In the Beginning Was Information (36 page)

[M4] Michalewicz, Z., Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 3rd edition, 1996, 387 p.

[M5] Mini Bible, Slide with "The Smallest Bible in the World," Available: Ernst Paulus Verlag, Haltweg 23, 67434 Neustadt/Weinstraße, Germany.

[M6] Mohr, H., Der Begriff der Erklärung in Physik und Biologie Naturwissenschaften, 65 (1978), p. 1–6.

[N1] Nees, G., Künstliche Intelligenz und Expertensysteme, Automatisierungstechnische Praxis 27 (1985), p. 25–32.

[O1] Ohta, T., "A Model of Evolution for Accumulating Genetic Information,"
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(1987) 124, p. 199–211.

[O2] Osawa, S., et al., "Recent Evidence for Evolution of the Genetic Code,"
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, March 1992, p. 229–264.

[O3] Osche, G., Die Vergleichende Biologie und die Beherrschung der Mannigfaltigkeit Biologie in unserer Zeit 5 (1975), p. 139–146.

[O4] Oth, R., Das große Indianer-Lexikon – Alles über Kultur und Geschichte eines großen Volkes – Arena-Verlag, Würzburg, 1979, 220 p.

[P1] Peierls, R.E., Wo stehen wir in der Kenntnis der Naturgesetze? Physikal. Blätter (19) 1963, p. 533–539.

[P2] Peil, J., Einige Bemerkungen zu Problemen der Anwendung des Informationsbegriffs in der Biologie, Teil I: Der Informationsbegriff und seine Rolle im Verhältnis zwischen Biologie, Physik und Kybernetik, p. 117–128; Teil II: Notwendigkeit und Ansätze zur Erweiterung des Informationsbegriffs, p. 199–213, Biometrische Zeitschrift Bd. 15 (1973).

[P3] Planck, M., Vorträge und Erinnerungen, S. Hirzel-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1949.

[R1] Rentschler, W., Die Erhaltungsgesetze der Physik Physikalische Blätter 22 (1966), p. 193–200.

[R2] Rokhsar, D.S., et al., "Self-Organisation in Prebiological Systems: Simulations of a Model for the Origin of Genetic Information,"
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, 23 (1986): p. 119–126.

[R3] Rüppell, G., Vogelflug Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1980, 209 p.

[S1] Sachsse, H., Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos in der Sicht der Naturwissenschaft. Herrenalber Texte HT33, "Mensch und Kosmos," 1981, p. 93–103.

[S2] Salomonsen, F.,Vogelzug, Aus der Serie: Moderne Biologie, BLV München, Basel, Wien, 1969, 210 p.

[S3] Schäfer, E.,Das menschliche Gedächtnis als Information-sspeicher, Elektronische Rundschau 14 (1960), p. 79–84.

[S4] Scherer, S.,Photosynthese – Bedeutung und Entstehung – ein kritischer Überblick, Hänssler-Verlag, Neuhausen-Stuttgart, 1983, 74 p.

[S5] Schneider, H.,Der Urknall, Zeitschrift factum (1981), Nr. 3, p. 26–33.

[S6] Schuchmann, H.R., "Artifical Intelligence," als Informations-technologie — "Künstliche Intelligenz," auf dem Weg von der Wissenschaft zur industriellen Anwendung, data report 19 (1984), H. 3, p. 4–11.

[S7] Shannon, C.E.,  Weaver, W.,
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[S8] Sösemann, F., Information, physikalische Entropie und Objektivität, Wiss. Zeitschrift der Techn. Hochschule Karl-Marx-Stadt 17 (1975), p. 117–122.

[S9] Spurgeon, C.H., Das Buch der Bilder und Gleichnisse — 2000 der besten Illustrationen, J.G. Oncken-Verlag, Kassel, 1900, 731 p.

[S10] Spurgeon, C.H., Es steht geschrieben — Die Bibel im Kampf des Glaubens, Oncken-Verlag, Wuppertal und Kassel, 1980, 94 p.

[S11] Steinbuch, K., Falsch programmiert, Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart, Hamburg, 1968, 251 p.

[S12] Strombach, W., Philosophie und Informatik, Forschungsbericht Nr. 122 der Abteilung, Informatik, Universität Dortmund, 31 p.

[U1] Underhill, R.,
Here Come the Navaho! – A History of the Largest Indian Tribe in the United States
(Tucson, AZ: Treasure Chest Publications, Inc., 1953), 285 p.

[V1] Vollmert, B., Das Molekül und das Leben — Vom makromolekularen Ursprung des Lebens und der Arten: Was Darwin nicht wissen konnte und Darwinisten nicht wissen wollen, Rowohlt-Verlag, 1985, 256 p.

[W1] Waltz, D.L., Künstliche Intelligenz, Spektrum der Wissenschaft (1982), H. 12, p. 68–87.

[W2] Weibel, E.R., Morphometry of the Human Lung Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1973.

[W3] v. Weizsäcker, E., Offene Systeme I — Beiträge zur Zeitstruktur von Information, Entropie und Evolution, — Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, 1974, 370 p.

[W4] Wieland, W., Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Wissenschafts-theorie, Angewandte Chemie 93 (1981), p. 627–634.

[W5] Wiener, N.: Kybernetik — Regelung und Nachrichtenübertragung in Lebewesen und Maschinen — Rowohlt Verlag, 1968, 252 p.

[W6] Wills, P.R., "Scrapie, Ribosomal Proteins and Biological Information,"
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[W7] Winograd, T., Software für Sprachverarbeitung, Spektrum der Wissenschaft (1984), H. 11, p. 88–102.

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[X1] Energie aus Sonne und Wind: Raum nicht in der kleinsten Hütte, Zeitschrift "tag+nacht" der Stadtwerke, Braunschweig, IV, 1983, p. 3.

Endnotes

[1]
After 12 weeks, no new organs are formed. When organo-genesis (= embryo-genesis = the growth and differentiation of cells at the sites of new organs during the first 12 weeks) is concluded, the embryo is referred to as a fetus, and its further growth is known as fetal development.

[2]
However, I would like to add the following condition. It is not clear from the statement whether God is referred to, or whether He is excluded. The question of the source of the information is acknowledged to be of fundamental importance, but even if the question about the source of the information has been answered logically and correctly, one would not be able to really understand this world without acknowledging the Spirit of God. If the Bible really is the Book of Truth, as stated in many ways (e.g., John 17:17), then it is the key for understanding the world.

[3]
Verification (Latin
verus
= true,
facere
= make):Verification means that a statement is tested experimentally. The result of such a verification is not generally valid, however. It holds strictly only for cases which have actually been confirmed, because the possibility that hitherto unknown counter examples may exist cannot be excluded. If one contradictory case is found, then the statement is rejected (falsified!). This can also be expressed as follows: It is not possible to verify a theory; a theory can only be falsified. A theory is good if it could be falsified very easily, and when it survives all open criticisms and tests, it can be accepted.

[4]
Provability: The German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943) held the optimistic view that every mathematical problem could be resolved in the sense that a solution could be found, or that it could be proved that a solution was impossible, for example the quadrature (squaring) of a circle. He therefore said in his famous talk in Königsberg (1930) that there were no unsolvable problems: "We must know, we will know." Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), the well-known Austrian mathematician, rejected this view. He showed that, even in a formal system, not all true theorems could be proved. This statement, called the first incompleteness theorem of Gödel, was quite a revolutionary result. Because of the far-reaching effects for mathematics and for science theory, Heinrich Scholz called Gödel’s work "A critique of pure reason from the year 1931."

[5]
Amendments to formulated laws of nature: An established natural law loses its universal validity when one single counter example is found. However, it is often only necessary to change the formulation to describe the actual law more precisely. We should therefore distinguish between the actual law as it operates in nature, and its formulation in human terms. More precise formulations do not invalidate an "approximately formulated law," but do provide a better description of reality. In the following two cases, the original formulations were too narrow, and had to be revised:

Example 1: The classical laws of mechanics lost their validity when appreciable fractions of the speed of light were involved. They were extended by the more precise special theory of relativity, because the relativistic effects could not be observed when velocities were small. The laws of classical mechanics are a good enough approximation for general purposes (e.g., construction of machines), but, strictly speaking, their original formulations were incorrect.

Example 2: The law of conservation of mass had to be reformulated to become a general law of the conservation of mass and energy, when nuclear reactions were involved (loss of mass, E = m x c
²
). Nevertheless, the law of mass conservation is a potent law of nature.

[6]
Many authors erroneously elevate Shannon’s information theory to the syntactic level. This is, however, not justified in the light of appendix A1, since it comprises only the statistical aspects of a message, without regard to syntactic rules.

[7]
Greek
hierós
= sacred;
glyptós
= chiselled, cut;
glyphike téchne
= the art of carving (in stone);
hieroglyphiká
= sacred writing signs of ancient Egyptian pictorial writing.

[8]
Decoding of hieroglyphics: The Greek text was easy to read and to translate, and already in Cairo it was found to be an homage to King Ptolemy inscribed bypriests of Memphis in the year 196 b.c. With the obvious assumption that the contents of all three texts were identical, it appeared to be possible to decipher the pictorial writing, symbol by symbol. This assumption proved to be correct, but the decoding process took quite some time, since a 1,400-year-old presupposition stood in the way. Horapollon, an Egyptian living in the fourth century, described hieroglyphics as being a purely pictorial script, as it indeed seemed to be. But this assumption resulted in some grotesque findings. When studying the Demotic text, a Swedish linguist, Åkerblad, recognized all the proper names appearing in the Greek version, as well as the words for "temple" and "Greeks." Subsequently, Thomas Young, a medical physicist, recognized the names Berenice and Cleopatra in the cartouches (the symbol groups appearing in the ovals in the sixth line from the top in Figure 10). Instead of looking for pictorial symbols, Young boldly suggested that the pictures were phonetic symbols representing sounds or letters. But he was just as reluctant as everybody else to pursue this idea — another example of the inhibiting effect that presuppositions have on the truth. The eventual breakthrough was made by the French founder of Egyptology, Jean Francois Champollion (1790–1832). He correlated single hieroglyphic symbols with the corresponding Greek letters appearing in the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra, and could then begin with the deciphering.

[9]
In the case of all artificial and formal languages these conventions were laid down deliberately. The origin of natural languages is discussed in appendix A2, "Origin of Languages."

[10]
Hexadecimal system: This is used for representing numbers with base 16 and the word is a hybrid derived from both Greek and Latin: Greek hexa = 6, Latin: decem = 10. Another more suitable word is sedecimal (Latin sedecim = 16), or "hexadecadic" from the Greek word for 16.

[11]
Pangrams: A pangram is a sentence comprising all the letters of the alphabet, where each letter is used once only. No such sentence is known in German; it should contain exactly 30 letters: a, b, c, …, z, as well as ß, ä, ö, and ü. Sentences comprised of a few more than 30 letters have been constructed, but they are often rather artificial.