It is remarkable that a scientist who taught communication theory can be just simply outright, plain wrong on the subject of information. What he has said isn't some matter of debatable opinion here; it's just demonstrably false.
In information-theoretic terms, noise is information-dense. The densest source of information is pure noise: every single bit matters. Patterns have less information density; the information can be compressed into a smaller information space. The string "010101010101010101010101" contains far less information than "001010101001001010110110" despite having the same number of bits.
Mutations introduce new information into the genome. It's as simple as that, and Dr. Spetner is either lying or stupid when he says otherwise.
The question is what use can be made of that information. Evolution has a very simple, direct answer to that question: natural selection. Those bits of information that turn out to be useful are conserved, and "utility" is measured by whether the organism lives to reproduce.
Dr. Spetner seems to be assuming that information from one pattern is lost during a mutation. Perhaps the physicist is unaware that information in DNA is readily duplicated. He is correct* that the human genome contains more information than most bacterial genomes. This is a known mechanism: DNA can be repeated during transcription. Two copies of a chromosome can fuse, or the mechanism producing transcriptions can repeat part of a mechanism that it's copying. This can produce longer and longer genomes over evolutionary time. It permits one copy of a gene to continue to produce precisely the same results that it always has, while a second copy receives mutations, adding more information.
He's also wrong that the fundamental difference between the bacterial and human genomes is the size of their information. It its true that the human genome is about 100 times as large as the largest bacterial genome, but there are many genomes considerably larger than human genomes. Some plants have genomes 50 times larger than human genomes, and some single-celled amoebas may have genomes even bigger than that. The complexity of an organism is only loosely related to the size of its genome. Growth is recursive: even a simple input can make very complex outputs. The difference between humans and bacteria is in the particular program specified in their genes, not the number of base pairs. A long program is not necessarily any more interesting or useful than a short one.
These are trivial errors that a PhD in any scientific field has absolutely no business making; they would be instantly contradicted by anybody with any knowledge of microbiology. Dr. Spetner is outside his field, and is either lacking information that he should have known he'd need before writing a book, or is deliberately ignoring what contradicts something he clearly wants to believe. It is clear that there is an audience who wants to believe it, and lacking even the most basic of scientific information, will cite the fact that some PhD agrees with them as sufficient reason for holding what is manifestly false.
Dr. Spetner does not have the faintest idea of what he is talking about, and his book is a travesty. I can't tell if he's stupid, lying, or deluded, but in none of those cases is his book of any use except to make other people dumber.
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* Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, though creationists usually don't manage that same level of utility.
In information-theoretic terms, noise is information-dense. The densest source of information is pure noise: every single bit matters. Patterns have less information density; the information can be compressed into a smaller information space. The string "010101010101010101010101" contains far less information than "001010101001001010110110" despite having the same number of bits.
Mutations introduce new information into the genome. It's as simple as that, and Dr. Spetner is either lying or stupid when he says otherwise.
The question is what use can be made of that information. Evolution has a very simple, direct answer to that question: natural selection. Those bits of information that turn out to be useful are conserved, and "utility" is measured by whether the organism lives to reproduce.
Dr. Spetner seems to be assuming that information from one pattern is lost during a mutation. Perhaps the physicist is unaware that information in DNA is readily duplicated. He is correct* that the human genome contains more information than most bacterial genomes. This is a known mechanism: DNA can be repeated during transcription. Two copies of a chromosome can fuse, or the mechanism producing transcriptions can repeat part of a mechanism that it's copying. This can produce longer and longer genomes over evolutionary time. It permits one copy of a gene to continue to produce precisely the same results that it always has, while a second copy receives mutations, adding more information.
He's also wrong that the fundamental difference between the bacterial and human genomes is the size of their information. It its true that the human genome is about 100 times as large as the largest bacterial genome, but there are many genomes considerably larger than human genomes. Some plants have genomes 50 times larger than human genomes, and some single-celled amoebas may have genomes even bigger than that. The complexity of an organism is only loosely related to the size of its genome. Growth is recursive: even a simple input can make very complex outputs. The difference between humans and bacteria is in the particular program specified in their genes, not the number of base pairs. A long program is not necessarily any more interesting or useful than a short one.
These are trivial errors that a PhD in any scientific field has absolutely no business making; they would be instantly contradicted by anybody with any knowledge of microbiology. Dr. Spetner is outside his field, and is either lacking information that he should have known he'd need before writing a book, or is deliberately ignoring what contradicts something he clearly wants to believe. It is clear that there is an audience who wants to believe it, and lacking even the most basic of scientific information, will cite the fact that some PhD agrees with them as sufficient reason for holding what is manifestly false.
Dr. Spetner does not have the faintest idea of what he is talking about, and his book is a travesty. I can't tell if he's stupid, lying, or deluded, but in none of those cases is his book of any use except to make other people dumber.
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* Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, though creationists usually don't manage that same level of utility.
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