==Both Jonathan Wells and Stephen Meyer evidently believe that Shannon Information Theory (not to mention Kolmogorov information complexity) is a theory of functional biological information.
The more I read about the subject, the more I have come to realize that it is the evos who want to limit the study of biological information to Shannon-type information. But as Wells, Meyer, Williams, Gitt and many others point out, if Shannon information cannot tell the difference between mere statistical complexity and CSI, then it is not up to the task...which does not take away from what Shannon information was designed to describe and explain in the least IMHO.
All the best—GGG
Well, whatta surprise! /sarc.
That only tells me that evos don't understand Shannon any better than Wells and Meyers do!
In short, Shannon Information theory is NOT a theory of functional biological information at all.
But then many evos are disturbed about the very idea of biological function in the first place. For the idea of "function" involves a kind of (seeming) "causal pull from the future" (as we see with Alex Williams' very interesting model of inversely-causal metainformation) — a/k/a a "final cause" — which is the sort of thing that the Newtonian model of physico-mechanics forbids.
Newtonian causation proceeds only from past to present, in irreversible serial time. The future (when we get there) is merely the sum total of past events. There is no idea that past events conduce towards a pre-existing, specified goal (i.e., biological function), that there can be any "guide to the system"; for evos, random mutation + natural selection in serial time explains everything biological. Adherents of the Newtonian paradigm will only concede that something may well "look like" a function; but that in fact if we think we see a "function," what we are really seeing is just an illusion.
Moreover, the evos evidently understand that, at some level, the idea of a specified biological function is inimicable to a theory based on "random mutation + natural selection." They want to find that increases in biological complexity result from a "blind," material process. One gathers they may be quite at a loss to integrate the idea of biological information — which is not physical or mechanical — into the Darwinian model. And so one imagines a tendency to denigrate it, or perhaps even to misrepresent what biological information is.
Whatever the case, biological information isn't described by Shannon Information Theory. Maybe this is why evos like Shannon theory. In the information hierarchy, it is very "low order," and applies to physico-mechanical systems as well as to biological ones. :^)