Argument #3: Mutations

[Mister Agenda]

Carl Sagan, stated that evolution was caused by "the slow accumulations of favorable mutations."

Welcome back, Rev, I was beginning to think we had lost you. Until today, we had a guest who went by Mickiel whose posts made me think of you fondly.

Sagan was essentially correct, though of course that's a simplification.

However, mutations which apparently result in new traits in an organism are due to the corruption of existing information rather than the formation of mutations gaining new information.

Can you define information in this context? Because, using the defintion implied in your statement, a block of marble would have more information than Michaelangelo's 'Pieta'. The description of the location of every atom in the block of marble would be much longer than the description of every atom in the Pieta, which was made by taking everything that wasn't the Pieta out of a block of marble, 'corrupting' much of the block's original information. Wouldn't a definition of information based on functionality be more appropriate?

Of course, with a definition like that, there's no issue with getting new functionality out of 'corrupted' information if there's a mechanism that conserves more functional sequences and discards less functional ones.

This reality conflicts against what would be expected for the advancement of evolution.

It's not a reality, it's you swallowing a bill of goods from IDers and creationists who want to accept their claims without examining them critically.

Here's an example of how new information can get into a genome: a gene is duplicated, creating an additional gene with no funciton. It's chock-full of information that doesn't do the organism any good because it's redundant and in the wrong place. Over time, point mutations (what you think of as 'corruption') alter the new gene, usually in ways that don't matter or are actually deleterious...the new gene may actually wind up being eliminated...unless a mutation beneficial to the organism occurs in the gene. Then natural selection will continue to act on further changes to the gene.

The new gene is like a block of marble, the point mutations are like the chisel, and natural selection is like...well, not much like Michaelangelo, but it's what preserves changes to the gene that have survival value to the organism and eliminates changes that are detrimental, with no particular end goal, but whatever it winds up being will have functionality.