Originally Posted by Mikie

Nope, you believe in evolution because you want to believe in it.

Originally Posted by Gregg

You hear that, all you evolutionists! You may THINK you believe in horse evolution, but you don't! Mikie hath spoken! Or, at least, whatever creationist website he pulled this from has.

Uh, Mikie, while "evolutionists" admit that all the fossils in the horse evolutionary sequence don't necessarily belong to the actual lineage that produced the modern horse, they pretty much all do "believe" in horse evolution. Still.Because it takes a damn long time, Mikie! Why can't you understand this?

Originally Posted by Gregg

Why is it so hard to see that lots of little changes over a very long period of time add up to a big change?

Originally Posted by Gregg

Actually, PE explains why we DO see mainly macro changes in the fossil record instead of smooth "microtransitions" with no gaps.And more transitional forms were discovered, with more being found all the time. PE helps explain why there are gaps and why we'll probably never fill them all in.Well yeah. Every fossil in existence demonstrates macro change.

Originally Posted by Gregg

Whee! I pulled it off! Do I get a prize?

Originally Posted by Gregg

I don't get it. Why would I "want" to believe in evolution, if there was another, better-supported theory for biological diversity? I mean, I was a theist for most of my life, and I accepted evolution then, too. Evolution didn't have much, if anything, to do with my decision to move away from theism. I wouldn't have any problem believing in some sort of intelligence directing evolution, if strong evidence could be produced for it (wouldn't make me believe in the god of the Bible though--never believed in that god, even when I was a theist). So what exactly is my motivation for "wanting" to believe in evolution?

I don't "believe" in evolution, any more than I "believe" in the sun. I just accept it because all evidence and observation supports it.

Originally Posted by Vincent

Mikie - your quote mining is showing.

Here's a news flash for you. Science isn't done by mis-quoting scientists out of context.

I'm still waiting for your explanation as to why there's chimp UBB code in our DNA.

scigirl

Originally Posted by Gregg

Claim CB102:
Mutations are random noise; they don't add information. Evolution can't cause an increase in information.
Source:
AIG, n.d. Creation Education Center. http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/docs/CvE_report.asp
Response:
It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of:


increased genetic variety in a population [Lenski, 1995; Lenski et al. 1991]
increased genetic material [Brown et al. 1998; Lynch and Conery, 2000; Ohta, 2003; Hughes and Friedman, 2003; Alves et al. 2001]
novel genetic material [Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996]
novel genetically-regulated abilities [Prijambada et al. 1995]

If these don't qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.


A mechanism which is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, where a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations which change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances where this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:
Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors [Lang et al. 2000].
RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. [Zhang et al. 2002]
Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. [Brown et al. 1998]
A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references to the biological literature.


According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation which mutations add to populations is the variation which selection acts upon. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism, so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism. [Adami et al. 2000]


The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations [Adami et al. 2000; Schneider, 2000].
Links:
Max, Edward E., 1999. The evolution of improved fitness by random mutation plus selection. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness/

Musgrave, Ian, 2001. The Period gene of Drosophila. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr01.html
References:
Adami et al., 2000. (see below)
Alves, M. J., M. M. Coelho and M. J. Collares-Pereira, 2001. Evolution in action through hybridisation and polyploidy in an Iberian freshwater fish: a genetic review. Genetica 111(1-3): 375-385.
Brown, C. J., K. M. Todd and R. F. Rosenzweig, 1998. Multiple duplications of yeast hexose transport genes in response to selection in a glucose-limited environment. Mol. Biol. Evol. 15(8): 931-942. http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/8/931.pdf
Hughes, A. L. and R. Friedman, 2003. Parallel evolution by gene duplication in the genomes of two unicellular fungi. Genome Res. 13(6A): 1259-1264.
Knox, J. R., P. C. Moews and J.-M. Frere, 1996. Molecular evolution of bacterial beta-lactam resistance. Chemistry & Biology 3: 937-947.
Lang, D. et al., 2000. Structural evidence for evolution of the beta/alpha barrel scaffold by gene duplication and fusion. Science 289: 1546-1550. See also Miles, E. W. and D. R. Davies, 2000. On the ancestry of barrels. Science 289: 1490.
Lenski, R. E., 1995. in Population Genetics of Bacteria, Society for General Microbiology, Symposium 52, eds. Baumberg, S., J. P. W. Young, S. R. Saunders and E. M. H. Wellington, Cambridge University Press, UK., pp. 193-215.
Lenski, R. E., M. R. Rose, S. C. Simpson and S. C. Tadler, 1991. Long-term experimental evolution in Escherichia coli. I. Adaptation and divergence during 2,000 generations. American Naturalist 138: 1315-1341.
Lynch, M. and J. S. Conery, 2000. The evolutionary fate and consequences of duplicate genes. Science 290: 1151-1155. See also Pennisi, E., 2000. Twinned genes live life in the fast lane. Science 290: 1065-1066.
Ohta, T., 2003. Evolution by gene duplication revisited: differentiation of regulatory elements versus proteins. Genetica 118(2-3): 209-216.
Park, I. S., C. H. Lin and C. T. Walsh, 1996. Gain of D-alanyl-D-lactate or D-lactyl-D-alanine synthetase activities in three active-site mutants of the Escherichia coli D-alanyl-D-alanine ligase B. Biochemistry 35: 10464-10471.
Prijambada, I. D., S. Negoro, T. Yomo and I. Urabe, 1995. Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 61(5): 2020-2022.
Schneider, T. D., 2000. Evolution of biological information. Nucleic Acids Research 28(14): 2794-2799. http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/
Zhang, J., Y. P. Zhang and H. F. Rosenberg, 2002. Adaptive evolution of a duplicated pancreatic ribonuclease gene in a leaf-eating monkey. Nature Genetics 30(4):411-415. See also: Univ. of Michigan, 2002, How gene duplication helps in adapting to changing environments. http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Relea.../r022802b.html
Further Reading:
Adami, C., C. Ofria and T. C. Collier, 2000. Evolution of biological complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(9): 4463-4468. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4463 (technical)

Hillis, D. M., J. J. Bull, M. E. White, M. R. Badgett, and I. J. Molineux. 1992. Experimental phylogenetics: generation of a known phylogeny. Science 255: 589-92. (technical)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Previous Claim: CB101.2 | List of Claims | Next Claim: CB102.1

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

created 2001-3-31, modified 2003-9-25

Originally Posted by Mikie

How do you know it's not "reused" code design? For instance, I see tires on my VW bug, and on your Ferrari. I'm not about to say that the tires on your Ferrari came from the same factory my VW tires came from, based solely on the fact that they are both rubber tires. I don't need to say that, because I don't have an internal "need" to feel that my bug is related to your Ferrari in any way. I WILL however concede that the same design and enginerring may have gone into construction on both of them. Get it? I hope so, because this is getting boring. If you can't grasp this simple concept, I can't help you.

Originally Posted by Mikie

- flood them with information, even if it doesn't make sense.