Werner Gitt

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Prof. Werner Gitt

Werner Gitt (born 22 February 1937) is a German young earth creationist.

1 Biography
2 Bibliography
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Gitt was born in Raineck, Ebenrode East Prussia, (now Nesterov in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia) in 1937, the son of Hermann Gitt, a farmer, and his wife Emma (née Girod). During the Second World War, his 15-year old elder brother Fritz was taken away and killed by the Red Army, his mother was taken to a Soviet labor camp where she died and his uncle Fritz was killed fighting for the Volkssturm. His father survived and was taken prisoner of war in France. He and his aunts were relocated to Föhr in the North Frisian Islands where he was reunited with his father^[1].

In 1963 he enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Hannover in Hannover to study engineering and completed his studies in 1968. He then went to the Technische Hochschule Aachen in Aachen where he gained a doctorate in 1970.

In 1971 Werner Gitt started his career at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt "PTB"), in Braunschweig. From 1978 to 2002 he was Head of Q4 Information Technology. In 1978 he was promoted to Professor at the PTB and was promoted to Director. He retired in 2002.

He is best known for his opposition to evolution. In his book In the Beginning was Information.^[2] (original German title: Am Anfang war die Information) and in an article for Answers in Genesis^[3] he argues that information theory refutes evolution, though this has been rejected by the scientific community as pseudoscience, specifically pseudomathematics.

Gitt categorized information into a five level heirarchy:

Statistics: Symbol frequencies, channel capacity etc. See: Information Entropy, Shannon's Theory
Syntax: All structural properties of setting up information.
Semantics: Meaning of symbols.
Pragmatics: Actions required by recipient to achieve sender's purposes.
Apobetics: Sender's purposes.

Gitt coined

apobetics: the teleological aspect, the question of the purpose; derived from the Greek apobeinon = result, success, conclusion.

^[4] He notes Shannon Entropy ("Information") only addresses the first information level - statistics.

In an article for Answers in Genesis^[5] he argues that information theory refutes evolution. Critics claim this has been rejected by the scientific community as pseudoscience, specifically pseudomathematics.

Rich Baldwin of talk.origins explained that Gitt has incorrectly cited research that used "algorithmic randomness and not statistical randomness", which has led to false conclusions.^[6] Secondly, Gitt "describes his principles as "empirical" but Baldwin explained "the data is not provided to back this up." Similarly, Baldwin explained Gitt "proposes fourteen 'theorems,' yet fails to demonstrate them". Similarly, Tom Schneider of the Molecular Information Theory Group at the National Institutes of Health, an expert on the application of evolution to biology similarly criticises his use of unproved "theorems", use of circular reasoning, self-contradiction, "Gitt has gotten Shannon backwards" and that Gitt falls into a "standard misunderstanding that information is not entropy, information is not uncertainty"^[7].