Once again Egnor proves he's more of a liability than an asset to the cause. Ooblog exchanges some emails with Egnor asking him to define "biological information.

The problem? Egnor can't do it.

No one knows how to measure biological information in a meaningful way. The current ways of measuring information (Shannon, KC, etc) are relevant to sending signals, and are not of much help in biology.

Gene duplication is not a source of significant new information. It obviously changes the way things work in the cell, to some extent, but it can only copy what's there, and we're asking how it got there to begin with.

Even though we can't measure it (and serious investigators like Dembsky are trying to figure this out), we know biological information when we see it. The genetic code, molecular machines, seamless integration of physiology are all obviously the kind of biological information that we are trying to understand. The only source of such information (or functional complexity or whatever) that we know of in human experience is intelligent design. There are no 'natural' codes, aside from biology, which is the topic at issue.

Darwinists have a responsibility to show that undesigned mechanisms can produce sufficient biological information to account for living things. If they don't even know how to measure it, how can they assert that random variation and natural selection can account for it, and why is the design inference ruled out?

Actually, biologists can measure biological information, Evolutionblog has a good post on this aspect, but that's beside the point.

Egnor argues the invalidity of "Darwinism" based on it's inability to measure a metric he can't define better than "he knows it when he sees it".

This is a wonderful new technique. I say that ID creationism shouldn't be given any validity until they adequately explain biologic "godism". I don't know how to define or measure biologic godism, but it's the presence of godliness in biological systems. Until they quantify biologic godism to my satisfaction in a reproducible and systematic way, I don't think we can trust what they say. Biologic godism needs to be measured, mathematically modeled, and fit into a new biological framework before we can trust this new hypothesis of theirs.

Isn't it so much easier to argue with people when you're just allowed to make things up?

Labels: Evolution denialism, Michael Egnor