Human Devolution

[Angrboda]

Sanford’s Genetic Entropy, on the other hand, is simply wrong from beginning to end. It misrepresents everything it touches: beneficial and deleterious mutations, gene duplication, natural selection, and synergistic epistasis. In all these areas, Sanford avoids engaging the large body of work which directly refutes his viewpoint, and instead cherry-picks a few references that seem to point his way, usually misinterpreting them in the process.

https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/stan-4/

Sanford repeatedly asserts that mutations, by which he seems to mean simple point substitutions or single point insertion/deletion events, do not increase net information. That is generally true for point substitutions or indels, but irrelevant. By “increase net information” I assume Sanford means “increase size of the functional genome” or “increase the number of distinct genes.” This obviously will not be accomplished by just substituting one amino acid for another at a given point.

However, there is a whole other class of mutations which are common and which do increase genomic size. These are duplications and insertions of genetic material, ranging from small chunks of DNA to complete genes and to duplication of entire genomes. As usual with major mutations, most of these duplication/insertion events will be deleterious to the organism, but a small fraction will be beneficial, and some will be effectively neutral. In my letter of July [“STAN 3”] I cited three studies showing beneficial gene duplications [9, 40, 41]. Gene duplication followed by further, normal mutations provides a clear path to increasing genomic complexity. Creationists are unable to demonstrate that this path is not viable. This rebuts their claim that natural causes are inadequate to account for the increase in genomic complexity in the evolution of vertebrates from simpler organisms.

https://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/stan-4/

More creationist claptrap.