Argument #3: Mutations

[Esquilax]

Dude, you're back!

The so called new information that many evolutionists claim that takes place is a result of a corruption of already existing information. The examples you cite fail to achieve a "gain in functioning" mutation. In fact if there were an evolution from molecule to man we should readily see an abundance of this occurrence, we don't.

The problem here is twofold: the first is that "information" in the sense that you're using it isn't an objectively real thing, it's a product of human beings being able to read the chemical reactions in DNA, so what we're talking about here isn't a "corruption" in information, but rather a change in the set of chemicals in a specific set of DNA. There's no "ideal" DNA code, and so nothing to state whether the changes are inherently good or bad outside of how the affect the organism in its life. If it helps, imagine it like a word in English; yes, the letters do get switched around in the reproductive process, and sometimes that will lead to nonsense in return, but at other times it leads to whole new words.

The other problem here is... well, what are you expecting to happen? "Corruption," what does that mean? What do you think that'd do to an organism? Human beings are born with at least sixty, upwards of two hundred, mutations each; here's a link, this is verified science. It's very clear that this isn't as harmful as your creationist buddies want to make it seem, else we'd all be in serious trouble, right? As it stands, we're all just people, because most mutations start out small.

As for mutations that allow for new functions, that's trivially easy to demonstrate; there's a strain of Flavobacteria that can eat nylon, a material that had not existed before 1935. More importantly, this same nylon-digesting mutation is reproducible in laboratories, as it was induced in a separate species of bacteria later.

There you go; an additional function, gained due to mutation, added under laboratory conditions. That answers your argument, right?

[pocaracas]

Welcome back, rev.
I see you're still up to your old faulty "arguments".
Haven't you learned anything, in those two other threads?

[Rampant.A.I.]

Rev, instead of railing against evolution and other widely accepted scientific basics, why not take time to actually read up on and learn what's been discovered by those fields?

In your view, an omnipotent creator built all of this, just for you, and modern science is able to discover not only the methods of creation, but the timeline, and a detailed history of how things came to be as they are now.

You didn't expect a simple, literal explanation, did you?

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You believe in a being so advanced, with so much mental capacity that he literally knows EVERYTHING happening in the universe, past, present and future, to which our greatest minds would be but a single sparkling salt crystal on the tip of an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean.

A being that is timeless to the extent that time is meaningless in even the extreme scales we can barely imagine.

Do you think a being like that literally descended from the heavens, picked up a lump of clay, fiddled with it, blew into it's nostrils, and placed a fully-formed human on earth on the 6th day, a paltry 6000 years ago?

Or do you think if such a being wanted to give the species he created a "Brief History" the biblical creation account might have been overly simplified for Bronze Age primitives, condensed to time periods they could understand, and rendered even more inaccurate, metaphor-laden and steeped in the cultural traditions of the time and place, and worldview of where it was received, and then passed by oral tradition for 130 years, before finally being written down and translated through multiple languages before you read it in our magnificent bastard tongue of English?

Or is it more likely that a being of infinite wisdom knows that, when it comes to ingenuity, no single-method system, no matter how smart the designer can beat educated trial and error for superior development?

Entertain, even for a moment, that what appear to be blind naturalistic processes could very well be the product or a timeless mind, so advanced that each error, species extinction, and and every death of every single member in every phylum that ever existed was meaningful, as that being refined a design?

Do you honestly believe that a being described the way the bible and Jesus refer to it would fiat a mirror into existence, make a bipedal hominid as a finishing touch on the 46 billion light year wide universe before lunch?

Or does it make more sense to you that such a being would create the same kind of creative, inquisitive, curious, thoughtful, playful, flawed, wrathful, vengeful, petty, childish, wonderful mind such a being would itself possess, and do it in such an artfully creative way that we're still unraveling the history of God's method with modern science, with the possibility that our best measurement methods can only turn up evidence of a blind naturalistic process because the most brilliant human minds on the planet cannot see the greater perspective accessible only to God's mind?

Think about how petty and infantile you're being, by clinging to a literal English reading of biblical genesis.

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Don't you want to know the extent of God's creation, understand a tiny fraction of the "how," and deepen your faith and connection to God by learning what he has left for human curiosity to discover and stand, paused to wonder wrapt in awe of?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Why are we even entertaining a guy who doesn't know the foggiest about evolution but who insists on talking about it as though he's an expert?

[Tonus]

re: "information." The genome is not a hard drive packed with data, where "corruption" would render the contents partially or entirely unreadable. As Max pointed out, there seems to be no correlation between the size or 'complexity' of a creature and the size of its genome (how much genetic information there is, so to speak). Such 'randomness' doesn't affect the theory of evolution at all, but it is an odd factor when considering creation by a supremely intelligent being.

[Confused Ape]

Waves hello to Revelation777. I wondered where you'd got to.

At some point even the most hardened evolutionist must admit that Christians simply don't evolve, ever.

Many Christians have evolved because they believe in theistic evolution.

[Sinbad]

FYI

Jesus would have been very proud of you

[Bad Wolf]

Rev, I hope you spent your time away educating yourself and actually understanding the things you don't believe, but doubt it.

[Anomalocaris]

Waves hello to Revelation777. I wondered where you'd got to.

At some point even the most hardened evolutionist must admit that Christians simply don't evolve, ever.

Many Christians have evolved because they believe in theistic evolution.

They may seem to believe in some form of evolution, but they certainly didn't benefit from any form of evolution.

[Bob Kelso]

Carl Sagan, stated that evolution was caused by "the slow accumulations of favorable mutations." However, mutations which apparently result in new traits in an organism are due to the corruption of existing information rather than the formation of mutations gaining new information. This reality conflicts against what would be expected for the advancement of evolution.

Derp.