Friday, July 14, 2006

Brendan Frey does real information theory and molecular biology

Here's the outline of a course he teaches. Unfortunately, the slides from his talk at ISIT-2006 are not up.


What is obvious to Frey, as well as anyone else in this field, as that we can only work with what we know from the genome, and transcriptions therefrom, which itself is compiled on the basis of an (incomplete) sample of the population.

Oddly enough, despite the hoopla, even the genome cannot circumscribe the entirety of what it means to be human, even in a limited mechanistic sense. Frey agreed with that point when I raised it with him after his talk, and also agreed with the point that this indicated a fatal flaw in the whole nonsense of "intelligent" "design" theory.

Frey does fascinating, important work, that does in a very fundamental, phenomenological sense, point to what we are. But there's no deity lurking, no ghost in the machine that has to be pulled out to make things right.

Frey's worthing knowing: he's a real information theorist working in molecular biology, the close cousin of evolutionary biology.

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