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Author | Topic: Information Changes in DNA by logical Analysis | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
But here you and WK are talking about information in a gene pool. I'm talking about information in a genome.
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
If you're only considering the genes of a single individual then reproduction cannot be part of the conversation, so you must be looking at DNAs role in controlling the cell machinery. Do I have that right?
--Percy
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
It is hardly news that creationist/Iders use logically flawed arguments. I'm just pointing out that these are the arguments they use.
I found your explanation here very closely follows a critique in a paper I was reading where they discuss Muller's ratchet (Mustonnen and Lassig, 2009).
Mustonnen and Lassig writes: It is instructive to contrast this view of adaptive evolution with Muller's ratchet, a classical model of evolution by deleterious substitutions [citations removed] . This model postulates a well-adapted initial state of the genome so that all, or the vast majority of, mutations have negative fitness effects. Continuous fixations of slightly deleterious changes then lead to a stationary decline in fitness (i.e. to negative values of Φ). Similarly to the infinite-sites approximation, this model neglects compensatory mutations. In a picture of a finite number of sites, it becomes clear that every deleterious substitution leads to the opportunity for at least one compensatory beneficial mutation (or more, if the locus contributes to a quantitative trait), so that the rate of beneficial substitutions increases with decreasing fitness. ... Thus, we reach a conclusion contrary to Muller's ratchet. Because selection in biological systems is generically time-dependent, decline of fitness is less likely even as a transient state than suggested by Muller's ratchet: the model offers no explanation of how a well-adapted initial state without opportunities of beneficial mutations is reached in the first place. And we all know how much the ID camp love Muller's ratchet. TTFN, WK
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
If you're only considering the genes of a single individual then reproduction cannot be part of the conversation, so you must be looking at DNAs role in controlling the cell machinery. Do I have that right? No, no, not at all. I'm talking about germ-line mutations. What I'm analyzing is the question of "information" (whatever that is) increasing or decreasing if we follow a single line of descent. We go from the genome of one individual ... to the genome of the next descendant ... to the genome of the next descendant ... and so forth. My point there was that I'm looking at the genomes of individuals along a line of descent, I'm not considering the amount of information in a gene pool. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 313 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
It is hardly news that creationist/Iders use logically flawed arguments. I'm just pointing out that these are the arguments they use. And I'm just pointing out why they're wrong. If you're going to say: "Creationists would put up such-and-such an argument", then I am going to reply by saying why that argument is deeply flawed.
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Dr Adequate writes: What I'm analyzing is the question of "information" (whatever that is) increasing or decreasing... If you want to know whether information is increasing or decreasing then you need to be able to quantify it. What I haven't been able to figure out yet is how you're quantifying information. --Percy
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NosyNed Member Posts: 9004 From: Canada Joined: |
If you want to know whether information is increasing or decreasing then you need to be able to quantify it. What I haven't been able to figure out yet is how you're quantifying information. It appears this argument doesn't require a definition of the quantity just as it doesn't require a definition of what is meant by "information". It is more abstract than that -- and simpler.
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
I guess I don't understand the argument Dr Adequate is making. The OP refers to an article at SkepticWiki, but the provided link is to the main page. Is this the relevant article:
Anyway, I began rereading this thread from scratch trying to make sure I understood it at each step along the way, and then I came to Dr Adequate's Message 4 where he refers to λ:
Dr Adequate writes: Well, I think everyone would have to admit that λ contains no information by any sensible metric; which is why I introduced it into the argument. So once someone explains what λ is I'll continue rereading the thread. But in the meantime, I notice that in the SkepticWiki article it says:
SkepticWiki writes: The most obvious problem with this argument is that the creationists who use it never say how information is to be measured in this context. I'm seeing the same problem in this thread. --Percy
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
I believe λ is Dr. A's null string which contains no DNA.
TTFN, WK
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Modulous Member Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined:
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So once someone explains what is I'll continue rereading the thread. It's a null string - containing no letters.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: I think you are missing the point. The point of the argument is to show that even without a defined measure, given a few sensible axioms it must be possible for mutations to increase information. Relying on a specific measure would be self-defeating.
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
I'm having trouble trying to put what Dr Adequate is saying into a context I'm familiar with. For example, when he says this in the Mutations and Information article:
SkepticWiki writes: Any mutation that lengthens the DNA will increase the number of "bits" in it... If by "bits" he means a measure of information, then this is by no means always true. It depends upon your message set. For example, let's say this is the set of possible messsages:
Assume each messages is equally likely. Let's say that our beginning DNA string is TAC and that it experiences a mutation to become TACGTA. Since both TAC and TACGTA are in the message set and are equally likely, no more bits of information are communicated. You have to keep separate the information from the encoding for the information, which frequently includes redundancy. If you're counting the redundancy then you're overstating the amount of information. In my example the amount of information represented by any one of the DNA strings is log26 or 2.58 bits. Mutating TAC to TACGTA doesn't increase it. --Percy
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
The section you quote actually precedes the argument that Dr Adequate refers to (labelled "Problem 2: A Mathematical Argument") which partly explains your problem.
I think that the specific point you object to refers to a straight binary encoding, rather than your arbitrary selection of "messages".
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Percy Member Posts: 22503 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
PaulK writes: The section you quote actually precedes the argument that Dr Adequate refers to (labelled "Problem 2: A Mathematical Argument") which partly explains your problem. Well, I'll try to slog on, but to the extent that his conclusions depend upon faulty assumptions they will in turn be faulty.
I think that the specific point you object to refers to a straight binary encoding, rather than your arbitrary selection of "messages". There's no such thing as a "straight binary encoding." This becomes obvious when one tries to answer the question, "What is the straight binary encoding of 1.585 bits of information?" The theoretical amount of information rarely has any precise encoding in an integer number of bits, and the excess number of bits are redundant. It feels to me like this is a case of trying to make into a general principle something that is not always true. --Percy
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: The relevant section is short and largely self-contained. I think that you are pretty much wasting your time trying to critique the other sections.
quote: That is a weird thing to say. Of course you can produce a straight binary encoding of a DNA sequence. SImply assign a distinct pair of bits to each of the 4 possible bases.
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