No Abiogenesis, no Evolution, then what?

Chiroptera was probably just checking to see if you knew that information has a formal definition. Scientific conceptions of information are Shannon information (see http:///DataDropsite/Shannon.pdf). Creationists like William Dembski, Werner Gitt and Lee Spetner have suggested their own alternative definitions of information that haven't found acceptance within the scientific community.What I think Chiroptera is trying to point out is that before you can make claims about creating information or whether it increases or decreases you first have to have a formal definition of information that permits you to measure it. Otherwise you have no way to answer questions like, "Which genome has more information, the chimp or the human?"--Percy

As the other replies have made clear, you haven't provided a useful definition of information. A useful definition would provide a method for quantifying information in order to test assertions, such as that mutation and selection cannot produce new information (Gitt's Theorem 9 verbatim).Using Shannon information (again, his landmark paper can be found at http:///DataDropsite/Shannon.pdf) we can measure how much information is present in a population for a given gene. For example, the gene for eye color in a population of squirrels may include three different colors: red, green and brown (the different types of a gene are called alleles, so therefore this gene for eye color has three alleles: red, green and brown). Three eye colors can be represented in log₂3 = 1.59 bits of binary data. The number of bits of information needed to represent three eye colors can be used as a measure of the amount of information contained in the eye color gene for this squirrel population.Now let's say that one squirrel couple gives birth to a baby squirrel with a mutation in the eye color gene that gives its eyes the color yellow. The population of squirrels now has four eye color alleles for the eye color gene: red, green, brown and yellow. The amount of information needed to represent four alleles of eye color is log₂4 = 2 bits. So the amount of information in the eye color gene has increased from 1.59 bits to 2 bits, an increase of .41 bits.The new baby squirrel grows to adulthood and has many children, some of whom inherit the yellow eye color allele. The new allele gradually spreads through the population. Since the new eye color has not been selected against, it becomes a new allele of the eye color gene for the squirrel population, and the amount of information contained in that gene has increased by .41 bits.This falsifies Gitt's Theorem 9 that mutation and selection cannot produce new information.--Percy

I just provided an example of how information arises without intelligence in Message 126.--Percy

I was only asking you for your definition of information because your claims about it cannot be interpreted without knowing how you define it. I already know what information is from a scientific perspective, and I provided you the link, not once but twice, to Shannon's landmark paper that established the field of information theory. I just did, in the very message you're replying to, Message 126.I provided a detailed example of the Shannon definition of information. More generally, the number of binary bits required to communicate one message of a set of messages (eye colors was my example) is the log base 2 of the number of messages. So if there are three eye colors to communicate, then the amount of information is: Let us say the eye colors are red, green and brown. This gene then experiences a mutation that adds an allele for the eye color yellow. This gene now has four alleles (red, green, brown, and now yellow). The amount of information in the population for this gene is now: Since 2 is greater than 1.59, the amount of information has increased. As I said before, this falsifies Gitt's Theorem 9 that mutation and selection cannot produce new information.--Percy

I've provided you the scientific definition of information. Since you don't accept this definition, how do you define information, and how would you apply that definition to my example of eye color to determine whether information has increased or not?--Percy