All I can say at this point is you need to do the homework problem I posed. Otherwise, we are going to be stuck at a language barrier. We need to be able to use a precise definition of information to avoid endless semantic arguments.
The analogy shows that saying duplication changes function does not necessarily entail information has increased.
An analogy is only an analogy. When the analogy departs from the real world and is no longer useful, it should be abandoned.
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It is not contradicting the real world example. Dr. Venema inferred something from the real world example, and my analogy shows, using a more familiar example that we can more easily reason about, that this inference is not warranted.
At any rate, at this point we can say at best it is unclear duplication increases information, and according to well established information theory duplication does not increase information.
On the other hand, Dr. Venema correctly points out duplication and divergence can increase Shannon entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. Whether this entails an increase in mutual, e.g. functional information, is a separate question, which I can dig into if there is interest.
And the real-world example from actual biological systems shows that two (or more) copies of an enzyme sometimes is useful, provides an advantage that can be selected, and thus increases biological information (by any reasonable definition of biological information).
You know, it’s interesting. This is exactly where ID was ten or fifteen years ago - arguing that evolution cannot produce new information, and trying to minimize the similarity between the human and chimp genomes. It’s like things haven’t changed a whit.
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The whole-genome duplication events in vertebrates and subsequent divergence and neofunctionalization of the resulting paralogs is absolutely an increase in “functional information” in that lineage. There are no reasonable biological arguments otherwise.
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Probably because the fundamental claim of ID is evolution cannot produce new information. I suspect that is the reason they haven’t changed the argument. Plus, it is mathematically provable, which is always a plus.
so back to @shekar’s original question to me… some of this discussion has demonstrated some of the other sources of my skepticism. with greatest respect to the great learning and knowledge of some here, their perspective still belies to me that their embrace of the Darwinist process leads them into what seem to me things that stretch my credulity part the breaking point. the idea that transforming a primate into a human is an easy, nearly inevitable process… i am astounded by the bulls-eye of what humanity is… our ability to read, write, love, understand morality, dignity, appreciate beauty in art, music, performance art, higher levels of science, math, and logic, and to me most astounding personally, ring, appreciating, and performing music. to be simply told it is a mere few serendipitous mutations, you don’t need a lot, and there is certainly nothing extraordinary, about humanity compared to other primates comes across to me as preposterous. But it seems necessary to embrace to uphold the Darwinian paradigm.
then, i am told that DNA does not contain “information”. Right. OK, but then neither does a 3D printer. If the embrace of Darwinism requires me to believe that the DNA and transcription process is not essentially an information processing system, i will have to remain solid in my incredulity. If we were smart enough to develop similar systems… artificially designed molecular information storing and processing systems, designed to create molecular machines… no one would blink and deny this was an “information processing” system, if it was something invented by the mind of man.
so humans are “just” primates with a few extra convenient mutations over other primates. DNA and related transcriptions are “just” chemical reactions that do things. i almost want to invoke a certain quote from a certain U.S. representative… this minimizing the astounding intricacy of the DNA data storage, transcription, and processing system feels to me similar to that other stunningly minimizing verbal hand wave… “some chemicals did something.”
when an embrace of a darwinism requires one to deny what seems to me patently obvious and nearly self-evident, and requires this level of what seems to me astounding minimization and hand-waves… this further contributes to my underlying skepticism.
And finally, @shekar, some will accuse me of painting the bulls eye around the target, when i express astonishment about the wonder of mankind. they are welcome to do so. But if Darwinism would require me to believe that there is nothing particularly extraordinary, stunning, astounding, or glorious about man that sets him apart from the animals, then my skepticism will be to that same degree further corroborated.
if someone wants to claim that Shakespeare was likewise “painting a bulls-eye around the target,” so be it. But if Darwinism would require me to deny this apt description as being anthropocentric, i must demur. i think the bard was recognizing something bjectively true, similarly attested in Scripture and across human cultures. If Darwinism would require me to deny this most apt sentiment of humanity, i will remain skeptical.
What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.
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No I don’t. You know no jargon, no math, no logic that conjure God up.
We are amazing creatures indeed. I’d be surprised if any believer here would take issue with the lofty descriptions you have for humanity here.
I also wonder if you don’t underestimate the already astounding, wonderfully tiny bulls-eye of a target the formation of a Chimpanzees or other apes already were - in the form of a common ancestor before us. You make much of what humanity is (and rightly so), but I fear in your zeal you’ve unintentionally made too little of what primates already generally were before we came on the scene? How do you know that this “primate material” could not be sufficient material for God to hone down a branch of it to a point where possibilities of ethics, love, invention, exploration could not take root, grow, and then finally “explode” onto the scene? Consider other mammals … lizards … insects … finally microbes, and then see if you can maintain your conviction that the great apes weren’t genetically already 99.?% in our direction compared to all that “simpler” life from even farther before.
A little lower than angels we are indeed. But let’s not pretend that, at least materially speaking, the rest of creation is actually so far behind us. God’s glory is not limited to the hominid species alone.
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Not what I am arguing. My argument is we can mathematically prove evolution cannot produce information, yet the human mind can. Therefore, something analogous to the human mind is responsible for all the information in the genome, not evolution. All these claims are within the hard sciences and mathematics.
I think @DennisVenema is right. That particular battle was settled long ago. Deja vu.
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That is a hallmark of pseudo-science–ID makes no progress. When asked years ago why ID hadn’t made progress, Bill Dembski complained that it wasn’t getting funded.
Short answer: it doesn’t. What makes you think a new gene would never provide a selective advantage? You might want to look at this paper, which is a more recent study of candidate novel genes in humans, where ‘novel’ means they derive from non-coding sequence, not from gene duplication. They identified 634 human-specific genes. Not surprisingly, these tend to be shorter and less transcribed than inherited genes. What’s interesting is that for only a handful of them could they find any evidence that a protein was actually being produced or that the gene was serving any function; most of the rest are presumably transient, soon to vanish.
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Without context it’s like asking whether a gene is big or not. What aspect of reality do you want to use ‘information’ to describe?
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Thus demonstrating that word count in an English paper is a bad analogy to gene count in biological systems. We could start a list of bad possible analogies to how DNA works in biological systems but we’d need a very long piece of paper.
Duplicating a gene sometimes has functional effect on an organism. That is an important fact about the world. Whether you describe that by some kind of information or not is up to you, but it has no effect on the reality and is not itself important.
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Exactly. So, to say ID is wrong because duplication doubles information is a non sequitur.
Thus demonstrating that evolutionary theory is a really bad case of the no true scotsmam fallacy 
I’m not trying to be combative – different metrics are useful for different purposes.
Not really. We have quite a bit of experience with genetics by this time and have a pretty solid basis for saying that low-complexity (highly repetitive) DNA is unlikely to have much function that depends in detail on the sequence or length of the region.
HARs are regions that are highly conserved across most vertebrates but quite different in humans. The motivation for identifying them was to find good candidates for regions that had been under strong selection in humans and that therefore might underlie interesting traits. Upon further investigation, some of them turned out likely to not result from strong directional selection but from very high mutation rates caused by recombination hotspots and GC-biased gene conversion. Others did indeed look like the probable result of strong selection. I’ve largely left working on human genetics, so I don’t know if there have been any major developments in the last few years.
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