Chris
Nor should they, by themselves. The information increase in evolution is
from variation, you big silly. Chemistry, of course, *does* account, in
combination with varying conditions at the molecular level during
replication, for variation. Selection accounts only for removing some of the
less viable information. Variation and selection is a game of "Twenty
Questions": The molecules ask, "Is this good information?" with respect to a
variation, and the environment is either silent or says "No, it's not." The
remaining variations produce more variations and again ask the environment
if any of them, by chance, contain good information. And, again, the
environment answers by zapping the ones that are inadequate. What reproduces
most in each generation are the guesses that are best for that environment,
that are the best (accidental) "guesses" of the genes as to what the "truth"
is about information survival and perpetuation in that environment.
I find it mysterious that anyone finds this process mysterious, because it
*does* rest on chemistry and physics, and energy ebb and flow, and the
presences of sufficiently variable substances to make new "guesses" and yet
sufficiently stable to be able to preserve some of them from one generation
to the next if they turn out to be good "guesses" as to what the environment
will accept.
For it to be *true* that variation and culling could not account for
biological information, it would have to be true that there were no
variations!!!!!!
Nearly all variations are increases in information (actually, reproduction
itself is *effectively* an increase in information if it increases the
population, even if the genomes are *identical* to their parent genomes
because they enable the information to overcome more "noise" in transmitting
itself to the future), and, if one pair of parent organisms produces many
offspring with many variations, information is increased even more, even if
some of the variations are in genomes that are deficient in some way in
information that the parent genes had. They represent yet more "guesses" as
to what the environment will accept as "good" information. But many
variations represent information increases directly, as compared to their
parents. Stephen knows this. The person with a gene for a sixth finger on
each hand, for example, may well have a genome with more information (at
least in the relevant portions of the genome) than the genomes of normal
people (in principle, it could also be the other way around, if the "finger"
genes would *normally* produce six fingers were it not for a gene that
suppresses the sixth finger, but we know that many variations *do* represent
increases in genetic informtion relative to parental genome information).
With trillions upon trillions of variations occurring every minute, we
should expect what we see: A lot of biological information. The culling
process does not keep up because the resources for life (water, air,
sunlight, minerals, left-overs from life that has died, carbon, etc.) are
too great. The production of more life and more information by this process
itself changes the environment and the culling process, thus leading to a
whole different set of variations in the *culling* process.
Energy flow into the system *is* information, so the energy flows that cause
variations are the source of the information, the new set of "guesses" that
is to be culled. That is, locally, the main source of information in
biological organisms is the energy of the Sun and the rotation of the Earth.
This is the "motor" that drives the variations, the increases in
information. Of course, it also provides some of the culling energy and the
information in other organisms that allows them to perform some of the
culling.
> Also, whether a biochemical system is
> irreducibly complex is a fully empirical question: Individually knock out
> each protein constituting a biochemical system to determine whether
> function is lost. If so, we are dealing with an irreducibly complex
system.
Chris
False. You have to consider variations in the proteins as well as their
presence or absence. Further, some proteins may be added in pairs or, more
rarely, even in triplets. Plus, you have to consider structural variations
for the system. Such variations could number in the millions or billions, or
even trillions for the larger allegedly irreducible biochemical systems,
even within a single cell.