Evolving New Information

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

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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. 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 log₂3 = 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 log₂4 = 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: 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. log₂4 - log₂3 = +.415 is the simple math that you have to address.Another of your objections dealt with complex specified information: 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?--PercyEdited by Percy, : "complex specified complexity" => "complex specified information"

Thanks much for this, I've started reading the paper but will probably have to finish later because I have to leave soon.But I wanted to note for NanoGecko that the paper appears to be about the origin of new genes. This is very much on-topic, but just so there's no confusion I want to make clear that my example addressed the simpler case of the origin of a new allele.--Percy

Well, maybe, but they're good points none the less. I just put down random codons without regard to whether they coded for the same amino acid or not. If it becomes necessary I'll improve the example for NanoGecko.--Percy

Evolution is descent with modification and natural selection, but Harrison is correct that it is primarily natural selection at work in the case of the peppered moth studies. But the passage you cite from him says that it isn't evolution because the peppered moth did not evolve into a new species, and that's incorrect.Evolution proceeds in tiny steps. A change from one species to the next occurs through the accumulation of many tiny evolutionary steps, of descent with modification followed by natural selection over and over and over again through the generations. Each generation is one step. Saying that the small amount of change observed in the peppered moth studies was not evolution is like saying that you're not really going for a walk unless you walk all the way to the next city.Just as you can go for a short walk and change your location a little, or you can go for long walks and change your location a lot, we can watch evolution for a short while and observe a little change, or we can watch evolution for a long while and observe a lot of change. But there's a problem watching evolution for a long while. Except for organisms with very short lifetimes like bacteria or even mosquitoes to an extent, the number of generations any scientific study can observe is very small.The slow pace of evolution is paralleled by the slow pace of the erosion of mountains. We know that mountains typically erode by a few inches per year, but we're never going to observe mountains eroding all the way down to plains because it takes millions of years. We just have to rely upon the fact that once a mountain erodes a few inches this year, there's nothing to prevent it from eroding a few more inches next year, and the year after, and the year after that, and so on for eternity.Each generation brings about a tiny amount of evolutionary change because reproduction is imperfect. Every generation contains new mutations not previously present in the population. Natural selection operates on these differences, and individuals with the more favorable changes contribute disproportionately to the genes of the next generation. And there's nothing to prevent this from happening in the next generation, and the one after that, and the after that, and so on for eternity. Changes can accumulate to the point where a species actually becomes a different species, and this is especially true when there are changing environmental conditions which increases selection pressures.--Percy

Have you read the book The Beek of the Pinch? --Percy

end e mispeled bek to.--perch

So your biology book provides the example of finches evolving into horses? Interesting. I suggest you use it for heating purposes the next cold winter. Now this is entirely reasonable, so maybe you shouldn't burn your biology book after all. A finch evolving into a horse is not the same as what you say here. Birds aren't even mammals. Thanks for the assurances, but you just revealed that you think a finch evolving into a horse is a valid example of evolution, so the evidence would suggest that despite your voluminous reading you lack the understanding of biology necessary for assessing the validity of what you read. About Sanford Wikipedia says: By the way, note Sanford's somewhat conflicting views, where he accepts ID while simultaneously rejecting common descent and believing in a young Earth just like young Earth creationists. Michael Behe, arguably the founder of the ID movement, accepts common descent and rejects a young Earth. Could I suggest to you that Sanford is not a reliable source, and that the fact that a read of his book doesn't reveal this to you further suggests that you be cautious in trusting your intuitions about biology.--Percy

I think you're completely lost. I presented a simple example illustrating how random mutations can increase information. Your complaint makes no more sense than if I were explaining algebra and after I presented the problem "y=4x+7" you complained that I had no way of knowing the relationship between x and y.But there's more than one way to explain anything, so if the correspondence to actual eye color bothers you then we'll just simplify the example.Imagine that in a population, one of the genes has three messages that it can communicate. Each message consists of a sequence of six nucleotides (the nucleotides for DNA are guanine, adenine, cytosine and thymine, and they're represented by the letters G, A, C and T):

• GGAACG
• GGAACA
• GGCACG

Since there are three messages in the message set for this gene, the amount of information it can communicate is log₂3 = 1.585 bits.Now imagine that in the next generation one of the offspring experiences a mutation in this gene. Had there been no mutation then it would have received the GGCACG message, but the mutation switches the last nucleotide from guanine to adenine, and the message becomes GGCACA. Now in the genome for the population there exists four messages for this gene:

• GGAACG
• GGAACA
• GGCACG
• GGCACA

There are now four messages in the message set for this gene, and the amount of information it can communicate is log₂4 = 2 bits, an increase of .415 bits.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.Edited by Percy, : Still learning to type, apparently. Anyone finding more typos, please be specific.

This is how you began your exchange with Onifre in Message 25You put the words in Onifre's mouth ("You tell me that..."), but no one here would ever suggest the possibility of an existing species evolving across "vast amounts of time" into a different existing species. While technically not impossible in that it doesn't violate any known physical laws, it is both incredibly unlikely and in this thread incredibly irrelevant.What would be more relevant is if you addressed your contradictory advocacy of a young earth in this thread and an old earth in the Misconceptions in Relativity thread.--Percy

Your inability to express a consistent viewpoint indicates inner confusion. Are you saying that you reject an ancient Earth and accept Carmeli's cosmological views that advocate the ancient Earth that you reject? Are you saying that preserved dinosaur protein indicates the Earth is young, or that dinosaurs actually survived until a few thousand years ago?--Percy

Until I read an article in this month's Scientific American (How Trivial DNA Changes Can Hurt Health) I would have replied in the same way, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe there really is no such thing as a neutral mutation.The example in the SciAm article was of a neutral mutation that still produces the identical protein. Let's say that in the gene for a certain protein that one codon mutates from GGA to GGG, which still produces glycine. The RNA machinery will still produce the same protein, but it turns out that because the particular chemical that RNA uses to interpret GGA properly is much more common than for interpreting GGG, the mutation to GGG causes the protein to be produced less efficiently or with greater error. As expressed at one point in the article: Given the possibility of such subtle effects as the concentration levels of very specific chemicals within the cell upon the protein factory, completely neutral mutations now seem much less likely to me.A news brief in the same issue (Genetic Copy Variations and Disease) described how high level mutations called copy number mutations are far more common than originally suspected: So not only are neutral mutations less neutral than we thought, the amount of genetic variation in members of the same species may be systematically underestimated. In other words, there's more new information evolving all the time than we may have previously thought.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Add missing close parenthesis.

No, according to *you* there are 4096 different kinds of eye color. 4096 is the maximum possible number of unique messages that can created with a six character sequence of four characters. I said there were three messages in the message set:

• GGAACG
• GGAACA
• GGCACG

What this means is that each organism in our population has only one of these three sequences for this gene. Some organisms have the CGAACG sequence for this gene, some have GGAACA, and some have GGCACG. No other sequence exists for this gene anywhere in this population, which means that when communicating information about this gene to offspring during reproduction, only one of those three messages can be communicated, unless...Unless there's an error while the sequence is being communicated. In other words, if there's an error during reproduction (a mutation), then the message for this gene may be communicated incorrectly. In my example I said that the GGCACG sequence experienced an error during reproduction and became GGCACA. Now, in addition to the three sequences that the population originally had, there is one organism that has the new sequence GGCACA, and so the number of possible sequences for this gene in our population is now four:

• GGAACG
• GGAACA
• GGCACG
• GGCACA

When there were only three messages in the message set for this gene, the amount of information it could communicate was log₂3 = 1.585 bits. There are now four messages in the message set for this gene, and the amount of information it can communicate is log₂4 = 2 bits, an increase of .415 bits.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

From Message 83: From Message 89: If someone actually reads the book that will be a nice bonus for you, but don't expect it to happen. The Forum Guidelines require that you make your arguments in your own words:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

You're referencing a book instead of a link, but the same principle applies. Make the argument in your own words. The purpose of debate is so you can assess how effectively *you* can construct and support an argument, not someone else.About the funny characters, were you trying to say ‘(μ) or something like that?--Percy

See Message 3.--Percy

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