Re: Dawkins and increase in information

Glenn R. Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Fri, 02 Oct 1998 13:38:16 -0500

At 09:36 AM 10/2/98 -0500, Moorad Alexanian wrote:
>It seems to me that the introduction of the term "information" by biologist
>is to enable them to tap into areas of science where that term has a very
>clear meaning and usefulness. The attempt is to explain complexity by means
>of such terms. It seems that unless one believes that all the potential
>future development of the universe and all that it contains were set up from
>the very beginning, then one would have to explain how the new source(s) of
>info that leads to more complex entities subsequently come into being. It
>seems to me that borrowing terms from other areas os studies and just using
>them in one's musings does not lead to any sort of genuine explanations and,
>least of all, to any form of scientific theory with predictive power.

As Spetner, a young-earth creationist, has effectively pointed out, natural
selection acts to pump information from the environment to the organism.

"If we consider the genetic information of a species we find evolutionary
theory implies that as the environment changes, so the genetic information
changes. This is a requirement of any evolutionary theory that attempts to
account for the widespread adaptivity found in the biological world. In
particular in the modern synthetic theory of evolution, random mutation
produces an assortment of genotypes of which one or more is favored by the
environment. The result is that there is a kind of information-transmission
taking place from the environment to the genetic information storage of the
species. The mechanism by means of which this information is transmitted is
natural selection." ." ~ L. M. Spetner, "Natural Selection: An
Information-Transmission Mechanism for Evolution," Journal of Theoretical
Biology, 7(1964):412-429, p. 412

Spetner messes up the calculation of how rapidly the transmission occurs,
but it does explain where the information comes from.

glenn

Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
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