Are Point Mutations problematic for ToE?

Could it be that Dr. Purdom limits her research to avoid a conflict with her religious belief? She seems to want to stop at a point where an untrained audience might get the impression that point mutations stall at the micro-evolutionary stage. She would thus, knowingly or not, be building a platform to refute macro-evolution that would appeal to the untrained audience. I am speaking from the position of a non-professional listener.It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. C. W. LeadbeaterThanks, Percy, for the Vitamin C example. That seems simple and reasonable to me.

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"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices."
Voltaire

I don't think this is quite the case. The attitude that seems to come up time and again is a belief that there are specific original 'created' sequences which represent the maximal informational content regardless of functionality or any other concern.Any deviation from these sequences must be a reduction in information, it is possible that a reversion would add back the lost information but you can never have any new information according to this view because no change, even one creating a new specific function, is producing novel information because information is only being measured in how closely a sequence adheres to a created ideal.I came up against this arguing about antibiotic resistance with Smooth Operator, he claimed that even if a mutation had no phenotypic effect other than conferring resistance it still constituted a loss of genetic infromation because the protein conformation had changed.Just for my 0.02 on the OP, as has been pointed out, there is no rational informational metric by which Georgia Purdom's claim could even remotely be considered true.TTFN,WK

Speaking as a Christian, I fear that the issue is willful ignorance at best, but more likely just plain money. There is a gold mine out there speaking to and writing books for the Christian Cult of Ignorance groups.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Ignore me, I'm an idjit.Edited by Nij, : No reason given.

I think it's vital that we emphasize that what creationists object to is based entirely on a strawman version of evolution. In this line of argument, they are ignoring how evolution actually works. As I said at the outset, I agree with what others have said. But at bottom, it's irrelevant whether a particular mutation increases or decreases "information" because it's indisputable that mutations do increase "information" in the population overall.By all means, show that the creationist claim that mutations decrease "information" is bollocks. But that demonstration is rather technical, and includes difficult discussions about what "information" means and how to measure it. For the uneducated, it's all a lot of muddy water. By contrast, the demonstration that every mutation increases "information," no matter how it's defined, is clear to even those who know absolutely nothing about genetics. A mutation creates a new genetic sequence that wasn't present in the population before the mutation occurred, but doesn't eliminate the sequence that existed before the mutation from the population. Ergo, more "information."

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

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We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat

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It has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

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...creationists have a great way to detect fraud and it doesn't take 8 or 40 years or even a scientific degree to spot the fraud--'if it disagrees with the bible then it is wrong'.... -- archaeologist

Other creationist beliefs that get in the way of their understanding:

• Anything random can only be bad.
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• Anything bad must decrease information.
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• Anything good must increase information.

All three are so obviously false, falsifying counterexamples so easy to come by, that I'll stop here.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.