Posted: Feb 27, 2012 7:36 pm
Paul Almond wrote:My view is that rather than think of Darwinian evolution as "creating new information" it is better to think of it as copying information from the environment into the genetic code. That is to say, the information about the features that living things should have to be good at reproducing is already out there in the environment. It is implicit in the environment. Evolution extracts this information gradually from the environment.
Agreed 100%.
I've been hammering this point for a while now, and tried to make it explicit with examples and analogies in the various threads with Jireh. I also tried to get the same point across to Rodcarty at one point. As I know Cali has written before, information can be said to represent "the physical state of a system". Since all material systems are always in some kind of state, the process of selection working on randomly generated variation will constantly work to "write" the gene-sequences most successful at propagating in this environment. It follows that all sequence information is produced by an evolutionary process. That's why I now think there must have been a transtition from chemical to template directed evolution. Origin of life research must search for non-templated chemical systems capable of evolving. Instead of evolution writing sequences with information about the environment, it is constructing something else that serves the same purpose.
Work is being done on exactly that: Evolution before genes.
We live in exciting times!