How Much Functional Information?
So now we are in a position to compute how much functional information is gained when cancer evolves. This is a rough calculation that parallels closely the work done by Dembski, Axe, Marks, and every leading light in the ID movement. As has been stated already, they are all making the same argument.
First of all, we know that driver mutations are very rare. Most mutations are not drivers. Most cancers have a lot of unique mutations we don’t find anywhere else. And we can even test if mutations are a step in the pathway to cancer in the lab. More importantly, we have lots and lots of cancer genomes, and looking at all this data we can figure out which mutations drive cancer, and how many are typically required. Here is an important study that does just this, with results summarized in a figure:
https://www.sanger.ac.uk/news/view/1-10-mutations-are-needed-drive-cancer-scientists-find
So depending on the cancer type, we need somewhere between about 2 (kidney) to 11 (colon) mutations to develop the cancer “function” in a cell. Can we quantify this in bits? Yes we can. This is an approximate calculation, but it in this context it is going to be very close to the true value.
How much information is in each mutation?
It takes about 31.5 bits of information to specify each mutation. We obtain this by computing the log base 2 of the human genome size, which is about three billion bases long. This is approximate. There are reasons to push this number a couple bits up and other reasons to push it a couple bits down. We’ll just assume these effects largely cancel out.
We want to compute the functional information content of the “cancer” function, which takes multiple mutations. How much is that?
As long as the number of mutations is small (say, less than 100), it works to just sum the bits of the mutations. So for some different types of cancer, the functional information gained is about:
2 x 31.5 bits = 63 bits of functional information in kidney cancer
11 x 31.5 bits = 346.5 bits of functional information in colon cancer
6 x 31.5 bits = 189 bits of functional information in lung cancer
Many ID advocates argue that anything that requires more than 50 bits of functional information is essentially impossible in evolution. If ID arguments were valid, we have here demonstrated that cancer is essentially impossible without intelligent guidance.