Last night when I was going to sleep I realized where we are
miscommunicating, I think. I didn't detect the shift in context in your
Sunday note.
>On Sun, 28 Jun 1998 11:03:49 -0700 (PDT), Greg Billock wrote:
>
>>Applying information theory to biology is a bit more realistic, because
>>we have lots of examples of 'messages' and can at least make progress
>>in detecting their relationships (although the 'code' doesn't seem very
>>clear as of yet). A main problem is that nobody really knows how much
>>information content is in DNA. If someone tells you there are 2*length
>>bits there, you can feel free to say they are full of it; there is
>>no way all possible DNA sequences can be associated with living
>>organisms. A fraction so small as to be barely detectable on the
>>total scale has the chance of being associated with a live organism.
I now believe, you are talking about doing for a living form what Yockey
did for Cytochrome c (J. theor. Biol. 67(1977):345-376 and updated in his
book). The information content of a 101 amino acid protein, if you have to
have a PARTICULAR sequence, has a high information content. And we can
calculate this (which is what I was saying) But as Yockey showed for
cytochrome, there are 10^93 sequences which will perform the function so
the information required to specify A functional sequence is much less than
the information required to specify A GIVEN sequence.
Of course you are correct that we can only calculate an upper limit to the
actual information required for a living form because we don't know all the
functional sequences which are POSSIBLE to exist. (Which is what I think
you were saying)
Is this correct?
I have made this criticism of the use of info theory that Thaxton, Bradley
and Olsen display when they calculate the information content of A sequence
of DNA from E.coli (Mystery of Life's Origins, p. 138). They assume that
one and only one sequence of DNA makes an E. coli and of course there are
billions of different sequences which work. Because of this, their energy
calculation is a maximal limit, and the actual value is much much less.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
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