This is the point that betty boop and I keep trying to drive home on threads involving "information theory and molecular biology."
Shannon's theory is about communications. It involves all of the elements: message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, decoding and receiver.
Under the Shannon model, information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver (or molecular machine) as it goes from a before state to an after state. It is the successful communication, not any particular element of it.
Dawkins - and ever so many others - want to cherry-pick from Shannon's model and decree what information "is." When we let them to get away with it, they change the focus of the debate to one of the elements - typically the message itself.
But when a person realizes the full import of Shannon's model to molecular biology - he will surely understand (as evidenced in Diamond's excerpt) - that all of the elements have to be there at the same point in time for communications to occur. And even then, it takes an event - like a desire arising in the sender to inform the receiver of something - to initiate a communication.
A message, sender, receiver, coding system (language, semiosis) or channel just sitting there does not accomplish a communication.
By some initiation event the sender has a message to transmit in order to reduce uncertainty in the receiver. It is purposeful. It is teleological per se.
Truly, the receiver must be prepared to receive the message, both must speak the same language (encoding/decoding) - and the medium (channel) of the transmission must be autonomous to the communication (that sender, that receiver) to cope with the noise.
BTW, betty boop and I have categorized the initiation events to these three types: 1) interrupt, something happens in the environment - like food to an anthrax spore, or the movement of a mouse on a PC, 2) cycle, an interval of time, a pinging or rhythm like a heart beat, and most importantly, 3) an act of will - such as a bird choosing to fly away when released from the top of a building (instead of unwillingly going "splat".)
Certainly, the Shannon model - being mathematics could care less the meaning of the message. For instance, the formula for the area of a rectangle doesn't change with the size or composition of it.
But of a truth, meaning is the point of the communication to both sender and receiver! Communications is purposeful.
The likes of Dawkins get tunnel-visioned on the information content of the received message. And no doubt atheism and naturalism deny purpose in nature as an article of faith. But the point of Shannon is that all the elements must be there, at the same time - and there must be an initiation.
It is also obvious that any "thing" which cannot communicate is not alive - and that any "thing" which can no longer communicate is dead.
When some of us Christians see Shannon's theory applied to molecular biology it is obvious that life could not emerge by happenstance, i.e. without God. It is also obvious that life need not be restricted to the physical, i.e. spiritual life, we are dead and alive with Christ in God (Col 3:3)
In short, biological functions (which are by definition purposeful, in that the function exists to secure a biological end or goal) that depend on successful communication of information (which seems to be all biological functions, including those at the level of single-celled entities) cannot be the product of an evolutionary development based on random mutation/natural selection (i.e., a gradualist, step-by-step process). Rather, evolutionary development is “drawn” from an information source, e.g., Williams’ concept of inversely-causal meta-information. If there is an information source, then it follows that its “information” is purposeful.
And yet the natural sciences nowadays refuse to grapple with teleology, with the idea that nature is “purposeful.” Here’s an interesting observation that helps provide perspective from a(n) (in)famous scientist whose name is associated with the ID “movement”:
Centuries ago nascent modern science took a crucial step. Breaking at last with the old Aristotelian thinking, it would no longer consider nebulous “final causes” in its explanations. Whether the ultimate purpose of, say, a mountain was to display the grandeur of God or something else could not be decided by an investigation of nature. Henceforth such questions would be relegated to philosophy or theology. Science would deliberately confine itself to issues about the mechanics of nature, and ignore issues of purpose. What a horse or a river or star is “for” would trouble science no longer.Thus Darwinists say purpose [teleology] in nature is only apparent, not real. Just as Dawkins says, when having to account for the obvious presence of design in nature, that this is not really design, but merely apparent design; he terms entities displaying this (to him fictional) quality as “designoids.”At the time it seemed like a prudent course of action. Yet the simplistic division of labor was doomed from the start, because some parts of nature quite clearly are “for” identifiable things. Science wished to explain the mechanics of nature apart from purpose, but especially in biology the mechanics themselves often cannot be understood apart from purpose. The “function” of a mountain may not be decidable, but the function of a wing surely is. The purpose of a horse might be obscure, but the purpose of a horse’s eye is not.
Biologists of course realized this. Only when Darwin seemed to provide a non-purposive explanation for apparent purpose could life itself be accommodated within the new framework. Biology was the last scientific discipline to come fully under the sway of non-Aristotelian, mechanistic thinking. Subsequently biologists continued to think and speak of aspects of life in terms of purpose, but only with the (usually implicit) understanding that is was merely apparent purpose. Although over the years many scientists acting as individuals concluded that purpose was real, “official” biology self-consciously restricted itself to considering only non-purposive explanations for the origin of the apparently purposeful systems of life.
I argue that this state of affairs is no longer tenable. Although for convenience humans may carve up intellectual pursuits into various academic disciplines, reality is not obliged to respect such boundaries. In order to come to grips with the real world — in order to arrive at true explanations — rationality demands that we abjure artificial distinctions when their usefulness appears to have reached its limit. Rather, in proposing explanations for nature we must use all of the data and all of the experience we have available. The end result of stubborn adherence to a simplistic division of nature into discoverable mechanics and undiscoverable purpose, I say, is nothing less than the official divorce of science from reason.
— Michael Behe, “When Science Renounces a Facet of Reason,” Divine Action and Natural Selection, Singapore: World Scientific, 2009, p. 709f Emphasis added.
Just a couple observations. It is only by denying all consideration of teleology in physical nature that can man be “fully integrated” into the Darwinian biological picture. Of course, the denial of teleology in nature also means that man as a part of nature cannot be a self-conscious, goal-directed, intelligent actor in nature. And thus an extraordinarily important distinction regarding the actuality of the human person is lost thereby. And with it any recognition, let alone justification, of human free will.
The thought has occurred to me that the “real battle” between Darwinian evolution theory and ID is not being conducted on the grounds the Darwinists allege. They have skewed the debate by asserting that what ID is really all about is religious proselytization under the cover of science by those nefarious IDers, who are really only Bible-thumping, right-wing Christian fundamentalist kooks trying to smuggle Creationism (i.e., God) into the science classroom.
It's funny that folks who would say that purpose in nature is only illusory could be so very confident about the definiteness and actuality of purpose they ascribe to their "adversaries," i.e., anyone who advances the proposition that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific hypothesis. (As if Darwinists never have purposes of their own.)
But I think the “real battle” is about whether final causes ought to be reintroduced into scientific thinking or not. Obviously, the Darwinists are saying “absolutely not.” The IDers are saying, “if you don’t, science becomes increasingly irrational and counterproductive.”
One last thought, re: “initiation” of biological messages. I thought Fr. Coyne’s discussion of the distinctions between “creation” and “origin” (quoted in an earlier post of mine) provides an excellent framework under which to consider this aspect of the problem. As you’ll recall, Coyne does not regard “creation” as having been only a one-time, start-up event that got the whole universe going “in the beginning,” but as the on-going universal requirement of biological existence itself. In other words, existent things are such only because they are constantly participating in Being. That is, biological life is contingent on Being — which is divine. Christians would call this: Divine Providence. I’ll say no more about this here, but just offer it as “food for thought.”
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your excellent essay/post!