James A. Barham
Member
Member # 50
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posted 19. March 2002 08:13
I have been wondering about the lack of references here in Brainstorms to the sophisticated, profound, and very important work of Richard von Sternberg. I gather that he is sympathetic to the aims of ID, but I wonder if his work has had much of an impact on the thinking of the ID community.
I have in mind, for example, the idea expressed in the following passages (von Sternberg 1996, pp. 100-101):
"An increase in genomic structural complexity and new potential information by the operation of these generic constraints, both within repetitive element subsystems and throughout the genome, is expected . . . the products of DNA amplification, transposition, sequence rearrangement, etc., creates [sic] new phase space for further organizational evolution. As new sequences are generated, they can coalesce into sequence families and subsystems; integration of repetitive elements into loci results in new sequence structures and thus new genetic information, potential or otherwise . . . The amplification and genome reorganizing activity of repetitive elements constitute an input of new structure-potential information which when coupled with boundary conditions may lead to a general increase in chromosomal complexity and genetic novelty prior to the operation of selection."
I would dearly love to be able to listen in on a direct exchange between Dembski and von Sternberg in regard to the question of the conservation of information vs. genome self-organization (that is, structuration via symmetry breaking and phase space expansion)
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Reference:
von Sternberg, Richard. 1996. "The Role of Constrained Self-Organization in Genome Structural Evolution," Acta Biotheoretica, 44: 95--118.
[ 19 March 2002, 08:17: Message edited by: James A. Barham ]
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