Intelligent Design

[Esquilax]

Molecules to man may be worded simply, but it isn't dishonest considering that materialists believe that molecules gradually combined to form either RNA or protein, which then increased in complexity via mutation and natural selection resulting in mankind.

If you present an overly simplified version of what you know to be a highly complex topic, for the purposes of making the idea seem cartoonish and unrealistic, because of a pre-existing ideological desire to discredit the idea, then that's dishonest.

Mutation does not increase complexity. Point mutations just change existing DNA leading to a decrease in function (which can be advantageous in certain environments, but it is still degrading the information).

Again, I must ask you to define genetic information before we begin a conversation about it, and to also explain how it's at all relevant to biological evolution. Moreover, why do you think that evolution describes an increase in genetic information? Because it, you know, doesn't? Like, at all? This is literally just a manufactured contention that has nothing to do with what evolution actually describes. It's irrelevant.

Regarding point mutations, are you conveniently omitting other forms of mutation dishonestly, or are you just not aware that point mutations are not the only kind? Because frameshift mutations do exist, and they can add whole new base pairs to a genome, not to mention repetitions are also possible. Restricting the conversation to just point mutations inaccurately simplifies things.

Gene duplication is the evolutionist way of explaining increasing complexity, but duplicated genes are silenced in the offspring, and because natural selection can only work on expressed phenotypes from the protein product of the gene, there is no way for a duplicated gene to eventually settle into a new function if it is not being expressed.

Just because it's not being expressed in one generation doesn't mean it won't be in the next, or the next, or the next. Evolution works over long periods of time and successive generations; a duplicated gene that persists over multiple generations has the same chance of mutating further than any other gene.

The only point mutation that can actually add new nucleotides to the genome are insertion mutations, which are always harmful considering that they push each following codon back one nucleotide, which changes EVERY following amino acid in the protein.

Point mutations are far from the only kind of mutation there is.

Bacteria have the capability to acquire new genes from the environment or from conjugation, but the genes they acquire were already in existence and are not the result of mutation. I would suspect that this is the case with nylonase.

So you're asserting that there was a gene fit for digesting nylon, a substance that did not exist until 1931, just pre-existing and floating free? Really?

I am skeptical of new digestive structures being produced through mutation. I could see existing structures altering, which is still well within the parameters of the variation I would expect based on how genes are regulated.

It's simple: a population of Italian Wall Lizards got left on a remote island during wartime, as an introduced species in isolation. The offspring of those lizards, faced with a new diet they didn't have normally, evolved entirely new cecal valves within their digestive system to cope. These valves do not exist, in any capacity, within the Wall Lizard populations they came from. By any definition, they are new structures evolving due to differing selective pressures.

Biological information is the specific sequence of nucleotides that produce proteins capable of accomplishing a specific task. Functional sequences are rare, yet our genome's are full of them.

If this is your definition, then surely you'd agree that evolution has already solved your manufactured problem via the existence of frameshift mutations? Or, you know, the fact that evolution doesn't require the production of entirely new information, since rejigged old information would still be a mutation as understood in the definition of evolution?

I am a biology major with a chem minor at my university and plan to get a PhD in molecular biology.

Good luck doing that while rejecting a cornerstone theory supporting the entirety of that field. I'm sure you'll go far; Answers in Genesis are always slavering for more shills with phds they don't use, after all.