Friday October 11th - 9pm Eastern

Information and meaning in biology: Predictions and successes of Intelligent
Design

by Cornelius G. Hunter

Half a century ago Claude Shannon formalized and elevated information theory. In his 1948 ground breaking paper he introduced "information" as a mathematical construct devoid of any semantic considerations. With this narrow definition of information Shannon greatly expanded the field of information theory and showed new ways to think about and solve information-related problems. He laid the groundwork for highly successful solutions in fields such as telecommunications and data storage and compression. But in addition to these spectacular successes information theory also raises certain subtle questions. One of these deals with the relationship between information and meaning and it has implications about the limitation of information in practical situations. If we seek to construct a message with meaning, or similarly a machine with function, the information content must not be maximized. Biological organisms contain information, but when we enlarge our view to include meaning we see that the information, in the Shannon sense, must necessarily be limited. The origin of species entails the origin of information, but that information cannot be maximized. In this paper we examine aspects of the design of the species and why information theory helps us see that design and not evolution best explains their existence.

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