No "new information" required

Of course I realize it --- that's why I said that although he'd written the latter I presumed that he meant the former.But since there's also a chance that he meant what he said, I didn't want to take the chance and maintain that that would be an example of evolution, since it wouldn't.

Just to give one example to expand slightly upon what Dr. A said, Werner Gitt, who is associated with 'Answers in Genesis', has a definition of information that explicitly requires a mental origin. For a fuller discussion of Gitt's formulation see The value of Gitt information.TTFN,WK

Actually, it isn't. They make up their own definitions, such as Complex Specified Information. This is exactly what I am talking about. If this is not an example of new information then evolution does not need to produce new information in order to produce the biodiversity we see today. That is exactly what you described with the bird's beak and wing, and yet you say that is not new information. It occurs through mutation and selection. Whether or not creationists want to call this "new information" has little to do with the reality that evolution does occur.

Or there's that chap we just had on these forums who insisted that information was the opposite of Shanon entropy ... in which case you can create new information by deleting chunks of the genome!

You must have heard of the classic stories of pathogen and insect natural selection. Viruses like HIV attacked by white blood cells and medicines and insects that feed on plants sprayed with insecticide evolve to gain immunity in incremental steps. Simple variation allows some pathogens or insects to be better adapted every step of the way. The beginning population has mutations that turn out to be beneficial. It's circumstance that decides whether the resistance genes are beneficial.