Godless Dave

Bingo.

Ragnarok

I think what the cretinist will say is "well, mutations change things but they increase the overall entropy of the information". Then they will insert some 2nd LOTD nonsense. This ignores the "selection" part of "natural selection" but hey, this is creation science, not rocket science.



For those who like such things, you can now watch evilution yourself on your computer. Look up "Alife". I played around with the Avida software for a while. It has "organisms" that consist of short computer programs running in a virtual machine. I started my run on a computer at work with the canned seed organism that comes with it. This critter is like 18 or 20 instructions long. After a 2 week run the dominant life form in the sim-world was something with about 45 instructions that could perform tasks the originals didn't.

Sounds like adding information to me. <img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

Coragyps

&lt;creationist hat on&gt; "But it was run on a computer designed by an intelligent engineer!" &lt;doff hat&gt;

Ragnarok

And yet it is awfully interesting that simulated creatures that have the same properties as living things - self replication, mutation, recombination and natural selection illustrate evolution just as predicted by evolutionary science.

If the point is that evolution can itself only occur in a system designed by an intelligent agent then fine - we have the Deist's clockmaker god, not Yahweh. If the point is that the computer hardware/software was jerry rigged to "produce evolution" then I would say it was only jerry rigged to mimic the aspects of life mentioned above. Evolution just sort of happens from there.

Jack the Bodiless

Actually, I've just thought of two more examples. One was the "hairy elephant" episode with mturner, who claimed (baselessly, as usual) that there was "not enough time" for elephants to become hairy mammoths quickly enough to cope with climate change during Ice Ages. I cited "wolfman syndrome" in humans as an example of a near-hairless mammal becoming hairy in a single generation as a result of a dominant trait arising from a single mutation.

Another possible example is an extreme case of polydactyly (extra digits) in cats. One cat had six toes on each hind paw and seven on each front paw. The front digits included a pair of opposable thumbs, allowing this cat to manipulate objects with almost human dexterity. If humans suddenly died out in a super-virulent smallpox epidemic, then feral cats who can easily grip, pull and twist human-made objects would have an advantage.

Each is an example of the addition of a potentially useful trait.

scigirl

Bumping this up for Athanasius,

scigirl

tgamble

Biological information is defined as information that can't be produced by mutations or evolution at anytime under any circumstances.