Dr Adequate
Banned
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Wogoga's long gone, but heck, we can still split a hair three ways amongst ourselves.
Missing genetic information refutes neo-Darwinism
- Thread starter wogoga
- Start date
Actually, I would argue that it is impossible to split a single hair more than once, because, after the first split, it technically ceases to be a hair. There are two parts of a hair now, which can be split individually, but splitting only part of a hair is not the same as splitting one whole hair.
Thus, once you split a hair one way, there is no hair left to be split any other way.
Of course, it can be argued that it is possible to e.g. split a hair from one end only half way up, and then do the same from the other end, but that would be splitting hairs!
Yep.
Plus, one more thing: If one declares the minimum size of a complete description of an organism to be infinite (a necessary consequence of the assertion that the phenotype was continuous), one cannot at the same time assert that evolution works, given that about 750MByte, compared to infinity, make up exactly 0%.
Which happens to be the same percentage at which the genes would - in that case - have an influence on fitness -as opposed to that wind-blowing-through-a-scrapyard-and-assembling-an-Airbus thing (-> Posting from Europe in the unlikely event you didn't guess ;-).
Certainly. Longevity is known to be genetic; longevity is measured in seconds, number of seconds is continuous.
Height is also genetic; height is measured in inches; inches are also continuous (down to the scale of Planck length, at which point opinion is divided).
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QM aside, in both examples you only show that the scale is continuous, not that the prop in question can in fact assume any arbitrary value on such scale.
Have you considered my argument about the implications of "phenotype being continuous" regarding the validity of evolutionary theory?
The amount of environmental information that ends up influencing the phenotype may be huge - but it definitely is not infinite.
Yes. Your soi-disant argument is total bollocks.
On the contrary, any incident where you're exposed to a continuous variable, you get an infinite amount of information.
Such as the angle at which a particular photon hits a particular protein. The angle is continuous, hence the protein's response potentially contains infinitely many responses. Standard "chaotic" processes can multiply the arbitrarily small differences in response to measurable levels.
I must admit that I'm stunned by the incredibly sharp minded brilliance and compelling logic of your refutation.
In reality, you're not "exposed to a continuous variable". And no, this is not just because of QM, which (it appears) you dismiss as "just a theory" (what does that remind me of...)
In reality, you have a limited sized data set of discrete values derived from observation of a variable. That's all you got.
That you don't know what the next measurement of the same variable would yield does not allow the conclusion that the set of potential measurement results was infinite.
This universe we live in simply is too small for infinities. It most definitely allows for some huge numbers, but considering how easily information related considerations really only concern themselfs with the exponent, rather than the mantissa, what this particular universe can do for you in terms of infinities is a rather poor job at best (if you look at the exponents).
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
That is only a problem if you assume that this 750MB is a compressed description of the phenotype, which it is not. A complete description of the organism may not be infinite, but for all intents and purposes it might as well be, because a complete description would necessarily include all environmental influences no matter how small. If it is not infinite, it is at the very least as large as the Universe.
I thought that was funny enough to nominate it.
I don't see how that follows. There may be only 20,000 genes, but those genes interact with each other.
Simplistically, gene 1 might product phenotype A, gene 2 might product phenotype B, but in each other's presence they might instead produce:
phenotype A2, B2, and C. A2 and B2 being slightly different versions (or possibly very different versions) of A and B. C, on the other hand, is a completley new phenotype.
Increase the number of genes and the possible number of phenotypes due to their interactions increases exponentially.
The fact that the interactions of genes is important to phenotypes is obvious from the fact that a change in a single gene can have more than one phenotypic affect.
This is true, but since the interactions of genes are important, even a single difference between individuals can mean any number of differences in "properties".
It sounds like you're saying that because you'll never observe an infinite number of possible values for a given variable, it's by defintion impossible for that variable to hold an infinite number of values.
True, but that doesn't mean that there aren't an infinite number of possible values that it could take.
Hell, through my life my height has taken on an infinite number of values along the way.
I think that's probably true. But does anyone suggest that the genome offers a complete discription? I don't think anyone has suggested that.
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
Absolutely. But they don't interact in a perfectly predictable way and therefore the genome is not a description of the phenotype.
Which means the genome is not a description of the phenotype.
Wuschel suggested that if a full description of the phenotype requires an infinite amount of information, evolution cannot work because an infinite amount of information could not be contained in 750MB of DNA. To me, that is a claim that it should offer a complete description.
Wuschel claims that a limited amount of "memory storage" within DNA disproves the continuity of the phenotype, but it is not a problem to the continuity at all. It is just a problem for the idea that the entire phenotype is encoded within the DNA. Which it is not.
This not what I wrote. My point is that if you allow the phenotype to be determined by an infinite amount of factors, the influence that the genome can have on the phenotype does not just reach zero, it is zero - we're talking infinity here, after all. No matter the information content of the genome for as long as it is finite.
As far as "information" is concerned, I refuse to discuss "information" for as long as we cannot agree on a formal framework to base this discussion on. Since, according to you and some others, "information theory" does not apply here, we have no formal leg to stand on and "information", "complexity" etc. thus can mean anything to anyone.
This, in turn, is the ideal breeding ground for pointless semantic warfare.
There!
cyborg
deus ex machina
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If you want to retain your sanity it would be best not to bring discussion of infinities into the issue.
The important points here are:
1) The genotype + environment generates the phenotype
2) There are factors of phenotypical expression that can be located in the genotype
3) There are factors of phenotypical expression that can be located as being caused by the environment
4) There are deep levels of entanglement between the two by virtue of the fact that, (and here's where the infinities come in) we can re-express 2 and 3 as:
**2) There are factors of phenotypical expression that cannot be located in the genotype
**3) There are factors of phenotypical expression that cannot be located as being caused by the environment
Choose your worms carefully.
The important points here are:
1) The genotype + environment generates the phenotype
2) There are factors of phenotypical expression that can be located in the genotype
3) There are factors of phenotypical expression that can be located as being caused by the environment
4) There are deep levels of entanglement between the two by virtue of the fact that, (and here's where the infinities come in) we can re-express 2 and 3 as:
**2) There are factors of phenotypical expression that cannot be located in the genotype
**3) There are factors of phenotypical expression that cannot be located as being caused by the environment
Choose your worms carefully.
strathmeyer
Master Poster
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- Nov 21, 2005
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So, what is neo-Darwinism? It's pretty easy to refute something you make up. What do they call that? Oh, yeah, a strawman... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman_argument
A better analogy could be this one:
Genetic alphabet, 4 letters
Genetic dictionary, 64 words with 21 different meanings
A human's genome, 20'500 recipes
Yet the interesting part is the following:Genetic dictionary, 64 words with 21 different meanings
A human's genome, 20'500 recipes
Workers and work-groups use these 20'000 recipes to create tens or hundreds of thousands of different types of workers and work-groups. In the process of generating and upbringing (chaperones) a next generation, the current generation of workers and work-groups is able to ignore errors in the recipes or to correct the impact of such errors at different stages, able to create new recipes by combining (parts of) recipes, able to perform several other tasks such as e.g. to add ingredients not mentioned in the recipes or to modify ingredients already incorporated in accordance with the recipes.
Here we must ask: where does all this information come from?I see only one reasonable answer within reductionist materialism: this information comes from the recipes and from the information built into the current generation of workers and work-groups by the previous generation.
But can the quantity of this additional information, provided by previous generations of enzyms, be bigger than the genomic information? I don't think so.
In order to resolve the missing-information problem however, this additional information, built into the current generation of enzymes, would have to be orders of magnitude larger than the genomic one.
From the ontogensis of birds I conclude that information outside the developing egg/embryo cannot have a relevant impact. How should a human embryo scan its environment and profit from this information? The same is valid for the umbilical cord.
Cheers, Wolfgang
"The Levinthal paradox is a thought experiment in the theory of protein folding dynamics. In 1969 Cyrus Levinthal noted that, because of the very large number of degrees of freedom in an unfolded polypeptide chain, the molecule has an astronomical number of possible conformations. ... If the protein is to attain its correctly folded configuration by sequentially sampling all the possible conformations, it would require a time longer than the age of the universe to arrive at its correct native conformation." (Wiki)
"The maturation of a protein from the corresponding amino acid chain can happen in the following way: In important (evolutionarily older) sequences of the chain, amino acids become active, that is they get animated by psychons. Because of environment continuity these psychons are the ones which have built up the same protein (or the same sequence of different proteins) innumerable times. These psychons build up protein parts which can be animated as a whole by other psychons which then build up the complete protein. So it also becomes comprehensible that RNA sequences (introns) are able to cut out themselves or that order is maintained during DNA recombination." members.lol.li/twostone/E/psychon.html#a09
Earthborn
Terrestrial Intelligence
You are assuming that an infinite number of influencing factors add up to an infinite amount of influence. But there is no reason to assume that is the case. Suppose we have a phenotype with a single property, a single degree of freedom. Imagine it as a slide that can go either left or right between 0 and 1. There is 1 environmental factor influences for 1/2. There are 2 environmental factors that influences for 1/4, 4 that have an influence of 1/8, 8 for 1/16th... ad infinitum. It means that there are an infinite number of environmental factors that do not add up to an infinite amount of influence.
This is not a very special case. It looks pretty much like the way nature works; the weaker the influence, the more of it there is. I am influenced by all the gravity of all the atoms in the Universe, but that adds up to just a tiny bit of influence. I am also influenced by the people around me, and though there are far fewer than the atoms in th Universe, they tend to influence me much more profoundly. I wouldn't the difference if there were an infinite number of influencing factors or a finite number, because the infiniteth factor would have an infinitely small influence.