It seems to me that this is a quite clear example of genetic information being transmitted over a channel. It is a set of instructions that people are sending around, manipulating, and than inserting into the "hardware" ("wetware") of a clone as instructions for what functions the clone must perform.
Indeed it is and I said exactly that. And that has no implications for the argument we are making. Of course information about the genome can be transmitted and even recreated. That is classical intelligent manipulation of information. It doesn't change the nature of the complexity of the genome itself.
I get the sense that you all "protest too much" to the notion that genetic information can be Shannon information because of the ID implications of that notion.
Now, Dave, you know you're in trouble when you have to resort to questioning our motives and objectivity.
Or maybe I'm being completely dense. How is extracting a gene sequence into a set of A,C,T, and G's, transmitting that data over the internet, and then reassembling it into a biological substrate for insertion into a clone not the transmission of "information?" I don't recall anyone saying it wasn't.
As far as I know, which I admit isn't very far, the concept of Shannon information is employed widely in biotechnology and bioinformatics.
Yes, it is widely employed and widely misemployed. Information science is very complex. I don't understand it very well and most other people don't either. Many examples of misuse abound in the literature. That doesn't change the basic concepts we're trying to explain to you.
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Received on Thu Apr 12 21:53:44 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Apr 12 2007 - 21:53:44 EDT