More about how evolution works: look at the video (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 11:44 (3312 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have understood the argument, and accept that chance is a highly improbable source of the system. That still doesn't make the term “intelligent information” any more helpful. -DAVID: I have explained there are two types of information, that from static objects like crystals, and that which dynamic and drives processes like living matter. So lets call what cells possess 'dynamic information' which is contained in a code, DNA. For the source of this type of information I choose mind.-In the context of how evolution works, it makes no difference what you call it. According to you, the ‘dynamic information' which drives evolution (as opposed to separate creation, which is driven directly by God) is a divine 3.8-billion-year computer programme for all the innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders, and my alternative hypothesis is that the ‘dynamic information' is a (perhaps God-given) autonomous intelligence. -Previously you distinguished between “descriptive” information and a “planning type” of information. I would suggest that discussion of these matters would be far simpler and clearer if we only used this current buzzword “information” descriptively: to denote the facts, the data, the knowledge extrapolated from objects, processes, events etc., which can be used to produce new objects, processes, events. Our description of what DNA consists of and does constitutes information, but what drives living matter is what we are describing - the mechanism, the intelligence, your God. In other words, it is not information that DOES the planning; it is the planning mechanism - itself perhaps created with the use of information - that uses information (facts, data, knowledge) to do the planning. So let us refer to it as the planning mechanism (or intelligence, or God), and not as information with some fancy tag.