NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
|
| Quote (cryptoguru @ Feb. 20 2015,05:59) | Cubist: I did answer your question, you just didn't understand the answer.
I explained what I mean by "new" and "novel" for the purposes of this discussion, is that which is too difficult to arise from a purely random event. i.e. one which would probabilistically require natural selection through competition and could not just arise through just a sequence of mutation events.
I would not expect to randomly arrive at a meaningful sentence by randomly selecting letters, however I may expect to get a short 3 or 4-letter word randomly. |
And yet it can be shown that production of words produced from random selection of characters, combined with a varying set of grammar and syntax rules can generate meaningful sentences.
Similarly, it can be shown that random variations in genetic material can occur and be judged against an existing, and slowly changing, fitness landscape. The information that results is that "this change fails to fail, that change fails."
This is meaningful information in the only sense that matters.
| Quote | | You believe that natural selection is the agent that turns random events into information. |
Yes. Because it can be shown that it does. Given a set of randomly generated letters being combined, plus a selection rule that permits collections of letters to be preserved if a given collection occurs in a dictionary, meaningful words will arise, quite rapidly. The dictionary can be change out and the process continued, and a meaningful collection of words will arise, quite rapidly, and as variations from the original set, which will be initially drastically reduced and will then once again proliferate.
For amusement, and potential enlightenment, see Markov Chain Text Generation Results
| Quote | | So we need to be able to differentiate between noise and information; a sequence of symbols that has specified meaning ... i.e. it solves a problem |
That's what filters do. Information is what passes through, noise is what's rejected.
You are confusing Shannon information theory with semantics. They are often confused, but starkly distinct.
Worse, as is clear in your examples that follow, you demand omniscience in the determination. How do you know that any given random string is meaningless across all possible languages, or even across all existent languages? Answer: you don't. That's why information and meaning are distinct.
| Quote | Example:
this point deletion creates a new string ... but it is not information, we can't differentiate it from noise, even if it was advantageous we can't call it information yet.
gacgtacga
gcgtacga
this sequence of new symbols (not pre-existant) could be new information
gacgtacga
gacgtacgattcaatgact
we don't known that until we show that the new string does something (has meaning) and is advantageous. Also a new string that small could potentially arise through mutation without any selective guidance. |
Mutations arise without any guidance other than physics and chemistry and the constraints they impose. Genetic mutations are random selection out of a very small pool of possible choices (4 codons, with each codon highly restricted in terms of its own chemical makeup due to physics and chemistry). No guidance is needed, or possible, for mutations. Guidance comes in at the stage of replication into a next generation. Winners of the first lottery get to participate in the second lottery. Lottery numbers are random with respect to winners/losers at each round. Selection is from round to round.
You really seem not to get this.
| Quote | | So I'm back to using ORFan genes, we know that they are functional and advantageous and they have no known ancestor, they are new information and they are significantly large enough to be impossible to achieve purely randomly. |
No, we do not know the latter 'fact'. You assert it, but proof is lacking. Assuming your conclusion, aren't you?
| Quote | Sure there are things smaller than this that could be information, but how do we know they are? In the case of ORFan genes we have a clear example of new genetic material that is useful to the organism and not pre-existing that would require something other than pure dumb-luck to occur.
So I'm asking for a demonstration of new information on this level (ORFan gene size) to arise out of purely random mutation and natural selection, without using intelligently applied known targets to artificially guide the selective process.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND MY QUESTION YET???
(or do you not want to understand it?) |
I've bolded and italicized the fatal contradictions and confusions that rig the game against any possibility of a satisfactory answer.
You do realize that demanding evidence or proof that something can arise that is "too difficult to arise from a random event" requires proof that there are things that cannot arise from random events. No such proof exists.
Worse, such a proof requires an operational definition of 'random' that is accurate, precise, consistent, and used consistently throughout said proof. You are assuming your conclusions in the manner in which you set up your "challenge."
Then there is the issue that you confuse random mutation and natural selection. Natural selection does not generate new information, random mutation does. Natural selection eliminates the 'unmeaningful'. Meaning is the fitness of the organism for the environment in which it occurs. Random mutation perturbs the content of the ever-changing set of entities on which natural selection filters out the less fit, that is, the less meaningful for the current environment, which is also changing, albeit generally at a vastly slower rate.
Your question, your "challenge" is precisely equivalent to "have you stopped beating your wife."
For reasons already adequately presented by others.
It also betrays incredible ignorance, or dishonesty, about how evolution works.
Worse, it ignores the real-world examples that prove that what you insist is impossible does, in fact, happen all the time. Which is doubtlessly why you focus on AVIDA and on your own misconceptions of what 'must' be the case, rather than what is clearly, demonstrably, the case.
Of course, if you were to confront Lenski's work head-on, you would have to propose an alternate explanation for the new and novel information's inception and persistence in the population. You would have to show when, and how, some intelligence intervened to do what natural processes allegedly cannot.
Until you do, we have no warrant for dismissing the answer 'it was all done by natural processes'. No other process has been proposed. The process we propose is a conclusion based on the evidence and known facts. Not an assumption, not a presupposition.
Whereas you insist that natural processes cannot produce information despite the countless counter-examples that prove this to be incorrect. Science would not be possible if this were correct.
|
