One problem I have with calculating these ratios is that presumably one
is really interested in some information content that makes a "significant"
difference, and then one has the ambiguity as to what "significant" means. For
example, if one looked at some object that is mass-produced in a factory, say a
particular type of Intel Pentium chip, there is a lot of "genetic" information
put into it that is the same for all "good" chips thus produced, but if one
looked at the actual detailed arrangements of atoms on the chips, I'm sure
there would be a much larger amount of "environmental" information that would
vary from chip to chip, but which would be essentially irrelevant for its
humanly intended use. Some of the information that Glenn calculated for the
brain is presumably of this character, though the memories that have
significant influences on our conscious experiences and actions, and which are
presumably encoded in the synaptic connections, would be humanly "significant."
Unfortunately the question is probably too fuzzy to be answerable, even in
principle, but I am still curious as to what the ratio is of genetic versus
environmental effects upon what is "significant" to me, and after sleeping on
this question it does not seem at all obvious that it is anywhere near as low
as the 0.00001 estimated yesterday from Glenn's numbers. In other worlds, the
"nature-nurture" debate still goes on. (Personally, I can say that with having
three children, the genetic part does seem a lot larger than I used to think,
but how it compares with the environmental part is still highly uncertain to
me.)
On a slightly different aspect, I'm not quite sure that I fully
understand the argument Glenn Morton has with ID supporters on this issue,
since presumably they could claim that the genetics were "designed" but the
environmental and quantum features were "natural" (or some such word that is
hard to agree about). However, I might be agreeing with Glenn when I put the
issue thus: Suppose the environmental influences are admitted not to be
"specially designed" in the sense of some "intervention" or suspension of the
mathematical laws of nature and are hence what might be nontheistically called
"historical accidents." (Of course, as theists we can regard them as parts
within a total universe that God has designed as a whole, and calling them
"accidents" just means that we cannot predict them in detail.) Then what is
the motivation for supposing that the human genes are, unlike the environmental
effects, "specially designed" in the sense of some "intervention" or suspension
of the mathematical laws of nature?
Trying to put words into the mouths of ID supporters, I might wildly
speculate that they regard both the environment and the genes as "specially
designed" but realize that at present it as too great a problem to try to find
laws for the environmental part, or to show that it is observably any different
from what one would get from quantum mechanical probabilities (which in my
minority many-worlds view are not fundamental probabilities at all, but merely
a reflection of the fact that we are each aware of only a small part of the
full QM state, and the part that we are aware of appears random, analogous to
the way that my birth order among ASA members would appear to be random, even
if the whole ordered list of birth orders would just be the set of the first N
positive integers, where N is the number of members, and so much less random).
However, maybe the ID hope is that one can find laws for the genes that are
different from the currently accepted laws, or maybe one can show that the
information in the genes cannot be plausibly be explained by the same QM
mechanisms that apparently work for the environment.
It would be nice to hear from ID supporters as to how they view the
relationship between the genetic and environmental information.
Don Page