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Originally Posted by Akashic_Librarian  "if you want to get to 10 and you have 6, no amount of subtraction or re-arranging numbers will take you there, you must add to what you have."
Thats amazing. Pure rational thought, the basis of evolution is almost disproved in that very sentence. Bravo! |
I agree; well put. It's too bad it suffers from a disconnect from the preceding point, which I quote: "Even in the very rare case where a mutation is beneficial it is because of a decrease in the amount of information."
Information is not arithmetic. You cannot count bits of information and add them all up into a total sum. Similarly, you cannot subtract information from a whole such that there is less information.
Let's take the English alphabet (kindly provided by my keyboard) and randomly generate (semi-random: my hands) an encoded sequence:
LSDJAHFLUIARHIOUARHFKLASJERHFLKASJEHFLAK
I deleted one character such that there are now 40 characters in the sequence. Is there information in this sequence?
Yes and no.
Yes. I notice things like "LSD" is the first three characters, an acronym for a drug. "FLAK" is the last four, a type of shrapnel. "JER" is a name. "FLU" is a disease. "IOU" is an abbreviation for debt. And so on. Try this yourself: you can find dozens. Perhaps I even interpret it into a secret message. Perhaps it's a ROT-13 encryption (though there aren't any 40-letter words that aren't chemical names or German, to my knowledge).
But, no. Taken as a whole, I cannot pass it to someone else and expect them to decode it the same way; it was hardly encrypted.
Asking you this binary question, "This sequence contains information, yes or no?", the answer varies based on circumstance and interpreter. That is the nature of information. The actual sequence has not changed. This is an important point.
In a genetic sequence, evolution depends upon mutations. Mutations, in this case, can be simulated by randomly changing one letter of the sequence to another. Let's say I do a lot of mutations and eventually come up with this new 39-letter sequence:
FORGODSOLOVEDTHEWORLDHEGAVEUSHISONLYSON
Did we lose information, or did we gain information? After all, we even
lost a letter! (Maybe it mutated into a period.) The correct answer is: It depends entirely on the context (a Roman would be quite perplexed) and the interpreter (read: Forg od solo ved'th eworl d'hega...).
You would have a hard time counting to 6, here, let alone 10.
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It cannot be stressed enough that what natural selection actually does is get rid of information.
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So we come around full circle to this notion that eliminating genes for, say, short roots is an elimination of information. There is a second problem to this argument, but I am less equipped to address it, since I am trained as an information scientist, not as a genetic one.
The crux of the problem is this: there is no such thing as The Short Root Gene. There is no Blue Eye Gene, or Red Hair Gene, or Tall Gene (what, is there a six-foot gene, a five-foot gene, and a four-foot gene?) High school biology teaches us how dominant and recessive genes will create the probability for potential outcomes. What it does not inform us of is that a gene is not totally responsible for anything.
You notice, after all, that they do not actually make a connection between the four chemicals, abbreviated ACGT, and those pretty little matrices. That's because there isn't one. Well, not one that an undergraduate college student specializing in biology and genetics could be reasonably expected to design and process in a year, never mind the average high schooler.
This gets into the area where I'm ignorant.
Let's say you have a group of ten genes, and you have this trait for red hair. Why do you have red hair? There is no single gene responsible for it: let's say we pick one at random and alter it. Suddenly, we may not have red hair. Instead, we might have six toes on each foot. When we say that mutations are generally not beneficial, you can see why: perhaps a mutation would produce an infant with only one lung. A beneficial mutation is not an evolutionary advantage: it's a survivable change. This is why incest is frowned upon: it increases the likelihood of deformed children. Mutants.
So, getting back to the original point.
Genes are not merely carriers of information, eliminated willy-nilly by the harsh fiat of natural selection. Within human beings (a single species!), we have an amazingly diverse representation, from skin, eye, and hair color, to physical size, mental disposition, even handedness. And yet our genetic structures are almost identical.
Yes, genes are an analogue for words, and perhaps species are paragraphs. Novels, even. And in these words, we have but four letters.
And yet, with these four letters, we represent every species on this planet. Information comes from the interpretation of these letters, these words. ACGT TGAC GTCA may mean a dark-skinned nomad to a desert, but it may mean a fair-haired sailor to the Arctice ice. Information is derived from context and its interpreter.
It's not 1+1. The oxymoron, "a deafening silence," comes to mind. An absence is as informative as a presence.