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Talk:Counterexamples to Evolution (view source)
Revision as of 18:04, November 15, 2008
, 18:04, November 15, 2008→Chromosome example
::: In your example of the creature gaining the information for arms, what information was lost? According to you, nothing! That is, it has gained the information for arms, but the genes previously did nothing, which means that they had no information for anything, so no information was lost! Similarly, if bits or base pairs that already have ''meaning'' are mutated, then that ''meaning'' will be lost.
::: In your example of the creature gaining the information for arms, what information was lost? According to you, nothing! That is, it has gained the information for arms, but the genes previously did nothing, which means that they had no information for anything, so no information was lost! Similarly, if bits or base pairs that already have ''meaning'' are mutated, then that ''meaning'' will be lost.
::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:49, 15 November 2008 (EST)
::: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 03:49, 15 November 2008 (EST)
:::: Lowkey, you are right about the fact that my analogy did not use just one mutation. It uses two. But the fact that it uses two does not make it a false analogy. Two mutations can easily happen in the same replication. Therefore, the analogy stands because it still represents what can happen in a replication.
::::And to your charge that I "have not provided an example of the copying error in which the 'copy' has a greater information content than the original," you are completely right. But I don't have to provide an example of this, because my analogy still works, and it is an example of how an information-gaining mutation could happen because of a combination of mutations.
::::Philip, that's not what I meant when I said the word "vehicle" was longer than "car" due to coincidence. But I don't know how to say what I did mean. I'll leave it. And your comment that it was ''intelligently selected''...are you implying that because you intelligently selected an example, intelligent selection happens in nature? I don't know ''what'' to say to this.
::::To your comment that I haven't been properly arguing because I have been equating data to information, you may be right. But hopefully this analogy (analogies are going to be the death of me) will work:
:::::''You have three copies of the same book. You want another three of the same, because your copies are getting old, and you want to get rid of them. So you go to a man who will copy the contents of the books for you. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that each book you gave him says only one thing: "The old man walks." Now in the copying, the man you hired makes an error in the third copy, instead making it read: "The old man talks."''
::::What did you know about the old man in your books before the copying? All you knew about him was that he walked. But after the copying, you have 3 new books, two of which say the same, and one that gives you a new piece of information about the old man, that he talks. You now know, after the copying, that the old man walks and that he talks. You have new information about the old man.
::::And about my creature example, the genes that were mutated did not have "meaning" because they did not code for proteins that carry out functions, so according to you, those genes had no information:"The point is that information is data that has ''meaning''." The genes did have data before the mutation, however, so when it gets a mutation that causes it to have "meaning" (code proteins), information is created out of the meaningless data.
::::To your statement that "if bits or base pairs that already have ''meaning'' are mutated, then that ''meaning'' will be lost," you are absolutely right. The meaning will be lost, which brings me back to the very first post I had in this section: If the loss of the previous meaning causes a creature to function improperly, that creature will not reproduce and the mutation will cease to exist. But if it causes the creature to function even better in its environment, its gene will be passed on, and the creature will never miss its previous gene, because it got something even better in exchange. --[[User:JArneal|JArneal]] 13:04, 15 November 2008 (EST)
== Thank you ==
== Thank you ==