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Author Topic:   Can mutation and selection increase information?
PaulK
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Joined: 01-10-2003
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Message 86 of 222 (815993)
07-27-2017 1:16 PM
Reply to: Message 78 by CRR
07-27-2017 7:06 AM


Re: random and non-random mutations
That is pretty obvious rubbish. The sorry misunderstanding of "random" has been covered already, but there is more.
Consider Spetner's attempt to discredit duplication and divergence.
quote:
The claim in the second bullet is that gene duplication represents an increase of information. That is like saying that two copies of a newspaper provide more information than does one. The role that evolutionists customarily assign to gene duplication is not that the duplication itself adds information, but that the duplication makes available a free copy of a gene (or even the whole genome), which is released from its normal function and is permitted to mutate in the hope of achieving an adaptive mutation. Any added information would then come from mutations. So the question reverts back to whether random mutations can add information, and I claim there is no evidence for it.
There are two errors here. First, the existence of the duplicate is itself information.
But the far worse error is that the very fact that Spetner doesn't count the duplicate as adding information completely changes the question of whether the subsequent mutations add information. Instead of considering just one gene, Spetner has to consider both together to validly measuring the information. Can Spetner honestly say that adding a gene that is very similar to one already present, but not a duplicate does not add information ? Even if it has - somehow - less information than the original ?
I think not. But that is exactly the way his argument goes.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 78 by CRR, posted 07-27-2017 7:06 AM CRR has not replied

  
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