My understanding is aligned with you @Art. The BLAST bitscore is worth explaining sometime, but it does not appear to be equivalent to what most IDists mean by FI.
Great. That is really helpful. You are agreeing then that:
- Human-to-human genetic variation is a negative control.
- Viral evolution is a negative control.
- Cancer evolution is a negative control.
You add the, appropriate, caveat that the horizontal transfer of genes is not a design based infusion of information. You also suggest as a negative control:
- Experiments that do not include “intelligent” selection (for example, Lenski’s experiment)
“Intelligent selection” is poorly defined by I think I get what you mean. It seems also that, correctly, this would include both in silico simulations and in vitro experiments. Both approaches are valid “experiments” if conducted correctly.
That is great news. From here, there are two ways forward I see.
First, I want to hear your response to what we have written already about your analysis. That seems the place to start. This should clarify a great deal about your methodology and what you are precisely claiming.
Second, after your methodology and refined and clarified, perhaps we will circle back to looking at some of these other cases. To have a preview of what this might look like, see here: Computing the Functional Information in Cancer. However, let’s not distract from the first point too soon.
Looking forward to it.