I do miss our dinners together. I finally moved into a house about 2
weeks ago so life is getting back to normality. I have a few minutes here
so I will respond.
At 09:14 AM 09/16/1999 -0700, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
>Hi, Glenn. If that is what you mean by information increase, then I have no
>problem with your definition, I just have a problem with it going anywhere.
> No matter how many times you rebuild London Bridge, so long as you
>rebuild it as a carbon copy of the old one, you have not perturbed the
>system, and you will never get a Golden Gate.
Information is defined by a mathematical equation and that is where people
conflate two ideas of information. THere is information as it is used in
common parlance and then there is the technical term. The technical term
gives you a number to go along with the quantity of information (which is
what a good theory should do. If one can't put a number on how much
information you are talking about, then one is dealing with an ill-defined
concept at least as far as science is concerned. As long as the number,
which is given by the equation, increases, one has increased the
information content of the object.
>>
>>And Art, neither will the use of the word 'information' in a non-technical
>>sense answer the problem. To claim an increase in information one must be
>>able to quantify the info he has. You can't do it with that loose
>>terminology.
>
>Spetner uses the term in a very precise and useful way (that was his
>specialty in Physics, after all).
I have read some of Spetner's technical papers and have no disagreement
with his use of information. What is interesting is that creationists seem
to require that all information come from the creator. Maybe ultimately
that is correct but the environment has lots of information and natural
selection acts as a pump to pump the information from the environment into
a species' genome. This is the point of one of Spetner's articles. Where
he errs is in his calculation of the rate of information transfer. I
posted this about a year ago. I know that there is a lot of math, but plow
through it and at least read my conclusions. Spetner calculates the amount
of trials it takes to add correct nucleotides to a sequence of DNA. I
follow his terminology which is a bit confusing as he uses the same symbol
for two different concepts (a bad practice).
******repost************
However, there is a weakness in the requirement that all information
must come come directly, rather than indirectly, from the Creator.
Information can come from the environment and natural selection is the
informational pump. The creationist Lee Spetner wrote:
"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
and
"The process by which such evolution is realized can be considered a
transmission of information from the environment into the genetic
storage of the organism. The information so transmitted will be
referred to as adaptive information and any theory of evolution can be
characterized by the mechanism it proposes for the transmission of such
information." ~ Lee M. Spetner, "Information Transmission in
Evolution," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Vol IT-14 January
1968, p. 3-6, p. 3
Spetner is correct that natural selection acts as an information
transmission mechanism taking information from the environment and
placing it into the genome. This, from a creationist, is exactly
where the information comes from which drives evolution. But Spetner's
contention requires that there be information in the environment. And
there is. In physics there is an interesting theorem called the
Bekenstein Bound. The maximum amount of information contained in a
sphere of radius R can be calculated by this equation. This is an
upper limit on information in the sphere, and the actual amount of
information is less than the Bekenstein Bound. Tipler writes:
"This is given by the Bekenstein bound: the information coded inside
the sphere is less than or equal to 3 x 10^43 bits multiplied by the
mass inside the sphere measured in kilograms and multiplied by the
radius of the sphere measured in meters. (In applying the Bekenstein
Bound, we have to include also the mass in the form of energy::
E=Mc^2.) Since a typical human has a mass less than 100 kilograms, and
is less than 2 meters tall-and so fits inside a sphere of radius 1
meter-it follows that a human being must be coded by 3 x 10^45 bits or
less. " (Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, (Doubleday, 1994),
p. 221)
The information included in the sphere encircling the earth's orbit is:
3 x 10^43 x 1.94 x 10^30 x 149 x 10^9 bits = 8.6 x 10^84 bits of
information. Or less.
So, we can conclude that there is much information which can flow from
the environment into the genome.
But can the transmission of information occur rapidly enough to drive
evolution. Spetner, in his Journal of Theoretical Biology article says
'No'. But there is a flaw in his argument. His argument was
constructed prior to one important discovery and failed to properly
account for a fact about biological systems from an information point
of view. Spetner attempts to show that given the observed reproduction
rates, the informational transmission rate is too slow. His assumption
is where he fails to be convincing. He writes: "Let the genetic
information storage F, consist of a sequence of n+l symbols, where l of
them represent essential information that has already been transmitted
from the environment while the remaining n are random. These two
component sequences need not, of course, be physically separated, but
they each may be distributed in any way over the entire sequence. We
shall compute the average number of trials necessary to achieve by
chance alone a specific sequence of n symbols." ~ L. M. Spetner,
"Natural Selection: An Information-Transmission Mechanism for
Evolution," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1964):412-429, p. 415
The last sentence is his assumption and it is where he errs in his
quest. By this assumption he is stating that there is one and ONLY ONE
sequence of n symbols which will perform the FUNCTION he desires to
evolve. This simply isn't true. In almost all functional biological
molecules there are hundreds of billions of FUNCTIONAL versions. For
instance, cow, sheep, pig etc insulins are all different from human
insulin in their sequence, but they can all be injected into a human
and they will perform well enough to keep the person alive for years.
Do they work as efficiently as human insulin? No, but they do perform
the function of human insulin in spite of having a different sequence.
In 1977 Yockey calculated that there were 10^61 different sequences
which could perform the function of cytochrome c. (Yockey, "A
Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by
Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 67(1977):377-398).
By 1992 new discoveries had increased that number to 10^93 different
protein sequences which perform the specific function of cytochrome c.
(Yockey Information Theory and Molecular Biology, (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 59)
What this means is that in Spetner's article when he calculated the
probability of mutating a molecule towards the more beneficial version,
his probability is way too low. He says,
"If we let p be the probability of mutation of a single nucleotide,
then the probability of achieving in one trial the desired sequence of
length n while not disturbing the existing sequence of length l is
P[n,l;k] = (1-p)^l (1-p)^k (p/3)^(n-k)
where we start with a sequence that just happens to have k of the n
symbols correct to begin with." ~ L. M. Spetner, "Natural Selection:
An Information-Transmission Mechanism for Evolution," Journal of
Theoretical Biology, 7(1964):412-429, p. 415
Now, this is the probability of moving toward a particular solution but
since there are others one must sum over the entire panoply of other
solutions. Assuming that there are j different solutions this requires
that the total probability is greater than what Spetner gives.
The relation of TP to P[n,l;k] can be expressed as TP= J P[n,l;k] where
J is a suitable multiplier determined from the sum. J will be positive
and greater than 1.
Thus when Spetner goes on to say,
"Then the average number of trials necessary to achieve the desired
sequence of length n, starting with k of the symbols correct, and not
disturbing the existing l is the reciprocal of P[n,l;k]." ~ L. M.
Spetner, "Natural Selection: An Information-Transmission Mechanism for
Evolution," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1964):412-429, p. 415-
416
The smaller P[n,l;k] is the greater is the number of trials, but with J
greater than 1 (accounting for functionality rather than desiring a
given sequence), the number of trials becomes less than for P[n,l;k]
alone. Mathematically it is:
N= 1/J P[n,l;k] << 1/P[n,l;k].
Spetner, using his much underestimated probability for FUNCTIONALITY
concludes:
"If we use this value for p in equation (4); then we obtain
n~ 0.12 log[base10]Nbar. (5)
Here Nbar represents the average number of trials in the evolutionary
step and n represents the number of symbols in the sequence that was
added to the genetic message. Let us for example consider an
evolutionary step in a population of animals with an annual birth rate
of 10^7 over a time of 10^7 years, then equation (5) tells us that the
information that could be transmitted to the species is less than that
which corresponds to two nucleotides." ~ L. M. Spetner, "Natural
Selection: An Information-Transmission Mechanism for Evolution,"
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1964):412-429, p. 416
Nbar in the above citation is the average or expected value of N. Where
he misses the boat is the increased efficiency of finding A functional
sequence rather than THE functional sequence the factor in equation 5
must be significantly greater than 0.12 which is calculated as if there
is one and only one functional sequence.
How can we calculate an estimate of how far off Spetner is? There is
a way. We will illustrate this by looking at the cytochrome c molecule.
Cytochrome c is a 101 amino acid long protein. There are 10^180
different sequences with 10^168 being in the high probability set (some
amino acids are rare and are unlikely to be drawn, but I will use the
entire set of permutations in the following calculations.) .
Spetner claims that only 1 sequence out of 10^180 perform the function
of cytochrome c. But as noted above, this is not true. Yockey notes
that there are 10^93 different molecules that will perform the
cytochrome c function. (Information Theory and Molecular Biology, p.
255). Using this, we can estimate how far off Sptener is. He is off by
the ratio of 10^93/10^180 and 1/10^180 or he is off by a factor of
10^93 in acceptable sequences and thus off by a factor of 10^93 in his
estimate of the speed of information transmission from the environment
to the species!
To conclude, Spetner is correct that the environment is what provides
the information for the evolution of new structures and new molecules,
but he vastly underestimates the speed of that transmission by 93
orders of magnitude. Applying this multiplier to Spetner's transmission
rate, we see that given 10^7 births, we can add
n~ 10^93 * 0.12 log[base10](10^7)
n~10^93*.84= 8.4 x 10^92 correct symbols to the message.
This means there is no material limit to the transmission of
information from the environment into the genome. Evolution is not
only possible it is HIGHLY likely once one has a reproductive system.
>There is nothing loose about his understanding or use of the term. He knows
>exactly what he is saying.
No, just an error in how many sequences of a given biomolecule can perform
a given function.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution