Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 27, 2016, 16:03 (3040 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ….please give me a concrete example of what you mean by speciation being caused by loss of information which was present at the beginning.
DAVID: You can't push the discussion of possible mechanisms too far. All we know is what I've presented. Adaptation is often seen with loss of information, and this means loss of information might be part of the speciation process. The rest is guessing how speciation occurs. You logically want more info for a new species, but I warn you speciation might defy logic, just as quantum mechanics does.-I keep agreeing with you that loss of information might be part of the speciation process (organisms discarding what is no longer needed). That is a million miles away from saying that loss of information CAUSES the speciation process. You have presented a hypothesis concerning how speciation takes place, and I have pointed out some glaring logical flaws in it (see below for another example). What would you say are the logical flaws in the hypothesis that your God might have created an autonomous mechanism that enables organisms to acquire and process new information with which to create the innovations that lead to speciation?
 
dhw:I can only assume that you agree with my own example: the platypus could only become a platypus by discarding all the information that would otherwise have made it an elephant or a human. Is that what you mean, and do you find it feasible?-DAVID: No. I can imagine a recombination of genes made the branch leading to platypus, is not the recombination that lead to elephants. As with chimp and human, a simple population number says the DNAs in both are 98% of each other, but internal analysis of DNA arrangement and expression says we are 78% similar. This is how differentiation is made.-Of course the genetic combination is different. Any innovation will require a recombination/rearrangement of some sort, if only to accommodate all the new information. How does that mean that the LUCA contained all the information, internal and external, necessary for the platypus and elephant, and the platypus had to lose the elephant information in order to become a platypus?
 
DAVID: The 3.8 billion years of info is your assumption, not mine. 
dhw: Life is believed to have begun 3.8 billion years ago. If you claim that all the information was present at the beginning, then it was present 3.8 billion years ago. Just as information is information, the beginning is the beginning.
DAVID: But what was implied, as you know, is that I also favor dabbling with info added.-The 3.8 billion years of info is your assumption, not mine, and if information has to be added by a dabble, it cannot all have been present at the beginning of evolution. Your different theories contradict each other, and your warning that “speciation might defy logic” is not much help! Maybe it only defies your logic.