From: 69jpil69@gmail.com   
      
   On Sat, 6 Dec 2025 18:19:56 +1100, MarkE  wrote:   
      
   >On 20/11/2025 11:07 pm, Ernest Major wrote:   
   >> 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.   
   >>    
   >   
   >Apologies for the delay in this response.   
   >   
   >Within the ranks of ID, Behe (at least) accepts some degree of common    
   >descent and therefore genome/information change. Although his recent    
   >book Darwin Devolves has this blurb on Amazon:   
   >   
   >'A system of natural selection acting on random mutation, evolution can    
   >help make something look and act differently. But evolution never    
   >creates something organically. Behe contends that Darwinism actually    
   >works by a process of devolution?damaging cells in DNA in order to    
   >create something new at the lowest biological levels. This is important,    
   >he makes clear, because it shows the Darwinian process cannot explain    
   >the creation of life itself. “A process that so easily tears down    
   >sophisticated machinery is not one which will build complex, functional    
   >systems,” he writes.'   
      
      
   If "Darwinian process" refers to random mutation plus natural   
   selection of extant life, then it's technically correct to say that it   
   can't explain the creation of life itself.  But that's a disingenuous   
   statement, as Darwinism technically refers to how life evolves, not   
   how life was created; that's called abiogenesis.  ISTM   
   anti-evolutionists go out of their way to conflate these terms.   
      
   OTOH it's almost certainly true that *abiotic* processes followed   
   similar Darwinian patterns and rules to randomly sort out which   
   chemicals were involved in abiogenesis.   
      
      
   >Would Progressive Creation (RTB) fit under occasionalism?   
   >   
   >The nature and measurement of information seems slippery. As you    
   >mention, is it Kolmogorov complexity or Darwkin's "incomplete record of    
   >the historical environment", or something else?   
   >   
   >ID posits a lawlike conservation of information, which I find    
   >intuitively appealing, but Dembski's efforts to formally define this    
   >have yet to land it seems.   
      
      
   There are two proper meanings to "conservation of information".  One   
   has to do with physics and doesn't apply at all to Darwinism.  The   
   other is an axiom of algorithms, that the info coming out of processes   
      
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