—
Here’s the same information, compressed (using gzip) and then made
readable using a unix utility called uuencode:

M’XL(“)E8$$0“VIU;FL`19$Q=JPP#$7[6?7KIN',`M+]?HHLPH“)\8BMOPYM[#Y/GCDG#MLY2EI8$9H5GLX=*R(_+ZP/,-5-1#\HRJNT`77@LL,MZD,"H7LSUKDW3@$#V2MH(KTO$Z^$%CN1Z>3L*J^?6ZW?^Y2+10;\+SOO'OC"/;7T5QA%987SY02I3I$MLKW"W,VZ-(J$E"[$;'2KYI^\-_L./3BW.+WF3XE8)?@D8X^U59DQ7IA*F+X/MM?I!RJ*%FE%])Z+EXE+LSN*,P$YNX5/P,OCVG;IK=5_K&CK6J7%’+5M,R&J]M95*W6O5EI%G^K)8B/XV#L=:5_`=5ELP#Y#\UJ??>[[DI=J''*2D];K_F230″$`@(“““

That’s only 465 characters; and if I didn’t have to encode it to stop
it from crashing your web-browser, it would only have been 319
characters. Those characters are a lot more random than the original -
so they have a higher information density.

—

The problem with this is that the characters aren’t “more random” (at least not in a meaningful mathematical sense, which surprises me that he’d do that). Now they appear more random if you’re expecting English text. But in that case, the concept of “Randomness” becomes completely relativistic.

As an example, it would be like saying “Te amo” is more random than saying “I love you” because “Te amo” isn’t English. A Spaniard, however, would say that “I love you” is more random than “Te amo.” The only difference is the language being used and who knows it.

FWIW, it would be true that the string “I love you” contains more information in the sense that it contains more characters.

Anyway, I think part of what many Darwinists forget when they look at information theory as it relates to DNA is that compressing data requires an increase in the complexity of the program that interprets the data. And we can see that even simply from the example given by MarkCC above.

It doesn’t take much “work” for an English reader to read through his original two paragraphs. It would be virtually impossible for that same reader to turn the ZIP file back into legible English so he could extract the message…and it’s all to save less than 200 characters (514 characters converted to 319 characters). Naturally, a computer can do the work for us–indeed, the computer must do the work for us.

Now to return to the idea that the ZIP file is “more random” than plain English: this is simply not accurate. In fact, every single character in the ZIP file is required to be exactly what it is in order for the file to be decompressed. In fact, ultimately that text must obey rules that random texts do not (again, I refer to the passage David Kahn wrote where he showed that even two texts that have the same letter frequency as random texts (i.e., each letter appears at roughly the same frequency), if they are encoded with the same key, will display “coincidences” at a rate higher than random texts would when the texts are lined up where the key would fit. ZIP compression would do the same thing, because zipped files have to follow the correct program else no one could unzip any files. Thus, there remains a mathematical difference between a random text and a text generated by ZIP compression; compression, therefore, does not increase randomness.

Finally, MarkCC has defined randomn characters as information; thus, in his system, there is no informational difference between signal or noise. That is: signal = information; noise = information; signal + noise = information. In fact, the more random a message is the more information it contains (since a completely random message cannot be compressed at all). This is, of course, how Shannon defined the terms, which is what MarkCC was going by, and under that system his conclusions follow. Information = entropy. The more entropy you have, the more information you have.

However, IIRC, you studied chemistry or physics, right? You may therefore recall that in physics, entropy destroys information. This would be the direct inverse of Shannon’s view because the more entropy you have, the less information you have.

The fact that there are competing definitions of information was why I specifically defined “information” in my original blog post as “something that is non-repeating and non-random and cannot be explained by only foundational forces.” Thus, my definition already conflicts with MarkCC’s definition, since his is that information is randomness and mine is that information is non-random (interestingly, we both agree that repetitions, or as he called it, redundancies, decrease information).

As I told one person that I spoke to on Triablogue, you can always feel free to substitute a different definition of information in there; but the key is that your definition must have some way to distinguish between signal and noise or else it’s not meaningful to the discussion of DNA.

Because we are working from different definitions, his post really doesn’t have anything to do with my argument. I did enjoy it, however; in fact, it makes me want to pick up my Godel, Escher, Bach again. :-)

Anyway, I do think that even saying that the “monkeys and the typewriter” exist as the laws of chemistry and physics (which is where I thought you would probably go) that we solve the problem. After all, my first reaction is to ask: “Why are the laws of physics and chemistry the way they are?” And ultimately, that’s the point of the TOE and/or GUT (which I think make awesome acronyms regardless of anything else!). But even so, pretty much everything that I’ve read on the subject of what happened immediately after the Big Bang (i.e., what caused the break in symmetry, which lead to the four “foundational” forces (gravity, strong & weak nuclear, and electromagnetic) coming about) was that there was no reason. That is, there’s no physical law that says the universe has to be the way it is (e.g., that magnetic forces should be so much stronger than gravity, such that an object the size of a refrigerator magnet can repel the force of an object with the mass of the Earth!). Interestingly, many people I’ve read say that it is impossible for us to ever know why the forces broke symmetry the way they did, it just the way it did it period (and I have to point out that this is just as much as “science stopper” as saying “Goddidit” would be… :-) ).

But I don’t want to sidetrack too much along those lines. (Actually, I do want to because it’s interesting to me–but it doesn’t have much to do with the point of my post!)

Anyway, I’ll write more later. BTW, you can always feel free to drop me an e-mail too. It’s a yahoo address with the handle “petedawg34″ (lovely spambots, oh how I doth hate thee!)

Did you check out any of the papers? Kimura’s is classic, as he uses Malthus to estimate ~0.3 bits/generation, although this is WAY wrong given current information on rates of mutation…

Anyway, the important part is the approach he uses and the math.

In other words, one could use Dawkins’ response that six monkeys typing away on six typewriters will eventually produce the works of Shakespear. I merely point out that I’m interested in how the typewriters and monkeys came about in the first place in order to then semi-randomly produce Shakespear (I use the word “semi-random” to differentiate between the “random” actions of monkeys and the actual random actions of, say, radioactive decay).

As always, good to hear from you though. :-)

Here are some peer-reviewed papers that describe in painful mathematical detail exactly how natural selection generates genetic information:

http://web.danielmorgan.name/Articles/evpapers.html

Also, as Mark-Chu Carroll demonstrates, incompressibility is one of only a few meaningful ways of defining information, and as such, the oversimplification of using syntax/messages to represent information is actually wrong.

http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/06/information-theory-index.html
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/06/dembskis_profound_lack_of_comp.php
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/02/once_again_sal_and_friends_but.php

Best wishes,
sdm