[Arch Enemy]

Originally Posted by schmichael

hardly! what i said was that mutations have never been observed to increase info (go read my post again). i did not deny that there are beneficial mutations. there are beneficial mutations, they just don't increase genetic information which is requred for evolution from goo to you.

so the problem is not me lying, it is you lacking understanding of what other peolpe are saying.

It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of:

increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)

If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins.

For example:

Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000).
RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002)
Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)
The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.

According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism (Adami et al. 2000).

The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations (Adami et al. 2000; Schneider 2000).

Nope; the problem is that you ARE lying.

so what do those experiments prove that is helpful to your arguement that pond scum turned into people??

Nobody has ever made the argument that we evolved from pond scum. Except you. And you alone. Until you understand that we evolved from apes, you (as usual) are adding nothing whatsoever to the conversation.

Get with it.

nothing. the fruit flies were still fruit flies! they had not evolved into birds or bats or anything else.

That is because evolution does not state that fruit flies evolve into birds (which are birds, not insects like fruit flies) or bats (which are mammals, not fruit flies).

I had hoped (in vain, apparently) that you understood this basic tenant of evolution. I guess not.

I'm also guessing you lack any understandibng of speciation whatsoever. It is not uncommon for creationists to hear the term 'speciation' and immediately assume that speciation refers to a dog evolving into a cat, when it has nothing to do with any such thing.

Speciation refers to the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. There are three main ideas concerning the emergence of new species (Modes of Speciation), each based on the degree to which populations undergoing this process are geographically isolated from one another (allopatric speciation, sympatric speciation, parapatric speciation, polyploidy speciation).

this is not an example of evolution but of speciation, exactly as the creation model predicts.

Genesis 1.24
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

Except that 'kinds' have nothing whatsoever to do with speciation, and you know it.

Speciation refers to the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. There are three main ideas concerning the emergence of new species (Modes of Speciation), each based on the degree to which populations undergoing this process are geographically isolated from one another (allopatric speciation, sympatric speciation, parapatric speciation, polyploidy speciation).

i'm afraid that other leading evolutionists would disagree with this statement.

Somehow I knew you would bring up Ruse.

You said 'other leading evolutionists'.

You mentioned one.

And didn't bother to read all of what Rue had to say, either.

How surprising.

Ruse's point was that two kinds of evolution exist side-by-side. There's the powerful scientific theory of evolution which is well-evidenced and one of the crowning achievements of science, and there's the quasi-religious evolution which promotes particular moral or social theories. His purpose is to prevent the two from being confused. Unfortunately, creationists have misused his essays on the subject to promote their own purposeful confusion of the two.

Ruse specifically pointed out several times that evolution (including common descent) is scientific. There are, however, other things called evolution which are not. For example, in Is Evolution a Secular Religion, he writes: ". . . if the claim is that all contemporary evolutionism is merely an excuse to promote moral and societal norms, this is simply false. Today's professional evolutionism is no more a secular religion than is industrial chemistry."

still think it's not a religion?

I still know it's not a religion.

your one and only lie that you have been able to quote me on, quite simply, was not a lie but was due to your misunderstanding. i have never denied beneficial mutations but i have denied that any mutations add genetic info. there is a difference.

Look up, sparky. Ya' lied. Ya' got caught.

come back when you can prove that mutations add the required info for goo to evolve into you.

Come back when you find a source that claims that humans evolved from goo. Thanks.