Could Art please post Spetner's information measure equation
so that we can compare the two?
>Thank you for forwarding me the questions that have arisen about how I
>define and measure genetic information. The presumption is that unless I
>quantify the information in a gene, I am not entitled to say, for any
>mutation, whether the gene gains or loses information. I reject that
>presumption.
>
>Before addressing the issue of quantifying the information in a gene, let
>me point out that all the random mutations I discussed in my book (and by
>extension, all known mutations whose molecular structures have been
>examined) cannot serve as prototypes for the mutations that are supposed to
>make up the long series of evolutionary steps claimed by neo-Darwinists to
>have led to major evolutionary advances. They cannot serve as prototypes of
>the mutations in the steps that are supposed to have led from a single cell
>to an insect, from a fish to a mammal, and so on. Most of these mutations
>are single-nucleotide substitutions that disable a control gene. Disabling
>a gene cannot be a recipe for evolutionary advance. Although sometimes,
>perhaps, a gene would have to be disabled in the course of evolving a new
>enzyme, such disabling cannot represent a major portion of what has to
>occur to achieve a new function. It cannot even represent a small fraction
>of what must occur. Most mutations in a putative series of evolutionary
>steps leading to a new species or a new order, class, or phylum, must add
>to the genome the information necessary to achieve that advance. It should
>be clear that information must be added to the genome to evolve a bacterium
>into a human, or even into a fruit fly. One who insists that it is not
>obvious that a human genome contains vastly more information than that of a
>bacteriulm is a sophist.
>
>If no mutation that has been studied is of the type needed for
>neo-Darwinian macroevolution, then there is no molecular evidence that
>random mutations and natural selection can achieve that evolution. Sure, we
>know many single-nucleotide substitutions that can lead to microevolution.
>But there is no argument about microevolution. My argument is against the
>premise that random mutation, even with the help of natural selection, is
>the driving force behind an evolutionary advance from a primitive cell to
>human beings. There is no genetic evidence for such a premise.
>
>I submit that one need not measure the information in a gene to know if a
>particular mutation has added or subtracted information. There is no
>general way of measuring the information in a single message without
>relating it to the ensemble of messages from which it was chosen.
>Similarly, there is no general way of measuring the entropy in a single
>message without relating it to the ensemble of messages of which it is a
>member. Shannon was careful to avoid relating the information measure he
>was defining to the meaning contained in a message. The communication
>engineer must build a communication channel that will faithfully transmit a
>message regardless of how much meaning the customer attaches to that message.
>
>There is no adequate definition of the information in a message without
>relating it to the ensemble of messages that could have been sent. Thus I
>cannot expect to measure the information in an arbitrary paragraph of
>English text. Nor can I expect to measure the information in a section of a
>genome. But whatever the information in a paragraph of text, if I struck
>out one or more sentences, I can be sure that I have not increased the
>information. Rather, I can confidently say that I have decreased the
>information. (I exclude the case in which the paragraph was nonsense and
>didn't contain any information to begin with. In such a case the
>information was zero both before and after I struck out the sentences.)
>This example shows that indeed one can sometimes determine whether a change
>in a message has decreased the information without having quantified the
>information of the original message.
>
>I hold that the disabling of a genetic function is a decrease in
>information. Disabling a repressor gene is a decrease of information. It's
>like striking out a sentence in a paragraph. The strikeout might be improve
>the readability of the text, but it is not an addition of information.
>Certainly, one cannot write a book by starting with a few paragraphs and
>blue-penciling them. One might improve those paragraphs (analogous to
>microevolution), but one could never produce a book that way (analogous to
>macroevolution). This analogy applies to mutations like the disabling of a
>repressor gene (which can cause the overproduction of an enzyme) or
>degrading the specificity of an enzyme (which could increase the enzyme's
>activity on some other substrate), even though such mutations might be
>beneficial under special circumstances.
>
>Neo-Darwinian macroevolution is supposed to proceed by getting rare lucky
>mutations, one after another, each installed in the population by natural
>selection. Single isolated adaptive mutations of the types that have been
>found are not sufficient. Eventually some real information has to be added
>to achieve macroevolution. The classic scenario of the neo-Darwinist is to
>duplicate a gene and then have it evolve without losing the function of the
>original gene. The duplicate might first lose some of its function, but
>then it has to build up something new. To use our example of reducing the
>specificity of the gene, it might be beneficial first to reduce specificity
>so as to grant the enzyme some activity on a new substrate. But that can be
>only the beginning. The second job is to have random mutations increase the
>specificity of the enzyme for the new substrate. The first is easy and can
>be done quickly. The second is much harder, and we have no evidence that it
>has ever occurred, in spite of the necessity for orders of magnitude more
>of this kind of mutation than for those of the type that disable a gene.
>
>Lee Spetner
>
Art
http://geology.swau.edu