I’ve never seen anyone squirm so hard to admit conceding such a simple point.
3 Likes
No it didn’t, but neither did it change the gibberish into non-gibberish. But this analogy is not accurate in that regard, since what you’re describing would be strictly neutral in our analogy–something that doesn’t actually exist in the real world. I’m struggling to see how that fact jives with saying that junk dna contains no information, however.
No, it didn’t. Just as the vast, vast majority of mutations to junk DNA don’t change it to functional DNA. But we’re not talking about where functional DNA comes from; we’re talking about the selective effects of most mutations and whether GE is true.
No, the changes to the gibberish I’ve described are not strictly neutral: every letter costs a different amount to print. That’s why I asked whether the cost changes. Does it?
1 Like
Sorry, I missed that. I’m trying to put together a kimchi stew at the moment.
So I’m gathering you’re suggesting that the effectively neutral mutations are as likely to reduce the cost of printing as they are to increase it. And since you’re claiming that there’s no information contained, all we’re doing is just cycling from one gibberish to another, and the cost of printing will go up and down randomly. Scratch that. The cost of printing will on average stay the same.
At least, I hope I understood you properly with this analogy. So you’re saying the effectively neutral mutations have no overall tendency towards being deleterious, and the mutations which do change the information content are fully selectable, and that selection acts upon them with such efficiency that, despite an overwhelming likelihood of damage, we still have either a net zero or a net gain over time.
I think I see the problem here …
It is still information, but there is no function or meaning. Thus “gibberish”.
“No Information” is not correct, or at least not complete. Gibberish is also information, but it doesn’t do anything relevant to biological function.
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Information is not gibberish. It’s the antithesis of gibberish.
Correct. As I suggested a long time ago, there fuzzy areas where that’s only an approximation – if the population has changed size, for example – but it’s a good approximation.
Again correct, although again there are edge cases. Some deleterious mutations that affect function can occasionally reach high frequency by chance, for example. But beneficial mutations, which are rare compared to deleterious ones, also occur quite frequently.
3 Likes
You remind me of the Young Earth Creationist who complains that fruit flies have been raised for thousands of generations - - and they are still the same.
Evolultion of a large population is fairly ponderous if there are no changes in the environment DRIVING those changes!
Without changes in the environment driving the consequences of mutations … there isn’t much to discuss. If we want fruit flies to evolve into something very different … it’s going to take years of selectively changing the laboratory boxes that house those fruit flies… and a good imagination for deciding what to change first.
1 Like
I wish I had a dollar for every time a Creationist confused information with meaning.
3 Likes
I understand what you are saying, and you aren’t wrong, but it’s a different interpretation of Information. You are using Information in the sense of “meaningful”. I’m talking about a more formal definition of information which measure a quantity (like # of characters on a page) but no meaning.
Gibberish has no meaning (no information in your sense), but still takes up space on the page (info in my sense).
Does that help?
2 Likes
Imagine I hand you two sheets of paper, each with 500 random English letters. I tell you that one is a message encrypted with a one-time pad, while the other is actually randomly generated letters.
- Do either contain ‘information’?
- Is it the same amount?
- Can you tell me which is which?
1 Like
True, but maybe not helpful here. We don’t have “one-time” ciphers in biology. I think we can still stick with biological gibberish.
1 Like
- Yes. The encrypted one.
- No.
- I think a mathematician could figure out which was encrypted and which was gibberish, even if they couldn’t crack the code.
Maybe this article will help both you and @Dan_Eastwood understand my position:
What happens in your analogy when you account for the fact that mutations are more likely to shift GC content to AT?
The article says you can’t define information, can’t quantify information, but you intuitively can tell if it increased or decreased. Yes that helps us understand your immense confusion.
3 Likes
Great: you don’t understand information. That explains it. It is simply a fact that both have information, that both have the same amount of information, and that the fact that it is literally impossible to determine which is which (because it is mathematically impossible to crack a one-time pad) is immaterial to the information content.
2 Likes
I’m just checking for basic understanding of what information ‘is’. Which, not surprisingly, he failed.
I don’t mean to muddy the waters further, poor Paul is lost enough as it is, but I just wanted to point out that gain-of-function mutations in junk DNA can be beneficial or deleterious, so it’s not as though 100% of mutations to junk DNA only affect the replication efficiency.
3 Likes
No one mentioned adding letters.
So, back to the purpose of this conversation, where did you get the false idea that noncoding = junk?
Ah yes, science-by-discernment - always accurate.