Evolving New Information

Where did you "quantify the increase in information?" I won't go into detail over your confusion about the number of bits of information beyond saying that DNA contains a great deal of redundancy. This means that it uses many more bits than necessary to represent and communicate information. The three alleles (not two) of my example require only 1.585 bits, not 12. The extra 10.415 bits are redundant and unnecessary as far as representing information, but they help a great deal with error tolerance.More importantly, I did not say that only 3 (again, not 2) alleles were "legitimate." I said that only 3 existed within the population. That means that if you checked that gene in every single individual in the population that you'd only find the 3 alleles I listed. It was that only 3 alleles existed, not that only 3 were legitimate. Other alleles are perfectly possible and legitimate, but no other alleles for that gene happened to exist in the population.Thus when a mutation produced a 4th allele the amount of information that could be communicated by that gene increased from 1.585 bits to 2 bits.--Percy

The physical implementation is an irrelevant detail. Here's your example from Message 232, I added some formatting for readability: We're wondering how you quantify how much information you added. In my genetic example I quantified how much information was added by a single mutation, and we're asking you to quantify how much information you added by modifying your code. I did detail your ignorance. Again, DNA uses many more bits than necessary to represent and communicate information. The three alleles of my example require only 1.585 bits, not 12. The extra 10.415 bits are redundant and unnecessary as far as representing information. If you'd like clarification on any specific details, just ask. You did ask about one thing, maybe addressing this will help you understand the redundancy in DNA: Redundancy occurs whenever information is encoded using more bits than necessary. The 3 alleles of my example can be encoded in just 1.585 bits. The additional 10.415 bits are redundant. There's a huge amount of redundancy in the syntax of all computer languages. For example, the word "object" has more letters than necessary. We could get by perfectly well with just "obj".Even just a short snippet of computer code is going to be incredibly complex to analyze from an information theoretic standpoint. That's why Cavediver asked you to quantify the increase in information, because it was apparent you weren't aware how difficult this would be, and because in attempting to quantify it you would gradually come to realize this. It would be much simpler if you could keep your focus on examples simple enough to discuss here, such as my very simple genetic example. All through this thread we've been talking about both communication of information *and* creation of new information. Reproduction requires communication of genetic information from parents to offspring. When noise occurs in that communication channel then new information is introduced in the offspring. In biology this noise-induced information is called a mutation. The machinery you think is lacking is already in place. A mutated allele will still produce a protein, and that protein will still circulate throughout the organism and produce an effect. The degree of desirability of that effect governs the organism's reproductive success and whether that mutation propagates within the population.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix typo.Edited by Percy, : Improve phrasing in next to last paragraph.

You are correct that we are following a "natural causes of the gaps" approach. We believe that what we don't know will eventually be explained by natural causes. This is because throughout millennia of experience, all scientific questions have resolved to natural causes, and not a single one to God.The ID position is that a certain scientific question, namely the cause of the diversity of life on Earth, has been answered, and that the cause is God, not evolution. They argue that they've eliminated all possible natural causes, and therefore only God remains as a possibility.But they haven't eliminated all possible natural causes, of course, and the argument that our current lack of knowledge about specific events in evolutionary history is evidence that they would be naturalistically impossible is IDists contribution to the "God of the gaps" fallacy, and as already pointed out, not a single scientific qustion has ever resolved to God.Before one can begin claiming God as one of the possible answers to scientific questions, one first has to have at least one case where actual evidence has resolved some scientific question to God. Only then would proposing God as the answer to unresolved scientific questions make any sense.--Percy

In everyday usage information can mean representations of facts or thoughts or ideas. When used in this way information is understood to have meaning. But Shannon information theory provides a very specific mathematical definition of information that excludes meaning. People can associate meaning with information, but information itself is independent of meaning.One very simple example of this is the famous message of Paul Revere's ride, "One if by land, two if by sea." The meaning of "land" is not inherent in one lantern, nor is the meaning of "sea" inherent in two lanterns. The code could have been, "One if by sea, two if by land," and it would have worked just as well. In information theory, meaning and information are two different things, and meaning is not part of information theory. Specifically, thoughts and ideas are not included in information theory. You never mentioned a "shell" before, so I don't know what you're referring to, and I can't figure out how you calculated the number of bits of information. Could you describe this for me? I'm using the definition of redundancy from information theory. This is the first sentence from the Wikipedia article on "Redundancy (information theory)": Since a message from a message set of size 3 can be represented in 1.585 bits, and since the DNA representation actually uses 12 bits, the extra 10.415 bits are redundant. The example I provided is a simplified model of what we observe happening in nature. My simple gene of 3 alleles experienced a single point mutation, something that is observed to happen all the time. This single point mutation caused the number of alleles of this gene to grow from 3 to 4 in our population. This represents a change in information from 1.585 bits to 2 bits, an increase of .415 bits.--Percy

If you're making a point you've garnered from some website, make the point in your own words and provide a link as a supporting reference. It's best to provide a link to a webpage rather than to an entire website, and if the webpage is long it helps to describe where on the webpage the relevant information appears.In other circumstances, such as answering questions like, "What was that link again?" bare links are fine. As you discovered with RAZD, this is not a reliable way to provide a link. The order of results in Google changes frequently. It's best to provide actual links rather than procedures to find links. So if we find two scientists who disagree with Hoyle and Gingerich, then what? Do we conduct a poll and find the percentage of scientists who support each side? If we did then intelligent design would lose by about a 100-to-1 margin.Or acknowledging that such approaches are the very embodiment of the fallacy of appeal to authority, we could actually discuss the details of the issues ourselves.--Percy

You missed Message 340.--Percy

Shannon's experiments? Shannon was a mathematician and did not conduct experiments to develop information theory. Obviously Shannon used his intelligence to do his work, we all do. This erroneous conceptual picture you have is at the core of your misunderstanding of information theory. In everyday terms information includes meaning, but information theory is a very specialized way of thinking about information. Information theory is concerned solely with the problem of transmitting sequences of bits from one point to another. In information theory those bits have no meaning. Measures of information are based upon bits, and there's no meaning.All transmissions of electromagnetic radiation are in effect just streams of bits, whether they come from the sun or from the local TV station. Humans attach meanings to those bits after they arrive, but the bits themselves have no inherent meaning. You think the amount of information in a program is equal to the number of bits output by its compiler? So when the new, more efficient version of the compiler is released and produces a more compact compiled file, your program now contains less information, even though you made no changes? Or you move the compiled file from a Unix to a Dos system and suddenly the file size is different and now your program has a different amount of information, even though you didn't change your program? Or you run the compiled file through gzip to reduce its size, and now the program has less information? In fact, gzip can only reduce file size when redundancy is present. Care to rethink how you should measure the amount of information in your program?As both Cavediver and I suspected, you have no idea how to calculate how much information is in your program, and not even a clue of how complicated a task you have set yourself.Any workable example must be simple to enough that we can accurately quantify how much information is involved. To do this you need to know the size of your message set. My simple genome example illustrated how a message set of size 3 (1.585 bits of information) can grow to a message set of size 4 (2 bits of information) through a simple point mutation. I think you should focus on this simple example. Here's the message set with just three alleles before the mutation:

• GGAAGC (green eyes)
• GGAAGA (blue eyes)
• GGCACG (yellow eyes)

And here's the message set with four alleles after the mutation produces a new allele:

• GGAAGC (green eyes)
• GGAAGA (blue eyes)
• GGCACG (yellow eyes)
• GGCAAG (brown eyes)

As PaulK has already noted, you've misinterpreted what Wikipedia is saying. The more complete excerpt does not change the meaning at all, it just repeats the definition in the first sentence in different terms, and it provides the example of checksums. Redundancy is the unnecessary bits used to transmit or store information. You said in Message 339, "It depends how we define redundancy. I obviously have a different interpretation than you do." But if you agree with the Wikipedia article then we have the identical interpretation. Since you apparently still disagree with me, it's more likely that you misinterpreted Wikipedia. You still have no idea what redundancy is. As the Wikipedia article states, redundancy is the number of bits used to transmit information above the actual number of bits in the message. Therefore a message from a message set of size 3 can be represented in 1.585 bits, and since the DNA representation actually uses 12 bits, the extra 10.415 bits are redundant. You can't argue with this, it's just a mathematical fact. If by "my model" you're referring to your Java code examples, since you are unable to quantify the amount of information in them, I think it's time for you begin addressing the simple example I provided, or to provide one of your own where the amount of information can be quantified.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Minor clarification.

Are you asking about the origin of *new* genetic information? If so, then that's what this thread is about. Why don't you read through the last couple pages and see if any of those posts provide a good enough answer for you.Or are you asking about the origin of the *first* genetic information? If so, then this thread is not about that, but briefly, we only have speculation at this point.--Percy

As I said earlier when I asked you if you were asking about the origin of the *first* genetic information, this thread is not about that.The topic of this thread concerns how mutation produces new information, see the introductory post, Message 1.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

You might try perusing the threads over at the Origin of Life forum. Some possible condidates:

• first genetic material
  
• From protobionts to living cells
  
• The "Digital Code" of DNA

You could also propose a new thread over at Proposed New Topics.--Percy

I said that Shannon didn't conduct experiments to develop information theory, not that he never conducted any experiments ever. Information theory is a mathematical, not an experimental, science, but it does have real world applications. That is precisely the point, that information theory is not concerned with meaning. If you're talking about meaning then you're not talking about information theory. No, that's how you defined information. I inquired how you were calculating the amount of information in your program, and you replied like this: So how did you calculate the amount of information in your program that you provided in Message 339: I presume you didn't just make them up, so where did they come from? Well, okay, yes, you have argued with it, but that log₂3 is 1.585 bits, and that DNA uses 12 bits to represent these 1.585 bits, and that the difference between them is 10.415 bits, are mathematical facts as undeniable as 2+2=4. You can argue if you like, but not rationally.--Percy

Hi LucyTheApe,This is a response to your Message 275 over in the Adding information to the genome. thread.In Message 339 you provided these figures for the amount of information in the code snippets you provided:

• Shell: 832 bits
• First section of code: 1752 bits
• Second section of code: 376 bits

Could you please show us how you calculated those figures? Thanks.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

Hi Taq,Since LucyTheApe is apparently going to take their time replying, I'd like to respond to this: These are what I think are the two primary ways in which DNA can be interpreted as a sender of information:

1. The sender is the organism's DNA and the receiver is the organism itself. The DNA message is translated into proteins that then travel throughout the body delivering the message.
   ​
2. The sender is the organism's DNA and the receiver is the offspring, which receives a copy of its parent's DNA. The DNA copy may contain errors, and for sexual species the DNA will usually be a combination of DNA from both parents.

There are additional ways of answering the question, but I think these are the most obvious. Hopefully there's no reason why creationists wouldn't look at it the same way.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.Edited by Percy, : Typo.

Hi LucyTheApe,For some reason you keep popping in and out every month or three, and now you're apparently doing it again, so here's some additional information that may help break this pattern.People don't believe you know much about information theory because you've demonstrated your lack of knowledge over and over again. You appear to be trying to solve the problem of how to win a debate on a topic you know little about, and so you've adopted this strange strategy of "post a couple messages then exit for a couple months."I know you want to drop the discussion about how you calculated the amount of information in your programs, but the mere fact that you thought it was possible tells us you have no idea what you're doing. Until you finally understand that whatever calculations you were doing were wrong you're not going to be seeking answers to how one actually calculates information.So you're going to have to explain how you calculated the amount of information in your programs. When you finally admit to yourself that you can't do it (something that everyone following this discussion already realizes), only then will we be able to make progress.--Percy

You're going to have to connect the dots for me on this one. The actual machinery that implements the information communication channels is unimportant at an information theoretic level.You've added a bit more detail and used different names, but it seems like much the same thing. We could break it down the processes in which information from DNA is the driving element like this:

1. Cell metabolism.
2. Body metabolism.
3. Heredity.

--Percy