Brian
>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.
Chris
Not really. The idea that genes contain "instructions" for
controlling the development of an organism is not problematic to
me. What is clearly false is that each gene can be equated with
some small number of bits (apparently, just *one* bit, in
Schutzenberger's view).
>Brian
>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?
Chris
I think I have an idea of why you may think this, but you are
wrong, about both Schutzenberger and Dawkins, et al. I suggest
you read the interview again. I do not claim that there is anything
stupid about genetic reductionism (of the organism's physical
structure) or with the idea of a genetic program. My complaint is
that Schutzenberger *radically* misrepresents both genetics and
genetic reductionism. Genetic reductionism does *not* claim that
the genetic information for the eye is represented in a few
thousand bits. It merely claims that the information for the eye
*is* represented (at least algorithmically) in the genes.
>Brian
>Well, you can, but I won't since the idea is not stupid. It may not
>be right, but its not stupid.
Chris
Oh, it may not be stupid for a child to think such things, or even
as a casual opinion for an adult who isn't trying to convince
people that Darwinism requires miracles, but it is stupid for an
adult person who *is* claiming to prove that Darwinism requires
miracles and who has had ample opportunity over thirty years to
correct this notion by at least *glancing* at a book on genetics, or
talking to a geneticist (*any* geneticist -- wasn't there even *one*
whom he might have contacted at the University of Paris or
through the Academy of Sciences?). Of course, *maybe* he knew
perfectly well that the bit-per-gene claim was egregiously false
(that would be my guess).
Further, he's not *criticizing* it. He's claiming that that's what a
gene *is* (according to "the understanding of the genome we now
possess" -- see below) and then claiming that there is not enough
information in the genes of the eye to account for the eye. The
idea that he's criticizing is that genes contain enough information,
even if we take into account *all* the genes that might be
involved, to explain what seems to come from them. He's
claiming that Darwinism requires a miracle to get an eye out of
two thousand genes. It is *Darwinism* that he is attacking, *not*
the looney idea of genetic information.
He's claiming that a gene contains *less* information than a
single codon *within* a gene!
Let me quote the passage immediately following the parts I
quoted in my original post:
Q: Would you argue that the genome does not
contain the requisite information for explaining
organisms?
A: Not according to the understanding of the genome
we now possess. The biological properties invoked by
biologists are 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 he's reaffirming the claim he made earlier. But this alleged
"understanding of the genome we now possess" is *not* the
understanding of the genome we now possess, nor has it
*ever* been. It is certainly not the understanding of
Dawkins, et al, nor of *any* geneticist.
Apparently, he skimmed over some popularization of
genetics in a Sunday newspaper supplement some thirty-
five years ago, written by some scientifically illiterate
reporter, leapt to his own bizarre (mis-)understanding of
genetics, and then, since it is *such* a good straw man if
you can get the riff-raff and the yokels to *accept* it as "the
understanding of the genome we now possess," he chose it
as a key in his attack on Darwinism.
Brian
>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.
Chris
Most of this is beside the point, and I agree with the analogy.
My point is that genes are complex and that they *each* contain
a largish chunk of information, and that Schutzenberger is claiming
that they are about a bit in length and information content. In
programming terminology, nearly all genes are complex
"*subprograms,*" not single "machine code" instructions. They
typically *each* contain hundreds of thousands of bytes of
information.
Genes represent (or contain) a sequence of instructions for
building an organism, true enough, but *each* gene contains
*vastly* more than a single bit of information (typically several
orders of magnitude more, to give you an idea of just how far off
Schutzenberger's claim is). That is, *each* gene represents
a sequence of information, not one tiny "unit" of information.
Even in "machine" code terms, each individual instruction
represents more than one bit, unless the "machine" only
has two instructions. If there are 32 instructions, then each
instruction contains five bits of information (that is, no
fewer than five bits are required to specify any given
instruction, assuming that no instructions are all the same
length.
And, in any high level programming language, each
"instruction" (called a, "statement" in this case) may
represent virtually *any* number of bits. For example, a
programming language could contain a statement that
causes millions of machine instructions to execute.
It *is* true that some of the needed information for
generating an organism is contained outside the genome (in
the various molecules that exist in the cell prior to DNA
replication), but that information is, in comparison to the
average genome, quite small. It is part of the "computer"
that processes the "program" in the genome, it is the
"micro-code." Without it, the "program" cannot be read and
executed, so it is absolutely essential, but it is still only a
relatively small amount of information, just as the micro-code
that implements machine code is very small compared to
Windows 98 (or OS 9, or Linux, etc.).
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