Group
On Thu, 30 Jul 1998 21:27:32 +0800, Stephen Jones wrote:
[...]
SJ>I have drawn Lee Spetner's attention to the post at:
>http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199807/0034.html in case he wants
>to reply to Glenn's critique.
[...]
Here is Dr Spetner's reply:
==============================
Information Transmission in Evolution
Lee M. Spetner <lspetner@alum.mit.edu>
Glenn Morton's posting "Evolutionary Information" of 5Jul98 was recently
brought to my attention. There are several points in his posting with which
I take issue.
One is in his reference to my papers of 1964 and 1965 and his (misplaced)
criticism thereof. Another is the way he calculates the information content
of the protein in the biosphere.
I'll bet Glenn thought the author of those old papers wasn't around any
longer to respond. But I am. I must say that it is not often that one has
the pleasure of seeing one's publications of more than 30 years ago
referred to and analyzed. I want to thank Glenn for giving me that pleasure
of seeing someone delve into the intricacies of those old papers.
Let me start, however, with the notion that the process of evolution must
involve the transmission of information from the environment to the genome
of the species. I'm glad Glenn brought that up. That notion seemed obvious
to me when I wrote those papers, but evolutionists balked at the idea. The
most prominent of them at the time was Bentley Glass, a world famous
geneticist. They thought of the information as being CREATED by evolution,
if anything. They did not understand the idea of there being information in
the environment and being then transmitted to the genome. As an engineer
involved with information transmission, I thought naturally in terms of the
transmission of information rather than its creation. (I even tried to
calculate the channel capacity of the evolutionary process, and finally
concluded that the concept didn't apply.) Glenn's posting is the first I've
read in which my notion of information transmission from the environment
was accepted.
I part ways with Glenn, however, when he refers to the information in the
environment as having to have come from God. I don't want to get into
theology, because my theology probably differs from his (I'm Jewish) so
I'll try to keep my remarks scientific. Let me show by an example that
environmental information doesn't HAVE to come from anywhere, and it can
still be transmitted somewhere. Suppose rocks are thrown on the ground in a
random fashion. No information was put into the positions of the rocks in
any purposeful way. Then I introduce an electromechanical automaton that by
trial and error learns to maneuver itself through the rocks until it learns
the paths it must follow without bumping into any rocks. In the learning
process, information has been built up in the automaton's memory. Where did
the information come from? Surely, it came from the environment. So was
there information in the environment or wasn't there? The answer is that
the information is a signal depends on the context. Considered as a random
placement of rocks, no information was put into the environment. Considered
as an obstacle course for the automaton, the rock positions contain
information.
After I had encountered misunderstanding in the biological community as to
what I meant by the transmission of information into the genome from the
environment, I decided to take the path of least resistance in the future
and write instead simply about the BUILDUP of information in the genome,
without reference to where it came from. That is what I did in my recent
book "Not By Chance," in which I show that neo-Darwinian evolution cannot,
and does not, work.
Whether I deal with the information transmitted to the genome from the
environment or I simply deal with the information built up in the genome,
without stating where it comes from, my argument is the same. The point I
have made in my recent book is that a theory of evolution that claims to
offer a naturalist materialist explanation of how the complexity of life
came to be must account for how the information built up. I show that the
build up cannot be accounted for by random mutations shaped by natural
selection. Whether God created life "directly" or "indirectly" is not
relevant to my argument. I do not deal with what God did. I only show that
neo-Darwinian theory does not work. I also show how evolution could work
with nonrandom mutations, wherein the environment actually triggers the
mutations. I cite a lot of evidence for this hypothesis.
Glenn said that a flaw in my argument in my 1964 and 1968 papers is that I
assumed "that there is one and ONLY ONE sequence of n symbols which will
perform the FUNCTION he desires to evolve." That is simply not true. That
assumption was only a temporary one made for pedagogic purposes. I then
went on to assume that there was not one but m sequences that would yield
adaptive phenotypes. Not only was the assumption of m sequences made in the
body of the 1964 paper, but it even appeared in the abstract at the head of
the paper. I then went on to calculate the probabilities as a function of
m. I follow the same path in my book in offering a much simpler and much
more intuitive calculation (without a single equation).
Lastly, I wouldn't calculate the information in the biosphere the way Glenn
does. He counts every copy of a genome as separate information. That's like
saying that if a book has half a million bytes of information, then a
thousand copies of it have half a billion bytes. In some sense that's true,
but is that sense useful?
==============================
Steve
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ senojes@hotmail.com
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
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Group
On Thu, 30 Jul 1998 21:27:32 +0800, Stephen Jones wrote:
[...]
SJ>I have drawn Lee Spetner's attention to the post at:
>http://www.calvin.edu/archive/evolution/199807/0034.html in case he wants
>to reply to Glenn's critique.
[...]
Here is Dr Spetner's reply:
==============================
Information Transmission in Evolution
Lee M. Spetner <lspetner@alum.mit.edu>
Glenn Morton's posting "Evolutionary Information" of 5Jul98 was recently
brought to my attention. There are several points in his posting with which
I take issue.
One is in his reference to my papers of 1964 and 1965 and his (misplaced)
criticism thereof. Another is the way he calculates the information content
of the protein in the biosphere.
I'll bet Glenn thought the author of those old papers wasn't around any
longer to respond. But I am. I must say that it is not often that one has
the pleasure of seeing one's publications of more than 30 years ago
referred to and analyzed. I want to thank Glenn for giving me that pleasure
of seeing someone delve into the intricacies of those old papers.
Let me start, however, with the notion that the process of evolution must
involve the transmission of information from the environment to the genome
of the species. I'm glad Glenn brought that up. That notion seemed obvious
to me when I wrote those papers, but evolutionists balked at the idea. The
most prominent of them at the time was Bentley Glass, a world famous
geneticist. They thought of the information as being CREATED by evolution,
if anything. They did not understand the idea of there being information in
the environment and being then transmitted to the genome. As an engineer
involved with information transmission, I thought naturally in terms of the
transmission of information rather than its creation. (I even tried to
calculate the channel capacity of the evolutionary process, and finally
concluded that the concept didn't apply.) Glenn's posting is the first I've
read in which my notion of information transmission from the environment
was accepted.
I part ways with Glenn, however, when he refers to the information in the
environment as having to have come from God. I don't want to get into
theology, because my theology probably differs from his (I'm Jewish) so
I'll try to keep my remarks scientific. Let me show by an example that
environmental information doesn't HAVE to come from anywhere, and it can
still be transmitted somewhere. Suppose rocks are thrown on the ground in a
random fashion. No information was put into the positions of the rocks in
any purposeful way. Then I introduce an electromechanical automaton that by
trial and error learns to maneuver itself through the rocks until it learns
the paths it must follow without bumping into any rocks. In the learning
process, information has been built up in the automaton's memory. Where did
the information come from? Surely, it came from the environment. So was
there information in the environment or wasn't there? The answer is that
the information is a signal depends on the context. Considered as a random
placement of rocks, no information was put into the environment. Considered
as an obstacle course for the automaton, the rock positions contain
information.
After I had encountered misunderstanding in the biological community as to
what I meant by the transmission of information into the genome from the
environment, I decided to take the path of least resistance in the future
and write instead simply about the BUILDUP of information in the genome,
without reference to where it came from. That is what I did in my recent
book "Not By Chance," in which I show that neo-Darwinian evolution cannot,
and does not, work.
Whether I deal with the information transmitted to the genome from the
environment or I simply deal with the information built up in the genome,
without stating where it comes from, my argument is the same. The point I
have made in my recent book is that a theory of evolution that claims to
offer a naturalist materialist explanation of how the complexity of life
came to be must account for how the information built up. I show that the
build up cannot be accounted for by random mutations shaped by natural
selection. Whether God created life "directly" or "indirectly" is not
relevant to my argument. I do not deal with what God did. I only show that
neo-Darwinian theory does not work. I also show how evolution could work
with nonrandom mutations, wherein the environment actually triggers the
mutations. I cite a lot of evidence for this hypothesis.
Glenn said that a flaw in my argument in my 1964 and 1968 papers is that I
assumed "that there is one and ONLY ONE sequence of n symbols which will
perform the FUNCTION he desires to evolve." That is simply not true. That
assumption was only a temporary one made for pedagogic purposes. I then
went on to assume that there was not one but m sequences that would yield
adaptive phenotypes. Not only was the assumption of m sequences made in the
body of the 1964 paper, but it even appeared in the abstract at the head of
the paper. I then went on to calculate the probabilities as a function of
m. I follow the same path in my book in offering a much simpler and much
more intuitive calculation (without a single equation).
Lastly, I wouldn't calculate the information in the biosphere the way Glenn
does. He counts every copy of a genome as separate information. That's like
saying that if a book has half a million bytes of information, then a
thousand copies of it have half a billion bytes. In some sense that's true,
but is that sense useful?
==============================
Steve
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen E (Steve) Jones ,--_|\ sejones@ibm.net
3 Hawker Avenue / Oz \ senojes@hotmail.com
Warwick 6024 ->*_,--\_/ Phone +61 8 9448 7439
Perth, West Australia v "Test everything." (1Thess 5:21)
----------------------------------------------------------------------_=_=_=IMA.BOUNDARY.HTML_4820800=_=_=_--