Intelligent Design

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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.


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.


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.


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


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?


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.


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?


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.

I wasn't trying to oversimplify it to make it seem unrealistic. I'll call it neo-Darwinian evolution if that's better.

Information: what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things. This is exactly what the genetic code is. It is relevant to evolution. Evolution must account for the particular arrangement of the nucleotides that leads to functional proteins. 1000 nucleotide long sequence that leads to a protein has more information than a 100 nucleotide long sequence. Evolution would have to have a mechanism to increase the number of nucleotides while maintaining functional proteins.

Frameshift mutations are a subclass of point mutations. I already talked about these (maybe not to you), but they destroy the function of the protein. The protein is made of amino acids. Amino acids are coded by a specific set of 3 nucleotides. When you insert a nucleotide, you shift each following nucleotide over a space. This disrupts each following codon, which changes each amino acid in the protein.

As for duplication events, if the duplicated genes are expressed, you get too much protein product which disrupts the cell's functions. This organism would get selected against. If it isn't expressed it can't be selected for.

The nylonase enzyme is about 1500 nucleotides long, which shows that it is a derivative of a preexisting protein. I haven't looked into it that much, but my guess would be that nylon's chemical structure closely resembles the chemical structure of the original substrate. It wouldn't take much change in the existing protein to break down the similar molecule.

I read a quick article on the lizards. It says that they still don't understand the genetic basis for the change, and that they will look into it. I will predict right now that the genes that led to the valves were present (but not expressed) in the original lizards. These sequences were then selected for in the new environment. Something like this would require very high mutation rates with extremely fortunate nucleotide sequences to happen that quickly.

You say evolution doesn't need to make new information because it can modify existing information. This just asks the question of where the old information came from.