Information and Genetics

Information attainable from tree rings.Age of tree.
Seasonal change in temperature.
Ocurrences of forest fires.
Insect population activity.
Changes in local river flow.
Changes in local geomorphology such as landslips.
Changes in Oxygen isotope ratios.
Changes in CO2 levels.
Presence of toxic elements in the environment i.e. contaminated sediment.It may not be a computer code but there is certainly plenty of information which can be encoded in tree rings.

This seems to be connected with the common confusion between citing a specific original piece of research and making an appeal to authority, many people don't seem to be able to tell the difference.

Then clearly morse code encodes nothing either by that definition.

So presumably by your logic there is nothing 'encoded' on a punch card containing a computer program.What can you produce from Morse code other than the original encoded text? Similarly from denrochronology you can produce a record of the events which have affected that tree. Would you consider a record to have no information encoded on it? Or a magnetic tape with a voice recording?The avatar is a beluga whale embryo, isn't he cute!!

Prions aren't true self-replicators either.

So which program is it exactly which has run for more than 3-4 billion years? And are you expecting life on Earth to vanish imminently thereby setting a hard and fast limit to the tenable period of evolution past, present and future? I suppose on reflection that if you are a biblical literalist then you probably are, wait 2000 years for a second coming and then none come along all at once.

Care to back up that assertion?Recent publications on both digital organisms (Lenski, 2003) and microbial experiments (MacLean, 2003) would suggest otherwise. The AVIDA program run by Lenski et al. covered 100,000 generations, a lot certainly but not requiring 3-4 bilion years an increase of 4 orders of magnitude. The microbial experiments done by MacLean et al. covered only 2000 generations, only 2 orders of magnitude below the artificial experiment. These scales don't seem wildly disparate given that one experiment, the AVIDA one, was looking for the evolution of complex features and the other for convergent evolution in adaptation to novel environments.*******************************************
Lenski RE, Ofria C, Pennock RT, Adami C.
The evolutionary origin of complex features.
Nature. 2003 May 8;423(6936):139-44.MacLean RC, Bell G.
Divergent evolution during an experimental adaptive radiation.
Proc R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2003 Aug 7;270(1524):1645-50.

OK. Technically this is not an assertion as it is a statment about what you yourself imagine, but given the way it is presented I don't feel it is unreasonable to ask you to back up what is otherwise mere conjecture. Do you, therefore, have any evidence whatsoever that modern systems, I take it you mean state of the art supercomputers rather than my lab desktop, can achieve 3-4 billion years worth of generations of GA evolution in mere seconds, assuming 'mere seconds' is less than a minute for arguments sake.I don't know how many generations you think there are in a billion years, it obviously varies from organism to organism. To make things simple we could just stipulate that one generation is one year, obviously ridiculous for humans but generous considering how many yeast generations you could fit into a year. So do you have an example of a typical GA program running 3-4 billion generations in less than a minute on any computer system?Do your imaginings have any basis in fact, or are they purely for your own amusement?

Could you tell us who this mystery geneticist was? I have a link to a christian courier articlewhere he is quoted as saying

quote:

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Nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved.

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Where "it" reffered to the information in the genome. All this suggests to me is that for someone working in molecular biology, and certainly on the HGP, he doesn't know very many people in his profession. If nobody in molecular biology believes in evolution, and I know this is untrue but lets take it as a given, then who is it exactly that is holding up the "evolutionist conspiracy"? None of the various articles talking about this chap, only some of which say he works on the HGP, actually say who he is. So an argument from an anonymouse authority, how strangely unconvincing.If elitists only impress their own kind how come so many people are impressed by Nobel prizes?I have now found the original George Caylor interview which doesn't say that the guy was involved with the HGP, or was it a different mol. biol. specialist with an elephant fixation that you were talking about?[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 10-09-2003]

Not on a bus, in the bed and breakfast establishment he runs with his wife JoAnne[sic].

Or the mystery geneticist.