Category Science

This Article Is About Self-Reference and Complexity (but This Title Isn’t)

I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop, and there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me.

In Chapter 4, he discusses his fascination with self-reference and feedback loops of all kinds. He talks about the operation of a toilet, in which water enters the tank, which raises the floater, which in turn cuts off the intake valve. The toilet can be said to “want” to be full. He then asks,

Why does this move to a goal-oriented — that is, teleological — shorthand seem appealing to us for a system endowed with feedback, but not so appealing for a less structured system?

(italics in the original.)

He seems to be saying that feedback ⇔ teleology (or intentionality, which is what I think Dennett and other philosophers might call it). In this, I think he’s wrong, though in an interesting way. Read More

How to Move an Entire Gas Giant Planet

One of the advantages of working in academia is that there are often lectures on interesting topics. (Those of my friends who went drinking last night before heading out to the VNV Nation concert last night may not share my assessment, though.) Yesterday, I went to a talk by Doug Hamilton about the axial tilt of the planets, and in particular about Saturn’s 20-some degree tilt.

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Two Aphorisms

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
— Edsger Dijkstra

Math is no more about equations than music is about staves and sharps.
— me

Software Enzymes for Musical Composition

When
I last wrote about using evo-devo to compose music,
I had gotten stuck on the problem of implementation. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how to write a seed organism that would develop into a simple composition that I could then use to evolve other tunes. I also wasn’t sure how to get the various genes to actually work together, not at a level at which I could start coding.

After some thought, it occurred to me that enzymes and proteins act sort of like functions in software: they bind to molecules (take arguments), which they can then modify, and sometimes release another molecule into the surrounding medium (return a value). So I just needed to come up with the software equivalent of an enzyme.

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Doctors Don’t Like the Word “Evolution”

I’m guessing that some researcher wondered aloud in the cafeteria, “How come medical researchers don’t talk about the evolution of antibiotic resistance? I mean sure, they talk about it, but they don’t call it evolution.”
This article
in PLoS Biology attempts to measure this observation.

In a nutshell, they found that biology journals say that antibiotic resistance “evolves”, whereas medical journals say that it “emerges” or “arises”.

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Happy 20th Anniversary, SN1987A!




On this day in 1987,
SN1987A,
my favoritest supernova ever, blew up. According to
this diagram at the
University of Virginia,
the star started burning neon in 1971, oxygen in 1983, silicon in 1987, and blew up ten days after that. Let that be a lesson to you, young stars: neon is a gateway drug that leads to inevitable self-destruction.

Flock of Dodos Meme

I went to see Flock of Dodos for its Darwin Day showing on Thursday.

At one point, Randy Olson, the filmmaker, points out that the Intelligent Design movement has lots of points that fit on a bumper sticker, such as “no transitionals” (or “not enough transitional fossils”), “teach the controversy”, and so forth, while proponents of evolution, especially scientists, can’t seem to express any point in less than a paragraph. And while this may indicate that scientists are careful to make well-thought-out, nuanced statements and avoid oversimplification, it makes for bad PR.

Later on, perhaps unintentionally, Olson does present an anti-ID slogan of his own: ID never rises above the level of intuition. For instance, as IDists like to point out, it’s obvious that Mt. Rushmore wasn’t carved by erosion and tectonic forces. Okay, fair enough. But that’s just the first step. Now they need to quantify this intuitive feeling, and come up with an objective metric of “designedness” or something, so that two people in different parts of the world, with different backgrounds can look at the same phenomenon and independently arrive at the same “designedness” number.

Likewise, creationists of all stripes are fond of saying that certain structures are too complex to have arisen by chance. Setting aside the obvious fact that natural selection is the very opposite of chance, one can still easily imagine a person to whom it’s intuitively obvious that human eyes are too complex to have arisen through the action of natural laws, without an intelligent guiding hand.

But again, that’s just a first step. How do you turn this intuition into something objective and quantifiable? I would expect someone to write a paper showing that natural laws can produce X amount of complexity in such-and-such amount of time, but that human eyes have X+100 complexity. X+100 > X, ergo human eyes are too complex to have arisen naturally.

The first step toward this would be to come up with a definition of complexity in biological systems, and a way of measuring it (and people like Bill Dembski do refer to the work of Shannon, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin in this area). The next would be to estimate the upper limit of complexity that natural processes can generate (which creationists have never done competently and honestly) and measure the amount of complexity in a biological structure (which, again, they’ve never done. Dembski has been asked several times to produce such a calculation, but has never done so, to my knowledge).

So when the Discovery Institute, trying to avoid getting sucked into the Dover trial, said that ID wasn’t ready to be taught in classrooms, they were right. ID has yet to rise above the level of intuition and gut feeling. And until it does, it has no right to be taken seriously as science.

Addendum: Another bumper-sticker-sized slogan for evolution I’ve run across is that we are risen apes, not fallen angels.

The Cruelest Line

While working on the Dover trial podcast, I think we’ve found one of the most cruel lines one can inflict on an actor:

Their names here, just for a couple of
examples, Moythomasia and Howqualepis. The names are really
unimportant. And on the other side, Psarolepis and Achoania.
Again, the names are unimportant.

By the way, if anyone knows how to pronounce these words, please let me know.

Pandas Podcast: Casting Call!

I’m putting together an audio dramatization of the Dover Panda trial, to be podcasted, and I need actors. If you’re interested in helping, go to the
project page and sign up!

Here’s how it works: pick some parts you’d like to play (preferably more than one in case your first choice isn’t available) and send me the list, along with a demo (because I’d like to know that you know how to record stuff on your computer). Once roles are handed out, you’ll record yourself reading your part in the
Dover
transcript
and send it to me. I’ll collect all of the recordings and splice them together into something like a radio drama or dramatic reading, and put them on the net.

Stock Scams and Pascal’s Triangle

There’s a stock market scam that goes something like this: make a
list of 1024 people, and send them an “investment newsletter”. The
copy sent to the first 512 people says that a particular stock will go
up; the other 512 get a copy that says that that stock will go down.
Let’s say it goes down. You throw away the list of people whom you
told the stock would go up, divide the remaining 512 in two, and send
them another “investment newsletter”. You tell the first 256 that some
other stock will go up, and tell the other 256 that that stock will go
down. Eliminate those to whom you gave a false prediction, divide the
remaining ones in two, and send them another tip, as before. Do this
ten times, and you’ll wind up with one person to whom, by sheer
numbers, you’ve given ten good predictions in a row. You then tell
that person that he’ll have to pay you to receive further stock
tips.

One problem with this scam (from the scammer’s point of view) is
that there’s a lot of waste: you have to start with over a thousand
names and whittle them down to just one sucker. But what if you
lowered your standards a bit? After all, if someone gets nine good
predictions and one bad one, you can still say you have a 90% success
rate, and that should help sell your nonexistent Wall Street wisdom.
What about 80%? Or 70%? If you start with 1024 names, how many
potential suckers will you have if you consider the ones to whom you
sent seven or more correct predictions, and not just the one where you
got all ten right?

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