Re: Where does information come from?


SRNissen wrote:
r norman wrote:
On 31 May 2006 08:52:34 -0700, TomS <TomS_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"On Wed, 31 May 2006 15:05:12 -0000, in article
<127rc584923lj6a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Robert Grumbine stated..."
In article <1jgfg.216593$WI1.173527@pd7tw2no>,
R Brown <brown@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This question is asked of me repeatedly by a creationist promoter of ID who
had a booth at our teacher convention last February. Specifically, he asks:
Richard
You nor your truth talk buddies still haven't been able to answer my
question ? Where does information come from? If not from a designer then
where? Waiting for an answer from the scientific community.
Will
What does he mean or imply (or does he even know what he means?) when he
uses the word "information"?
Is DNA information? Is he asking for the origin of DNA? Is the question
disingenuous? If so, how do we respond?
Your first question to us should be your first question to him. As
he's an ID promoter 'surely' he knows what 'information' it is that the
ID is inserting.

But no, he's very likely simply being disingenuous. My vote for dealing
with that is to (attempt to) get some specificity about what he means.
Perhaps, rather than just asking "what do you mean?" it might be
a good idea to come up with some questions to help him realize that
he needs to clarify for himself what he means. For example:

Is information an "intenstive" or "extensive" property? If you
have two objects, each of which have X amount of information, how
much does the combination have - X (intensive), or 2X (extensive)?
If DNA duplicates, does it duplicate the amount of information?
Anybody who has taken freshman chemistry should have heard about
this.

I do love that line of argument.

And if one bacterium of volume 10^-9 mls has 1 bac (a unit of
information),
how much information (in units of bac) are there after the bacterium
undergoes fission and the daughter cells grow back to 10^-9 mls in
size.

How does you answer change if DNA replication is or is not perfect?

If an intelligent chemist mixes equal parts of preA and preB to form a
long polymer of ABAB(AB)n, how much information is created?

If an absent minded professor mistakenly mixes equal parts of
preA and preB to form a long polymer of ABAB(AB)n, how much
information is created?

If an eathquake knocks over two bottles, one of preA and one of
preB, and a long polymer of ABAB(AB)n is formed, how much
information is created?

If "information" is related to entropy then it must be extensive. The
problem, of course, is that it becomes extremely difficult to pin down
exactly what is meant by "information" in a biological context,
especially as raised by some creationist demanding to know where it
comes from.

Genetic information isn't subject to entropy in the classic,
thermodynamic sense.

What do you suppose you've just said? It makes no sense to me.

.

Relevant Pages

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