ExYECer
Posts: 36 Joined: May 2002
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“And ev and others have shown that in principle mutation and natural selection are sufficient to increase information in the genome.”—Frances
But this is not in dispute, is it?
But it is, if you check out the works of the more vocal ID proponents it seems that the claim that evolution cannot increase information is quite prevalent. Phillip Johnson reviving the 'specter of Spetner' comes to mind as a good example.
I do not understand why you have such a hard time seeing the information increase in Schneider's experiments or Adami's experiments. It is a relatively straightforward calculation that shown that Shannon information increases during the experiment. You claim that the experiment is 'to match a target sequence'. That statement by itself suggests that you have not carefully read the work and the programs involved since there is no 'target' to match a particular sequence. It saddens me to see time after time Schneider's work be 'attacked' or misrepresented in this manner.
So once again: Show where in the program the object is to match a target sequence or the value of its information content.
Quote | This information, the target Rfreq, a population, recognizer, etc., etc., altogether must constitute some ponderable amt of information. What happened to the “zero information” we were going to begin with? Is any of this information, other than Rfreq, measured precisely by the experimenter?
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Please explain the relevance of the target R_freq as it applies to the program, what lines of code do you consider enforce this target, what relevance does population or target recognizer or etc etc have other than to distract from the simple point that you still have not indicated any relevant objection. The information content of the genome is zero, that is random at t=t_t0. What other objections do you have that are relevant to the experiment? Schneider is modeling a biological system in an abstract way.
The final comment that there is teleology involved due to the fact that the experiment was to set out to see if R_seq can match R_freq shows a clear example of equivocation and irrelevancy.
Lets focus on this clearly visible 'smuggling' of information per suggestion of Janitor: Where was the information clearly inserted, support your claims with references to the programming code and show that they are relevant.
To give a few hints to show that Janitor is wrong:
there is no preset target to which R_seq has to evolve, in fact the experiments show that it varies significantly. When removing selection, R_seq does not change much so if it were population that played a role in inserting information, removing selection should not have made a difference. As for the etc. etc. without details of objections, one may just wonder about their relevance to the discussion.
So far people seem to object to Schneider's experiment but they seem to be a bit unfamiliar with the details etc etc :-)
As far as the dispute of complex specified information, Dembski was the one to raise the issue that Schneider had claimed that he had shown that CSI could increase through natural means.
Quote | As an example of smuggling in complex specified information that is purported to be generated for free, consider the work of Thomas Schneider. Schneider heads a laboratory of experimental and computational biology at the National Cancer Institute.
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Source
Dembski seems to agree that CSI was generated, he just considers the CSI to have been smuggled in.
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