Robert J. Marks II in his article on IDC in the conservative political outlet Human Events:
Yet we all agree that a picture of Mount Rushmore with the busts of four US Presidents contains more information than a picture of Mount Fuji.As Jeff Shallit indicates, no, we really don’t. He has formal measures of information in mind, as I usually do. But I’ve posted a lot of formal stuff lately, and I’m going to do something more intuitive. [What you see here is an abortive attempt at late-night writing from over a month ago. Now that Jeff has posted a note he sent to Marks, I'm going to let it go as is. The pictures are fun.]
Is there some special kind of information in an image of Mount Rushmore that would grab the attention of an extraterrestrial flying by? A bright patch is certainly noticeable, but I don’t think that qualifies as a special kind of information, or as much information of any kind. And as lichen grows on the sculpture, it darkens. (This video has before-and-after shots at 4:50.) If you want to know what really wows E.T., click on the image below.
There may well be a “look here, look here” icon long after the faces have crumbled.
Am I playing a dirty trick? No, by showing you the big picture, I’m allowing you to see that the form of the sculpture does not stand out from the rest of the mountain. It could not have been otherwise. A sculptor subtracts from what is already present to arrive at the result. Even when the medium is marble, there are sometimes features that drive the composition (see the quotes of Michelangelo and Henry Moore in a past post). Gutzon Borglum could not simply imagine the form of the monument, and then pick a mountain arbitrarily. He had to study available mountain form-ations, and imagine what he could produce by removing modest amounts of material.
Am I trying to diminish the work of Borglum? Certainly not. For someone to envision a monument in the side of a mountain is amazing. My point is that much of the form-ation of the sculpture was already done. The in-form-ation by the sculptor was relatively fine detail, for the most part, and that is why the gross features do not stand out from the surrounding stone.
Of course, the ID creationists make E.T. get up close and personal. The point has been made a gazillion times that an extraterrestrial may be so unlike a person that faces mean nothing to it. What objectively stands out in a shot that is tighter, but not as tight as the IDCists want it to be, is the relatively flat surface surrounding the heads. The pile of rubble beneath the carving also draws attention to it. How ironic.
The IDCists always frame what they say contains some sort of special information, without accounting for how that happens. Put simply, why does E.T. zoom in on a relatively small part of Mount Rushmore, if it doesn’t stand out? To come at this another way, Marks expects us to compare the typical image of Mount Fuji, far in the distance, to the typical image of Mount Rushmore, which is a small part containing the sculpture. That is what prompted me to go looking for shots from different perspectives and different distances. [… “If you want any more, you can sing it yourself.”]
"Mountfujijapan" by Swollib
Special Added Bonus Feature: Creationist Persecution Fantasy
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