‘Tanzania’ sweetpotato variety.
Credit: Benard Yada, National Crops Resources Research Institute
(NaCRRI), Uganda.
(NaCRRI), Uganda.
Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, creationists often claim that mutations cannot create new genetic information.
This argument rests on a deliberate misrepresentation of Shannon information theory, developed by Claude Shannon to optimise the transmission of information. Shannon’s theory equates information with entropy (a measure of uncertainty), not with “meaning”, and it draws on mathematical principles that can be related to thermodynamics. In thermodynamics, energy is conserved—neither created nor destroyed.
Creationists then assume, incorrectly, that this means the “information” in a genome cannot be created. They also tend to overlook the fact that, if their analogy with energy held true, it should also be impossible to destroy genetic information—yet they have no difficulty accepting the latter.
