Evidence to expect given a designer

The best formulation of genetic information in this sort of context dependent vein I have encountered is the work of Jack Szostak (2003 PDF) who formulated a measure called Functional Information. This was then experimentally applied by Carrothers et al. (2004 PDF) which looked at a molecular biochemical function, the binding of an RNA sequence to GTP, and measured the binding affinity for multiple sequences selected out of a random pool for high binding affinity and used comparisons of these sequences to study how they changed relative to the binding affinity, allowing them to assign them 'functional information' for the GTP binding function to specific sequences. They calculated that for this system a 10 fold increase in binding affinity required an additional 10 bits of information.This approach was shown to be more widely applicable by Hazen et al. (2007 PDF). Although it is still very specifically tied into a particular function and I'm not sure how you would adapt it practically to study larger systems. The authors themselves only say that it is applicable to larger systems in principle.TTFN,WK

Steven Frank produced a mathematical formulation of a very similar conception of information flowing from the environment to the genome (2009). TTFN,WK

I think I've mentioned before that this is rarely the response I have seen to this argument. More usually the creationist/IDist insists that since there had to be an initial information reducing mutation for your example experiment then there has therefore been no net gain in new information, simply a recovery of previously lost information.Since many IDists/creationists adhere to the idea of some sort of platonic created genetic sequence which is inherently informationally maximal, being the product of divine design, they consider any net gain over that to be impossible and all change away from that initial created genome to be deleterious. See for example the several discussions I had with Smooth Operator where he insisted that even if a mutation improved a gene product's functionality or bestowed an entirely novel beneficial trait on the organism it still constituted a loss of information because the sequence had changed at all, e.g. Message 574.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

The only people crediting Watson and Crick with first discovering DNA are idiots. DNA was first discovered in the 19th century, what Watson and Crick did was to deduce the correct molecular structure of DNA.TTFN,WK

Another bad example showing how little biology you actually know. Cut haemoglobin in half and, depending on the intersect, you can in fact get two identical halves because haemoglobin is formed from a tetramer of globin subunits, usually 2 alpha subunits and two beta sub units. Since the current evidence supports a duplicative origin of the globin superfamily, including the alpha and beta globins, you seem to have picked a particularly poor example to support your current line of argument.As an aside, if you chop example 2 in half it doesn't lose all its meaning. 'A CAT SAT.' is still a perfectly good sentence and conveys a substantial portion of the meaning of 'A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.' So even your non-biological example is highly flawed.TTFN,WK

The NMSR site you reference has several things substantially wrong in its account of the Nylon Bug story. For some of my issues see the thread 'Is the evidence concerning the Nylon bug being exaggerated'.TTFN,WK

OK, so what microRNAs are associated with the Cytochrome C gene sequence? Certainly microRNA exist and have regulatory functions, but what evidence is there that there is any association of microRNAs produced from Cytochrome C sequences in different species with different regulatory networks? This seem to be a pretty specific claim, is there actually any research that would support it or are you just making up ad hoc explanations with a trendy hot topic term thrown in?It seems a particularly specious argument that this is some sort of highly efficient system compressing more functions into one sequence when there are about 50 pseudogene forms of Cytochrome C in the human genome.So where are all these examples of protein coding gene sequences which also encode multiple functional microRNAs?I am certainly aware of some examples of dual function microRNAs which both act as mediators of gene regulation in their RNA form and as templates for proteins ( Wadler and Vanderpool, 2007; Gimpel et al., 2010; Vanderpool et al., 2011), but these come nowhere near the extent you are suggesting and are all from bacteria.There are some examples in the eukaryotes of RNAs from coding sequences which fulfill functional roles other than as templates for protein synthesis, but these roles are not as microRNAs (Ulvelling et al., 2011). I am certainly onboard with the idea that other layers of information, regulatory and structural amongst others, can be encoded overlapping with protein coding sequences (Itzkovitz et al., 2010 PDF) and there are even instances of overlapping protein coding sequences, but I am unaware of the situation you suggest being a common one, as it would need to be for your explanation of the diversity of homologous genes to make sense.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : added some spacing