, “There people have no clue what they are talking about, and are only worth any effort to deal with because of the fact that they misinform others constantly.” They are like a recurring rash – the only information you get from it is, “Huh.. Still there. Needs more medication to fix.” And, they can’t even manage the “complex” part, since they keep coming up with stupid BS, involving “levels of complexity that require a god!”, which is undefinable, unquantifiable, and thus untestable.
Still waiting on you twits, my dear creations, to provide “any” information, complex or otherwise.
ask the creationists to define “information.”
also have them discuss the entropy of information.
i assume they will have no idea, and prevaricate ignorantly.
information theory was started back in the 40’s with Claude Shannon.
quoted from wikipedia article on Information Theory:
“Information theory was initially formed in the context of telecommunication but soon found a wide range of other applications. It is now at the intersection of mathematics, statistics and computer science, and has applications in diverse fields ranging from electrical engineering and physics to neurobiology.”