To be honest, I've never seen a gapper attempt to be scientifically consistent with observed facts. Maybe this is me being callously deaf, but it seems that gappers don't really appeal to science to support their notions. After all, if I get thing right, Gap Theory thinks that Satan performed one gigantic supernatural muckup between Gen 1:1 and 1:2, right? How are we expected to quantify that? How do we falsify that?
I guess that gives me a little respect for them. YECists seem perfectly happy to try and prove a supernatural event through naturalistic evidence.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v...nformation.asp
Ignore the rhetoric in the main body of the article. Just look at the footnotes, they tell you everything you need to know.
1. This paper has presented only a qualitative survey of the higher levels of information. A quantitative survey is among the many tasks still to be performed.
In cruder words, "We're just telling you some of the characteristics of information. We still have no idea how to measure it." Note that for you to say that something "adds information" we need a quantitative ("how much?") measurement of information - precisely what this article
doesn't give.
Whoops!
2. This paper has been adapted from a paper entitled ‘Information: the third fundamental quantity’ that was published in the November/December 1989 issue of Siemens Review (Vol. 56, No. 6).
No wonder. This isn't an article about biological information; it's an article about information in communication technology. No wonder. Note that the article can be edited to remove all reference to DNA and biological information and still be a perfectly legible, but now completely irrelevant, article.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/feedback/negative_10September2001.asp
I don't pretend to be an information theoreticist, but Spetner has majorly mixed some apples and oranges right from the start:
The products of a substrate on which the enzyme has a higher activity will be more numerous than those of a substrate on which the enzyme has a lower activity. Because of the filtering, the distribution of concentrations of products will have a lower entropy (1) than that of substrates. Note that we are neglecting whatever entropy (2) change stems from the chemical changes of the substrates into products, and we are focusing on the entropy (3) change reflected in the distributions of the products of the substrates acted upon by the enzyme.
(emphases and numbers added)
Note that Lee uses the word "entropy" 3 different times in this passage which sets out the basic assumptions of his calculations. It's quite clear that Lee means informational entropy in case 1 and 3, but just what does he mean by entropy 2? After all, his whole article is
about the entropy change that "stems from the chemical changes the substrates into the products"; his premise is that an enzyme's information content is measured by how much the entropy of the final distribution of products is as compared to the initial distribution of substrates. He can't possibly disregard the main subject of his entire article and the source of his only quantitative measurements! He is disregarding
chemical, or thermodynamic, entropy here. What a sad case of mixing. It is as if someone said: "There were four crosses at Calvary: Jesus' cross, the two thieves' crosses, and the cross soldiers."
Besides, Lee himself admits that mutations can cause information gain. As quoted from
http://members.tripod.com/aslodge/id89.htm :
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
It's interesting, first of all, that the URL you pointed to picked the "nylon bug" as an example of a random mutation yielding a gain of information. (The short answer is, the mutation does yield an increase of information, but was it random?) It's interesting because the "nylon bug" is exactly what I used in my letter #7 to Jim Crow (of which you got a copy) as a possible example of a nonrandom mutation triggered by the environment. To respond to your query, I shall have to elaborate on this more than I did in that letter, which was not polemical.[/FONT]
(emphasis added) It is obvious that I am not quoting Lee out of context here; you can check that yourself. Lee is very convinced now (or has to admit, at any rate) that the nylon bug
does indeed add information; therefore he has to shift the goalposts and ask now if "
random mutations add information", as if he has any way to prove that beneficial mutations are not random!
