Information; needed for evolution to progress (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, May 05, 2017, 12:49 (2542 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID’s 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.

dhw: The nub of this essay, for all its fancy language, is what we all know to be the unsolved mystery of evolution, which is innovation. Of course the new information cannot be invented from thin air. It may come from intelligences combining and responding to new environmental conditions. The fact that nobody has ever observed this is balanced by the fact that nobody has ever observed ANY of the theories in action. That’s why innovation remains a mystery. As for the inventor of the mechanism that designs evolutionary changes, once again it is an unknown force (see my post under "Biological complexity"). That is not an explanation but an acknowledgement of our ignorance. The moment you call the force “God”, you load it with human attributes, no matter how hard you try not to.

DAVID: Nice side step. You didn't answer the analogy of the Titanic. There has to be initial information. Pure intelligence doesn't invent new information. It has to be discovered. We are intelligent but the new scientific findings I present from scientific papers is stuff that must be discovered and then understood by you and I. Innovation requires new information and then planning. Only a mind can do that based on our experience as humans. I don't think there is any mystery, as I assume God is that mind, but it is not a human mind.

The Titanic example merely confirms what I have explicitly accepted over and over again – that we only know about adaptation, not innovation, which requires new information. And I have explained how, in my hypothesis, the new information is acquired: namely, through interaction between organic intelligence(s) and the conditions to which the organisms are exposed. We do not know how that intelligence originated, and it is singularly unhelpful to say in one breath that pure intelligence doesn’t invent new information, and in the next to tell us that pure intelligence (your God) invented the new information as well as the intelligence that uses that information. Maybe it’s true. I’m an agnostic and I admit to being totally in the dark, but if something doesn’t make sense to me or demands blind, unreasoning faith, I can’t believe it. That is why I continue to reflect on different hypotheses, as opposed to closing my mind to all but one.