It's a mistake to think of entropy only in terms of themodynamics. Entropy also applies to information. While the sun adds energy to the earth it doesn't add information. DNA contains information.
Can you provide one example of how adding energy to a system produces information?
I'm not personally familiar with any definition of entropy that doesn't involve thermodynamics. In fact, as far as I know, the entire concept of entropy originates with thermodynamics and is defined within that field.
Does anyone have any legitimate sources that address the question?
"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776
"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"
Unfortunately, entropy can be applied to fields other than thermodynamics. But as for entropy and the information theory, the jury is still out on that one. If you look up entropy on wikipedia, it give some good examples of where entropy applies to fields other than thermodynamics.
From Wikipedia
In information theory, entropy is the measure of the amount of information that is missing before reception and is sometimes referred to as Shannon entropy.[35]. Shannon entropy is a very general concept which finds applications in information theory as well as thermodynamics. It was originally devised by Claude Shannon in 1948 to study the amount of information in a transmitted message. The definition of the information entropy is, however, very general, and is expressed in terms of a discrete set of probabilities pi. In the case of transmitted messages, these probabilities were the probabilities that a particular message was actually transmitted, and the entropy of the message system was a measure of how much information was in the message. For the case of equal probabilities (i.e. each message is equally probable), the Shannon entropy (in bits) is just the number of yes/no questions needed to determine the content of the message.
The question of the link between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy is a hotly debated topic. Many authors argue that there is a link between the two,[36][37][38] while others will argue that they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.[39]
Hope this helps.
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"This can't be good" - Sherriff Jack Carter
"Don't fuck with The Mess. Unless you've been there, done that, and have the t-shirt, shut your cakehole." - Me
"By the Blood of Sanguinius" - Blood Angels Battlecry
"The enemies of the Emperor fear many things. They fear discovery, defeat, despair and death. Yet there is one thing they fear above all others. They fear the wrath of the Space Marines." - Anonymous
"This can't be good" - Sherriff Jack Carter
"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776
"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"
He just thinks he's clever by not stating what exactly he means by "information". DNA doesn't need some magical information-carrying energy from the Sun to create useful information, since a certain process is known to do that. Though, I suppose if you assume before-hand that evolution is impossible and that all DNA have to form spontaneously, then it might be a valid argument. Of course, it's meant to disprove evolution, so that won't fly...
It's actually a pretty fucking stupid claim. Does he really think it takes some sort of special energy in order to combine certain molecules into a self-replicator? Or that it takes special energy to cause mutations in said self-replicator that may make it better?
Furthermore, "entropy" is also a term used in dramaturgy. Maybe they will start making claims about that too...
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His "argument" relies on his say-so. Why don't you ask him to outline the argument instead of assuming that it's there because he says it is?
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, that nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.
Information entropy refers to the ability to predict a successor value given the former values (some people also call it compressibility). Your computer has a number of entropy inputs (such as yourself), without which its responses would be completely and utterly predictable - a fact which leads to a number of security vulnerabilities. In this sense, information entropy in a computer tends to decrease - random results are not typically used to rearrange the structure of the system, and in some cases where they are (ASLR, for example), the randomness is not large enough to be significant.
In terms of DNA, any random point mutation has the potential to increase the information entropy of a chromosome. Any. Put simply, if a point mutation makes the sequence more predictable, it has decreased information entropy. If it has made it less predictable, it has increased information entropy. If the resulting mutation is more fit for its environment, it will propagate more. This can very well lead to a general increase or decrease in information entropy simply due to factors involved in selection.
Linking it to thermodynamic entropy is rather ... tenuous.
Tell that shithead to look at the computer he's typing on. It requires an energy input (electrical signals or what not) to gain new posts and new messages on his screen.
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Jesus was lined up on the cross. His arm was pinned the wood and the nail was set againt his flesh. At that time he had the following information...
1. This might hurt a bit,
2. A nail is resting on my skin.
Then the Roman soldier swings his hammer and strikes the nail. This imparts ENERGY into the nail, nail pierces flesh and jesus recieves the following information...
1. Oh ME fuck my ME that fucking hurt!
2. A nail has pierced my fucking arm and has nailed me to a piece of fucking wood.
Therefore energy can transfer information.
Goddammit, now I'm forced to say in public that I agree with Mr. Coffee. - Mike Wong
I never would have thought I would wholeheartedly agree with Coffee... - fgalkin x2
Honestly, this board is so fucking stupid at times. - Thanas GALEForceCarwash: Oh, I'll wax that shit, bitch...
Well, I came up with this in the way of a preliminary reponse.
I can tell you that "information" gets added to DNA every time gene duplication occurs, and that's a fairly common mutation. With a duplicated gene, information is added to the genome, and one of the copies can freely change without breaking anything in the species.
Besides, the whole "you can't personally answer this question, so there must be no answer" ploy is typical.
Why don't you tell me what ID theory predicts that can be tested, keeping mind that "ID can predict anything" is exactly the same thing as saying "ID predicts nothing".
Followed by...
I suppose I could actually point out that a gene-duplication mutation actually requires energy to happen, so energy input into the organism does have at least one known mechanism for adding information.
In fact, the energy coming from the sun actually powers pretty much all of the chemical reactions required for life as we know it, so it's not hard to draw the conclusion that yes, yes... energy does in fact add information to the ecosystem.
"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776
"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"
A gene duplication won't add information if it's been duplicated some number of times already. A duplication followed by a mutation on either gene -will- add information, as it is no longer possible to create a data structure that says "There are x number of the following sequence..." (called run-length encoding).
This is utter crap. It isn't even wrong, it's just utterly nonsensical. At a guess I assume he's confusing the physical concept of information (e.g. particle location and velocity) with the much higher level and pretty much unrelated notion of adaptive complexity.
It's actually a pretty fucking stupid claim. Does he really think it takes some sort of special energy in order to combine certain molecules into a self-replicator? Or that it takes special energy to cause mutations in said self-replicator that may make it better?
Any ID advocate trying to do science is inheritably stupid. It's a lost cause to show him proper science.
Lord Runolfr said...
There is no clear link between entropy in the thermodynamic sense and the "Shannon entropy" discussed in information theory. Even if there were, removing entropy from a system requires either work (energy) or an external "heat sink" that is "cooler" than the system (as waste energy will spontaneously migrate out of the system in order to increase overall entropy in such a situation).
The point of gene duplication is that when you have two working copies of a coding gene, the organism can produce the resulting protein from either one. The "backup copy" can then mutate without depriving the organism of a that protein. An imperfect copy at this point can actually produce a different protein which may or may not be useful, depending on the situation. Useful or not, the genome is now coding for an additional protein that it wasn't encoding before. The "information" content of the genome has increased.
9:34 AM
Intelligent Designer said...
So your point is that a random mutation to inforpation results in more znformation?
12:42 AM
Lord Runolfr said...
A duplication of "information" that then mutates to "inforpation" would, in fact, result in an increase in the information content of the genome, if you aren't foolish enough to assume that "inforpation" would be a useless change.
Since you seem to like using words as an analogy for gene "information" content, let's use the gene "them" as an example.
"Them" has become a required gene for our hypothetical species. It could easily mutate into a valid gene like "the", "then", or "theme", but without the gene "them", the organism wouldn't survive to reproduce.
A gene duplication event occurs in our species, so now a a descendant has two copies of "them" in its genome. Either one can fulfill the requirement for the organisms to have a "them" gene, so the second copy can now mutate into "the", "then", or "theme" without breaking the requirement for a "them" gene. We'll assume that one of our organisms mutates to develop a "then" gene.
The old genome:
--them--
The intermediate genome:
--them---them--
The new genome:
--them---then--
We have now increased the information content of the genome. If the "then" gene is helpful, or at least harmless, to the organism in its environment, it will remain in the gene pool of the organism's descendants. Further duplications and mutations can add considerable variety to the genome.
...and so on. Basically, the information content of the genome can easily increase as a result of mutation.
"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail
"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776
"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"
