On Eric Drexler’s blog for Janury 30, 2009, he embedded a video from Drew Berry that is the best current animation of how DNA works inside a cell in real time.
It shows how genetic information is encoded and replicated and should make clear all the ways errors can occur and how they would propagate. Sometimes pictures really do help.
Yeah, it was a spur of the moment post, I apologize. The OP and the rest of this thread is about the details of genetic mutation, and I shouldn’t have butted in.
However, I just couldn’t help thinking that the OP’s friend had no such intention. Every time I hear the words “information” and “evolution” together, it is a creationist trying to use information theory to debunk evolution. Usually in the form of “information is conserved, so how can random mutations create more information and therefore ‘higher’ animals?”
Anyway, again I apologize. Lobot isn’t a creationist, and I shouldn’t be judging his friend based on one paraphrased sentence.
So much excellent information here, and those videos in particular are extraordinary! Thanks to everyone.
Just to be 100% clear, I’m not a Creationist in the least (in fact I’m an atheist). My friend is a Christian, but I don’t think he’s a Creationist so much as an evolutionary agnostic (so to speak). However, I didn’t want to probe too far–that way lies madness.
Oh, I think he probably is a creationist - or at the very least, has uncritically accepted some things told to him by creationists - the ‘no new information’ thing is a really common standard creationist argument.
Not to bring this too far into GD territory, but the conversation started with “Those nutty anti-vax’ers!” where we were both in agreement. This moved to the idea of dogmatic, uncritical belief, to which he raised evolutionary theory as an example. I was taken aback, to say the least.
But I do think it’s conceivable to buy into Creationist arguments enough to doubt natural selection, etc., without then necessarily accepting the alternative hypothesis. Of course, I think “Creation science” is pseudo-scientific bunk that warrants derision at best, but that’s not the point.
Fair enough - you know the guy, we don’t - it just seemed like a bog-standard creationist argument.
Having said that, I worked for a guy who wasn’t a creationist at all, but didn’t accept evolution, so I guess they’re out there.
The question is invalid - evolution by natural selection is not a random process. It’s true that it is a process that contains noise, but the noise is selected for based on reproductive fitness. Generally the process adds information to what already exists (e.g., makes new things out of the parts of things its already made) because its much more complicated (and statistically unlikely) to go back and recode what already exists in order to accommodate a new feature. An example of this is areas of the brain. Various brain areas tend to evolve together. It’s possible of course for one brain area to evolve independently of other areas but generally brain areas scale linearly with eachother in size during evolution. It would be very complicated, even if you had perfect knowledge of the genome, to go back and genetically untie one brain area from the others such that you could scale them independently. Thus, they all tend to evolve in a synchronized fashion and you get general improvement of all areas. This is actually quite a good thing - it means new areas such as prefrontal cortex get wired up with old areas such as the cerebellum, giving you lots of extra function.
Now that’s just brilliant. Thanks for the link!
Newspaper A: “Hanson convicted”
Newspaper B: “Hanson not convicted”
Does this pair, one of which is a flawed copy, contain more, less or the same information as the original? Could the flawed copy be said to contain negative information?
Of course most flaws will be identifiable as flaws and ignored or removed, or are better than the original. But it seems to me it’s at least possible to have negative information. 
I think some people are understanding information “syntactically” while others are undestanding it “semantically.” In other words, some are using the term “information” in a way which allows you to measure the amount of information simply by looking at the symbol string, without reference to what the symbol string means. Others are using the term “information” in a way which requires reference to the meaning of the symbol string.
It looks like mathematical and physical notions of information are syntactic, while many lay people naturally assume information measurements are semantic.
The two headlines you listed, looked at purely syntactically, contain more information than either single headline would.
Thought of semantically, you could say the pair contains “less information” than either single one would, because the pair taken together, interpreted as English sentences, is less useful than either one would be by itself.
-FrL-
The one thing many people cannot comprehend is the numbers involved. The human genome is 3200,000,000 base pairs long. Transcription errors in DNA run to about 1 per 10,000,000, so during any cell division, there could be up to 320 base transcription errors. Humans have 10[sup]14[/sup] cells, so the possible variation just in a single person is huge. Multiply that by 6 billion individuals, then scale by geological time…
The point is, a single error in a single strand of DNA is not worth much, just like a single character error in a newspaper may not make any sense. But generate billions of newspapers, and discard those with spelling mistakes (which will be most) and eventually you will have a paper that makes sense and says something different (and maybe better).
Si
Then multiply by the ratio of successful gametes to cells in the body. (Or just remove 10[sup]14[/sup] and replace it with something in the range of… 2 - 10.)