Re: Where does information come from?

wade wrote:
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.

Depends on whether or not you care about the location of the second bacteria. If you don't, there's somewhere between 2-4 bits more information, depending on how tightly it's coded. 1 bit is here defined as 1 yes/no state. I don't know how much information there is in a "bac" because you haven't told us anything about the bac unit except "it's the amount of information in a random bacteria" and boy howdy, that's a variable number let me tell you.


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

The above answer assumed perfect replication. I'm not good enough at the math to tell you the _exact_ amount of additional information there is in the system if, say, two base pairs change place, but it's somewhere between 2 and 20 bits. But it really depends on how extensive the mutation is. If the entire bacterial genome in the second bacteria is scrambled truly randomly (let's assume the bacteria still survives this) then the gain in information is significant - almost multiplied by two.


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?

Not a lot. In fact, if he achieves a perfect mix of ABAB(AB)n, he has _decreased_ the information in the system.


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?

Exactly the same amount as a above.


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?

The same amount.


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.


I mean exactly what I said. Some creationists try to claim that that information is subject to entropy; you can only get less of it as time passes. This is true for regular old Shannon information, but since genetic information should rarely be considered Shannon information, it's rare that you're in a situation where it makes sense to talk about entropy in the genetic information.

- SRNissen
FABRICATE DIEM, PVNC.

.

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