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Author
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Topic: Rand McNally meets Dembski
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David L Rice
Member
Member # 167
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posted 17. April 2002 11:37
Parts of this post came from my previous post on 'light through a dragonfly's eye'
When you think about it organisms are gigantic flow diagrams or information landscapes. A road map is also an information landscape. When we consider the nature of just what information is it becomes intuitive that information cannot be discerned unless there is a directional movement, flow or transfer from one source to another. In the case of a book, for example, the information is not recognized unless there is some type of transfer from the book to your eye. Movement of information is both the initial cause and sustaining cause of biochemical and physiological systems.
In the case of living organisms this information flow can be detected and illustrated from the molecular scale up to the scale of the organism itself and the environment. But how can we know that mere mapping of the information gets us to design? Well I think I've got at least a partial answer - information mapping can be a way of illustrating how irreducible features interact. Schematic flow diagrams at different scales can illustrate that at one scale directional information becomes the cause and at another scale it becomes the effect. I think that irreducible systems not only merely contain parts or systems that cannot be removed but also the parts (or systems) themselves operate differently at different scales. Just like a road map of the state of Mississippi I won't know a thing about getting around the state capitol unless I zoom in to the city itself. Likewise I can't get out of the city unless I zoom out so that I can find the interstate. We find this same property in designed systems and we find it in living systems.
Go north, turn left 50 degrees, wait for the next signal you'll see a flare on the horizon, steer clear of rocky cliffs, gather the troops, go to the ridge and wait for the captain. Is this an intelligence report or a metaphor for serotonin reuptake?
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kyle7
Member
Member # 191
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posted 02. May 2002 16:01
David,
Thanks for your post. I think your mapping of information would be a beneficial tool for identifying IC systems. Darwinists seem to gloss over the details of biological systems, and they fail to see the coupling of the systems. Coupled systems are a real difficulty for evolutionary theory, because a number of very specified mutations must occur in order for the selection to occur. The "phase space" of the genome is so large that multiple simultaneous mutations reduce the probability to effectively zero, or require the timeframe to be significantly longer than the 3.2 billion available years. IC systems necessitate a high degree of coupling. A mapping of the information flow would help identify areas where the degree of coupling is high.
I would suggest that you include the mapping of the processes and the energy flow. This combined mapping would be a useful tool to the ID movement. Another area that will help the ID movement will be the mapping of function related to the genome. Once scientists do this, I think the ID movement will gain momentum.
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charlie d.
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Member # 159
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posted 02. May 2002 16:50
quote:
Darwinists seem to gloss over the details of biological systems, and they fail to see the coupling of the systems. Coupled systems are a real difficulty for evolutionary theory, because a number of very specified mutations must occur in order for the selection to occur.
Kyle7, far from "glossing over" the coupling of biological systems, the study of coevolution is one of the most lively fields of evolutionary biology, and has probably been since Darwin.
Recent advances in genomics and proteomics are finally beginning to shed light into the molecular constraints on the evolution of interacting proteins. Detailed, even quantitative analyses of coevolutionary processes have already been published. Here is a great paper just recently published in Science. This is the abstract:
quote:
Science 296:750-2, 2002
Evolutionary Rate in the Protein Interaction Network
Hunter B. Fraser,1* Aaron E. Hirsh,2* Lars M. Steinmetz,3 Curt Scharfe,3 Marcus W. Feldman2
High-throughput screens have begun to reveal the protein interaction network that underpins most cellular functions in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. How the organization of this network affects the evolution of the proteins that compose it is a fundamental question in molecular evolution. We show that the connectivity of well-conserved proteins in the network is negatively correlated with their rate of evolution. Proteins with more interactors evolve more slowly not because they are more important to the organism, but because a greater proportion of the protein is directly involved in its function. At sites important for interaction between proteins, evolutionary changes may occur largely by coevolution, in which substitutions in one protein result in selection pressure for reciprocal changes in interacting partners. We confirm one predicted outcome of this process--namely, that interacting proteins evolve at similar rates.
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