> > TT:-
> > Overwhelmingly, natural selection's role
> > is that of *destroyer* of information.
> > Its primary action is destroying whole
> > genomes full of large volumes of information
> > added by meiosis and subsequent mutations.
> > The information it adds is piddling - both
> > by comparison with what it destroys, and
> > by comparison with the information added
> > by mutations.

> GH:-
> As I stated before, I agree with Tim's perspective on this issue.
> Strangely, I do so because I think of information as having an objective
> existence independent of observers, although this is not Tim's view.
> However, if you adopt this position for a moment you can see a critical
> relationship between natural selection and information beyond the
> "destructive" role that Tim describes above.  That is the role of
> information processing.  My argument is that natural selection is to
> heritable information what the mind is to experience.  A great 
> deal of noisy
> (largely incompressible) information is fed into the process (natural
> selection or thinking, respectively), and a large amount of input
> information is filtered out to maximize the signal to noise 
> ratio.  In this
> view, the main job of natural selection is to make sense of the
> informational input, and the possible creation or destruction of 
> information
> along the way is merely a distracting side-effect.

JE:-
I agree that "the main job of natural selection is 
to make sense of the informational input". 
However, I do not agree the senseless "information"
can validly constitute information! AFAICS, allowing
information as validly senseless only constitutes a 
contradiction of what information could be.

In any science of biology, disinformation
must be able to be testably separated from information
where both remain contextual, i.e. constitute
 _relative_ measures. Relative to what? 
The Darwinian fitness maximand, i.e. the
information required to produce one Darwinian fitness. 
No other testable maximand has been proposed that
can contest and win against it. For example,  
inclusive fitness (rb-c) which seeks to contest
the Darwinian maximand cannot be maximised because
it is just a relative fitness measure. Selection
cannot maximise the difference between two total
fitnesses it can only maximise  any total fitness
that is being compared. Thus the information required for 
evolution to proceed is the information required to 
increase an absolute fitness measure. Any information 
that decreases it constitutes disinformation which is 
"information" about noise i.e. in any _relative_ measure 
of  information it is _NOT_ information. Unless a test 
exists to separate information from disinformation 
the concept of information remains meaningless within 
a science of biology.
 

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

PO Box 266
Church Pt
NSW 2105
Australia

edser{at}tpg.com.au
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