Werner Gitt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

Contents

[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. In his later book In the Beginning was the Big Bang? (Am Anfang war der Urknall?), he argues that the Big Bang Theory is weak due to the lack of Arguments and Evidence pointing towards the Big Bang, and its reliance on the existence of Dark Matter which he claimed as of the year 2000 may not exist.

[edit] World View

Gitt categorized information into a five level hierarchy:

  1. Statistics: Symbol frequencies, channel capacity etc. See: Shannon entropy
  2. Syntax: All structural properties of setting up information.
  3. Semantics: Meaning of symbols.
  4. Pragmatics: Actions required by recipient to achieve sender's purposes.
  5. Apobetics: Sender's purposes.

Gitt coined the term apobetics, the teleological aspect, the question of the purpose; derived from the Greek αποβαίνων [apobeinon] = result, success, conclusion.[4]

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.

Gitt's arguments have been rejected by the scientific community. 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 criticizes 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].

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

  1. ^ My Childhood in East Prussia by Werner Gitt
  2. ^ In The Beginning was Information by Werner Gitt
  3. ^ Information, science and biology by Werner Gitt, Answers in Genesis
  4. ^ G4 (1982)
  5. ^ Information, science and biology by Werner Gitt, Answers in Genesis
  6. ^ Information Theory and Creationism: Werner Gitt by Rich Baldwin, part of the talk.origins Archive
  7. ^ Errors in Werner Gitt's work with Information Theory by Tom Schneider, Molecular Information Theory Group at the National Institutes of Health

[edit] External links

Languages