> It seems to me that the introduction of the term "information" by biologist
> is to enable them to tap into areas of science where that term has a very
> clear meaning and usefulness. The attempt is to explain complexity by means
> of such terms. It seems that unless one believes that all the potential
> future development of the universe and all that it contains were set up from
> the very beginning, then one would have to explain how the new source(s) of
> info that leads to more complex entities subsequently come into being. It
> seems to me that borrowing terms from other areas os studies and just using
> them in one's musings does not lead to any sort of genuine explanations and,
> least of all, to any form of scientific theory with predictive power.
I'm quite confused. In most cases that I have seen, including the one
just discussed on this list, the term "information" has not been
introduced by biologists, but by opponents of evolution. And those
opponents invariably seem to use the term in ways that have little or
nothing to do with its use in other areas of science. So I don't
understand why the biologists are being taken to task for failing to
construct a predictive theory using the inappropriate terms being
offered by their opponents.
To address your specific question, in standard information theory (if
I understand it correctly) sources of information require little
explanation; any source of noise is a source of information. "Sources
of info that leads to more complex entities" is not a topic for
information theory, but for biology, and there the identification is
also straightforward: the source is imperfect reproduction. The
predictive theory that explains how that happens is evolution. I just
do not understand why these are thought by anti-evolutionists to be
important scientific questions.
Steve Schaffner
sschaff@slac.stanford.edu