Steven Jones wrote:
[...]
SJ>Johnson is summarising a complex issue for a *newspaper*
SJ>interview. I cannot speak for Johnson but I believe, from
SJ>discussions in another forum, that he would probably
SJ>concede that mutation and selection might be able to create
SJ>small amounts of information in a specialised, technical,
SJ>Information Theory sense. For example, when a gene is
SJ>duplicated, according to Information Theory, there is no
SJ>new information *content*. But then if one of the pair of
SJ>genes subsequently mutates, that is technically the
SJ>production, of one new bit of information content, in an
SJ>Information Theory sense.
[...]
By either Shannon or Kolmogorov information measures, a
message comprised of two identical subunits does contain more
information than is in the subunit, so long as the subunit is
not composed entirely of repeats of one symbol. The
highlighting of "content" makes it look like Steven is
attempting to discuss meaning, which is not a topic of
Information Theory.
The information change due to a point mutation doesn't reduce
to "one bit" so easily. Under Shannon, one could develop an
expectation based upon the fact that one base instantiates one
out of four possible states. Then one could modify this by
reference to an ensemble of possible messages. Of course,
other types of mutations may cause larger changes in measured
information by either Shannon or Kolmogorov measures.
William Dembski took a stab at estimating a maximum information
increase per generation due to natural selection. See it in
<http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/papers/Dembski.html>.
Wesley
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