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Author Topic:   Can random mutations cause an increase in information in the genome?
fallacycop
Member (Idle past 5520 days)
Posts: 692
From: Fortaleza-CE Brazil
Joined: 02-18-2006


Message 283 of 310 (288045)
02-18-2006 10:11 AM


Definition of terms does matter
It appears to me that a lot of the comunication probems in this thread is due to differeces in the way people understand the word information.
Some of us may have seen this word defined in the study of information theory and will have no trouble accepting that an increase of the number of alleles in a population represents an increase in the information content and, therefore, answer the topic question with a resounding YES.
But the ID crowd doesn't accept that, since they are thinking about a more intuitive notion of what is meant by information, and figure that an increase in the number of alleles in the population may mean no new information at all, since these new alleles may be non-meaningfull.
To te credit of the IDers, this concept of what information is seems to be a perfectly valid one, even if not easily defined.
The meaning of information here made me remember something a famous sculptor (can't remember which one) said about his work. He said he doesn't create any sculptures, and that all that he's done was to remove the stone excess, and bring about the sculpture that was already in the rock to begin with.
the example above makes clear that information (in the IDers intuitive sense) may be created during the evolutionary process when natural seletion removes the excesses, just like a sculpture is created b removing the excesses.
This removes the paradox of how can new information be created by a random process, since the information here (in the IDers sense) is actually being created during the natural selection phase of the evolutionary process, and that phase of the process is not random at all.

Replies to this message:
 Message 284 by AdminJar, posted 02-18-2006 10:17 AM fallacycop has not replied
 Message 287 by randman, posted 02-18-2006 7:27 PM fallacycop has not replied
 Message 295 by Garrett, posted 02-20-2006 10:12 AM fallacycop has not replied

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