unrestrained_hand@hotmail.com wrote:

Milan wrote:

"Elroy Willis" <elroywillis@swbell.net> wrote in message
news:5i8tb1pvvg7orp4fcqcbhuosmieo1nn9s4@4ax.com...

Name the animal or life form which you think has the most
"information" in its DNA.

I guess it must be the "Jesus" (Jesu imaginarium) . Only one individual of
the species was known but he had the gene to walk on water, come back to
life, fly, and do all sorts of funky things like making wine from water,
etc. I bet he had far more than 30,000 genes.

regards
Milan

Or perhaps just no junk DNA. The April issue of Science News a few
years back had an article on an archaeologist who had found the Holy
Grail. He was speculating that we could confirm this by analyzing the
DNA on it and determiing that it was half human, half-divine.

"WTF would divine DNA look like?! How does he know it's *the grail?
Etc." I was ranting and stomping around the room something fierce
before my better half pointed out which issue it was.

Heh.

I'm still mad.

Kermit

"What would God want... with DNA?"

The Last Conformist wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Elroy Willis wrote:

Name the animal or life form which you think has the most
"information" in its DNA.

It must be a currently-living species, but it can include anything
from an amoeba thru a zebra, or a-z..

What is the definition of "information?" you might ask?

I've read that dogs have 78 chromosomes and humans have only 46.

Does it take more genetic "information" to form a flipper vs. a hand?

What do the fundies define "information" as, exactly?

Information: That which cannot increase through evolution. Any questions?

Yes. Who forgot to tell Dembski this?

He knows it. It's one of his unstated assumptions.

The Last Conformist wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

Elroy Willis wrote:

Name the animal or life form which you think has the most
"information" in its DNA.

It must be a currently-living species, but it can include anything
from an amoeba thru a zebra, or a-z..

What is the definition of "information?" you might ask?

I've read that dogs have 78 chromosomes and humans have only 46.

Does it take more genetic "information" to form a flipper vs. a hand?

What do the fundies define "information" as, exactly?

Information: That which cannot increase through evolution. Any questions?

Yes. Who forgot to tell Dembski this?

He knows it. It's one of his unstated assumptions.

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 17:10:31 GMT, "R. Baldwin"
<res0k7yx@nozirevBACKWARDS.net> wrote:

"John Vreeland" <vreejack@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:c2etb1hf47qv688v46ul6rrt2uc970f31m@4ax.com...

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 13:05:15 GMT, Elroy Willis
<elroywillis@swbell.net> wrote:

Name the animal or life form which you think has the most
"information" in its DNA.

I would guess that it would be the animal that displayed to most
complexity in its phenotype. The complexity of our brains makes us a
strong contender, but there are non-brain things out there that are
complex, as well. The hives of social insects, perhaps.

What is the definition of "information?" you might ask?

No. Information describes. Is there a useful definition which
contradicts my assertion?

Yes. Claude Shannon's. Shannon defines information as the string of
symbols
output by an information source, modeled as an ergodic state machine. The
amount of information in a symbol depends on the probability with which
the
information source sends it (the greater the surprisal, the greater the
information). He sets aside completely the problem of meaning, and only
looks at the problem of replicating a message in the presence of noise. It
doesn't matter whether the information source describes anything. We just
want to make sure the receiver gets the same messages that was sent. It is
eminently useful. The Internet exists because of Shannon's theory.

There is also algoritihmic information and Fisher information, both useful
but not having the same impact on society as Shannon information.

I studied Shannon, but it is so entirely inapplicable to evolution
that I forgot about it.

Complexity is a different issue. I would say that information
describes complexity, but no one knows what complexity is, or at least
how to measure it without understanding all the information, so that
definition is circular.

There are definitions for complexity. Kolmogorov complexity for a string
of
symbols is defined as the length of the shortest program on a given
computer
that outputs that string. Computational complexity has to do with the
amount
of resources (time and memory) required for a computation. There are
others.
Try typing "complexity" in Wikipedia and you'll get quite a few.

Last time I counted there were thirteen or fourteen formal measures of
complexity. But a naive Kolmogorov algorithm is useless. A program
that understands the meaning of what it is compressing will do a
better job. If you feed a random string of symbols to a Kolmogorov
transform is gives you the wrong answer. If you tell it what is
important about the string (perhaps nothing at all) then you may get a
better answer. Any attempt to analyze a genome using compression must
take this into account. GIGO applies.

__
To be inerrant is to never know the truth.
John Vreeland - replace "eye-tripoli" with the appropriate tetragrammaton

"On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:51:49 GMT, in article
<9cpvb1le1333vlkg1865p4vssmlie7dr39@4ax.com>, Elroy Willis stated..."

John Vreeland <vreejack@hotmail.com> wrote in alt.atheism

Elroy Willis <elroywillis@swbell.net> wrote:

Does it take more genetic "information" to form a flipper vs. a hand?

Nobody answered this question yet, that I've seen. Would you mind
giving it a shot?

I currently believe that sea turtles evolved from land turtles, and
that's why they have to crawl back up onto land to lay their eggs.

Does their DNA which codes for flippers contain more information than
a land turtle's DNA which codes for land-based turtle legs?

If all animals were created by some god, why would that god make sea
turtles have to crawl up onto land to lay their eggs, and endanger all
their offspring which have to crawl back to the sea, and be scarfed up
by predators along the way?

The standard answer to any of these question about "why would
God do such-and-such" is something like "we do not know the ways of
the Lord."

But to say that we don't know the ways of the Lord is to say
that invoking Him is not intended to be an explanation.

If the creationists (or whatever they're calling themselves
lately) don't want to offer any explanation, that's their business.

But I don't have to accept that "there is no explanation" is

"On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:51:49 GMT, in article
<9cpvb1le1333vlkg1865p4vssmlie7dr39@4ax.com>, Elroy Willis stated..."

John Vreeland <vreejack@hotmail.com> wrote in alt.atheism

Elroy Willis <elroywillis@swbell.net> wrote:

Does it take more genetic "information" to form a flipper vs. a hand?

Nobody answered this question yet, that I've seen. Would you mind
giving it a shot?

I currently believe that sea turtles evolved from land turtles, and
that's why they have to crawl back up onto land to lay their eggs.

Does their DNA which codes for flippers contain more information than
a land turtle's DNA which codes for land-based turtle legs?

If all animals were created by some god, why would that god make sea
turtles have to crawl up onto land to lay their eggs, and endanger all
their offspring which have to crawl back to the sea, and be scarfed up
by predators along the way?

The standard answer to any of these question about "why would
God do such-and-such" is something like "we do not know the ways of
the Lord."

But to say that we don't know the ways of the Lord is to say
that invoking Him is not intended to be an explanation.

If the creationists (or whatever they're calling themselves
lately) don't want to offer any explanation, that's their business.

But I don't have to accept that "there is no explanation" is
an explanation.