My latest paper, “Measuring Active Information in Biological Systems” was released today at BIO-Complexity. The paper itself is somewhat math-heavy, so I thought I would give UD readers a short overview of the basic ideas.
This paper is focused around the question of “random mutations” vs. “directed mutations”. Most people aren’t aware of this, but, more and more, biologists are finding mutations which are decidedly not random, but directed by a cell’s internal machinery. For those interested in more background information, see this video.
However, skeptics often simply dismiss the arguments for directed mutation. In Larry Moran’s case (and I find this response to be typical), he agreed with the basic facts, but refused to concede that it was directed. Despite the fact that the mutation spectrum aligned directly with the near-term needs of the organism, Moran couldn’t allow himself to say that the mutation was directed.
To the rescue comes Robert Marks and William Dembski, with Active Information. Active Information has been used to analyze non-biological “evolutionary” systems for the existence of information repositories guiding their evolution. I decided to apply that same technique to biology.
The core of the technique is this. The No Free Lunch theorem states that, loosely, that there is no general search mechanism that is optimal for all possible search spaces. More specifically for our purposes, it says that a “random search” is actually equivalent to the time of the expected outcome of any particular search process, as long as the search process is not *designed* to match the search space.
Therefore, whether or not an organism’s mutations are random, the expected speed of success of the organism’s mutation system should be equivalent to a random search, unless the search system is specifically designed to match the selective pressures it will face. Therefore, whether or not mutations are random, the effects of truly random mutations will give us an expected value for the success of any given non-designed search.
We can experimentally model random mutations in a number of ways. There is a bit of a problem, though, in that it is near-impossible to turn off an organism’s internal mutation system without causing other problems. Therefore, the paper presents a way, mathematically, to separate out the effects of the random mutations vs. the internally-generated mutations.
So, once we have determined the efficacy of random mutations, this gives us an expected value for the efficacy of the organism’s internally-generated mutations, if the mutational system is not designed. If the mutational system is significantly more directed towards beneficial outcomes than the expectation, then we have justification to believe that there is some sort of orienting mechanism at play which is causing mutations to be aligned with the needs of the organism (i.e., there is design in the mutational mechanisms).
Note that the product of such a study is not purely for speculative purposes. There are real, practical reasons to want to know this. First of all, it takes a lot of resources (time and material) to analyze mutational mechanisms in organisms. This represents a large risk of resources if we don’t know that there is a mechanism to find. Using Active Information, we can measure how much information the cell is contributing to its evolution, and, if it is significant, this justifies the expenditure of resources to determine the mechanism.
Additionally, we can start to treat evolutionary potential as a phenotype. That is, different organisms may have different evolutionary capabilities. Knowing what these capabilities are require the ability to measure them, which is what Active Information provides. Additionally, once they are known, these can be used for bio-engineering when evolutionary potential is a necessary component. For instance, for cleaning up waste, it would be important to know which organisms are more likely to evolve the ability to eat that particular kind of waste.
Anyway, I hope you all take the time to read the paper, and I am curious as to your comments!
Good work johnnyb,
And johnnyb, while establishing the fact that the vast majority of mutations are indeed directed, not random, is a very important step in falsifying the Darwinian presupposition about random mutations, for me the bigger fish to catch and fry has always been falsifying the primary claim from Darwinian materialists that information, in and of itself, is merely ’emergent’ from a material basis. That is to say, for me the bigger fish to catch and fry has been to establish the physical reality of information, i.e. that information is an independent entity that is separate from matter and energy and is therefore not merely ’emergent’ from a material basis as is held within the foundational presuppositions of the Darwinist’s reductive materialistic framework.
For primary example, Rolf Landauer himself maintained that the information in a computer is ‘physical’.,,,
Although Landauer said “Information is Physical”, Landauer was not implying that information has a independent reality separate from matter and energy, but he was actually implying that information is physical simply because it is inevitably inscribed on a physical medium. In fact, Landauer said that Roger Penrose’s contention that information has an existence independent of matter and energy was a quote unquote ‘quaint notion’.
This same belief that ‘Information is inevitably inscribed in a physical medium. It is not an abstract entity’ that is separate from matter and energy is a foundational presupposition of Darwinian thought.
Perhaps the simplest way to establish the physical, independent, reality of ‘abstract’ information, a physical reality that is separate from matter and energy, and to thus falsify the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution, is with quantum teleportation: As the faollowing article states “the photons aren’t disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Instead, it’s the information that’s being teleported through quantum entanglement.,,,
,,, it is only the information that gets teleported from one place to another.”
To go further, in the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, it was demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
Moreover, this following 2011 paper goes even further and states that “an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,,”
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
What is so interesting about finding “entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”, is that the information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
And thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within the books of all the largest libraries in the world.
Needless to say, that is a massive amount of positional information.
As the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
On top of that we can add the fairly recent findings that demonstrate that quantum information is ubiquitous within biology. For example, as Dr Reiper remarks in the following video, “practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.”
The interesting thing about quantum information is that it is experimentally shown to “non-local” as well as “conserved”.
As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, ““Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
And as the following article states, “In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.”
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
And in conclusion, Intelligent Design, and a direct inference to God as the Intelligence behind life, (via the non-locality of quantum information and/or the non-locality of quantum entanglement within biological molecules), has, for all intents and purposes, finally achieved experimental confirmation.
Verse:
Evos still use a dipstick
BA – those are all interesting uses of information. I’m mixed on how far those will bring us. There could be something there. I generally use more practical notions of information just because they are more accessible.
Practical is good, JohnnyB. Thank you for your contributions.
johnnyb,
I don’t know how more ‘practical’ you can be in science than providing empirical proof for the physical reality of immaterial information.
Empirical proof holds primacy in science over mathematical models!,,,, ALWAYS has the last word!
So, when I read a book, what is this physical “stuff” that is being transferred to my mind? Does the book get lighter after I have read it?. If information is instantiated durably in some immaterial medium why do I need a book at all?
What is the empirical evidence for the information the dendrochronologist derives from tree-rings other than what he says he has learned from studying them?
What definition(s) of evidence are in play here?
Bill Dembski interviewed in this video @11:30
https://youtu.be/Uxr2VMhY1dg
Seversky at 7 asks
To ask “Does the book get lighter after I have read it?” is to misunderstand the physical relationship between information and matter/energy.
First and foremost, information is immaterial. We can inscribe information on an almost endless variety of material substrates, using on almost endless variety of different languages, and yet the meaning of the information never changes between the material substrates as long as the information is faithfully encoded and decoded on the almost endless variety of material substrates. In other words, there is something profoundly immaterial about information that refuses to be reduced to materialistic descriptions..
As George Williams pointed out, “Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes…”
And as George Ellis pointed out, information is a ‘top down’ “higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves.”
In other words, it is the ability of the immaterial mind to have knowledge of a particle’s position, and to then arrange that particle’s position in relation to other particles, that allows us to impart immaterial information into material substrates. To repeat what George Ellis stated, information is a ‘top down’ “higher level relation that is not apparent at the scale of the electrons themselves.”
And indeed, as was pointed out previously, it has now been demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
Shoot, the recent experimental realizations of the ‘Maxwell’s Demon” thought experiment go even further than that. Quote-unquote, “James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
And to get a bit more technical, but hopefully not too technical, classical sequential information is now shown to be a subset of quantum information,,,,
,,, classical sequential information is now shown to be a subset of quantum information by the following method. Specifically, “when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,,
In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. ”
The fact that classical sequential information is a subset of quantum information is further driven home by the relation of quantum information to sequential information in DNA. As Dr Reiper remarks in the following video, “practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.”
Thus we now have many lines of empirical evidence, (particularly from quantum information theory and from the recent experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment), establishing the fact that information, regardless of the fact that it is immaterial, is, none-the less, physically real and that it has, of all things, a ‘thermodynamic content’ that can be imparted, in a ‘top-down’ manner. onto material substrates.
As far as empirical science is concerned, these experiments establishing the physical reality of immaterial information are direct empirical falsifications of the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, Presuppositions that hold immaterial information, (and mind), to be merely emergent from some material basis.
Of supplemental note: Seversky goes on to ask,
This is an interesting question. One might be predisposed to believe, as Seversky does, that information can’t possibly exist for us personally unless the information is physically represented in our brain somewhere. Yet, contrary to what some people may be predisposed to believe, and as Pim van Lommel points out in the following article, “extensive research has been done to localize memories (information) inside the brain, so far without success.,”
Thus contrary to what Seversky wants to believe beforehand, no one can seem to find exactly where the ‘memory banks’ are located in the brain.
Of related note to the fact that no one can seem to find exactly where memories are stored in our brain, it is also interesting to point out that in many deep ‘Near-Death Experiences”, many people go through a ‘life review’ in which their entire life, every detail of it, (all the ‘information’ of a person’s life), is gone over in the presence of God:
Around the 20 minute mark of the following Near Death Experience documentary, the Life Review portion of the Near Death Experience is highlighted, with several testimonies relating how every word, thought, deed, and action, of a person’s life (all the ‘information’ of a person’s life) is gone over in the presence of God:
In 1997 “Not By Chance” by DR Lee Spetner was published. It was his answer to “The Blind Watchmaker”. In it he presented his “non-random evolutionary hypothesis” which had “built-in responses to environmental cues” as its main mechanism. In his next book he expanded on that a little more, saying that organisms were given the information required to adapt and evolve.
This makes sense that if organisms were intelligently designed that they were intelligently designed with the ability to adapt and evolve. It wouldn’t make any sense to go through all of the trouble to intelligently design the earth and its inhabitants but then leave everything else to contingent serendipity.
Just to be clear- Dr Spetner does not say that all mutations are so directed. He understands that mistakes do happen
JohnnyB
Very insightful article on a fascinating topic. I highly appreciate it.
BA77,
Thanks for your always very informative comments.
JohnnyB,
The genetic code has attracted celebrity-level media attention since it was discovered.
However, aren’t there other biological codes?
Do they qualify under this topic “Measuring Active Information in Biological Systems”?
For example,
The bioelectric code: An ancient computational medium for dynamic control of growth and form
L-type voltage-gated Ca2+ channel CaV1.2 regulates chondrogenesis during limb development