Evolving New Information

advancement in this debate. Sanford developped along with Baumgardner a computer program named 'Mendel's accountant' which ''is a user-friendly biologically realistic simulation program for investigating the
processes of mutation and selection in sexually reproducing diploid populations''.(on a side note, Baumgardner is the one who developped the 'Terra' program, used by geophysicists)Sanford says in an interview that this program has been reported in two secular journals. I'm trying to find the articles in question.EDIT:John Sanford, John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, and Walter ReMine, Mendel’s Accountant: A biologically realistic forward-time population genetics program, Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience 8(2):147—165, June 2007.John Sanford, John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, and Walter ReMine, Using computer simulation to understand mutation accumulation dynamics and genetic load, in Y. Shi et al. (eds.), Computational ScienceICCS 2007, Part II, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4488, Springer—Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, pages 386—392.They has made simulations using this program that confirmed what Sanford was advancing in his book Genetic entropy.This is the description of the program, I'm reading it right now. (http://www.scpe.org/vols/vol08/no2/SCPE_8_2_02.pdf)Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

See Message 3.--Percy

That's fascinating Percy.Presumably there's also a frequency dependent effect wherby less used codons are translated faster (since there's less competition for the tRNAs used).

Can anyone define information as it pertains to mutations? I'd like to join in on the debate; however, I am not sure I fully understand how the word information is being used.

Message 1 defines information in the context of mutations.--Percy

Didn't Shannon say that his information theory should not be applied to biology, genetics, life or something like that ?

You are a veritable font of misinformation.--Percy

Yeah, I'm checking that one out ... wasn't sure at the time I wrote that question, even less now since I can't seem to track the source down.I'll keep looking, but I may have to retrack that question

One thing I am sure is that your initial definition of information in the context of genetics didn't include the semantic aspect.

Here's something Shannon actually did say, it's from his paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication: Semantics are not part of information theory.--Percy

Semantics is 'irrelevant to the engineering problem', this is different from 'irrelevant to information theory'.

You're going to argue about the interpretation of plain English?Shannon's information theory was proposed as a solution to the engineering problem of communicating information in the presence of noise. There are no semantic aspects to information theory. The only people who think they've come up with theories of information that include semantics are creationists like Dembski, Gitt and Spetner, and they've never bothered to connect their ideas to reality.But though these people think it is possible to include semantics in a theory of information, even they understand that Shannon information does not include semantics. I couldn't say it any better than creationist Perry Marshall at his Cosmicfingerprints website: Could I suggest that you reverse the order of your "reply first, research later" approach?--Percy

Semantics is not part of Shannon's definition of information, since he was more concerned in transmitting information in a wire then to develop the full idea what is information etc.Nonetheless, semantics is part of information. I mean, if information was one dimensional as Shannon proposed, then 'I have a black dog' would have less information then ''J'ai un chien noir''. But in reality, these two sentences have the same amount of information for the receiver.

No one's saying there's no such thing as semantic information. Of course semantic information exists.But Shannon's theory of information does not include semantics. It only covers aspects of information that are quantifiable. You cannot adapt Shannon information to make arguments about semantic information. Anyone making claims about semantic information cannot cite Shannon.--Percy

Ok then we agreeBTW I never found that quote where Shannon talks of biological systems. So unless I ever find it in the future, it doesn't exist and I agree I was in error.