Re: 'Directed' evolution?

Glenn R. Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Tue, 22 Sep 1998 19:49:13 -0500

At 11:40 AM 9/22/98 -0500, Ron Chitwood wrote:
>The book 'Not by Chance" by Spetner, I think is must reading. Sometimes
>its above my head as someone unconversant with microbiology but the theme
>is quite clear. Randomness simply cannot explain the information increase
>over the supposed eons of evolution. To quote one passage, pp 131.
>"...Among all the mutations that have been studied, there aren't any known,
>clear, examples of a mutation that has added information."

And as was shown here, mathematically a few months ago, polyploidy in which
the genetic code doubles in length in a single generation is an addition of
information to the genome.

This is from a note on the evolution reflector dated Jun 12 21:39:21 1998

Cliff had written:
>Do two dictionaries have more information content
>than one?

I replied:

Mathematically it does. Information can be measured by either
compressibility or by an entropy-like equation. Via compressibility, the
sequence which can be compressed the most, has the least information.
Consider the sequence.

AAAAAAAAAA.

It can be compressed to the sequence:

10A.

There is very little information in this sequence.

Now consider the sequence

ABCDEFGHIJ.

It cannot be compressed any further than its own length. But lets add two
of them together.

ABCDEFGHIJABCDEFGHIJ

This can be compressed to

2ABCDEFGHIJ.

Note that this sequence has one more character than the original sequence
ABCDEFGHIJ. Because of this, there is more information in the two
sequences than in the one by itself.

Polyploidy does increase information.
glenn

Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
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