The Information Challenge | Australian Skeptics

Richard Dawkins via last.fm

I recently came across the following video on YouTube




Of course when I saw this I immediately thought that maybe there was a response.




The rebuttal video links to an article written by Dawkins himself to explain how he was blindsided and that the interview was edited to make him look bad. The link to that article is below.

The Information Challenge | Australian Skeptics

I think that Richard Dawkins' response is plausible but I think that the question was a valid question and in that video he did not answer it. His written response is more substantive but it still does not answer the question.

Dawkins wrote:

This idea of information fed from ancestral generations into descendant gene pools is one of the themes of my new book, Unweaving the Rainbow. It takes a whole chapter, “The Genetic Book of the Dead”, to develop the notion, so I won’t repeat it here except to say two things. First, it is the whole gene pool of the species as a whole, not the genome of any particular individual, which is best seen as the recipient of the ancestral information about how to survive. The genomes of particular individuals are random samples of the current gene pool, randomised by sexual recombination. Second, we are privileged to “intercept” the information if we wish, and “read” an animal’s body, or even its genes, as a coded description of ancestral worlds. To quote from Unweaving the Rainbow: “And isn’t it an arresting thought? We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.”

I don't think he answered the question.What I still want to know how does one species' gene pool get infused with more genetic information to turn it into another? During the article he likened our genomes to hard drives and DNA as computer code. I agree. However if he is right  that all higher organisms contain code from past generations then where does this code comes from. Random mutations don't explain it and as a computer programmer I can tell you that I don't want my code mutating.