Information
and Evolution
By Do-While Jones
Darwin developed his theory of evolution before anyone ever
thought of information theory. Although the study of information theory is still in its
infancy, it is clearly posing some problems for the theory of evolution.
We now know that DNA contains the instructions for building
various kinds of living cells. We even know how to measure that information in
"bits."
But what really is information? Where does it come from? What
does it have to do with evolution?
Let's answer the last question first. If information can be
created by chance and natural selection, then DNA could have evolved the information
necessary to build living cells without the help of an intelligent designer. But if
information only comes from an intelligent source, then DNA had to be created by an
intelligent source. It could not have evolved. So that is why it is important to figure
out if information can come from a random process or not. We certainly can't figure out
where information comes from if we don't know what it is, so that's where we must start.
What is information?
The nickname "Information Superhighway" is an
overused cliché for the Internet. It is so overused that many people are sick and tired
of hearing the term. But it does illustrate an important point. Information flows (in the
form of text or images) between people over the Internet.
Let's talk about images first. Images are patterns of colored
dots. These colored dots (called pixels) are formed by mixing various amounts of red,
green, and blue light. It takes a certain number of bits to transmit each pixel. You can
multiply the number of bits per pixel times the number of pixels per image, and that will
tell you the maximum number of bits of information the picture can contain.
Images rarely contain that maximum number of bits of
information. Images are generally "over-sampled," resulting in "redundant
pixels." Since it takes time to send each bit over the Internet, engineers have
worked hard to figure out ways of "compressing video" to remove these redundant
bits. How this is actually done is irrelevant. The point is that ways exist to determine
the amount of information in an image and the minimum number of bits needed to transmit
the image. So, information is a quantity that is measured on a regular basis.
The amount of information in a message is inversely related
to its probability. Suppose I could tell you which face would come up on the next roll of
a die. Since the probability of a correct prediction is 1 in 6, that message would contain
2.585 bits of information.1 If I could tell you
(within ½ mile) the latitude and longitude of the location where the next meteor will
strike the Earth, that message would have 15.6 bits of information because the odds of
predicting that location are about 50,000 to 1. A message containing the 6 numbers (out of
80) that will be drawn in a lottery would contain 28 bits of information because those
odds are about 300 million to 1.
Information by Chance?
It is possible to write a computer program that generates
random characters (letters, numbers spaces, punctuation marks) with the same statistical
distribution as found in a typical English document. If we let that program generate
random characters, and run that gibberish through a spelling checker, most of the
"words" will be misspelled. But there will be a few character sequences that
happen to be correctly spelled English words. A mathematician can calculate the expected
number of correctly spelled words in randomly-generated text. If he does the calculations
correctly, then the number of randomly produced words will be close to the prediction. If
the number of words spelled correctly matches the expected value, then there is no
information in the randomly-generated text. No surprise means no information.
If you select a text file at random from somebody's floppy
disk, and run it through a spelling checker program, nearly all the words will be
recognized by the spelling checker. (There might be some technical terms or geographical
names that the spelling checker doesn't recognize.) Since the number of correctly spelled
words is not even close to the expected number for random text, it is a clear indication
that the text file was produced by an intelligent agent rather than a random process.
A thorough analysis of a typical text file will show some
patterns. The letter "q" will often be followed by the letter "u".
Certain sequences of letters, like "t-h-e" will appear more frequently than
would be produced by a random process. So, the existence of patterns suggest the presence
of information. (The same is true of images. Images that convey information have a pattern
in them. But if you disconnect your TV antenna you just get pattern-less "snow"
or "confetti" on your screen.) Truly random data does not contain any patterns.
There is more to English text than just patterns of
characters that form words. One could write a program that randomly selects English words
from a dictionary and builds sentences from them. If you pass such a file through a
spelling checker program, it would find many correctly spelled words. This is an
indication of an intelligent source. In fact, the process wasn't completely random. An
intelligent programmer selected words from a dictionary that had been created by someone
with a knowledge of correct English spelling. So, the surprisingly high number of
correctly spelled words is a valid indication that an intelligent source was somehow
involved in producing the file.
A file produced this way might contain, "Ate sound
John." This sequence of words is not a sentence because it is syntactically
incorrect. English sentences don't take the form verb-object-subject. Words have to be in
a valid order to make a sentence.
"John ate sound" has the subject, verb, and direct
object in a valid order, so this "sentence" is syntactically correct. Even so,
it is semantically incorrect. In other words, it has no meaning. One cannot eat sound.
Text files produced by intelligent humans contain words that
are spelled correctly, arranged in syntactically (that is, grammatically) correct
sentences, that have semantic content (that is, they make sense). This gives them the
ability to convey information from one person to another.
The probability that a random character generator (even if it
is filtered by a spelling checker) would produce the sentence, "Amelia Earhart's
airplane crashed into the ocean at 5 degrees, 8 minutes, 24 seconds south latitude, 172
degrees, 54 minutes, 3 seconds east longitude." is essentially zero. But just for the
sake of discussion, suppose it did. The chances that the wreckage of her airplane would be
found within one-half miles of the specified latitude and longitude is about 1 in 50,000.
Suppose you received a message from an unknown source that
correctly specified the location of the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. A random
character program could not have generated that message. Someone who knew where she
crashed must have written the message. Random messages don't contain that much
information.
Consider the DNA molecules in your body. Your DNA is a
sequence of about 3 billion base pairs that contains the blueprints for all the cells in
your body. The information coded in this molecule tells how to make blood cells, skin
cells, brain cells, bone cells, and optic nerves. It contains instructions far more
detailed than directions to Amelia Earhart's missing airplane.
If a tree falls …
Philosophers sometimes debate the question, "If a tree
falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" We may not be able
to answer that question, but we can answer a more pertinent one. "If someone sends a
message and nobody receives it, is information transferred?" Certainly the answer to
that question is, "No."
The information in a DNA molecule would be useless if the
cell didn't know how to process it. Consider this actual fragment of DNA.
ctgcaggaaa ctttatttcc tacttctgca taccaagttt ctacctctag
atctgtttgg ttcagttgct gagaagcctg acataccagg actgcctgag acaagccaca agctggtgag ttgtaggcat
tttttccatt actttctgat tcataggctc aacgcacctc aaagctggaa atgccgggtc tgggtacacc ctggggaact
gcaaagcctg cacacttggg gggaatgatc aagatgagag gcaggggtgg ggatggcatg tgcaccagga gatgttagag
aaacctgagg aagagcagag tgcagcaggt gatgggggag agtgggcagc aagcgaggcc aggacagcca ctctgctcag
tcaccagtcc acacacccag gggctcactc tgcccctctg agcacccaag gacgttaaag agctggaact gttagtctaa
atataggacc atccaagctc tgaaccaaaa tgtgtccctt gcctcaactc aggagatcca cagaggcaga agtaaggaat
ttattttctg aaagatagat ttctatcagt tctgggtgac atgttctgac act
Does it tell you anything? If it does, you can pick up your
Nobel prize. But your cells know it is a human monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 receptor
gene, 5' region. Your cells know how to read it, even if you don't. Did the cell's ability
to read DNA evolve by chance? Do computers figure out how to read information from the
Internet without someone programming them to do it? Certainly not.
The Evolutionists' Delemma
Evolutionists must explain where the genetic information in
DNA came from. They can't do it. Here is how one evolutionist tries to dance around the
problem:
It is simply not possible to change a hemoglobin gene into an
antibody gene in one step. … To understand how evolution really works, we have
to abandon the notion that such mutations can happen. Instead we must think of mutations
as small changes affecting the functions of preexisting genes that already have long and
complex histories. Usually, new mutations tend to damage genes in which they occur because
they upset their precise functioning and their finely honed interactions with other genes.
But sometimes they change them in ways that increase the fitness of their carriers, or
might increase the fitness of their carriers farther down the line if the environment
should alter in a particular way.2 [italics in the
original]
Dobhzhansky's view [is] that much of the variation needed to
accomplish the transition was already present in the gene pool … 3 [italics in the original]
There are two fallacies in this argument. The first is that
random changes in existing information can create new information. Random changes to a
computer program will not make it do more useful things. It doesn't matter if you make all
the changes at once, or make one change at a time. It will never happen. Yet an
evolutionist tells us that if one makes random changes to a hemoglobin gene that after
many steps it will turn into an antibody gene. That's just plain wrong.
Information does not gradually increase through small,
incremental random changes. There is no scientific evidence to even suggest that it does.
But many of us are painfully aware that just one bit error in Windows 95 can cause our
computer to die! Information certainly can be lost by a small, incremental change.
The second fallacy is the assumption that information
"was already present in the gene pool" just waiting to be changed. Where did
that previous information come from? Presumably it came from modifying other existing
information. But where did that existing information come from?
Remember, a message telling the 6 winning lottery numbers (a
300 million to 1 shot) contains 28 bits of information. Just the first 50 letters of the
monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 receptor gene printed above contains about 100 bits of
information. That whole gene contains about 1166 bits of information. But that gene
represents just 583 of the 3 billion base pairs in a single human DNA molecule.
Information Isn't Just Structure
At our last Fourth Friday Free Film showing, our favorite
critic argued that hydrogen and oxygen naturally combine to form water, which is a more
complex structure, and therefore contains more information than hydrogen and oxygen alone.
(We admit, he didn't say it quite that succinctly. He never says anything succinctly.) He
confused structure with information.
The carbon atoms in a diamond are arranged in a neat crystal
structure. The carbon atoms in a lump of coal are not. The carbon atoms in a diamond don't
have any more information than the carbon atoms in coal. Information is coded in patterns
that have meaning to the receiver. Water molecules and diamonds don't contain patterns
that represent information. Yes, they have structure, but no, they don't have information.
Information Needs a Source
If you find a message that contains information (such as the
location of Amelia Earhart's airplane), someone had to write it. Random chance does not
produce information. If there is information coded in a DNA molecule (and there certainly
is), an intelligent source must have put it there. There is no scientific evidence that
even a small amount of information can be generated by chance. There is scientific
evidence that random changes to a message can remove information. Mutations might remove
information, but they will never create it.
To believe that a DNA molecule evolved by chance, you have to
reject science.
Footnotes:
1 The amount of
information is log2(1/probability).
2 Christopher Wills, The Runaway Brain, 1993,
page 166
3 ibid. page 64
