A challenge to Creationists.

Micaiah said:

Okay, I thought you had a little more insight into this topic. I'll start from scratch.

All living things are made up of little itsy bitsy things called cells. The DNA is something that lives in the cell. You and I started off as a cell, but that is another story.

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You still haven't defined information in a scientific sense you just gave examples. Is a pattern rocks information? What about a random arrangement of rocks? I can write a machine that uses random stuff to produce not so random stuff. Is the random stuff information? Science works more than vague explanations.

Ignoring all of these problems, suppose DNA is an information system. You still haven't explained what an increase/decrease of information is. How can we talk about increase and decrease of information without some sort of metric.

That's what the OP is about and that's what Creationists fail to do.

Here's an extremely interesting question, Micaiah, by what definition does a Mickey Mouse DVD have less information than the human DNA genome? this is a no-brainer, really.

Well, I will admit that you didn't make it sound rock-solid. But here's an indicative quote of your position:

I would be interested in some kind of explanation as to how the information in the DNA arose in the first place.

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http://www.christianforums.com/t2282677-there-is-no-basis-for-conflict-with-evolution.html&page=5

indicating that, in fact, you do not believe that there are any natural processes capable of spontaneously producing information. Am I correct?

And since I've tried my best to put together an information gain concept that works at my level and supports evolutionary theory, I really hope you could recapitulate with one of your own that supports creationist theory. Not everything should be cut-and-paste here. Like C.S. Lewis said, "The real test of faith is in the vernacular" - how can you hold to something you can't even begin to explain?

You seem to be missing the point I made in Post 43. There is evidence that mutations resulting from the action of transposons is not random. Like the conditional IF statement it may be triggered by a certain condition.

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So what if it is not random? (Define random, anyhow. For example, a coin toss is not random if we had a big enough supercomputer that could calculate the angular momentum imparted to it, its starting position, the number of turns it would make and the time before it hit the floor, it would know exactly in what position it would hit the floor and the coin toss would be completely deterministic. However, in practical life we have no such supercomputer, so it is random to a degree.)

Consider, say, a program which was its own editor/compiler. Imagine an editor/compiler which edits its own binary. When I open the editor, the characters I type in go right at the end of the file which is currently running. So, let's say I type in a complete program that does something, say plays a game of tic-tac-toe. Now when I open the editor again, it both starts editing itself and starts playing a game of tic-tac-toe.

My typing is non-random input.

Question: has the file's information content increased? And if not, why not?

Are Oxygen and Hydrogen molecules information system that store the information on how to make water?

Is H20 an information system that stores the information on how to make ice and steam?

Comparing a chemical molecule that reacts to form proteins to a DVD is not a good analogy. In the case of DNA, the medium is also the actor. This is not the case with computers or DNA.

The genome is evidently a lot more that just an information storage system, and is not just a series of unrelated chemical reactions. This highlights the intelligence in the design of the genome.

KerrMetric said:

Please define "information" in a precise manner that allows you to use it as a metric for information content.

In other words, when you make statements that mutations cannot increase information content I want you to show me mathematically with a precise definition of information that this is so.

Be the first Creationist to ever answer this challenge!

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You mean like the RNA / DNA thing? For example, the chances of a monkey whacking away on a keyboard for enough time to produce a coherent sentence is lessened when one takes into account that every other key on the keyboard is poisonous to the monkey. You mean like that?

What challenge? ssstt!

Micaiah said:

The genome is evidently a lot more that just an information storage system, and is not just a series of unrelated chemical reactions. This highlights the intelligence in the design of the genome.

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Of course. It's a series of related chemical reactions. However, it's governed by physics and chemistry.

johnd said:

You mean like the RNA / DNA thing? For example, the chances of a monkey whacking away on a keyboard for enough time to produce a coherent sentence is lessened when one takes into account that every other key on the keyboard is poisonous to the monkey. You mean like that?

What challenge? ssstt!

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Toxic key syndrome?

Since we like quantifying so much, Micaiah, why don't you quantify your claim that there is intelligence designed in the development of the DNA genome. How much information is needed to put together a DNA-RNA transcription protein construction system? And why can't abiogenetic reactions supply that information?

shernren said:

Since we like quantifying so much, Micaiah, why don't you quantify your claim that there is intelligence designed in the development of the DNA genome. How much information is needed to put together a DNA-RNA transcription protein construction system? And why can't abiogenetic reactions supply that information?

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And the answer is ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 42

Only 42? And you're saying abiogenesis is hard?