From: brian harper (harper.10@osu.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 23 2003 - 16:26:50 EDT
At 06:06 PM 7/22/2003 -0700, richard@biblewheel.com wrote:
>I had written:
>
> >I see no reason why the IDers couldn't assert
> > that C-12 was formed through natural processes established when God
> > fine-tuned the universe.
>
>To which George replied:
>
> > Of course they could. But then they'll be asked
> >why life couldn't have been formed through natural processes.
>
>This seems to be the crux of the issue. It is why I thought the questions
>should be separated. In my previous post, I said that the difference between
>the evolution of elements and evolution of life is that life looks like a
>machine designed for specific purposes, whereas elements can be understood
>as the result of the time evolution of well-known physical laws. What I
>meant was that given nothing but natural law, we would expect and could even
>predict the production of the elements. The case is entirely different with
>Life, as evidenced, e.g., by our complete failure to understand biogenesis.
>
>Perhaps a better way to understand this intuition is in terms of
>Information. The evolution of elements through natural processes follows
>natural laws that do not result in an increase of information (entropy is
>strictly constant under unitary time evolution). The evolution of Life, on
>the other hand, involves huge increases in the amounts of information stored
>in the DNA. The natural question then is "where did this information come
>from?" (Of coure, this might be understood as the transfer of entropy from
>the living subsystem to the larger system though respiration, eating, etc,
>but that's a separate issure I don't want to enter now.) But in any case,
>this difference puts the question of the evolution of life on an entirely
>different plane than that of the evolution of elements. The two questions
>seem to me to be completely distinct, unless one assumes RFEP from the
>outset.
Regarding the question "where did this information come from?".
First let me say that the question has always struck me as odd
since it implies a law of conservation of information.
As an attempt at answering the question theoretically you can refer
to the following article by Tom Schneider:
http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/
ABSTRACT
How do genetic systems gain information by evolutionary processes?
Answering this question
precisely requires a robust, quantitative measure of information.
Fortunately, fifty years ago
Claude Shannon defined information as a decrease in the uncertainty of a
receiver. For
molecular systems, uncertainty is closely related to entropy and hence has
clear connections to
the Second Law of Thermodynamics. These aspects of information theory have
allowed the
development of a straightforward and practical method of measuring
information in genetic
control systems. Here this method is used to observe information gain in
the binding sites for an
artificial `protein' in a computer simulation of evolution. The simulation
begins with zero
information and, as in naturally occurring genetic systems, the information
measured in the fully
evolved binding sites is close to that needed to locate the sites in the
genome. The transition is
rapid, demonstrating that information gain can occur by punctuated
equilibrium.
Brian Harper
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