There have now been dozens of threads and hundreds of posts on this forum that try to address the issue of biological information and in particular, the information content and development of new information in the genome. These threads and posts always seem to get hung up on the definition of 'information' to the extent that they turn into unproductive shouting matches.
In many of their posts, evolutionists attempt to demonstrate an evolutionary mechanism for the production of new information that starts with the duplication of an existing gene, something that occurs and has been documented quite frequently, with one of the duplicates then undergoing a series of random mutations that eventually produces a new and useful gene. In this post I will (hopefully) demonstrate that gene duplication without further mutations in itself produces new information, and in doing so I will take a new tack on defining 'information'.
The main reason that information is so hard to define is that the kind of information we are talking about is very subjective, not only in determining its quantity, but also in even trying to define it in qualitative terms. For example, I am quite sure that creationists/bible-literalists and atheists would have very different opinions about the qualitative and quantitative information content of the bible and of Darwin's
Origins of Species. Many disciplines use the term 'information' in many different ways that often have no relation to each other. One way to get around this impasse, when a community can't agree on a formal definition of a term, is to define the term by example. I. e., the community finds several examples that they generally agree fits the meaning of the term, and several examples of things that they agree don't meet the meaning of the term and leave aside several examples of things that are ambiguous or for which there is no general agreement. This is a very common practice in biology and is referred to as a 'consensus' definition. There might be no formal agreed upon definition of a particular fossil species, but there is often a consensus definition of what traits any member of that species must demonstrate and what it must not contain. So, I will show that gene duplication by itself can create information by defining information by example.
Suppose we have a book on the eating habits of primates. Each chapter discusses the eating habits of a particular primate. I would be surprised if anyone disputed that this book, and each of its chapters, contain information. If you did not know about the eating habits of primates, or if you had a job, such as a zoo attendant, that required that knowledge, this book would certainly inform you and raise your level of knowledge about that subject.
Now, let's discuss the gene for the digestive enzyme Amylase, and, in particular, the copy number of this gene in chimpanzees and humans. Amylase is the key enzyme for breaking down starches into sugar. Chimpanzees have one copy of this gene and humans have multiple copies, from two to nine. Chimpanzee diets are very restricted to low starch (and usually high sugar content) foods like fruits, nuts, berries, and other low starch foods. Humans often have staple diets of high starch foods such as rice, potatoes (my spell checker seems to be a Dan Quail fan), and starchy grains. In fact, the Amylase gene copy number variation in humans is very regional and correlates well with the starchiness of the regional diet.
An animal's genome contains as much information as the book I mentioned concerning that animals diet. And not only particular genes, but also those gene's copy numbers contain detailed information (using our example definition of information) of that diet. Note that this so far is not an argument for evolution, since we haven't discussed where the gene copy number came from, but if the copy number arose from ancestral gene duplication events (which some could argue are just "micro-evolutionary" processes), then those gene duplications produced new genetic information even in the absence of further mutation to a new function. Since gene duplication events have been observed in the lab to occur randomly demonstrates that that new genetic information can occur by purely natural means.
In this thread I hope to have other forum members comment and critique the above post and to offer other examples of evolutionary processes producing information where the specific type of information is defined by particular examples that (almost) all would agree has the meaning for 'information' that we generally assume. I also have a few further examples I hope to post in this thread if it is accepted (e. g., ACO: Ant Colony Optimization). I'll leave it to the admins to decide what forum should house this thread.
Note 1) Since this is ski season and the Sierras have tons of fresh new powder, I may be a little slow in responding to your posts.
Note 2) The idea for this thread and the details about the Amylase gene came to me from page 217 of Jerry Coyne's recent book,
Why Evolution is True. Whatever your persuasion, your time would be far better spent reading that book than reading posts like mine.
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