Even some scientists give lip service to fairy tales.

Damn ! I should have seen that coming....

It seems to me that your definition of complexity would imply that a Helium atom is more complex than a Hydrogen atom by virtue of having more interacting particles. But if that's the case, is your definition of complexity simply a numeric accumulation?

I haven't asked the next implied question yet, which is your definition of "information".

Suppose an organism which was already at one level of complexity were to evolve into something with fewer active genes in its DNA

Thats not an example of ?Complexity" its an example of a process

if ya cant be certain of any examples of what youre saying, its difficult to back up your claim

I choose not to answer this question because it has never happened. It is very unlikely to happen.

A more recently discovered and less well-known aspect of genome evolution in bacteria is gene loss, in which entire chunks of the genome are deleted. "A region of a hundred genes or ten genes may have been lost [at a time]... these big deletions occur all the time," Ochman states.

Whereas gene acquisition can be beneficial, gene loss is usually catastrophic. However, in host-inhabiting bacteria, the protection of the host environment may allow the bacteria to survive such a loss.

"If you're a free-living organism, you lose a certain gene, if it's essential, you're dead. But if it's something that's not essential," for example a gene for the production of a nutrient you can get from your host, bacteria can keep living and reproducing after the loss, but they can never perform that function again. Further, because they are imprisoned within the host, they may have little opportunity to gain the genes back from other bacteria by swapping genes.

"Most people think that bacteria only have tiny genomes so they can replicate faster," Ochman says. Instead, a reduced genome may be a negative side effect in bacteria living as obligate insiders. Such bacteria have small populations, and because natural selection is weaker in small populations than in large ones, harmful mutations leading to gene loss can accumulate, whereas such mutations would be weeded out in a larger, free-living population.

"You're not getting smaller because it helps you replicate faster, you're getting smaller because things get knocked out, and are eroded away, due to your population structure," Ochman emphasizes.

rosborne979,
Hey, I like debating with you ! You are teaching me without telling me my opinion is bullshit. I have been wrong in how I thought genes did not lose code. I always thought they simply grew more and kept redundancies. Thinking about it, that may be how viruses came about. But I still maintain my overall point of view. The fact that there is an extra process that removes genes I believe supports increased complexity. Wouldnt it be simpler not to have such a process ? As for information storage, the trend is still there as it involves every living thing.

Hey, I like debating with you ! You are teaching me without telling me my opinion is bullshit.

However, I would like to state clearly that even if I believed in increasing complexity, that in no way implies that the process is being driven by any godlike intervention, but rather by basic laws of physics.

And I will take the opportunity to state clearly that I dont believe it is a basic Law of Physics.

It may be something in the nature of dimensions colliding, and this is the result of increasing intermeshing.

Dimensions colliding is one considered possibility for the origin of the Big Bang.

Perhaps I should have said that I don't think the root causes of what we see around us are in any way supernatural. I think that the structure of the Universe is such that what we see around us arises naturally and is an expression of the Universe itself.