What is information?
One of the most common Creationist ploys used to sway the lay public is the appeal to information. “Evolution can’t create information!” is the new battle cry. But what do they mean by information? True to form Creationists who use the term will never define what they mean by it, preferring the wiggle room that vagueness gives them. In the world of honest people though the term information can mean several different things depending on the context.
In the most basic sense information means a message conveying our state of knowledge about an object or idea. It’s a human construct to help us describe the physical world. Objects by themselves don’t contain stuff called information; it’s not a property of matter like mass. Information doesn’t float around in space. There can be no information without instantiation by matter and energy. Information is merely what we call our description of an object or idea. Let’s look at a few examples
Information Theory: Information theory (IT) is the field of mathematics that deals with the quantification of information passed during communication. In the simplest case you have a sender, a message being passed over a (possibly noisy) communications channel, and a receiver trying to reconstruct the original message. Measuring the information content is a way to determine the veracity of the communication or the uncertainty in the message recovery. For a digital message the information content is related to the natural log of the number of symbols sent and is usually expressed in bits: A binary string of length 32 will have an information content of 5 bits. Note that the information content has nothing to do with any meaning of the message. Meaning is determined beforehand by the sender and receiver. It involves intellectual abstraction, assigning values to the symbols in the message above and beyond the symbols themselves. Paul Revere’s lanterns in the Old North Church (“one if by land, two if by sea”) had very little information but huge meaning. There are various subsets of information defined in IT. Shannon information is the basic definition given above. Kolmogorov–Chaitin information is a measure of how compressible a message is, i.e. a string of a thousand repeating 1s and 0s could be described as (1 0 repeat 500 times). Neither have anything to do with biological evolution.
Physical Information: This is the usage most laymen are familiar with. How much information does an object contain? Since there is no inherent quality of matter called information the answer is the information content depends on how thoroughly we as observers describe the object. Example: We are out walking and we see a red car in the distance. The object has the information “red car”. As we get closer we see it’s a 1966 Ford Mustang. The object now offers more information to us. If we could examine every last screw, bolt, and mechanical piece we’d have tons more information. If we could examine and catalog every atom we’d have tons more information still. The physical properties of the car haven’t changed one iota; our description of the car has gotten more detailed. The information content of how we see the car has increased.
Biological information: how can we apply this to biological evolution? Turns out it’s already been done. Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of DNA addressed the problem back in the 1950’s. In Crick’s words
“By information I mean the specification of the amino acid sequence in protein. . . Information means here the precise determination of sequence, either of bases in the nucleic acid or on amino acid residues in the protein”
When scientists talk about the information in DNA they are talking about the genetic sequences that undergo a complex chemical reaction to produce a protein. They are not talking about meaning. There is no abstraction involved in DNA. A genetic sequence doesn’t "mean" a certain protein; it is part of the chemical process that produces a protein. The deliberate equivocation between information and meaning is a favorite Creationist ruse.
By Crick’s definition every time we get a gene duplication with point mutation event we get a new genetic sequence or new information. Still, Creationists will squawk “evolution can’t produce the information for new functions or new features!!” Sure it can. Basic evolutionary processes of random genetic variations filtered by selection causes the new “information” to accumulate into morphologies that have the best chance of surviving in their particular environment. It’s not wrong to say the information for the new features comes through feedback from the environment.
Bottom line? The next time you hear a Creationist blither about “information” call him on his definition. Watch him squirm just like our little village Jorge does.
Comments or constructive criticism welcome.
One of the most common Creationist ploys used to sway the lay public is the appeal to information. “Evolution can’t create information!” is the new battle cry. But what do they mean by information? True to form Creationists who use the term will never define what they mean by it, preferring the wiggle room that vagueness gives them. In the world of honest people though the term information can mean several different things depending on the context.
In the most basic sense information means a message conveying our state of knowledge about an object or idea. It’s a human construct to help us describe the physical world. Objects by themselves don’t contain stuff called information; it’s not a property of matter like mass. Information doesn’t float around in space. There can be no information without instantiation by matter and energy. Information is merely what we call our description of an object or idea. Let’s look at a few examples
Information Theory: Information theory (IT) is the field of mathematics that deals with the quantification of information passed during communication. In the simplest case you have a sender, a message being passed over a (possibly noisy) communications channel, and a receiver trying to reconstruct the original message. Measuring the information content is a way to determine the veracity of the communication or the uncertainty in the message recovery. For a digital message the information content is related to the natural log of the number of symbols sent and is usually expressed in bits: A binary string of length 32 will have an information content of 5 bits. Note that the information content has nothing to do with any meaning of the message. Meaning is determined beforehand by the sender and receiver. It involves intellectual abstraction, assigning values to the symbols in the message above and beyond the symbols themselves. Paul Revere’s lanterns in the Old North Church (“one if by land, two if by sea”) had very little information but huge meaning. There are various subsets of information defined in IT. Shannon information is the basic definition given above. Kolmogorov–Chaitin information is a measure of how compressible a message is, i.e. a string of a thousand repeating 1s and 0s could be described as (1 0 repeat 500 times). Neither have anything to do with biological evolution.
Physical Information: This is the usage most laymen are familiar with. How much information does an object contain? Since there is no inherent quality of matter called information the answer is the information content depends on how thoroughly we as observers describe the object. Example: We are out walking and we see a red car in the distance. The object has the information “red car”. As we get closer we see it’s a 1966 Ford Mustang. The object now offers more information to us. If we could examine every last screw, bolt, and mechanical piece we’d have tons more information. If we could examine and catalog every atom we’d have tons more information still. The physical properties of the car haven’t changed one iota; our description of the car has gotten more detailed. The information content of how we see the car has increased.
Biological information: how can we apply this to biological evolution? Turns out it’s already been done. Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of DNA addressed the problem back in the 1950’s. In Crick’s words
“By information I mean the specification of the amino acid sequence in protein. . . Information means here the precise determination of sequence, either of bases in the nucleic acid or on amino acid residues in the protein”
When scientists talk about the information in DNA they are talking about the genetic sequences that undergo a complex chemical reaction to produce a protein. They are not talking about meaning. There is no abstraction involved in DNA. A genetic sequence doesn’t "mean" a certain protein; it is part of the chemical process that produces a protein. The deliberate equivocation between information and meaning is a favorite Creationist ruse.
By Crick’s definition every time we get a gene duplication with point mutation event we get a new genetic sequence or new information. Still, Creationists will squawk “evolution can’t produce the information for new functions or new features!!” Sure it can. Basic evolutionary processes of random genetic variations filtered by selection causes the new “information” to accumulate into morphologies that have the best chance of surviving in their particular environment. It’s not wrong to say the information for the new features comes through feedback from the environment.
Bottom line? The next time you hear a Creationist blither about “information” call him on his definition. Watch him squirm just like our little village Jorge does.
Comments or constructive criticism welcome.
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