Macro and Micro evolution for dummies.

[John V]

Bzzzzzzzzzt I'll take creationist claptrap for $500 John.

If you want to couch the conversation in terms of "information" it is the exterior environment "providing additional information". Mutations themselves are not a termination of cause in any case, but an expression of a few choice natural laws and other interfering agents - none of which, I'll add, are "intelligent". The aggregate effect of these things are lumped together as a mechanism (though more accurately it's a term we use to describe mechanisms) of evolution.

What kind of babbling bullshit is this? (Bonus point if you can name the movie that line's from!)

[The Grand Nudger]

Care to be more specific (so I can bury you in mounds of peer review)?

Let me make this simpler. The "information" line of argumentation is (yet another) creationist strawman. It is not science. What mutations can "supposedly" do is irrelevant, as what you are proposing has nothing to do with the preamble you invoked.

[John V]

Care to be more specific (so I can bury you in mounds of peer review)?

I can't be more specific as I can't make heads or tails out of it.

I didn't think it was controversial that genes hold information which affect phenotype.

[Kirbmarc]

And genes contain heritable information.

No, they simply trigger the production of proteines. A mutation changes the kind of proteines produced. No need to add "information" into this.

I'm guessing you learned about evolution through youtube clips.

It's nice how you resort to inconsequential and irrelevant name calling just because I made a typo twice.

Mutations are a mechanism of evolution and can cause losses and supposedly additions of information.

Mutation cause production of different kinds of proteines. Proteines are not "information". Phenotypes aren't "information", either. Natural selection isn't based on "information, it's based on the transmission of genotypes because their corresponding phenotype makes it possible to have offsrpings. The theory of evolution by natural selection never mentions "information", and doesn't need to do it to work.

[The Grand Nudger]

Genes hold information the same way that dirt holds information. Sure.

[John V]

And genes contain heritable information.

No, they simply trigger the production of proteines. A mutation changes the kind of proteines produced. No need to add "information" into this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene
Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism's cells and pass genetic traits to offspring.

Mutation cause production of different kinds of proteines.

Yes, as the information in the gene changed.

[The Grand Nudger]

Or- the "information" remains the same overall, but it's expression has changed. Nothing need be added, only rearranged.

[Kirbmarc]

I didn't think it was controversial that genes hold information which affect phenotype

Genes trigger the productions of proteines. I guess you could say that they contain "information" if you use a metaphor where the RNA "reads" DNA, but it is a metaphor. Actually it's a natural process, and there's no writer that encodes information into the DNA.

And I guess that if we want to get really technical they do, because according to some implications of quantum mechanics everything is information. But this is not what creationists argue when they talk about "information".

Creationist believe that there intra-species variations and inter-species variations are somehow qualitatively different, and justify this by saying thing like "a dog is a wolf that has lost information". A dog is simply a wolf selected for a few specific features.

Variations (caused by mutations) cause both micro and macro evolution. There's qualitative difference between the two.

Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism's cells and pass genetic traits to offspring.

It's a figure of speech, just like saying "species are selected" when actually there is no one who selects them (the different individuals simply reproduce or not). It takes far less time to say "genes hold information" than to say "genes trigger a specific set of chemicals reactions that causes the production of a string of amino acids.

Creationists take this figure of speech literally.4

[John V]

Genes hold information the same way that dirt holds information. Sure.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/20...-code.html
When it comes to storing information, hard drives don't hold a candle to DNA. Our genetic code packs billions of gigabytes into a single gram. A mere milligram of the molecule could encode the complete text of every book in the Library of Congress and have plenty of room to spare. All of this has been mostly theoretical—until now. In a new study, researchers stored an entire genetics textbook in less than a picogram of DNA—one trillionth of a gram—an advance that could revolutionize our ability to save data.

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL...so....is dna the information or is it the hard drive where information is stored John? Ah, lovely little ticks of language.