Ok... I've decided to begin to respond to you again. I hope we don't have another falling out like before. For now, however, I'm going to limit myself to one such post per day.
quote:
Sure, the DNA is made of the atoms you listed, but the atoms themselves do not contain the genetic information. For example, scramble their order and you don't get hemoglobin or the other proteins, even though the same atoms are present in the same quantities.
In short, your definition of DNA involves some sort of qualitative judgement. I.e., one possibility is a human-made decision that a certain thing produced by the DNA is better than another thing produced by the DNA. Another possibility is that, if it leads to survival to reproductive maturity and reproductive success, then it is "information", but if it doesn't, then it is "not information" - in short, "natural selection" is judging its information content. Is this correct? Did I miss any possibilities? If you're not requiring a qualitative judgement as part of your definition of information, please say so.**
Why is whether a judgement is being made critical? Because it means that there is no sort of *inherent* information to it. If one person can look at a random sequence of ones and zeros and see their mother's maiden name, then it has information under that judgement. However, most people looking at DNA make decisions about it based on things that it produces that they view as relevant. They view these things to be relevant because they view life as relevant. In short, success at life itself - i.e., natural selection - is the judging what is information. It is keeping things that have more "information", and throwing away things that have less "information".
It is just as if I had a computer program that modified random sequences of 1s and 0s and kept or discarded them based on how they ranked according to an algorithm which I declared to be an "information assessment": the end result would always be something that does well under the algorithm. Your "information" is actually how well it survives to reproduce; thus, it is really better described as fitness. Fitness *can* be produced through random changes.
In short, if how successful it is at living is your criteria, then your definition of information is getting to be its judge as well.
Of course DNA can hold information, by your definition - in the context of whatever is judging. For a biologist doing research on hemoglobin, there's information in the DNA about hemoglobin. But there's only information in the DNA because the biologist considers the gene for producing it to be something that is relevant, and the biologist chose this to be relevant because of a view that hemoglobin is relevant. The biologist views hemoglobin as relevant because the biologist view life as relevant. Life is selected for by natural selection, so life itself is really judging information quality by this definition, and throwing out what contains "less information", and keeping what has "more information".
** - If no judgement is being made (merely the odds of a particular combination occuring out of all possible sets, as you initially portrayed it), then snowflakes are information rich; I don't think you want to go down that route.
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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."
™ Version 4.2