Re: design: purposeful or random?

Arthur V. Chadwick (chadwicka@swac.edu)
Tue, 25 Feb 1997 11:19:36 -0800

Glenn says:

>As a point of fact, a randomly chosen sequence has more information in it
>than an ordered sequence.

You must intuitively sense that this is not true. A random sequence only
has information in it if it has had information imposed upon it by an
outside system. There is no information in a random sequence whatsoever. A
random sequence of bases in a DNA molecule has a finite but very low
probability of having meaningful information in it. But if it does have
meaningful information, it is because the information is imposed upon it by
another system. For example there is some exceedingly small, but finite
probability that some part of a random sequence could code for a protein
that did function in a given biological system. Yockey, I think rightly,
assigns a probability of effectively zero to having this happen. To put it
another way, perhaps you would have preferred to have your own DNA be a
random sequence, then you would have more information in you than you do at
present???
Of course a sequence that appears to be random can be exceedingly rich in
information if it is encoded and you can come up with the correct cipher.
But such a sequence is certainly not random.

Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu