This is a continuation of a digression that arose in the
A Designer Consistent with the Physical Evidence thread concerning how mutation produces new information. What follows is just a copy of my
Message 324.
--Percy
NanoGecko writes:
It is just as well that the DNA contains so many base pairs of coded information, and that there is a safety mechanism in that usually both parents need to have the copying error (mutation) before the mutation will express itself in the offspring.
Whether any gene is expressed is a function of many things, the one we're most familiar with being the dominant/recessive characteristic. In sexual species a mutation does not need to be present in both parents in order to be expressed in the offspring, and so it is possible for a mutation to express itself in the first generation of its appearance. And of course in non-sexual species this isn't an issue.
Your analogy is only about a mixing of genetic information via the amazing process of sexual reproduction to produce a variety of offspring outcomes.
Actually, it wasn't an analogy, I didn't specify the type of reproduction, and it was an example of a single mutation, not allele mixing such as would occur with sexual reproduction. If it helps, it is simplest to think of the example organism as a sighted asexual species with eye color.
You weren't specific about what portions of my example you took issue with, so help me figure this out. Our organism has three alleles for eye color:
- GGAACG (green eyes)
- GGAACA (blue eyes)
- GGCACG (yellow eyes)
Since there are three messages in the message set for this gene, the amount of information it can communicate is log
23 = 1.585 bits. This is just straightforward information theory, I'm just setting the table right now, there shouldn't be anything here to take issue with. I think this is what you prefer to call complex specified information, and I'll attempt to accommodate you.
Now we look at a single reproductive event where an organism with the allele for yellow eyes (CGCACG) produces an offspring with a mutation in this gene so that it is now CGCACA, and the offspring has brown eyes. Our message set has now become:
- GGAACG (green eyes)
- GGAACA (blue eyes)
- GGCACG (yellow eyes)
- GGCACA (brown eyes)
There are now four messages in the message set for this gene, and the amount of information it can communicate is log
24 = 2 bits, an increase of .415 bits.
You had several objections to this. One is that the mutation for brown eyes is polymorphic, and I have to completely agree. Having multiple alleles for a gene is the very definition of polymorphism, and increasing the number of alleles is, at heart, the way that mutation increases the amount of information in a genome. You later say:
The NEW information that I am talking about is the ACTUAL NEW INFORMATION THAT IS REQUIRED TO HAVE OCCURRED by those that believe in the evolutionary fairy story.
So you're asking us to describe the type of new information that is required by evolution to rpovide new functions, and my mutation example is exactly that. Mutations are ultimately how evolution provides new function, and I provided an example of a mutation providing a new function, and showed how from an information theoretic perspective that it represented new information. If you think it doesn't provide new information then you have to explain how the message set growing from 3 messages via mutation to become 4 is not an increase in information. log
24 - log
23 = +.415 is the simple math that you have to address.
Another of your objections dealt with complex specified complexity:
BUT they do NOT constitute a coded increase in ordered complexity in the genetic code...
My example began with an organism with an eye-color gene with three alleles, and you call this complex specified information (you actually used the term "ordered complexity", but hopefully this is a synonym). I then said there was a mutation that added an allele, and you're saying that the added allele is not complex specified information.
But what if I had instead begun my example by saying that the organism originally had four alleles for eye color like this:
- GGAACG (green eyes)
- GGAACA (blue eyes)
- GGCACG (yellow eyes)
- GGCACA (brown eyes)
You would have said this is the complex specified information for that gene and had no problem with it, just as you did when I began my example with a three-allele gene. So if the allele for brown eyes is complex specified information when it is part of the original genome, how is it not complex specified information when it arises through mutation?
--Percy
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