Re: [asa] Re: information, complexity, environment -- was ]Biologic Institute

On May 13, 2008, at 8:12 PM, Randy Isaac wrote:

> Think of "complexity" as the entropy of the system which, in a very
> oversimplified way, can be roughly estimated as the number of
> nucleotides, both in the nuclear and in the mitochondrial DNA. This
> does get increased by factors such as protein folding and all sorts
> of 3-D phenomena. One way in which this type of "information" is
> increased is by an increase in total DNA content--gene duplication
> or other gene modification that leads to additional DNA.
>
> As I mentioned the last time we addressed this topic, the DNA
> "information" is dissimilar from information generated by
> "intelligent agents." One difference is that information generated
> by intelligent agents is represented by a physical configuration,
> but is independent of that configuration, whereas DNA complexity is
> equivalent to the physical configuration and is not independent of
> it. Ergo, DNA "information" is not of the type generated by
> intelligent agents.
>
> Randy
>

There is also an implicit assumption that organismal complexity is the
result of DNA complexity. That these didn't correlate caused the C-
value and G-value paradoxes. In yesterday's PNAS Stumpf et al found
something where the complexity actually does match organismal
complexity, namely the so-called protein-protein interactome.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/short/105/19/6959?rss=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactome

People have been trying to make an analogy between DNA transcription
and computers. As David S. noted the analogy between biology and
computers really, really breaks down. I know what information theory
looks like in the latter and biology looks really different. The PNAS
paper complicates this further. In the case above, signal transduction
really doesn't match anything in a computer design as no
"instructions" are being processed. One could call "information" what
is being transmitted through the signal transduction pathway but this
isn't what the neo-Paleyists mean but rather the information in the
genome itself which as Randy has noted above is a misnomer. There is
so much equivocation here that the information content of the word
"information" asymptotically approaches zero.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Wed May 14 00:22:24 2008