Evolution
Life Sciences
The Evolution-Lobby’s Misguided Definition of “New”
Links to our 8-Part Series, “The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Citation Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information”:
• Part 1: Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information |
When Judge Jones claimed that Ken Miller showed “the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes,” Ken Miller and his friends at the NCSE didn’t just equivocate on the definition of “information,” they also misused the term “new.” In fact, they would likely accept something as “new” if it were merely a copy or a duplicate some pre-existing stretch of DNA, even if the new copy doesn’t actually do anything new, or perhaps even when the new DNA doesn’t do anything at all. In contrast, proponents of intelligent design would define “new” genetic information as a new stretch of DNA which actually performs some different, useful, and new function. For example, consider the following string:
- DUPLICATINGTHISSTRINGDOESNOTGENERATENEWCSI
- DUPLICATINGTHISSTRINGDOESNOTGENERATENEWCSIDUPLICATINGTHISSTRINGDOESNOTGENERATENEWCSI
The above example is of course analogous to the commonly cited evolutionary mechanism of gene duplication, which evolutionists commonly cite as a mechanism by which Darwinian processes can produce new information. But new functional information is not generated by a process of duplication until mutations change the gene enough to generate a new function–which may or may not be possible. As Professor of Neurosurgery Michael Egnor insightfully said in response to one evolutionary biologist:
[G]ene duplication is, presumably, not to be taken too seriously. If you count copies as new information, you must have a hard time with plagiarism in your classes. All that the miscreant students would have to say is ‘It’s just like gene duplication. Plagiarism is new information- you said so on your blog!’16
Indeed, evolutionary explanations cannot simply rely upon duplication, for there must be duplication followed by recruitment to a new function. However one defines “information,” merely duplicating a string does not produce new functional information.17
References Cited:
[16.] Comment by Michael Egnor at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/02/dr_michael_egnor_challenges_ev.php#comment-349555 (February 20, 2007)
[17.] Again, as implied in the body, if one could predict the string would be duplicated, then the Shannon Information would also not increase after duplicating the string, in which case there is no increase in CSI nor Shannon Information.