So your an Athiest

[AAA]

I agree that a lot of scientists believe evolution does a fine job. But there ARE scientists who know their stuff who also disagree with it. I do understand it. The point you seem to be making is that because I have a different interpretation of the evidence than many scientists, I am wrong. Also biologists tend to give the answer that new genetic information arises from mutation, but mutations occur so infrequently within a cell, and they lead to a decrease in function or no change at all. 

If you know of a better explanation to add genetic information please share it so that I can maybe get on board with the theory of evolution.

I've mainly been avoiding this conversation because I'm trying to get a new business off the ground and I don't have time for a lot of online "play time", but I have to jump in at this point. AAA, you sound like you've done a bit of reading, but you're dead wrong about how a lot of how cellular biology works.

1) New genetic information arises from mutations, yes, but there are several forms of mutation which can occur. These include but not limited to: point mutations (changing of one base pair to another), frame-shift mutations (changing where the cellular "reader" starts reading the sequence for the genes that follow in that segment), transpositions (a piece that gets "clipped out" and moved elsewhere in the genome, often interrupting or changing other genes nearby and how those genes express), recombinations (shifting of DNA fragments during the process of making gametes and recombining them), and most importantly duplication mutations (where a whole gene gets copied into twins of itself, where a subsequent mutation of the duplicate does not change the function of the original, allowing for "new" genes to evolve from the copy).

2) While many mutations do something bad to the organism, most mutations are totally neutral, as they occur in places that don't code for proteins or serve any other major function in the cell. Others are beneficial, however rare this event may be is irrelevant. Every human born has an average of ten (10) unique mutations; most of them do nothing, but sometimes we have either problems or benefits as a result. None of this requires intelligence or design. They are simply by-products of the way DNA codes and replicates.

If you're going to challenge evolutionary biology, fine. But at least do so from a basis of actual knowledge, not straw-man building.

Edit to Add: I am a retired biologist, as well, and my fiancee is currently working as a genetics lab tech with her biochem degree... so you're barking up the wrong tree if you want to convince us, without peer-reviewed information, of these wild assertions you're making about cellular chemistry.

I very much appreciate that someone is actually answering my questions with specifics. You sound like a busy guy, so if you don't have time to respond then that's fine, but I have some questions.
1. Point mutations (frameshift are a class of this) do not seem sufficient to actually produce new information. The only point mutation that adds new information is a frameshift, and it results if it lands in a protein coding sequence, it results in non-functional protein product due to the fact that it now changes each of the following codons (and therefore amino acids). Do you think point mutations have creative properties?
2. Transposable elements are pre-existing DNA and their insertion into DNA sequences are still not the creation of new genetic information. I still do not see how they could arise by evolutionary means. They have the inverted repeats and genes for proteins for their own removal. How does mutation lead to this type specific DNA sequence? 
3. Aren't recombination events still just the alteration of existing DNA without producing new sequences (I know that it is going to be copied later), but isn't the gene just moving from one homologue to the other?
4. Gene duplication is the most convincing. However, it makes sense to me that having an extra gene would lead to having twice the protein product of that gene, which I feel would cripple the cell's functions and be a waste of resources. If it is a waste of resources than wouldn't it get selected against before it could diverge into a new sequence?

I'm not necessarily trying to convince anyone of anything, I just think intelligent design has been laughed off by the scientific community and I'm not sure why.

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Great! someone who can understand the biology then. First off I doubt you know more about it than me, I am at the top of my class at my university with a bio major, and I plan to get my PhD and go into research. If you understand the biology of it then let me ask you a question. How did the first proteins necessary for DNA replication evolve if you cannot reproduce (and thus change across generations) without them already being functional? The simplest question I have. If you can't answer it, then what makes you think it happened?

As for your analogy, it falls short because life is not as malleable as water in a hole. Life could not form under any condition, only specific ones. Water can fill any puddle, not just specific ones.

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I will be getting my PhD in biology, and I will be going into a career in research.

If you're actually serious about learning about the latest research in abiogenesis chemistry, NASA/JPL have been working on that for years (the implications for space-probe construction and project goal orientation should be obvious), and they maintain excellent articles online about the subject. They've come up with some surprising answers, even if the puzzle isn't solved just yet:

https://www.astrobiology.nasa.gov/articl...e-of-life/


Also, the National Institutes of Health maintains a database of peer-reviewed literature on almost any subject you can imagine, including that one, at PubMed:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24621309

Those are just a couple of articles I grabbed in haste; feel free to read on your own to answer the questions you're slinging at us. Suffice it to say, no one at NASA or the NIH are looking at "Intelligent Design" for their answers-- not even the roughly 1/2 of researchers who are Christians.

You need to check your prejudices.

Thanks, I'll read them! But some NASA employees do believe in an intelligently designed universe. One that comes to mind is Guillermo Gonzalez.  They may not agree that life itself was created though.

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People have done the calculations. And the fact is that it is not likely that our planet would exist. Yes there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars, but the variables for a life sustaining planet must be set at very specific values (gravity, nuclear forces, cosmological constant). The fact that the laws of the universe must be a certain way for life show that either it just happened to be right the first time, or we are just one of many universes. Also your coin example is under exaggerating the issue.

People have done what calculations? You would cite if you knew.

Chances are that somebody may have done calculations and found that life as we know it, origin redux is unlikely, but that does not make our own existence particularly remarkable. Even if so, and this is doubtful because such an endeavor to prognosticate would be taken up by a narrow-minded Christian who's goal is not to discover anything but to disprove the work of others, this would not eliminate the possibility of life evolving elsewhere in a different form. Our universe is actually finite, but just how finite it is has been debated, and those like you with an agenda to prove would surely low-ball that figure.

As for life itself, the definition of this has broadened greatly over the past four decades, what with oceanographic research revealing life forms thriving, under conditions where it was previously believed that no life possibly could.
http://www.indiana.edu/~g105lab/images/g...nities.htm
No, Virginia, life does not depend on conditions to fall into place for it. Life digs its cleats into any toehold which it can hang onto, and then it makes its own ecosystem of any resources which it can draw energy from. It works this way because it's life which is alive, not its physical conditions and not its chemical elements. There's no evidence for your god in any of this.

Yes life exists in places you would not expect to find it. But extremophiles are more complex than normal bacteria, so even if you believed in evolution these would certainly not have been able to be the first that evolved. I think the most broad definition of life that could be given is something capable of taking molecules from the environment and use them to produce accurate copies of itself. I don't think I'm being narrow minded, and I want to discover new things. Just because I'm a Christian doesn't mean I won't be a good researcher. Look at virtually every researcher before the 1800s.