Re: increase in information represented by DNA

In message <9ad36bf5-81cb-4a08-aab9-f8ec4fde8e05@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, treusdrie@xxxxxxxxx writes


John Harshman wrote:
treusdrie@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

>
> Robert Carnegie wrote:
>
>
>>Evolution is not about
>>increasing information, it is about increasing or maintaining
>>fitness.
>
>
> Information is indispensable to the adaptedness of an organism to its
> environment. An increase in the correspondence between an organism to
> its environment requires an increase in information.

Can you define "information" such that we can measure it and tell if
it's increased due to some particular evolutionary event?

Information is the degree to which one variable of a system depends on
or is constrained by another.

>>However, it isn't absolute wrongthink to consider a gene, a DNA
>>sequence, that does something useful, as "information" - but it still
>>may be a mistake.
>
>
> The gene itself is not information any more that a book is. The gene,
> like the book, has information as a content.

Is there a way to measure the information content of a gene?

The fitness of a phenotype is a function of the information content of
its genotype.

Assuming for the sake of argument that we can meaningfully assign an information content to a genotype, it would seem not to be a monotonically increasing function of the genotype, as can be from all the parasitic organisms which are phenotypically and genotypically simplified in comparison with their ancestors. (For reasons that aren't clear to me there's a strong tendency for parasites to have small genomes.)
--
alias Ernest Major

.

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