random accumulation of nucleotides<\/a>.\u00a0 Something else?<\/p>\nWe really don’t know what to refute here.\u00a0 In my experience of discussing this particular issue with creationists, is that they will happily change the definition of ‘information’ even within the same sentence in order to support their notions.<\/p>\n
One way to talk about information is how easy is it to transmit.\u00a0 Note that the rigorous definitions of information do not talk about “meaning”.\u00a0 In terms of transmitting information the sequence “AAAAAAAAAA” has much less information than “AUTNDMUGHE” .\u00a0 That’s because it is easy to compress the first one and it’s easy to confirm that the information has been transmitted correctly.\u00a0 The latter sequence cannot be easily compressed and is more difficult to confirm that it has been transmitted correctly.\u00a0 If you send 30 minutes of white noise over a phone line, you are sending more information than in a 30 minute political speech.\u00a0 Not because of the meaning, but because of the ability to compress the information.\u00a0 Speeches have long pauses, often use the same words\/sounds, etc while white noise is completely random.<\/p>\n
I don’t think that this method of discussing information has any meaning for living things.\u00a0 A living thing is not JUST it’s DNA sequence or the sum of the proteins in its body or whatever.\u00a0 Scientists have been asking questions of creationists like this for over a decade and no answer has ever been forthcoming.<\/p>\n
What would a ‘natural source’ of information be?<\/p>\n
I have to assume that if no ‘natural source’ can be found, then the assumed alternative is a supernatural source.\u00a0 But, even if a supernatural entity exists and creates information, that information must still exist in the natural world.\u00a0 Since no one, at any time, has ever observed something miraculously appearing out of thin air, then we must assume that everything has a natural source.\u00a0 Including information.<\/p>\n
Most often, this type of statement is used to imply that intelligent sources can produce information, but non-intelligent sources cannot.\u00a0 This is fundamentally untrue.\u00a0 Non-intelligent sources can produce highly complex, information rich systems and structures.\u00a0 Termites for example.\u00a0 There is a ground termite species in Africa whose mounds are all aligned North-South.\u00a0 The mounds contain farms, nurseries, and a ventilation system.\u00a0 All from non-intelligent termites (although, I do know of two creationists who argue that termites are intelligent).<\/p>\n
What is the science ‘natural source’ of information in organisms?\u00a0 Simply chemistry.\u00a0 Everything that happens in us, around us, every response that we generate, every sense that we have is all chemical reactions and interactions.\u00a0 That’s it.<\/p>\n
It’s not meaningful in a moral\/cultural way, but that’s all it is.\u00a0 Thinking is nothing more than sodium and potassium ions being pushed through cell membranes causing a cascade of chemical reactions that travel through the cells in our brains.\u00a0 And yet, those chemical cascades have produce technology, logic, math, science, and even fantasy.<\/p>\n
Is this sufficient to discredit the first line of the creationist claim?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 It depends on if one is interested in evidence or not.\u00a0 There is evidence that natural processes produce new information.\u00a0 We are natural processes, running on wetware.\u00a0 Termites are natural processes.\u00a0 Heck, we even use natural processes to generate information (atmospheric white noise, for example).<\/p>\n
Random processes are never known to produce information.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Really?\u00a0 Again, we have this problem of defining information. Without understanding what is meant by information, there’s no way to deal with this.<\/p>\n
I have heard, in this context, that ‘information’ is related to function.\u00a0 I.e.\u00a0 random processes cannot produce a new function in organisms.<\/p>\n
That’s simply not true.\u00a0 We previously mentioned human hemoglobin beta.\u00a0 A random mutation has been found that prevents infection by a deadly disease.\u00a0 In Lenski’s lab, random mutations have occurred and allowed a bacteria to do something that it has never been able to do before.<\/p>\n
A random process can also just increase the amount of genetic material in an organism.\u00a0 A mutation can result in the copying of an entire gene.\u00a0 Asymmetrical crossing over can produce entirely new chromosomes (and this is found in comparing human and chimpanzee chromosomes).<\/p>\n
Finally, one more thing needs to be mentioned.\u00a0 Evolution is not an entirely random process.\u00a0 One of the important factors of evolution is natural selection.\u00a0 Selection is not random.\u00a0 Yes, a rock slide could have killed that one dinosaur that would have, in a few generations, developed a descendant that was intelligent (in the way that humans are) and the landscape of the Earth was forever changed.<\/p>\n
In general however, traits that appear to have advantages are promoted and traits that have disadvantages are suppressed.\u00a0 Simply speaking, selection is a part of the process.\u00a0 It is arguable that selection is a result of the environmental pressures on the genes in the organism.<\/p>\n
Regardless of how one looks at it, the end result is that organisms that have more appropriate genes for the environment tend to survive better than organisms that have less appropriate genes.\u00a0 This is the opposite of random.<\/p>\n
I’d love to delve into this further, but without a detailed claim, it’s hard to provide specific evidence that refutes it.\u00a0 Which is why the creationists continue to be as vague as possible.\u00a0 It let’s them change their definitions in mid-discussion and it prevents specific evidence from directly refuting them.<\/p>\n
That being said, the claim presented by the creationists here, is refuted.\u00a0 It’s simply not true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ah, this is a modern classic. Indeed, this is what the idea of intelligent design is based on. I could go for hours on this topic. I will try to restrict myself to only refutations of this creationist claim.<\/p>\n
There is no known natural source of the information that is present in all life systems. Random processes are never known to produce information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,76],"tags":[939,938,283,937],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creationism","category-origins-of-life","tag-creationism","tag-evolution","tag-intelligent-design","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/smilodonsretreat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}