Yep. The same goes for cultural systems like language.
It seems that you forget where SARS came from. Initially it was a virus that was specific infectious to animals. Now it changed to be more infectious to humans. It’s highly suggestive that this virus is less infectious for the original species. That is the way it normally works. There is change in RNA but no increase in information.
Mutations that make bacteria resistant against antibiotics are mostly a burden for the bacteria. Is gives fitness cost. For instance ribosomes that are blocked by antibiotics and are less blocked after mutations work less efficiently. Loss of information.
That does not mean that the original virus has become less infectious or disappeared from the prior host population, so now you have two viral populations infecting two host populations. From there, they go their independent ways, organisms evolving and exploiting their niches. If you do not consider that to be an increase by your definition of information, then your definition of information does not preclude anything in evolutionary theory, does it?
Not a loss of functional information. Fitness is the success of an organism in a given environment. If the reality of your environment is antibiotics that will kill you, that is a vital piece of information, and the value of adaptive resistance far outweighs any tradeoff. That makes you the winner, and the other tough bacterium the loser. Information is a mechanism of evolution, and adaptation is acting on and exploiting environmental information.
I think it to relevant to consider two things
- the virus was already capable of infecting humans before it further adapted to humans
- a virus of its own is not capable of reproduction. The genetic information in the virus is only a part. The virus needs information of the host. A new host gives a new combination of host and agent information used to complete the reproduction cycle.
Maybe ChatGPT is a nice example of evolution. I don’t know but the results are impressive. What do you think, does ChatGPT create information?
Disagree. I judge this to be incidental only. Sure organisms have adapted to this sort of variation, but you can say the same of any number of diseases and parasites. But saying the functionality of DNA depends on stochasticity because of this just isn’t true.
What do you base your judgment on? The functionality of the DNA quite literally requires that both proteins be produced, which quite literally occurs only because of this stochastic mechanism. If you could turn off the stochastic read-through, the DNA (or RNA in the case of viruses) fails to perform its function. In the case of RNA viruses, at least, that will probably lead to the extinction of the virus. Organisms don’t generally fail to reproduce if you remove their parasites.
Organisms can adapt to anything and then become dependent on them because of it. But this only means that without them, the organisms don’t evolve these dependencies. So your conclusion does not follow. Just because such a dependency exists in organisms doesn’t mean DNA cannot work in organisms which evolve without them.
Doesn’t Wolbachia alter the reproductive cells of its hosts so they cannot reproduce without them (i.e. cannot reproduce with organisms which are not also infected)?
Recall the statement to which I originally responded: ‘It is an entirely deterministic system of physical cause and effect.’ DNA is not an entirely deterministic system in the sense that was meant here, i.e. a stretch of coding DNA does not map 1 to 1 to a protein. You haven’t challenged that fact. Instead, you’ve challenged a statement that I didn’t make (‘DNA cannot work without randomness’, maybe? I dunno). Why, I don’t know.
Regardless, I think the basis for your challenge is fundamentally misguided. Randomness in cell biology as a whole is not some minor feature that can be treated as a perturbation of a basically deterministic system. The cell is an environment where randomness is rampant, and cellular machinery has to work despite that randomness. Quite often that means working through the randomness. I suggest you take a look at this book: Life’s Ratchet
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- Zoonotic infections happen all of the time.
- We don’t know what the original host species is.
That’s because you have no formal or quantitative definition of information. It is merely a target you continually move for no other reason than to try and prevent evolution from producing information.
See above.
I gave a really quantitative description. Good to describe exactly your primers, however in biology there is extensive exchange of information. And that is easily seen for production of information.
And it’s simple: in a closed natural system, information does not increase. Not only with regards to evolution. This law is universal. You can analyse and analyse but noise will not become signal.
There is nothing quantitative in that post. All you are doing is dragging the goal posts across the field.
If we compared the human and chimp genomes, would you consider the differences between the sequences of those genomes as an increase in information in either lineage?
OK, this is a new topic. Well, We are believed only to differ a few hunderthousand generations from chimps with a minimal effective population of 10000. And therefore a long waiting time for each mutation to settle. humans have several unique important brand new genes that have no ancestral relationship to any known other gene in biology and are believed to have emerged from scratch. If this was true, there was creation of information.
Thanks for the fascinating discussion.
In terms of the original question, I like the analogy of DNA and embodied computer software (ie. a computer program and a computer) better than DNA and language.
Perhaps one characteristic that brings it into sharper focus is self-replication. A book cannot replicate itself, so it, and its contents (language) are more abstract. However, it could describe to us, via language, how it could be replicated.
I am not a Biologist, but I guess a DNA molecule by itself cannot self-replicate either, rather it contains instructions on how to do it, and it must be a part of a larger system of molecules. So the analogy of DNA and a computer program and computer isn’t perfect either. But it seems closer to me.
As an aside, there are actually people who try to write self-replicating computer programs. They are called quines. See Quine (computing) - Wikipedia
Here is a question: are there biological systems that can be programmed in some sense? That is, they are something like a universal computer, that can run a program. I suppose it is an axiom of biology that the rules for DNA coding for proteins has not changed during the entire history of life on earth. Is that true? If so, perhaps organisms are more like special-purpose computers that are mind-bogglingly sophisticated and beautiful, but cannot be programmed. And, by replication, can produce mind-boggling diversity.
I can agree that we are talking past each other somewhat. Our interests and concerns are somewhat different. It is quite clear to me that language and DNA are more similar than either are to computer programs. Both language and DNA develop organically while a computer programs are a product of design. And for me this role of stochasticity only reinforces this. Yes people do read past punctuation and alter the meaning of what is said because of it. And this talk of functional dependence is misguided by suggesting design when design has nothing to do with either language or DNA.
Why is there a contradiction between been designed and being subject of evolution? Esperanto is designed.
Design is the only difference between living organisms and machines.
Like the genetic engineering of GMO soybeans, Esperanto was created from that which already evolved.
For what reason do you think that? Even the most simple cell is so complex that it is impossible to make a laboratory copy of it.