Irreducible Complexity and TalkOrigins

First, tell us how you're measuring how much "information" there is in the genome. That's more or less right. No ... not really.The difference between a beneficial and a harmful mutation is like the difference between a guy with one lottery ticket and one with 10,000 lottery tickets. Neither of them is likely to win, but the odds overwhelmingly favor the guy with 10,00 tickets over the guy with one. The odds are slim for any particular mutation to achieve fixation. But there are a lot of mutations. Transposition is a copying error. It would be nice if any of that meant anything, but I'm afraid that it doesn't. See my remarks about "information".What you mean by "how many copying errors would it take to produce an active cumulative evolution" I cannot guess. "Information", again. Yes. Yes. Yes. I think you'll find that evolution is to be credited for evolution, and that adaptation is evolution. That would depend on the degree of evidence for the unobserved phenomena. I, for example, am not skeptical of electrons, though they are unobserved, but I am skeptical of flying pigs (also unobserved). ... have yet to be produced.

That's what we asked you. Trouble is, it includes the word "information". And it does not tell us how to quantify it. Because the ID crowd throw the word about without telling us how to quantify it. Still doesn't tell us how to quantify it. Right, that's Shannon information. In which case any mutation which increases the size of the genome increases the amount of information in it; and any point mutation leaves the amount of information constant. In which case the creationist stuff about mutations and information is false. Have a look at this experiment. But why should the degrees of similarity be exactly in line with the predictions of evolution? This article may help to clarify the issues. This is exactly why scientists distinguish between analogy and homology. The difference is that the observations supporting evolution are reproducible. We can go and look at the fossils or the DNA or the morphology of living creatures again and again and again, it's not like someone saying "I saw a flying saucer but it's gone now." It didn't. Natural selection was also involved. It is. It's also the greatest evidence for the Earth being flat. Here is Claude Shannon's original paper on the subject --- this is where it all starts.

That would be Kolmogorov complexity. And yes, mutations can increase it, as you point out.

No, not really. Consider that we could easily come up with a finite Turing machine that generates pi (which contains an infinite amount of Shannon information) which is smaller than any Turing machine that produces some sufficiently large finite number. As a matter of fact, it's incomputable in the general case.However, it is computable if the string is finite (as in genetics) and given a particular description language. You'd just have to try every description that's shorter than the explicit description of the given finite string, and see if any of them returns that string.

They both contain 32 bits of information. To calculate that, you just have to multiply the length of the genome by 2. Strictly speaking, I should say "only relative to a given description language, which you haven't actually specified". There is no absolute value of Kolmogorov complexity without a specified description language.But if we're not being technical and pernickety, the second string has more Kolmogorov complexity than the first, because in any reasonable description language (English, for example) you can give a briefer description of the first than the second.

Why?It's the logarithm, to the base 2, of the number of potential strings of that length.16 bases, each with four potential values.32 bits of information.

Well now you need to present a definition of information.If information is the number of bits, then the information in a genome is twice the number of bases.If you're talking about Kolmogorov complexity, then it isn't.

But that would be relative to a particular description language, and we'd be back to Kolmogorov complexity.

Well, as your tone suggests, it doesn't.However you define and quantify information, if some point mutation reduced the information, then the opposite point mutation would of course increase it.Every mutation has its opposite. An insertion can be undone by a deletion, a point mutation by a point mutation, an inversion by an inversion, a frame shift by a frame shift, and so on.And however you choose to measure information, if one mutation reduces the information in the genome, the opposite mutation must increase it. Otherwise you could have two identical DNA sequences containing different amounts of information, which would be nonsense.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

That's because I thought up this line of argument myself.* looks smug *

Another point mutation. (See below.)If a point mutation from A to T at a particular point on a genome reduced information, then the mutation back from T to A at the same point would be an increase in information. Sharp.In that case, though, in particular a deletion mutation would not remove information. In which case any series of deletion mutations would not remove information. In which case, there is no information in any genome. In which case it is not an objection to evolution to say that mutations can't create information, since there isn't any information. Then Spetner is wrong.Have a look here. Where does the "information" in these RNA species come from? Well, say you have a chuck of genome that goes...CAG ACC GGT CGC...and it undergoes a point mutation so that it now reads...CAG ACC CGT CGC...then if the second genome now has less information than the first, it follows that a point mutation from...CAG ACC CGT CGC...to...CAG ACC GGT CGC...would constitute an increase in information.In the same way, if an insertion (and frame shift) from...CAG ACC GGT CGC...to...CAG ACT CGG TCG C...is a decrease in information, then a deletion (and frame shift) from...CAG ACT CGG TCG C...to...CAG ACC GGT CGC...would be an increase in information.Since a mutation can be undone by another mutation, it follows that if there are mutations that decrease "information" (whatever that may be) then there are also mutations that increase it.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Now lets look at it another way.Since there are mutations that will change any base anywhere in the genome to any other base, and since there are mutations that will lengthen or shorten the genome, and since there are muations that will change chromosome number, it follows that there is a sequence (indeed, an infinite number of sequences) of mutations that will change any given genome into any other given genome. For example, the genome of a monkey into the genome of a man.If none of these mutations increases "information" (whatever that is) it follows that evolution can get on just fine without ever increasing "information", and, indeed, we are in the case you mentioned earlier, in which "information" is conserved by mutation and hence there is no "information" in any genome.

You have missed my point so thoroughly that I can't figure out what you think my point was.To recapitulate: you asked what I would say to someone who maintained that mutations always conserve information.My reply was that if this is true, then since deletion is a form of mutation, it would follow that we could delete as much of the genome as we like (or all of it!) without destroying any information.But this is possible only if there wasn't any information in the genome to start with.Now, this does not involve me "redefining information" in any way: I am simply showing the logical consequences of any definition of "information" such that mutations conserve information.Note also that the conclusion that no genome contains information is by no means part of "the evolutionary model". I dodn't claim that. But someone who claimed that all mutations conserve information would be forced by logic and the existence of deletion mutations to claim exactly that. Implicitly, someone who claims that mutations conserve information is claiming that.---We might state the result more formally.Given any measure of genetic information such that two identical genomes contain the same amount of genetic information and such that the "null genome" (i.e. the "genome" consisting of no bases whatsoever) contains no genetic infomation, it follows that either no genome contains any information, or that it is possible for a mutation to increase information. You seem to have grasped it all right, though.Is that cool or what?More later, must eat pizza.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, there are plenty of ways to measure information. For example, we could just measure the number of bits. That's easy, it's just twice the length of the genome. Or we could calculate the Kolmogorov complexity --- tricky, but feasible if you have the entire genome mapped.But when a creationist says that "mutations only decrease information", he will never tell you how he's measuring information, 'cos if he gave any particular measurement, it would be trivial to prove him wrong. An insertion mutation, for example, would increase the number of bits; a duplication followed by a point mutation would increase Kolmogorov complexity; and so forth.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.