Mutation and complexity. Spoiler: David K. DeWolf will be shown to be wrong.

[kyrie1618]

Disclaimer: There are people I respect who believe Intelligent Design (hereafter ID). I'm not qualified to take on the entire movement. I'm just after the part that says complex life can't evolve blindly and naturally.

"Even if it were shown through experimentation that a Darwinian mechanism could produce a more complex life form from a simpler

Comments

Eenteresting

[bec_87rb]

What is complexity in this context?

Maybe Not So Eenteresting...

[chhinnamasta]

I'm assuming he means it in the Kolmogrov Complexity sense. However, we must be aware that the Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler-Huffman compressibility of a string is simply an upper bound on its complexity. Another algorithm may compress two strings differently, maybe even inverting the results. Kolmogrov complexity is not computable.

Re: Maybe Not So Eenteresting...

[kyrie1618]

You are completely correct, of course. We know of very few lower limits on Kolmogorov Complexity. The Pigeonhole Principle tells us that most strings are ultimately incompressible, but it does not tell us which ones. A truly random bit has a Kolmogorov Complexity of one bit, but how good is my entropy pool? If my entropy pool is drained, my computer is physically incapable of producing truly random numbers and my pseudo-random number generator may not be good enough.

Further, I realized after posting that I forgot to regenerate my minimum and maximum entropy strings for the 10-base-shorter knockout telomere. Plus, the maximum entropy estimate really should be a range and not a point. Oops!

Version 2 of my essay must address these problems, or I am an aged avian embryo.

Re: Maybe Not So Eenteresting...

[kyrie1618]

So, given that Kolmogorov complexity is ultimately unattainable, which estimates of complexity should I add in version 2? Or should I just add a disclaimer that these are merely upper bounds?