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To: Rytwyng
...violations of Shannon Entropy (informational theory.)

This just doesn't make any sense. Why do imperfect self-replicators violate Shannon Entropy?

340 posted on 10/08/2002 2:42:05 PM PDT by BMCDA
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To: BMCDA
...violations of Shannon Entropy (informational theory.)

This just doesn't make any sense. Why do imperfect self-replicators violate Shannon Entropy?

Imperfect self replicators can't create meaningful code in more than one or rarely two step iterations. Sudden appearance of coordinated traits is probabilistically impossible. Think of a computer program, that's copied over and over: the program might get a typo in replication (which may kill it, or disable it, or may occasionally make a small functional change), but large coordinated sections of functional new code need to be intelligently written. Even the simplest computer viruses need to be created by pranksters, they don't originate at random by mutation of other code.

Darwin himself admitted that if it were established that some complex structure could no originate step-by-step, evolution would utterly break down. The sudden appearance of whole new orders in the fossil record (eg, the Cambrian explosion) cannot be accounted for evolutionarily.

359 posted on 10/08/2002 4:34:57 PM PDT by Rytwyng
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