William Lane Craig continues to desperately defend the indefensible.

[YGninja]

The mutations observed are almost exclusively negative or neutral.

Untrue: mutations run the gamut from negative to positive, of which we've seen plenty of all stripes. For example, following population isolation, Italian Wall Lizards have been observed to evolve entirely new valves in their digestive tracts to handle the new food sources they were forced to predate on in their new environment. Bacteria has been observed to evolve the ability to digest nylon where no other food is available, and some populations of rattlesnakes are evolving out their rattles, as warning their prey isn't a good way to catch food. You're simply wrong on this one.

http://www.cod.edu/people/faculty/fanche...tation.htm
"most mutations are neutral; they either make no change in the expression of any gene, or the changes made do not affect the function of any gene product. Of those mutations which do make a difference, most have a negative effect."

I said "almost exclusively", not "exclusively", and hence your post doesn't refute anything. Italian wall lizards didn't evolve anything, their DNA is identical to the original ones, the change was just a reversion to a previous type, utilising pre existing DNA which had merely been out of use. Nylonase isn't new information, a small amount of the original population held a mutation allowing them to digest nylon, when placed in the environment only the ones who could digest nylon survived, and only they reproduced, eventually becoming 100% of the population. Rattlesnakes, if it were true, would be an example of losing something, not gaining something. You can't get from a single cell to a human only by losing things.

Data is corrupted or deleted. Natural selection can act on it as much as it wants, the thing is only ever going to devolve. Whats more, you need a mechanism to increase the quantity of data. Mutation only changes existing data.

Nope. We've observed it adding genetic material and information too.

My original statement "The mutations observed are almost exclusively negative or neutral. Data is corrupted or deleted."

Perhaps to clear up confusion it would be better put "The mutations observed are almost exclusively negative or neutral - data is corrupted or deleted".

There are ways for a genome to acquire "new" information, Just the "new" information is just duplicated old information, which then has to mutate to become "new" information, but mutations are almost exclusively neutral or negative, so this process simply isn't effective or common enough to support the idea that all life came from a single cell.

A human contains alot more data than a single cell, and you've no mechanism to explain how the genome can acquire such quantities of new data, even over billions of years.

Mutation is sufficient for this; new genetic information can be added, and there's plenty of reportage on this to prove it. I don't need a new mechanism: the old one works just fine.

Lets ask Richard Dawkins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaKryi3605g

Also see my above comment. Mutation is in no way sufficient. Imagine a book, and the more people who read and enjoy the book the more the book is "naturally selected", and widespread it becomes. Now imagine randomly deleting and changing the letters in the book. Maybe 1 in 1000 of those changes, will accidently add humour to the book, and make it more popular, but the other 999 will make it incomprehensible and actually shorten the length of the book. Whats going to happen if you repeat this process 10'000 times? You inevitably end up with a very short, defunct book of gibberish. You aren't going to end up with a better, bigger book, hence the same process in evolution is not going to create humans from single celled bacteria.

[quote]
Now, I've shown you mine, you show me yours: what is the mechanism that halts mutations, so that they don't accumulate to the point that we'd need to reclassify an organism?

There is no mechanism which halts mutation, and hence humans are weaker and have smaller brains than our ancestors. In the last 100 years alone western IQ's atleast have dropped an average of 14 points. This is your 'evolution' in process, it is change over time, but its effect is only negative, deconstructing things rather than building them better, and hence this isn't a theory that supports all life emerging from a simple cell and growing more complex, rather, it supports all life being perfect at the time of creation, and then degrading.