Gene duplication = information!

This seems painfully circular. You will show that gene duplication creates evolution by defining creation of information by the example of gene duplication.I don't see why this should convince any creationist, and after all this blather about "information" is their thing, not ours. Let them define it.

Well, "information" can be defined in many ways. We are trying to get from a concept which is qualitative and intuitive to a definition which is qualitative and precise. There are a number of ways that we could do that. There are a number of ways that people have done that.Shannon information is one way of measuring information. If I came up with a new way of measuring information and called it "Dr Adequate information", then so long as it had some sort of fit with what we intuitively mean by information, then you couldn't say that I was wrong by proposing my definition.So let the creationists bring it on. Let John Smith claim that evolution can't increase "John Smith information". Let's analyze the claim. Let's see whether DNA contains any "John Smith information", and let's ask whether evolutionary processes can increase it.But I don't see how AIG has got even that far. He doesn't say how we can quantify "AIG information", he just says that "AIG information" should be so defined such that that gene duplication is an increase in "AIG information", and then he triumphantly proclaims that gene duplication is an increase in "AIG information" --- by definition.If we are going to talk about increases or decreases in information, then we need some way to measure how much information is in a given genome of an organism. Anyone who tries to come up with an idea of "information" which doesn't do that is blowing smoke.

Well, evolution has a clear-cut definition already. But I think anyone can come up with their own metric of "information". There may be more than one way to do so --- Shannon information and Kolmogorov complexity, for example.So if someone wants to come up with a new metric of information, then we can think about it. If John Smith offers us a metric, then we can start talking about "Smith information". But if someone invents their own theory of evolution, then they're either right or wrong, and if they come up with their own definition of evolution, then they're definitely wrong --- by definition.

Let's see your definition of information, then. Try to make it quantifiable. It can be used as an information metric, because it measures the complexity of an algorithm which generates the information. KC is in many ways closer to our intuition of information than Shannon information is.

It's a metric. But there's no reason to be partisan about it. It's not right, it's just useful. Good.