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To: GodGunsGuts; Alamo-Girl; CottShop; tacticalogic
...it is the evos who want to limit the study of biological information to Shannon-type information.

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. :^)

28 posted on 10/16/2009 12:17:24 PM PDT by betty boop (Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is. —Pope Benedict XVI)
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To: betty boop
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.

So very true! Their strained references to "apparent" function are strangely humorous.

Whatever the case, biological information isn't described by Shannon Information Theory. Maybe this is why evos like Shannon theory.

Truly, Shannon Information Theory v. Complex Systems Theory is a false dichotomy.

Thank you for your wonderful essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!

32 posted on 10/16/2009 10:24:18 PM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: betty boop

Excellent reply, BB! I like your casaul pull from the future...aka forward planning. To this day, in all my reading, the evos have never come up with a satisfactory answer for that...no will they ever IMHO. Unless you consider trillions of mindless pre-adaption miracles as a satisfactory answer, Creationists and IDers have the best explanation for inversely causal meta-information by far.


33 posted on 10/17/2009 9:38:10 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
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