Re: Stephen Wolfram vs. Charles Darwin on natural selection
- From: r norman <r_s_norman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:37:27 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:32:21 -0500 (EST), William Morse
<wdNOSPAmorse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
dkomo wrote:
Tim Tyler wrote:
dkomo wrote:
Richard Dawkins proposed that a rough measure of complexity for an organism
is the length of its description. [...]
That's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
--
LOL.
"Incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity
The first result is that there is no way to effectively compute K.
Theorem. K is not a computable function.
In other words, there is no program which takes a string s as input and
produces the integer K(s) as output."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Incomputability_of_Kolmogorov_complexity
http://tinyurl.com/5vjtkl
But if you follow further on that wikipedia entry you encounter the
obvious, that many compression programs do exactly what you say there is
no program to do - they take a string s as input and produce as output a
file (which could be expressed as an integer K) that contains all the
information in s. Not exactly the same as Kolmogorov complexity, but an
indication that incomputablity may be true in the abstract but it may be
possible to come very close to computability in the concrete.
Let's skip all the theoretical stuff about computability of Kolmogorov
complexity of strings and get to the meat: the notion that there does
exist a "description" of an organism. The fact of the matter is that
we have absolutely no way to write one nor to verify that any claimed
description indeed describes one organism uniquely. We can often
enough verify that the description fails (for example: "dkomo is a
feathered annelid with eighteen legs") but not that it is unique.
Certainly the length of the genome does not work to describe
complexity because there are what we think of as comparable organisms
(puffer fish and any other fish) with enormously different size
genomes. Is the fingerprint pattern part of the description of a
human? I think it probably should be but it is not part of the genome
-- identical twins have different fingerprints. Is the personality?
What about all those aspects of the personality that depend on
environmental influences? What about all those aspects of human
behavior dependent on learning? Are they part of the description of
who and what we are as organisms? Is the fact that I am a retired
biologist part of my description?
We may be able to use compressibility by some particular algorithm as
a pretty good measure of the "complexity" of a string of symbols of
defined length from a finite alphabet. Still we don't have even a
clue as to how to write an English language or genomic language or any
other language string of characters to describe an organism, let alone
select the shortest possible such description.
.
- References:
- Re: Stephen Wolfram vs. Charles Darwin on natural selection
- From: Tim Tyler
- Re: Stephen Wolfram vs. Charles Darwin on natural selection
- From: dkomo
- Re: Stephen Wolfram vs. Charles Darwin on natural selection
- From: William Morse
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