John Marlow <johnmarlow@gmx.net> quotes James P. Hogan as if the man is a deep thinker:
>the question of the origin of the stupendous amount of information in a genome
Why it a big mystery that lots of things contain lots of information? There is no such thing
as a law of conservation of information, quite the reverse. The second law of thermodynamics
says that entropy at best stays the same and in fact usually increases, and that means things
usually become more disorganized, and that means it's harder to describe them than it was before,
and that means they contains MORE information as time goes on not less. Creating information is
easy, it's very difficult not to, thus a heterogeneous lump of clay or rock contains far more
information than a perfect salt crystal a thousand times larger, or even a diamond. Using the
quantity of information to attack evolution is silly, if he used the quality of information he still
wouldn't win of course but at least he wouldn't embarrass himself as badly. Although Mr. Hogan
may be good at writing space operas he doesn't seem to know much about information theory,
or evolution.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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