Argument #3: Mutations

[GrandizerII]

It is a change of already existing information.


I can give an equally supported refutation to this: no, they don't fail to achieve a 'gain in functioning' mutation.


In fact, we do.

Dear Atheist Friends,

Consider the following:
- Even among evolutionary apologists who search for examples of mutations that are beneficial, the best they can do is to cite damaging mutations that have beneficial side effects (e.g. sickle-cell trait)

Carroll, S.B., The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the ultimate forensic record of evolution, Norton, New York, pp. 174–179, 2006.

- Within neo-Darwinian theory, natural selection is supposed to be the guardian of our genomes because it weeds out unwanted deleterious mutations and favours beneficial ones. Not so, according to genetics expert Professor John Sanford. Sanford, J.C., Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome, Elim Publishing, New York, 2005

Natural selection can only weed out mutations that have a significant negative effect upon fitness (number of offspring produced). But such ‘fitness’ is affected by a huge variety of factors, and the vast majority of mutations have too small an effect for natural selection to be able to detect and remove them.

Furthermore, if the average mutation rate per person per generation is around 1 or more, then everyone is a mutant and no amount of selection can stop degeneration of the whole population. As it turns out, the mutation rate in the human population is very much greater than 1. Sanford estimates at least 100, probably about 300, and possibly more.

- Mutations are not uniquely biological events that provide an engine of natural variation for natural selection to work upon and produce all the variety of life. Mutation is the purely physical result of the all-pervading mechanical damage that accompanies all molecular machinery. As a consequence, all multicellular life on earth is undergoing inexorable genome decay because the deleterious mutation rates are so high, the effects of the individual mutations are so small, there are no compensatory beneficial mutations and natural selection is ineffective in removing the damage.

So much damage occurs that it is clearly evident within a single human lifetime. Our reproductive cells are not immune, as previously thought, but are just as prone to mechanical damage as our body cells. Somewhere between a few thousand and a few million mutations are enough to drive a human lineage to extinction, and this is likely to occur over a time scale of only tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This is far short of the supposed evolutionary time scales. Like rust eating away the steel in a bridge, mutations are eating away our genomes and there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Evolution’s engine, when properly understood, becomes evolution’s end.


http://creation.com/mutations-are-evolutions-end

I argue that any mutation has the potential to be both beneficial and unfavorable. Beneficial or unfavorable: both relative descriptors depending on the circumstances. Like you mentioned, sickle-cell allele is a clear example.