Re: increase in information represented by DNA

On Dec 15, 8:29 am, Inez <savagemouse...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 14, 9:42 pm, SortingItOut <eri...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Dec 14, 9:30 pm, SortingItOut <eri...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 14, 4:08 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Inez wrote:
That is the definition of information and the basis of its equivalence
with adaptiveness, which is the topic of this thread whether or not
you find it useful.

Does anyone find it useful? How is it useful?

It is useful to the supposed topic of this thread which is the
dependence of adaptation on information. As in other threads, you keep
trying to change the subject and introduce extraneous criteria.
Adaptation requires information. At the moment it doesn't matter
whether or how anyone puts that fact to use.

Hopefully I can be pardoned for jumping into the middle of a
converstation when I haven't carefully read everything from be the
beginning, but I think that perhaps the claim "adaptation requires
information" is not something that everyone here readily accepts
without some sort of support. This may be why Mr. Harshman is trying
to pin you down to some sort of operational specifics- to prove that
they actually exist.

Well, I believe he's just agreed that they don't exist. Now in some kind
of touchy-feely way I see his point -- we can think of adaptation as a
population's gaining information about the environment. But how this
translates into information in a genome is unclear, if indeed any such
thing can be done. Which I doubt.

I know what you mean. I can kind of see the same touchy-feely thing.
I think my problem is that I see "increase" in quantitative terms, and
I think he means it more in qualitative terms. The adapted organism
is "better"...it's information is "better". But I don't think the
incremental increases in information are stored in some reservoir or
bucket where they are accumulated over time. I don't think we can
ever look at the genome of an organism and determine a quantity of
information that will equal the sum of all of the increases over
however many generations it was.

Take this simple illustration (that I hope is valid):
I have a 4-digit binary number: 0000
To make this number more useful in my changing environment, I must
flip two bits: 0110
There was a 2-bit increase in information to make the number more
adaptive.
Now the environment changes again, and again a 2-bit increase in
information is required for the number to adapt. This time the upper
2 bits must be flipped: 1010

So there were 4 bits total of increase in information, but you can't
compare 1010 to the original 0000 and conclude that it has 4 bits more
of information.

That's why I say he's using it more as a qualitative term. He using
the absolute value of the change in information and calling it an
increase, but to the genetic makeup of the organism, it was simply a
change. It might be an increase in the total quantity, or a
decrease. The removal of some part of the genetic code might make the
organism better adapted. Treus would call this an increase in
information (i.e. it's better, so therefore it's more). But by
seemingly any possible measure of information in the DNA, this would
be a decrease.

Which leaves me wondering what is the possible value of always calling
it an increase in information. What can we do with that?

I assume bacteria have been changing for millions of years. Do
today's bacteria really have millions of years of accumulated
information in their DNA? Can we see the quantitative sum of millions
of years of increases in information? I'm not a biologist, but what
what I've heard, I doubt it.

Maybe a better analogy is a drawing on a whiteboard. Let's say you
have a very complex drawing on a whiteboard. Then you erase part of
it and redraw it differently. Then you erase a different part of it
and again redraw it differently. You do this a thousand more times.
Each change is in a sense an increase in information.

I don't really understand this part. It seems to me that when you
erase part of your drawing (or change two of your binary digits in the
previous example) you are both adding new information and losing the
old information that was already there. The net amount of information
seems the same to me.

Which is exactly my point. Treus is saying that every beneficial
mutation represents an increase in information. This implies that we
can somehow measure this increase in information, do the same with
subsequent increases in information, thousands of generations later
determine the amount of information in the genome, and confirm that
the final amount of information equals the starting amount of
information plus the sum of all the individual increases along the
way.

My understanding of mutations is in conflict with this idea. (But I'm
not a biologist, so I don't put much stock in my understanding of
mutations). But my understanding is that only some mutations
increases the total number of base pairs in the DNA. The majority of
mutations, even the majority of beneficial ones, only change the DNA,
they don't add to it. But even if it's not the majority, my point
only needs that some significant percentage of beneficial mutations
only change DNA and don't add to it.

That was the point in my first post about bacteria. Single-celled
organisms have presumably been evolving for hundreds of millions, if
not billions, of years. If we could compare the DNA of today's
bacteria with that of their ancient ancestors, would we be able to see
a net increase in information that equals the sum of all of the
individual "increases" in information along the way (with the
important stipulation that *every* beneficial mutation results in a
measurable increase in information)?

My ultimate point being that Treus' use of "increase" is a bit of a
misnomer (I think). The organism is more fit, and needed the
"increase" in information to match the "increase" in information of
the changed environment, but there's not really a net, measurable
increase in information in the genome, precisely because many (or
most) beneficial mutations are simply a change, not an increase.

Another way to think of it is that the environment changed, which
changes the requirements for an organism. Dealing with a new type of
predator arguably requires new information, but can be same be said
for having to adjust to a change in temperature? But at the genetic
level, does making an organism faster or more responsive or changing
it's camouflage always require a net increase in DNA information?
What about changing length of fur to either shorter or longer? Does
one add and information and the other take it away, or are they both
simply a change?



The resulting

drawing is very different from the original. It may at a glance look
(and perhaps be) more complex than the orignal, or maybe less
complex. But it certainly doesn't contain the accumulated information
of all of the intermediates, at least not in a measurable way. The
final version is a product of the intermediates, but the measurable
history is gone. The conditions that brought about the intermediates
are also gone. The "increases" in information along the way built on
each other, but they did not sum together.

It's almost as if Treus' "increase" is an arbitrary term. You could
just as well (it seems) make up a new word to represent what he's
talking about.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

.

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