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In What Way Does the Human Genome Contain More Information than any Bacteria Genome?

Impaler

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In this blog creationist Michael Egnor was being asked to define information. Like any good creationist he refused to provide a solid definition and instead asked the evolutionists to do it. He did, however, make this statement:

Even though we can’t measure it (and serious investigators like Dembsky are trying to figure this out), we know biological information when we see it.

Now if information is needed in evolution then there must be some organism that actually has information that would have needed to evolve. We apparently don't need any system to accurately measure it, instead we can just look at the genome and say "yep, that's it there".:sigh:

So seeing how we've sequenced the human genome surely there must be something in there that creationists would call information. So I ask you to explain how the human genome contains more information than bacteria's. I ask you to use bacteria because the difference in information should be quite apparent, though you can use any organism if you wish.
 
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heh, we just had a massive argument with a creationist over on iidb who was making exactly that point "we know it when we see it"....

The problem with the information argument as it stands is that the creationists tend to think in terms of sending a signal - where the information at the start is compared to the information at the end and any differences are treated as a loss in the information.

That of course isn't a biologically useful definition, since DNA is about function and so it is more logical to treat information in terms of what things the DNA can define. By this I mean if we have the gene for a protein, and then we make a duplicate of it and alter one of the duplicates, we now have two genes, for two different proteins. Creationists might crow that this is just a deformation of the original information and yet does not count, yet it is by precisely this sort of mutation that we end up with things like antifreeze proteins in fish, and the blood clotting cascade. If a creationist would like to show me how a fish with an antifreeze protein has the same or less information than one without in a rigorous mathematical manner, I would be delighted to see their attempt.
 
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flatworm

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The problem with the "we know it when we see it" approach is that their entire argument is based on a quantitative claim. They claim it is impossible for this quantity, called "biological information", to increase by natural means.

One wonders how they arrived at this conclusion, if they still have yet to actually measure or compute this quantity for any organism whatsoever.
 
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Impaler

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Saying "we know it when we see it" also gives them the absolute, final word on the subject.

"It doesn't matter what you think information is, or if you can logically conclude that a mutation is new information. If I say it's not information it's not, because only I know what information is."
 
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RedAndy

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This kind of thing is distressingly common in Creationism/Intelligent Design/whatever euphemism they are using today. "Information," "Kind," "Evolutionism," and so on, are all ambiguously defined, but we are assured that the Creationists "know it when they see it."
 
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arensb

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The problem with the information argument as it stands is that the creationists tend to think in terms of sending a signal - where the information at the start is compared to the information at the end and any differences are treated as a loss in the information.

That of course isn't a biologically useful definition, since DNA is about function and so it is more logical to treat information in terms of what things the DNA can define. By this I mean if we have the gene for a protein, and then we make a duplicate of it and alter one of the duplicates, we now have two genes, for two different proteins. Creationists might crow that this is just a deformation of the original information and yet does not count, yet it is by precisely this sort of mutation that we end up with things like antifreeze proteins in fish, and the blood clotting cascade. If a creationist would like to show me how a fish with an antifreeze protein has the same or less information than one without in a rigorous mathematical manner, I would be delighted to see their attempt.

Right. The whole "information" thing is just a red herring:

Biologist: New features appear over time through natural selection.

Creationist: Ah, but where did the information for these new features come from?

Biologist: <gene duplication> <mutation> <recombination> <selection> <etc> and you wind up with fish whose blood doesn't freeze in cold water. [produces several papers demonstrating this in the lab and in the wild]

Creationist: Ah, but that's just reshuffling or corrupting information that was already there, so there was no gain of information!

Biologist: Okay, so new features can appear even without a gain of information. So what's the problem?
 
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Impaler

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Biologist: Okay, so new features can appear even without a gain of information. So what's the problem?

Good point, only creationists insist that there is information in organisms. That's why I want them to point out exactly what part of human genome can only be explained by increased information.
 
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FishFace

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I don't think many of us understand what the creationist is getting at when they say, "but no new information was added," because what they are trying to say, albeit it in a very poorly described manner, is valid.

When we explain evolution, we might use the example of a giraffe's neck getting longer, and the tree getting taller, and so on until practical limits take over. Or we might cite antibiotic resistance which often occurs through inactivation of a protein, preventing binding. The thing is, if these kinds of changes are the only ones possible i.e. making something taller, faster, bigger, smaller or just plain gone, then evolution would not work. You need a process by which the neck itself evolved, or by which a bacterium evolved the protein the first place.

That is what the creationist is trying to say, I think, when they complain about information. Now, we know, of course, that there are obvious instances when novel functions have arisen - nylonase, for example, or the many antibiotic resistances accomplished through novel proteins.
When we explain these things, it may transpire that the creationist simply says, "but that's just reshuffling existing information." In which case new information isn't necessary for evolution.
But new features are necessary.
 
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