Role of Mutations

What kind of neutral mutations are we discussing? (I assume these are mutations which can be passed from one generation to the next.)Different neutral mutations include the following:

• those that only substitute one nucleotide for another, making no change in the resulting amino acid sequence (for protein-encoding genes)
• those that alter one amino acid in the interpreted sequence without altering protein function
• those that alter nucleotides in non-coding regions of the DNA which also do not affect gene expression
• those that are only expressed after the maximum age for reproduction
• those that add, take away, or noticeably alter a trait of the organism with no beneficial or deleterious consequences, at least for that particular environment

I'm guessing you want to talk about the last kind; am I right?Of course, by definition, natural selection can never act on a neutral mutation. Until the environment changes in such a way that makes the mutation matter to the organism, it will be "invisible" to natural selection. Obviously, it also has to be expressed or must affect the organism somehow for it ever to matter, so it would have to be a neutral mutation of the fifth kind.For a neutral mutation to be preserved in a population long enough for the environment to change such that the mutation is advantageous, then, it must occur in an organism that already has a selective advantage. Natural selection tends to get rid of traits that confer no advantage, even if they are not deleterious, since they are only a burden to form and maintain. Actually, there is good evidence that this has happened. Take cave-dwelling animals, for instance. With no working eyes and unusually long and sensitive "feelers," as well as being largely albino, many of these creatures could not be expected to survive in the environment of their ancestors (i.e., outside the cave).But in the cave, these traits are perfect: working eyes are not needed, so without any, the creature does not have to worry about maintaining them; larger, more sensitive antennae (or whiskers?), though unnecessary anywhere else, help the animal find its way through the dark; being albino is good for a cave environment since pigment is useless.So yes, mutations which may have once been harmful in previous generations can become advantageous if the environment changes significantly. By "constantly changing nature of mutations," I will assume that you mean that the same mutations could be helpful, harmful, or neutral, depending entirely on the environment.I do not think you could adequately refute that argument merely by showing that some "bad" or neutral mutations may be "good" under certain circumstances. The argument goes that the vast majority of mutations are neutral or deleterious and that the few beneficial mutations are only losses of genetic information, so the trend is for populations to deteriorate ("devolve"), not improve ("evolve").To refute this, you would have to show that most mutations, or "build-ups" of mutations, can be advantageous in at least one plausible environment or to give a verifiable example of an increase in genetic information from a mutation (i.e., the addition of a new functional gene or set of genes which did not exist previously in the gene pool).

It seems to me that there is a huge confusion here on the meanings of "evolution" and "information," very common in creation-evolution debates.PetVet2Be, I agree with your general argument, but I believe that you need to make sure those with whom you are debating know exactly what you mean by what you say.First of all, "evolution" has many meanings often used in debates, including

1. change
2. variation in allele frequencies within a population (or populations) over time (a favorite among evolutionists)
3. speciation
4. the entire "evolutionist worldview" (basically derived out of necessity from atheism): the big bang, followed by a naturalistic formation of the solar system and earth, abiogenesis, and finally the branching out of all species from a common ancestor
5. natural selection
6. a naturalistic increase in genetic information in a population over a number of generations, driven by mutations and only harnessed by natural selection
7. natural selection + mutation
8. "molecules to man" (i.e., chemical evolution followed by constant increase in genetic information to produce all of life's present diversity) (a favorite among creationists)

There is no real controversy over whether 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 actually occur; creationists just believe that they in no way contradict creation and may even support it. Unfortunately, many evolutionists often demonstrate that speciation, natural selection, and beneficial mutations occur and claim that this strongly supports evolution.The fourth and last are far too general for any one argument. Whenever a creationist uses either, he is often harangued by the evolutionist, and the argument quickly turns into "Evolution has nothing to do with abiogenesis; it only deals with what happened after the first life." (PetVet2Be, I noticed that most of the AiG articles you cited dealt almost exclusively with abiogenesis and not with the topic of this thread, mutations. For the sake of peace and staying on-topic, it is probably best to assume that evolution and abiogenesis have nothing to do with each other (although I personally disagree with this). Try to deal with them as separate issues in separate threads.)The sixth definition, then, is probably the most relevant to the debate. (We should probably use "de-evolution" or something of the like to describe losses in genetic information.) Now we just need to define information.When creationists speak of increases in genetic information, they usually think of new genes and alleles and even chromosomes coming into existence where they did not exist before. This simply cannot happen by chance mutations, the only known potential physical mechanism for altering the genetic code, and has never been observed to occur.Creationists generally argue over Gitt information, or something like it, while evolutionists seem to prefer Shannon. We need to agree on which one we are debating.Obviously Shannon information can arise by chance, since his definition had nothing to do with the meaning of the information, just its transmission. (According to Shannon, random sequences supposedly have higher information content than English sentences.)Therefore, we need to focus the debate on the Gitt type of information in DNA. (And yes, we do find Gitt information in DNA. The “statistics” is the four different nucleotides; the “syntax” includes the triplet codon system and that fact that every protein-encoding gene begins with the start codon and ends with a stop codon; the “explicit” meaning of the nucleotide arrangements is the order of amino acids in the interpreted alpha helix; and the “implicit” meanings of the DNA include structure and function of the folded protein, instructions for embryonic development, instincts, etc.) I must disagree. Somehow, each allele of every one of the millions of genes among all the millions of species had to come into existence at some time in the past. For evolution to be plausible, it must be able to explain how all this genetic information came to be; thus it requires that mutations have the potential to increase information and that this has happened frequently in the past.Unfortunately, like I said, no one has ever observed a naturalistic increase in the kind of genetic information to which creationists are referring.

I think I can pretty much agree with this statement. Actually, speciation can occur without any new information at all, at least using today's definition of species as being distinct populations that for any reason do not breed with members of another species.For example, consider two populations of the same species that become geographically isolated. Because of different climates, their gene pools would shrink as natural selection eliminated different unfavorable alleles in either population, causing noticeable differences in behavior patterns and appearances between the two. They may then be considered different species even though they are still compatible enough to produce fertile offspring.Lions and tigers can produce fertile offspring, as can dolphins and killer whales. The animals in each pair are considered separate species despite this fact, simply because they do not normally breed. Speciation in these cases likely occurred due to specialization (i.e., loss of potential for certain characteristics such as a mane or stripes through loss of alleles).Of course, speciation has been observed where there is an "increase" in information: polyploidization in plants. However, in these cases, there has been no new information, only duplication of information already present. It only requires incomplete mitosis. The ability for some plants to change ploidy, and thus speciate, is merely a useful adaptive mechanism.In every case with which I am familiar, speciation has occured through loss of function of a gene or genes, loss of alleles, or duplication of some kind. What instances do you know where new information was added by mutation or natural selection? Let's assume that a dog evolved into a new species over, say, 100,000 generations. At what point in this evolution does the dog cease to be a dog?Of course, it would be expected, according to evolution, that the dog would not evolve into the new species in one generation. But somewhere along the way it can no longer be considered a dog. If it were partly dog and partly the new species, wouldn't that then mean it was no longer a dog, by definition? Just something to consider. I am curious to know on what things AiG is "just wrong"?

Yes, by certain definitions, evolution can be just "horizontal" or "downward" change. But that is not the kind of evolution creationists are debating.Somehow, all genes have come into existence. There is obviously more information in all these genes than there is in none. For evolution to be true, it has to explain the existence of all this information by natural processes. Simply saying that evolution can work downwards does not show how it has worked upwards in the past. This is because information is determined almost entirely by the system that interprets it.Which of the following sentences has more information?

• "The moon is not made of cheese."
• "The heavenly body which orbits the earth is not composed of bovine milk byproducts."

According to Shannon's theory of information, the second sentence contains around twice as much information as the first, since it only deals with the lowest level of information: statistics.However, someone who can read and understand English will recognize that they contain about the same amount of information because they have the same meaning, or at least convey the same message. The only difference is that they are worded differently.It is also important to note that according to classical information theory, the sentence contains the same amount of information regardless of the language that the reader understands. But in reality, to a person who knows only Chinese, the sentence has no information because he can understand none of the meaning (though he might be able to tell that the sentence was intelligently constructed ).Semantics and higher levels of information are certainly difficult to measure and can probably never be measured in the same way as statistics. Information can be defined as an arrangement from a finite set of symbols (statistics) grouped and ordered according to certain conventional rules (syntax) which can be interpreted through accepted conventions to instruct or inform (semantics). Higher levels of information (pragmatics and apobetics) are implicit.To detect information against random noise, you must know the conventions of the "language" first (syntactical structure, meaning, etc.).Try to find the information hidden in the random noise:892 hgd4509*&^#a;kj HK;LHJI pi h iuh PIUJ H ih jh h;j/,bjo;v j;/m/ kj lj?;ljcl /jkI hope this will make my point clear to you.npij9834 7@({?>!~i uhJPUHpkjnbp;KJHPV IAHPIHUFG; /;LKA;H;sghjH{OIJHga/.J POH!49875kjh78Could you find it? Of course you could, but only because you can understand English. The information content in any code depends on the conventions of that code. This fact goes for chromosomes as well as spoken conversation.