At 11:40 PM 9/13/00 -0500, Chris wrote:
Chris,
This is about the most pathetic post I've seen here in some time.
In some ways its funny though. You seem not to be aware that
the idea that Schutzenberger is criticizing here (genes as units
of information) is not his own. It is instead the idea of genetic
reductionists. Have you heard of the genetic programme? If it is
stupid then let's give credit where credit is due. Let's call Richard
Dawkins et al stupid, OK?
Well, you can, but I won't since the idea is not stupid. It may not
be right, but its not stupid.
You also seem to know very little about information theory, btw.
If one proposes the genetic programme hypothesis then the
reasonable way to investigate it is to let the symbols represent
genes. One then has instructional messages composed of
sequences of these symbols. By way of analogy, one could
have a factory. One could make an alphabet where each symbol
represents some operation. Perform operation X on machine Y.
You then have messages that are sequences of these operations.
The analogy is quite good. According to the genetic programme
hypothesis this is exactly what genes are supposed to do. They
are supposed to represent a sequence of instructions for building
an organism.
>At 06:37 AM 09/14/2000, you wrote:
>>Reflectorites
>>
>>On Thu, 7 Sep 2000 19:24:09 EDT, Bertvan@aol.com wrote:
>>
>>BV>(Schutzenberger M-P, "The
>> >Miracles of Darwinism: Interview with Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger,"
>> >Origins & Design, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring 1996, pp.10-15.
>> >
>> >http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od172/schutz172.htm
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>BV>The interview with Schutzenberger was excellent. Easy to understand.
>>I am
>> >relieved there are such scientists, although apparently few of them are
>> >biologists.
>
>I haven't had time yet to write up a full critique of Schutzenberger's
>"interview" (i.e., apparently with himself as the interviewer, judging
>from the "setup" nature of the questions), but I *do* hope that at least
>some of the ID folks who read it will have noticed the major and
>fundamental factual and theoretical flaws in his claims. I will deal with
>only one here: The idea of a gene as a "unit" of information. We begin
>with a harmless enough quote, which, taken out of context and interpreted
>in one way, is even true, though there is some stretching to interpret it
>such a way:
>
> Schematically, a gene is like a unit of information. It has
> simple binary properties.
> When active, it is an elementary information-theoretic unit, the
> cascade of gene
> instructions resembling the cascade involved in specifying a recipe.
>
>
>So far, so good, if we allow some stretching for his statement that a gene
>has binary properties. He *might* mean that, interpreted as a string of
>information, it would have binary properties because strings of
>information can be represented as strings of ones and zeros. But, watch
>what happens next:
> Now let us return to the example of the eye. Darwinists imagine
> that it requires what? A thousand or two thousand genes to
> assemble an eye, the specification of the organ thus requiring one
> or two thousand units of information?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>This is absurd! Suppose that
> a European firm proposes to manufacture an entirely new
> household appliance in a Southeast Asian factory. And suppose
> that for commercial reasons, the firm does not wish to
> communicate to the factory any details of the appliance's function -
> - how it works, what purposes it will serve. With only a few
> thousand bits of information, the factory is not going to proceed
> very far or very fast. A few thousand bits of information, after all,
> yields only a single paragraph of text.
>Okay, here's where things start to get wacky. What's happening here is a
>grossly illogical slide from the idea that a gene is "like a unit of
>information" (of *unspecified* size) to the idea that a gene is a *very*
>small "unit" of information, apparently one bit per gene, if we take his
>reference to thousands of genes and his reference to thousands of bits of
>information as an implicit equating of the two.
>
>Perhaps he should go back and study elementary genetics. A gene can be
>anything from something like a couple hundred bytes to about 2 and a half
>*million* bytes of information, in humans, at least. So, just *where* did
>he get the ignorant (and *stupid*) idea that a gene is roughly one bit in
>size? What raging *idiot*, even one on severely mentally deranging
>*drugs*, would think that a typical gene would contain such a minuscule
>amount of information? It makes *NO* sense at *all*, despite Bertvan's
>remark that the interview made sense to her (how could she *possibly* have
>believed this, after being on this list for almost two *years* (that I
>personally know of)?
>
>But Schutzenberger continues, in the same paragraph:
> The appliance in question is
> bound to be vastly simpler than the eye; charged with its
> manufacture, the factory will yet need to know the significance of
> the operations to which they have committed themselves in
> engaging their machinery. This can be achieved only if they
> already have some sense of the object's nature before they
> undertake to manufacture it. A considerable body of knowledge,
> held in common between the European firm and its Asian factory,
> is necessary before manufacturing instructions may be executed.
>Of course, this is *also* true of genetics, general cellular genetics
>applies to eye cells as well as to the rest of the body. Only the
>*special* features of eye cells have to be specified, not baseline
>information about how human-body cells work. Furthermore, the eye is
>fairly simple in important respects. Retinal light-receptors only come in
>four types, repeated many times, so, once the "design" of each *type* is
>specified, that *one* instance of each bundle of information can be
>repeatedly *applied* for each individual cell of that type. The same is
>true of most of the cells of the eyeball, the cornea, and the iris. There
>are plenty of complications, but not nearly as many as Schutzenberger
>would apparently have us believe.
>
>For my final point relative to the information in genes, consider his next
>paragraph:
>
> Q: Would you argue that the genome does not contain the requisite
> information for explaining organisms?
>
> S:Not according to the understanding of the genome we now
> possess. The
> biological properties invoked by biologists are in this respect
> quite insufficient;
> while biologists may understand that a gene triggers the
> production of a particular
> protein, that knowledge -- that kind of knowledge -- does not
> allow them to
> comprehend how one or two thousand genes suffice to direct the
> course of
> embryonic development.
>
>Here we see him explicitly claiming that genes do not carry enough
>information for explaining organisms. This is implied by his lunatic
>initial claim, but it is nevertheless worth noting. What he should have
>said at the beginning of the paragraph is something like: "Not according
>the understanding of the genome that I am permitting myself to have, in
>order to maintain my nearly perfect ignorance of the topic."
>
>Thus, he is wrong in at least two ways, within the first couple of paragraphs:
>
>1. Claiming that genes contain minuscule amounts of information.
>
>2. Claiming as established fact that the genome cannot contain enough
>information for "explaining organisms."
>
>Frankly, given the blatant obviousness of these errors, I find it hard to
>believe that anyone could possibly take the interview seriously. Even
>intelligent ID-supporters would know enough not to be able to swallow this
>kind of crap.
>
>So, just *who* is his intended audience? Apparently the same audience
>Phillip Johnson caters to: The ignorant, the willfully blind, the
>anti-scientific, the mindlessly religious.
Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering
The Ohio State University
"One never knows, do one?"
-- Fats Waller
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