I take responsibility for the sloppy wording about prions.
That section of our book tried to address the inevitable "laundry list" of anomalies when discussing information theory applied to molecular biology.
The point was that the prion contains no message (DNA, RNA) and is not autonomous to the molecular machine. Under the Shannon model, it would a type of "noise."
In sum, when the prion is introduced into the communication - it causes malfunctions either in the channel or decoding, e.g. blocking the successful communication of beneficial messages perhaps as you say by causing other proteins to misfold.
The emphasis was on the communication (information theory) of the message (DNA, RNA.) Prions have no message and are not part of the communication, they are like meteorites pounding a radio transmitter/receiver. They are made of the same 'stuff' but they don't belong there.
The “message” of an ingested prion protein is to “tell” a native prion protein to misfold. It is not “noise” so much as it is a molecular trap that other prion proteins can fall into, thus luring even more into the “trap” of being a misfolded mess.
Prions HAVE a message, and an essential function, when they are folded correctly. They are part of the message, made of the same “stuff” (that stuff being an amino acid chain coded for by a messenger RNA transcribed from DNA). It is only when the information is “garbled” by misfolding, and able to “garble” by misfolding other prion proteins that leads to the pathology.
As I said. What you wrote made absolutely no sense in the way you wrote it, betrayed a deep ignorance of molecular biology and no actual knowledge of prions, and would make no sense to anybody who possesses this knowledge.
Luckily in your case I don't think your “target audience” is either in possession of this knowledge or desires to know anything about Molecular Biology; and they will be well served by reading what you wrote, as it will not actually increase their knowledge of Molecular Biology.
[[The point was that the prion contains no message (DNA, RNA) and is not autonomous to the molecular machine. Under the Shannon model, it would a type of “noise.”
In sum, when the prion is introduced into the communication - it causes malfunctions either in the channel or decoding, e.g. blocking the successful communication of beneficial messages perhaps as you say by causing other proteins to misfold.]]
and here again we see the importance of metainfo- species specific metainfo controlling, directing, allowing or dissallowing change- all withint species specific parameters.
The changes that would have had to occure for macroevolution would have included introducing, not just simplistic /micro-changes accumulating harmlessly, that had no apparent effect on the species, but would out of necessity had to include drastic changes to bring about hte morphological and biological changes that would move a species beyond it’s own kind- even gradually this would have presented a HUGE problem for hte speices, and would have proven deadly, as htese changes woudl have broken the boundaries of allowable microevolutionary change, and would have affected many many systems and subsystems, and would not have had rthe proper metainfo to deal with al lthese changes- to control htem, intigrate them, coordinate, and utilize htem for hte preservation of the species. The info to do so would simply have been non existent- We know htis from experiments and breedign programs.