Really Bad Math: Evolution and Information

To me, one of the most irritating trends in creationists' attacks on evolution is the misappropriation of math to create totally bogus arguments based on nothing more than fancy jargon. They rely on nothing more than most people's fear of math: they count on the fact that most people see mathematical jargon, and won't look any closer.

The two key ways they do this is to misuse information theory; and to misuse probability. Probability is a matter for another day; today, I'm going to do my best to show quickly and easily how wretched the whole line of argument about information theory is.

First, let's take a quick look at a couple of examples of this argument, picked entirely at random. (I did a google search on "information", "evolution", and "create", and in the list of hits that came up, these were the lucky first two creationists.)

The Creation Science Homepage, "Do You Believe in Evolution", question :

Information from Randomness?

Information theory states that "information" never arises out of randomness or chance events. Our human experience verifies this every day. How can the origin of the tremendous increase in information from simple organisms up to man be accounted for? Information is always introduced from the outside. It is impossible for natural processes to produce their own actual information, or meaning, which is what evolutionists claim has happened. Random typing might produce the string "dog", but it only means something to an intelligent observer who has applied a definition to this sequence of letters. The generation of information always requires intelligence, yet evolution claims that no intelligence was involved in the ultimate formation of a human being whose many systems contain vast amounts of information.

Science Against Evolution

Evolutionists must explain where the genetic information in DNA came from. They can't do it. Here is how one evolutionist tries to dance around the problem:

It is simply not possible to change a hemoglobin gene into an antibody gene in one step. … To understand how evolution really works, we have to abandon the notion that such mutations can happen. Instead we must think of mutations as small changes affecting the functions of preexisting genes that already have long and complex histories. Usually, new mutations tend to damage genes in which they occur because they upset their precise functioning and their finely honed interactions with other genes. But sometimes they change them in ways that increase the fitness of their carriers, or might increase the fitness of their carriers farther down the line if the environment should alter in a particular way.2 [italics in the original]
Dobhzhansky's view [is] that much of the variation needed to accomplish the transition was already present in the gene pool … 3 [italics in the original]

There are two fallacies in this argument. The first is that random changes in existing information can create new information. Random changes to a computer program will not make it do more useful things. It doesn't matter if you make all the changes at once, or make one change at a time. It will never happen. Yet an evolutionist tells us that if one makes random changes to a hemoglobin gene that after many steps it will turn into an antibody gene. That's just plain wrong.

Anyone who's read my posts on information theory should immediately see what's bogus about this. Literally, the very definition of information in information theory is randomness.

So of course a random process can "create" information: a random process is, in fact, in information theory, by definition, a random process is precisely an information generator.

I'm not saying that the idea of it being difficult to create meaningful proteins randomly isn't difficult: it really is. But it works because of the sheer quantity of information being generated: when you're talking about billions upon billions of living things, constantly reproducing, constantly mutating - even if only one mutation in a billion generates information that is in any way valuable, that's no problem. But that's really a subject for another post.

But as you can see, the whole "information theory" argument isn't an argument at all. It's an attempt to make an argument from authority by using the words information theory and entropy, without any real reference to the actual theory beyond its name. It relies on the fact that most of the people who they're trying to reach aren't going to go and read Shannon's papers or Chaitin's books. Because even a glance, a trivial passing skim of a page or two of any real information (pun intended) about IT will reveal the utter fraud of their so-called arguments.