Re: Increasing information experiment

On 22 Jan 2006 16:55:07 -0800, "Navillus" <cwsullivan@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>Gary Bohn wrote:
>> "Navillus" <cwsullivan@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
>> news:1137975034.986740.169190@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>>
>> > Let's say you took a culture of bacteria that you knew the exact DNA
>> > makeup of. Allow it to grow in a very large Petri dish (I dunno, the
>> > size of a room or something) so you had a very large population of
>> > bacteria.
>> >
>> > Now you start introducing mild toxins or chemicals of some sort that
>> > the bacteria have to develop and immunity to. You make sure that you
>> > start with easy ones that the population should have no problem
>> > adapting too. You could also do things like introduce new food
>> > sources. You do many steps like this, maybe 50 different obstacles
>> > that the bacteria have to evolve around.
>> >
>> > If you take the final population of bacteria, their DNA is going to be
>> > different. If you mapped the DNA sequences, isn't there a good chance
>> > that you'll have bacteria with significantly longer code? Isn't this
>> > an increase in information that IDiologists say doesn't happen?
>> >
>> >
>>
>> Depends on whose version of information you use. Shannon just needs a
>> change.
>>
>> --
>> Gary Bohn
>>
>> Science rationally modifies a theory to fit evidence, creationism
>> emotionally modifies evidence to fit a specific interpretation of the
>> bible.
>
>Longer DNA -> more proteins being coded for to deal with new
>environment -> increase in information
>
>right?

You don't need a huge petri dish to do something along these lines.
What is done is to grow the bugs in piece of kit called a chemostat.
What this thing does is flow fresh media in while simultaneously
removing some of the culture. That way you can keep the conditions
constant so as to test the effect of whatever you've added to the
media.

If I've read your suggestion correctly, you are talking about
sequential tests for different challenges? These experiments in
general test the effect of one thing at a time. Since you are dealing
with a population, you'd rapidly lose the variants from test one in
later tests without whatever was the selection was in test one.
Testing 50 at once is not real good way to do it either. You would
have a tough time figuring out whether any of your selective agents
were interfering with each other.

Your information content would go up if you use Shannon as your metric
as Gary posted. IDists tend to disavow that metric, or start babbling
about mutations as always being detrimental.

What you actually see at the sequence level depends on the choice of
system and selective agent. Since lac in E. coli is always popular,
you can check to see what happens when you supply different, poor
substrates for betagalalactosidase as the sole carbon source. For one
carbon source, the most common effect was duplication of the lac
operon. For another it was deletions involving regulatory genes
controling the synthesis of a sugar transporter.

DNA length or number of amino acids in a protein is not a good metric
to use from an evolutionary poin of view.

B Miller

.

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