Rhaedas

Just a nitpick...maybe you were talking about the mutation you mentioned specifically, but certainly there can be and likely are more than just one mutation in the reproduction process, right? As you said, many are neutral, so go unnoticed, but I'd find it hard to believe that in all the DNA structure, there'd only be a single instance of a bad copy.

Their claim of the five minimum mutations sounds a lot like the irreducible complexity argument, and a strawman as well. If that was the case, then yes the odds of mutations that do something good or bad would be low. But, even if we assume that their reasoning is correct, and you need five specific mutations to have an influence, that doesn't mean that all five have to occur at the same time. Through several generations you could have various mutations that don't have a visual affect on their own, but eventually combine to produce a more pronounced effect.

I've noticed over time that creationists don't seem to understand statistics.

Prester John

Its interesting to note that each human body has on and in it 100 trillion bacterial cells alone.

http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/en...uman_body.html

I think the math is flawed. If he can't be bothered to get basic numbers right then its hardly reliable. The falacy as decribed by Jack appears to be being used.

Jabu Khan

Also I think the reason these statements are so accepted by fundementalists is because they're already operating from the assumption that life only had a few thousand years for all those mutations to result in the diversity we see today. To try to explain to them the billions of years of assault from meteors and commits and the amount of organic chemicals coming into contact with each other on the early earth requires them to dismiss a lot of other firm beliefs as well. Many don't even understand the utter multitude of bacterial and viral life still present today.

theyeti

I 'll just address a few of the more egregious errors:

This is a nonsensical statement. What does he mean by "simplest new structure"? Individual proteins do not require 5 simultaneous mutations in order to change function, and all structures are ultimately built up from proteins (or their actions). There are many accounts in the literature of proteins changing function with only a single mutation, and of individual mutations in regulatory regions having profound effects on morphology.

This is wrong. The mutation rate for prokaryotes is about 10^-6 per generation per nucleotide. Since each bacterium has a few million nucleotides, each one will receive several mutations per generation, on average. And E. coli doesn't have 10,000 genes, it has fewer than 5000. Some bacteria have only a few hundred.

This is way off. About 75% of mutations in protein coding regions will be non-harmful, and a much higher percentage can exist for non-coding regions (depending on what it does). Notice that 75% is a slight bit larger than 0.1%.

Aside from the clearly wrong assumptions going in here, 100,000,000 bacterial cells is nothing. There's many times that number living in your bathroom sink.

All of the assumptions here are laughably wrong, but as for the number of bacteria, there are about 5 x 10^30 on Earth. If they divide once per hour, then that means 1.39 x 10^27 being made every second. Over 10^17 seconds, that makes 1.39 x 10^45 bacteria, or more than 5 orders of magnitude more than the obviously wrong 10^40 target being presented here. So even with ridiculous numbers, they still lose.

The rest of it's just rhetorical puffery, quote mining, relying on creationists as authorities, etc.

theyeti