Intelligent Design

[Esquilax]

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

We just get this stuff a lot, these sorts of rhetorical tricks designed to make evolution look silly before the conversation has even begun. Happily, you seem like you're actually taking this seriously, which is a nice change from the usual creationist dreck.

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.

Proteins are hardly magic, we're already learning how to manipulate their expression via gene therapy, specifically through the introduction of specific nucleotide sequences that have been linked to protein expression. In fact it was early last year that, via some RNA injections, scientists were able to produce up to a threefold increase in protein expression in Zebrafish embryos. This mechanism is not only evidently extant- given that the scientists were able to locate and manipulate the nucleotide sequences that could increase protein expression- but we're also able to toy with it and ramp it up.

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.

Granted, I should have done more to familiarize myself with that phenomena. However, not all frameshift mutations do this, as I'll explain further down.

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.

If it isn't expressed it's still present in the organism and passed on when it breeds, whereupon further mutations could alter it such that it is expressed or used for a different function. Evolution most commonly deals with successive mutations, not singular events.

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.

What's interesting about nylonase is that originally, it was pegged as a gene duplication followed by a frameshift mutation, which just goes to show, successive mutations are a real thing in evolution. Eventually this hypothesis was dismissed, but the point remains that a frameshift mutation isn't an automatic negative.

Moreover though, the nylonase enzyme isn't a single thing, but three different enzymes that are completely different from the normal enzymes that strain of flavobacteria uses. Nylonase enzymes- of a completely different sort- have also been evolved into different strains of bacteria by means of adjusting selection pressures; you're not just looking at an alteration to a single protein to deal with a chemically similar substance, but at a cross-species tendency to develop new, differing enzymes to deal with an imposed selection pressure, which is the textbook definition of an evolved trait.

But I'm curious, too: why do you think that evolution isn't a change in existing proteins and structures?

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.

Apparently the isolated population is genetically identical to its parent population, in the sense that they're the same species still. But natural selection working to select and intensify new traits based on environmental pressures is still evolution. Seriously, could you define what you think evolution is? Every contention you've made fits neatly within evolution, though you're using them to argue that evolution didn't happen. It's weird.

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.

Earlier species. And that information came from earlier generations still. We can keep going like this, right up until the point where you'll have to falsely conflate evolution and abiogenesis to continue having a problem with this, at which time I'll just point out that you're falsely conflating two separate theories and at that point you'll have a problem with abiogenesis and not evolution... which kinda means I was right.