This is quite a lot to respond to, so let's take it one step at a time.
A change in genetic information does not mean that new information has been created. For an analogy, if you are programming a code and you make a syntax mistake, the code is different, but the vast majority of the time the mistake will lead to negative errors. Basically, functional information is lost, degraded. Even if you grant that some mistakes will lead to positive changes (which is debatable), it is a huge leap of the imagination to declare that successive, accumulating beneficial mutations could produce the vast amount of new information required for evolution to occure. It simply defies the laws of mathematical improbability. For every one beneficial mutation there are 999 harmful ones. Even if you ignore that fact, you've got a long way to go to prove that each mutation in a series that creates a new feature in an organism can provide a positive effect, when it is obvious that thousands of positive mutations would be required for even the simplist of the changes that evolution claims have happened to every single species in the world. You cannot possibly bridge that gap, or at least, logically bridge that gap.
Ok, let's refine what I said. If a mutation degrades information, in that the mutations causes the genetic information to lose a function it once had, I would not refer to that mutations as adding new, functional information. I would say that genetic information has been negatively corrupted. If a mutation in a fly's genetic structure causes it to grow four wings, yet it cannot fly anymore, I would call that an information-degrading mutation, for the simply reason that the fly has lost its ability to fly, and has not gained a more-complicated ability at the same time.
I think you are forgetting what exactly a negative mutation is. If the mutation is indeed negative, the organism's defective mutation will not propogate throughout the gene pool of that species. It will be less fit, and therefore, less able to pass along its gene.
Mating is indeed not random, which is why truly negative mutations will not propogate.
The negative or positive orientation of a mutation is determined by natural selection. If the organism can't run away from its predator, it doesn't matter if it is more attractive to a mate. Still, natural selection decides it pretty much automatically.
My reference to mutations being negative or positive was for simplicity's sake, but it is quite obvious that the majority of mutations have a profoundly negative effect on an organism while offering no positive effects to outweigh it.
There are mutations which have little to no effect on reproduction, which means that they play no role in natural selection. Other factors may propagate a mutation, but unless the mutation is positive it will not benefit the organism and cause the mutation to be propogated, and thus, successive mutations cannot accumulate and then benefit the organism. The idea of a "long chain of successive, beneficial mutations" that slowly accumulates is simple wrong. It is indefensible unless the vast majority of the mutations in that sequence can be shown to create a positive or neutral effect, without causing a severe negative effect. As you should already know, that is a huge difficutly to prove plausible.
We have never seen a mutation create a completely new gene; it has never happened as far as we know. To argue otherwise is simple speculative. You cannot say that a gene is altered and thus a new gene has been created, when in fact the first gene's function has been lost or degraded. At some point, new genes must be added, and old ones simply cannot be slowly reconfigured, with many harmful consequences. Unfortunately for evolution, this is consistently what we see happening.
Sure, so the mutation has little effect, and thus there is no reason to believe that the mutation has any reason to propogate among the entire species. You cannot argue that it simply will propogate, when natural selection says that there is no reason for it to.
Sure.
Your previous statement "There won't be a noticeable phenotype to affect reproduction, despite the genetic difference" is a perfect example of a "neutral" mutation. Obviously, the mutation is not 100% neutral, but it can be said to be basically neutral since the effect is non-noticeable, and non-contributing to natural selection.
Not all genes are on the same chromosome and linked in this way. My point is simple: mutations that cause positive effects are extremely rare. Much more often is harmful mutations that cause an organism to be less fit, or mutations with small effects that make no noticeable change in an organism's fitness. With either of the latter two, that mutation by itself has no reason to propogate, and cannot accumulate.
So, with what you said about mutations affecting and being affected by other genes. Yes, that is true, BUT it still does not change the fact that in order for a series of positive mutations to be responsible for ultimately creating new genes, the mutations must provide positive benefits along the way. It is a blind leap of faith to argue that all the mutations will be neutral or non-damaging, AND also linked to other desireable genes, up until the point where a new gene is created and becomes desireable by itself.
I never argued against the fact that mutations with slight effects would not show increases in frequency, but you must know that eventually the mutations must have a positive effect or else they will simply not be responsible for an organism's evolution.
The number of mutations in order for the gaps to be filled in are in the thousands... the facts are that each one of them could simply not be non-damaging, and the statistics show that the much much greater probability would be that the series of mutations would never occur because of the damage that would be done in each successive mutation.
This chain of positive mutations is imaginary, and the suggested chain of non-effecting mutations that eventually lead to steps forward in evolution is implausible.
That is quite a lot of information to respond to. I finally managed to find sources that discussed the experiments you are referring to.
I was a little dismayed to find out that you failed to point out the alternative hypothesis that still exists:
The natural substrate for phosphotriesterase will have structural similarity to these phosphotriesters when it is discovered.
So basically, because they don't know the natural substrate, the additional hypothesis is that the enzyme evolved over the past 50 years. I wonder why you failed to mention this.
I'm saying that the evidence to support your view does not exist. It is speculation.
New, functional information. A mistake in copy may change the order of the sequence in a gene, but that is not the same as new, functional information being created.
The functionality is on the level of a changing identifier, defined only by the proteins themselves. Once again, the reshuffling of genetic information is not the creation of new information, it is an organization of preexisting information. HIV is indeed unique in many of its properties, an amazing virus. But to extrapolate the mutation of HIV, like the aspect of multiple antibiotic resistance, and say that it is evidence for mutations leading to evolution, is simply not true. The change has a great effect, but that does not mean that the change itself is large or significant in terms of information or complexity increase, but rather that our body's reaction to is significant. It is, by comparison, a shuffling of the genetic information that does not increase information, but just simplpy change it. There is no added functionality. The functional change is only on the side of our immune defenses, and the drugs that are designed to destroy the virus.
Two points:
1) There is no increase in functional complexity with the mutation. It is not the type of change, in quality or direction, which would cause the virus to become a more complex type of living organism.
2) The virus has no evolutionary relationship to any other form, so the changes with it cannot be transferred or used as examples for evolutionary history of truly living organisms.
I don't assume that fossils have a high rate of preservation during normal passing of time. But the total absence of any fossil showing a transition between the major changes that are proposed to have occurred is astounding. Combine that with the fact that there are supposedly millions of years of time while these changes were to occur, and you can see why there are so many objections to the "conclusions" evolutionary biologists are so eager to jump to.
Here's what's happening. I'm challenging the proposed evidence for evolution, and you are saying that I must also challenge these other things science holds to be true. The reality is, I'm not questioning these other things, because the evidence for them is strong, and I do not have reasons to doubt the conclusions that others have reached based on that evidence.
However, I see the same evidence you see for evolution, but I also see how the conclusions are drawn that do not match with the factual data that has been collected. When that happens, I have to ask myself what other motives could possibly exist besides the desire to know the truth about the history of life. This I have done. Upon digging deeper into the question, I have found more uncertainty about evolution, not less. I have read the objections, and looked for the answers, but the answers are not there, and I am not willing to throw reason and science out the window to believe something that has been handed to me by others with false assumptions, false motives, and questionable evidence.
I'm not sure why you think we can't test gravity, but I assure you there are ways. The history of life is just that: history. It happened one way, and just one way. In that respect, we cannot test it, we can only construct a plausible scenario based on the evidence we have. My arguement is that evolution's scenario is neither plausible, nor based on the evidence we have.
You see, most people will not question something that scienctists support, unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I have compelling reasons to question evolution.
There are other explanations, also plausible, that are supported by the data we have. For instance, anatomic homology supports the Creation model as much as it supports evolution. It is not direct evidence for evolution, as some would lead you to believe.
Science does work by proposing alternative theories to present questions. I believe the evidence greatly favors the Creation model. Many scientists are also naturalists, and cannot accept the idea of God participating in physical reality. For that reason alone, many refuse to dismiss evolution, or accept the Creation model, regardless of how improbable evolution becomes.
But if science does not lead us to the truth about the history of life, then where is its value? I would rather accept Creation and dismiss evolution than believe a lie due to my philosophical belief in naturalism.
Irreducible complexity is a good one. A lot of problems there. How about the nonsupportive fossil record, or the discrepancies in the dating methods? Or biogenesis? Or what about the geological layers that misrepresent the proposed timeline of evolution?
I could go on...
Indeed, the species are united quite remarkably, each well suited for their role. The problem is not that gaps exist, but that the gaps are incredible in their magnitude. For instance, no fossils exist to connect the supposed transition from reptile to bird. None. How many millions and millions of years do you imagine that transition taking? Do you not find it strange that not a single fossil can be found during that time period?
This is but one example. Read Michael Denton for some more... the examples abound.
A change in genetic information does not mean that new information has been created. For an analogy, if you are programming a code and you make a syntax mistake, the code is different, but the vast majority of the time the mistake will lead to negative errors. Basically, functional information is lost, degraded. Even if you grant that some mistakes will lead to positive changes (which is debatable), it is a huge leap of the imagination to declare that successive, accumulating beneficial mutations could produce the vast amount of new information required for evolution to occure. It simply defies the laws of mathematical improbability. For every one beneficial mutation there are 999 harmful ones. Even if you ignore that fact, you've got a long way to go to prove that each mutation in a series that creates a new feature in an organism can provide a positive effect, when it is obvious that thousands of positive mutations would be required for even the simplist of the changes that evolution claims have happened to every single species in the world. You cannot possibly bridge that gap, or at least, logically bridge that gap.
Ok, let's refine what I said. If a mutation degrades information, in that the mutations causes the genetic information to lose a function it once had, I would not refer to that mutations as adding new, functional information. I would say that genetic information has been negatively corrupted. If a mutation in a fly's genetic structure causes it to grow four wings, yet it cannot fly anymore, I would call that an information-degrading mutation, for the simply reason that the fly has lost its ability to fly, and has not gained a more-complicated ability at the same time.
I think you are forgetting what exactly a negative mutation is. If the mutation is indeed negative, the organism's defective mutation will not propogate throughout the gene pool of that species. It will be less fit, and therefore, less able to pass along its gene.
Mating is indeed not random, which is why truly negative mutations will not propogate.
The negative or positive orientation of a mutation is determined by natural selection. If the organism can't run away from its predator, it doesn't matter if it is more attractive to a mate. Still, natural selection decides it pretty much automatically.
My reference to mutations being negative or positive was for simplicity's sake, but it is quite obvious that the majority of mutations have a profoundly negative effect on an organism while offering no positive effects to outweigh it.
There are mutations which have little to no effect on reproduction, which means that they play no role in natural selection. Other factors may propagate a mutation, but unless the mutation is positive it will not benefit the organism and cause the mutation to be propogated, and thus, successive mutations cannot accumulate and then benefit the organism. The idea of a "long chain of successive, beneficial mutations" that slowly accumulates is simple wrong. It is indefensible unless the vast majority of the mutations in that sequence can be shown to create a positive or neutral effect, without causing a severe negative effect. As you should already know, that is a huge difficutly to prove plausible.
We have never seen a mutation create a completely new gene; it has never happened as far as we know. To argue otherwise is simple speculative. You cannot say that a gene is altered and thus a new gene has been created, when in fact the first gene's function has been lost or degraded. At some point, new genes must be added, and old ones simply cannot be slowly reconfigured, with many harmful consequences. Unfortunately for evolution, this is consistently what we see happening.
Sure, so the mutation has little effect, and thus there is no reason to believe that the mutation has any reason to propogate among the entire species. You cannot argue that it simply will propogate, when natural selection says that there is no reason for it to.
Sure.
Your previous statement "There won't be a noticeable phenotype to affect reproduction, despite the genetic difference" is a perfect example of a "neutral" mutation. Obviously, the mutation is not 100% neutral, but it can be said to be basically neutral since the effect is non-noticeable, and non-contributing to natural selection.
Not all genes are on the same chromosome and linked in this way. My point is simple: mutations that cause positive effects are extremely rare. Much more often is harmful mutations that cause an organism to be less fit, or mutations with small effects that make no noticeable change in an organism's fitness. With either of the latter two, that mutation by itself has no reason to propogate, and cannot accumulate.
So, with what you said about mutations affecting and being affected by other genes. Yes, that is true, BUT it still does not change the fact that in order for a series of positive mutations to be responsible for ultimately creating new genes, the mutations must provide positive benefits along the way. It is a blind leap of faith to argue that all the mutations will be neutral or non-damaging, AND also linked to other desireable genes, up until the point where a new gene is created and becomes desireable by itself.
I never argued against the fact that mutations with slight effects would not show increases in frequency, but you must know that eventually the mutations must have a positive effect or else they will simply not be responsible for an organism's evolution.
The number of mutations in order for the gaps to be filled in are in the thousands... the facts are that each one of them could simply not be non-damaging, and the statistics show that the much much greater probability would be that the series of mutations would never occur because of the damage that would be done in each successive mutation.
This chain of positive mutations is imaginary, and the suggested chain of non-effecting mutations that eventually lead to steps forward in evolution is implausible.
That is quite a lot of information to respond to. I finally managed to find sources that discussed the experiments you are referring to.
I was a little dismayed to find out that you failed to point out the alternative hypothesis that still exists:
The natural substrate for phosphotriesterase will have structural similarity to these phosphotriesters when it is discovered.
So basically, because they don't know the natural substrate, the additional hypothesis is that the enzyme evolved over the past 50 years. I wonder why you failed to mention this.
I'm saying that the evidence to support your view does not exist. It is speculation.
New, functional information. A mistake in copy may change the order of the sequence in a gene, but that is not the same as new, functional information being created.
The functionality is on the level of a changing identifier, defined only by the proteins themselves. Once again, the reshuffling of genetic information is not the creation of new information, it is an organization of preexisting information. HIV is indeed unique in many of its properties, an amazing virus. But to extrapolate the mutation of HIV, like the aspect of multiple antibiotic resistance, and say that it is evidence for mutations leading to evolution, is simply not true. The change has a great effect, but that does not mean that the change itself is large or significant in terms of information or complexity increase, but rather that our body's reaction to is significant. It is, by comparison, a shuffling of the genetic information that does not increase information, but just simplpy change it. There is no added functionality. The functional change is only on the side of our immune defenses, and the drugs that are designed to destroy the virus.
Two points:
1) There is no increase in functional complexity with the mutation. It is not the type of change, in quality or direction, which would cause the virus to become a more complex type of living organism.
2) The virus has no evolutionary relationship to any other form, so the changes with it cannot be transferred or used as examples for evolutionary history of truly living organisms.
I don't assume that fossils have a high rate of preservation during normal passing of time. But the total absence of any fossil showing a transition between the major changes that are proposed to have occurred is astounding. Combine that with the fact that there are supposedly millions of years of time while these changes were to occur, and you can see why there are so many objections to the "conclusions" evolutionary biologists are so eager to jump to.
Here's what's happening. I'm challenging the proposed evidence for evolution, and you are saying that I must also challenge these other things science holds to be true. The reality is, I'm not questioning these other things, because the evidence for them is strong, and I do not have reasons to doubt the conclusions that others have reached based on that evidence.
However, I see the same evidence you see for evolution, but I also see how the conclusions are drawn that do not match with the factual data that has been collected. When that happens, I have to ask myself what other motives could possibly exist besides the desire to know the truth about the history of life. This I have done. Upon digging deeper into the question, I have found more uncertainty about evolution, not less. I have read the objections, and looked for the answers, but the answers are not there, and I am not willing to throw reason and science out the window to believe something that has been handed to me by others with false assumptions, false motives, and questionable evidence.
I'm not sure why you think we can't test gravity, but I assure you there are ways. The history of life is just that: history. It happened one way, and just one way. In that respect, we cannot test it, we can only construct a plausible scenario based on the evidence we have. My arguement is that evolution's scenario is neither plausible, nor based on the evidence we have.
You see, most people will not question something that scienctists support, unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I have compelling reasons to question evolution.
There are other explanations, also plausible, that are supported by the data we have. For instance, anatomic homology supports the Creation model as much as it supports evolution. It is not direct evidence for evolution, as some would lead you to believe.
Science does work by proposing alternative theories to present questions. I believe the evidence greatly favors the Creation model. Many scientists are also naturalists, and cannot accept the idea of God participating in physical reality. For that reason alone, many refuse to dismiss evolution, or accept the Creation model, regardless of how improbable evolution becomes.
But if science does not lead us to the truth about the history of life, then where is its value? I would rather accept Creation and dismiss evolution than believe a lie due to my philosophical belief in naturalism.
Irreducible complexity is a good one. A lot of problems there. How about the nonsupportive fossil record, or the discrepancies in the dating methods? Or biogenesis? Or what about the geological layers that misrepresent the proposed timeline of evolution?
I could go on...
Indeed, the species are united quite remarkably, each well suited for their role. The problem is not that gaps exist, but that the gaps are incredible in their magnitude. For instance, no fossils exist to connect the supposed transition from reptile to bird. None. How many millions and millions of years do you imagine that transition taking? Do you not find it strange that not a single fossil can be found during that time period?
This is but one example. Read Michael Denton for some more... the examples abound.
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