From: {$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk   
      
   On 19/11/2025 11:00, MarkE wrote:   
   >   
   > However, if I understand Meyer's claim, he's saying that the base-pair   
   > sequences in DNA are not physio-chemically determined, but rather DNA is   
   > a neutral substrate for storing an arbitrary, immaterial code. (In the   
   > same way, different sequences of 0s and 1s on your hard drive have   
   > essentially the same mass and energy, and are therefore not "physical"   
   > in that sense.)   
   >   
   > However, evolution is claimed to be a non-mind process that accumulates   
   > particular code sequences, i.e. information. Even if Meyer's assertion   
   > that "Information is a massless, immaterial entity" is accepted, he   
   > still needs to show why evolution (even in-principal) cannot be a source   
   > of such information.   
      
   There are different views as to what the information in DNA is. On the   
   one hand one can take an infomatics viewpoint and use the Kolmogorov   
   complexity as a measure of the amount of information present. On the   
   other hand one could follow Dawkins and argue that natural selection   
   impresses an incomplete record of the historical environment of   
   ancestral populations on the genome of a species, and this is the   
   information in the genome. Similarly phylogenetic bracketing can be used   
   to infer with various degrees of confidence ancestral phenotypes,   
   habitats and distributions - that's information extractable from clade   
   pan-genomes.   
      
   Meyer would seem to need a definition of information which can't be   
   added by evolutionary processes, but yet still differs between taxa.   
      
   If you stipulate that evolutionary processes don't change the   
   information content of genomes, then as it is clear that evolutionary   
   processes do change the DNA sequence of genomes, then one concludes,   
   from the voluminous evidence for common descent with modification   
   through the agency of natural selection and other processes, that all   
   genomes have the same information content, and the claim that an   
   intelligent designer is required to account for the information   
   evaporates. (There might be a circular argument as a residue.)   
      
   If one the other hand you accept that evolutionary processes do change   
   the information content of genomes then you difficulty in justifying the   
   need for a mind to act as the source of information. On the one hand you   
   could resort to occasionalism (Islamo-Calvinist determinism) and deny   
   the existence of natural processes, a la Ray Martinez (suspected of   
   being an occasionalist evolutionist). On the other hand you could argue   
   that the information is imported from the environment and a mind was   
   needed to create the initial pool of information, in which case you're   
   basically back at the Cosmological Argument. If, on the gripping hand,   
   you assert this much and no more, you need to identify limits to how   
   much can be achieved by evolutionary processes. If you don't, all you   
   have is an appeal to incredulity.   
      
   --   
   alias Ernest Major   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)