My understnding o fthe paper is that they have considered
Shannon's mathematical calculations in biological terms
and eventually concluded that they don't really have any
explanatory power for genomes.
quote:
...means that I can't supply an "information" content to a DNA string. I simply don't see the difference between a string of base pairs and a string of letters or numbers.
That's a different matter -- all I was (and have elsewhere) said
is that Shannon's information theorem cannot be meaningfully
applied to genomes.
You can represent the genome in some other way, in which case
there is an information content to your model ... but it
depends what you mean by information when you talk about the
information
content of a genome.
If you use any concept of meaning in the definition of information
it cannot apply to genomes any more than it can apply to a
jello-mold.
I think most creationists use a 'meaning' oriented definition
of information, whereas most engineering research focusses on the
'data' underlying that information.
My opinion is that the reason all attempts to apply Info.Theory
to genomes is flawed is that the 'information' is an emergent
property of the chemical reactions within the cell -- that is
the information is at the organismic level -- even that view is
tenuous and not useful since without an intelligent interpreter
there is no information at all.