CRR writes:
Biological Information What is It?
Werner Gitt, Robert Compton, and Jorge Fernandezquote:
But what do we mean by the term biological information? We suggest that, at present, it cannot be unambiguously defined.
Yes, Gitt is correct, he doesn't have the ability to define, let alone measure, what he calls "biological information". That's because he confused information with meaning, and we have no way of measuring meaning.
This also means that all your claims of increasing and decreasing biological information are nonsense. You can't measure it, therefore you can't know when it increases or decreases.
quote:
This leads us to ask the more general question: What precisely is information? Anyone who has studied this field is aware of three working definitions of
information:
Classical Information Theory: Shannon (statistical) information [3]; dealing solely with the technical/engineering aspects of communication. This involves analyses including obtaining statistics on the material symbols for data transmission, storage and processing.
Algorithmic Information Theory: Solomonoff/Kolmogorov/Chaitin [4—6]; dealing with the ‘complexity’ (as this term is defined in the theory) of material symbols in data structures and of objects in general.
This latter is derivative of the former.
quote:
Complex Specified Information (CSI) Theory: Dembski [7]; roughly the same as Classical Information Theory but adding the important concept of a ‘specification’.
CSI is made up.
quote:
With the combination of abstract code and syntax we are able to generate more complex language structures such as words and sentences. However, at this (formal language) stage meaning plays no role. It was at this level only that Shannon developed his Theory of Communication [3] into the highly useful statistical analyses of the material symbols, solely for the technical purposes of data transmission, storage and processing.
Give that last phrase a closer look: "data transmission, storage and processing." That's pretty much everything DNA does. The information in DNA can be measured and quantified. The made-up stuff that you're talking about cannot.
--Percy