Information; needed for evolution to progress (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, May 04, 2017, 02:04 (2759 days ago) @ David Turell

Information must be added or evolution cannot proceed:

https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/05/evolutionary-informatics-marks-dembski-and-ewart-...

"Authors Robert Marks, William Dembski, and Winston Ewert bring decades of experience in search algorithms and information theory to analyzing the capacity of biological evolution to generate diverse forms of life. Their conclusion is that no evolutionary process is capable of yielding different outcomes (e.g., new body plans), being limited instead to a very narrow range of results (e.g., finches with different beak sizes). Rather, producing anything of significant complexity requires that knowledge of the outcomes be programmed into the search routines. Therefore, any claim for the unlimited capacity of unguided evolution to transform life is necessarily implausible.

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"They describe how searches in engineering for some design outcome involve the three components of domain expertise, design criteria, and iterative search. The process involves creating a prototype and then checking to see if it meets the criteria, which functions as a teleological goal. If the initial design does not, the prototype is refined and the test repeated. The greater the domain expertise, the more efficiently adjustments are made, so fewer possibilities need to be tested. Success can then be achieved more quickly.

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"the authors demonstrate the limitations of evolutionary algorithms. The general challenge is that all evolutionary algorithms are limited to converging on a very narrow range of results, a boundary known as Basener’s Ceiling. For instance, a program designed to produce an antenna will at best converge to the solution of an optimal antenna and then remain stuck. It could never generate some completely different result, such as a mousetrap. Alternatively, an algorithm designed to generate a strategy for playing checkers could never generate a strategy for playing backgammon. To change outcomes, the program would have to be deliberately adjusted to achieve a separate predetermined goal. In the context of evolution, no unguided process could converge on one organism, such as a fish, and then later converge on an amphibian.

"This principle has been demonstrated both in simulations and in experiments. The program Tierra was created in the hope of simulating large-scale biological evolution. Its results were disappointing. Several simulated organisms emerged, but their variability soon hit Basener’s Ceiling. No true novelty was ever generated but simply limited rearrangements of the initially supplied information. We have seen a similar result in experiments on bacteria by Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski. He tracked the development of 58,000 generations of E. coli. He saw no true innovation but primarily the breaking of nonessential genes to save energy, and the rearrangement of genetic information to access pre-existing capacities, such as the metabolism of citrate, under different environmental stresses. Changes were always narrow in scope and limited in magnitude. (my bold)

"The authors present an even more defining limitation, based on the No Free Lunch Theorems, which is known as the Conservation of Information (COI). Stated simply, no search strategy can on average find a target more quickly than a random search unless some information about that target is incorporated into the search process. As an illustration, imagine someone asking you to guess the name of a famous person, but without giving you any information about that individual. You could use many different guessing strategies, such as listing famous people you know in alphabetical order, or by height, or by date of birth. No strategy could be determined in advance to be better than a random search.

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"biological evolution is directed by blind natural selection, which has no active information to assist in searching for new targets. The process is not helped by changes in the environment, which alter the fitness landscape, since such changes contain no active information related to a radically different outcome.

"In the end, the endogenous information associated with finding a new body plan or some other significant modification is vastly greater than that associated with the search space that biological offspring could possibly explore in the entire age of the universe. Therefore, as these authors forcefully show, in line with much previous research in the field of intelligent design, all radical innovations in nature required information from some outside intelligent source."

Comment: the nub of this essay is in the Lenski e. coli experiment. 58,000 generation and only a rearrangement of DNA and a slight change in what the bacteria were capable of doing. They were still E. coli. It is basically like changing the deck chairs on the Titanic. No effect on the eventual outcome. If the captain of the ship had received a radio message about the iceberg, the outcome would have been vastly different. The logic of this example is unassailable. Evolution requires new information. It cannot be invented from thin air. There must be a source.