Re: Where does information come from?

On Wed, 31 May 2006 23:19:36 +0200, SRNissen <soren.nissen@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

r norman wrote:
On 31 May 2006 13:14:26 -0700, "Greg G." <ggwizz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

goodrich_ms@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
R Brown 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?


Information comes from Intelligence.
Astronomers can look at light from a star and deduce information about
it such as the size, temperature, component elements, distance from
earth, speed relative to earth, and mass and orbits of its companions.
Is the star intelligent?

I can often troubleshoot a machine by listening to it. Are bad bearings
more intelligent than good bearings?

I think you misunderstand the argument.

Star send photons of different energies through space, a machine
generates sound waves. When we detect those physical events, we
interpret them (call them 'signals' if you want) and infer information
from them. The information is in how the physical events are
interpreted, not in the events themselves. For example, was it 'one
[light] if by land' or 'one if by sea'? The presence of a lanterns,
or perhaps a pair, in a church tower is a signal but does not convey
information; the information lies in the interpretation.

Whether intelligence is needed is an entirely different story. A very
simple machine could be built to do the interpretation -- a human or
"intelligent designer" is not needed.

But if that's the definition used - that something does not become
"information" until a sentient being is processing it - then the
creationist "How could intelligence possibly increase?" argument (which
this entire thread arose from) makes no sense at all - intelligence is
incidental, then, and the question is reduced to "How could mutations
happen."

I don't think that's what the creationists are trying to do. They know
that if they ask a question with a purely mechanical answer, the answer
will be found, unlike a question with a more philosophical answer like
"what is information anyway?"


My impression is that the creationists use one of two lines of
arguments. The less sophisticated is: "Information is negative
entropy. Therefore an increase in information is a decrease in
entropy which is impossible by the second law." Of course that is
totally false even if information really is negative entropy and even
if information increases.

The other is perhaps more sophisticated: "Evolutionists say that
random mutation is responsible for change. Random processes cannot
generate meaningful information; they produce chaos or increase
entropy. Evolutionists say that the other process of evolution is
selection, but selection cannot produce anything new, only eliminate
something that already exists. So nothing in evolution can increase
information." That is probably the reasoning behind the question
"where does information come from?" Of course this is totally false.
Even if you accept some appropriate measure of information based on
genome sequence it is easily increased by generating lots of sequences
and then selecting a specific few to keep. Gene duplication with
modification of one copy is a very clear example of "increase in
information".

The real problem, of course, is even more fundamental; it is agreeing
on some computationally useful and biologically meaningful measure
(and definition) of "information".


.

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