Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Liberty1970
This makes it easy for evolutionists to claim that random processes can generate "information".

Source?

8 posted on 10/15/2009 8:35:39 PM PDT by ColdWater
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies ]


To: ColdWater
This makes it easy for evolutionists to claim that random processes can generate "information". Source?

A monkey typing on a typewriter creates Shannon information. Thus not a few Darwinist writers have simply dismissed the information problem by asserting that information is generated constantly by mutational changes.

I don't have a link offhand, but Richard Dawkins would be an example. He tried to recover from an interview with Gillian Brown that subsequently became part of the video From A Frog to a Prince, in which he was unable to provide an example of evolution producing information. In his follow-up, he claimed that natural selection 'informs' the genome by selecting out unsuitable mutants.

In other words, if you have a population of black and white moths and natural selection kills off all of one color, then informational gain has occured. In a sense this is true, but it is silly to portray it as a solution to the origin of information in the genome itself - natural selection (by itself) weeds out genomic information, leading to less information in the genome, not more.

I presume that there is more serious thinking going on somewhere among evolutionary theorists who grasp the information problem, but at the popular/propaganda level, they are either not getting it, or pretending not to get it.

17 posted on 10/16/2009 7:10:55 AM PDT by Liberty1970 (Democrats are not in control. God is. And Thank God for that!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson