"There has never been a mutation that has added information!"

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"There has never been a mutation that has added information!"

Ok, so I'm debating evolution with some new world creationist on facebook, and he keeps on saying "There has never been a mutation that has added information", and that mutations are just a loss of information. He keeps asking me to name a mutation where information has been added. Can anyone help me?


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While the link posted is

While the link posted is quite nice, I usually find it sufficient to simply ask what, exactly, is meant by "information" - then watch them hem and haw as they pour over the creationists sites they got this ridiculous argument from and come up with next to nothing.

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evilrabbit wrote: Ok, so

evilrabbit wrote:
Ok, so I'm debating evolution with some new world creationist on facebook, and he keeps on saying "There has never been a mutation that has added information", and that mutations are just a loss of information. He keeps asking me to name a mutation where information has been added. Can anyone help me?

A guy who was a "collective concious" mystisist I used to work with at my last job(nuts btw). He used to claim that people would call every time he went outside for  a ciggarette.

Anyway he also used this argument. Nutters are nutters no matter what they try to prop up. 

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Yellow_Number_Five

Yellow_Number_Five wrote:
While the link posted is quite nice, I usually find it sufficient to simply ask what, exactly, is meant by "information" - then watch them hem and haw as they pour over the creationists sites they got this ridiculous argument from and come up with next to nothing.

Yep. As long as they don't have a demonstrable meaning for 'information', their argument is just a bunch of hot air. Ask him to demonstrate exactly how to calculate the information decrease from a mutation. 

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evilrabbit wrote: Ok, so

evilrabbit wrote:
Ok, so I'm debating evolution with some new world creationist on facebook, and he keeps on saying "There has never been a mutation that has added information", and that mutations are just a loss of information. He keeps asking me to name a mutation where information has been added. Can anyone help me?

It seems to me the evolutions are always taking the defense side of the "issue" (I think the real issue is that creationists refuse to look at the obvious) of evolution, when it is the creationists who need to defend their claim that a god created life with evidence of a god.

Without any evidence of a god, the creationists have absolutely nothing to base their claim on.

People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.


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Perhaps this is just me, but

Perhaps this is just me, but since both sides are making Positive claims, both sides need to provide evidence and support. Unless one side is simply denying the other side. They have to prove it wrong.

EDIT: By prove it wrong, I mean find another meaning for whatever evidence there is. It need not be active.

But I could be wrong.


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JoshHickman wrote:Unless

JoshHickman wrote:
Unless one side is simply denying the other side. They have to prove it wrong.
Creationists have no evidence, therefore it is wrong. Simple enough?

Evolution is a fact.

Quote:
 EDIT: By prove it wrong, I mean find another meaning for whatever evidence there is. It need not be active.
?

People who think there is something they refer to as god don't ask enough questions.


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hardy har har. . .

why does it have to add anything for it to evolve anyway? am i missing some fundamental law here? we have 2 less chromasones then chimps. they were merged from the pre-exsisting ones but none the less, they became fewer. that sounds like subtraction to me. or would you say that we are de-evolving? maybe im wrong, but well find out huh? being on this board is tough. . . lol

 

sorry about my spelling it is always poor and i dont give a damn!

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Well I think the idea is

Well I think the idea is that if nothing is added then things can't get more complex.

I did a quick google search on genetic mutations and it seems christian sites like to talk about it for some reason.

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/18/1/85

I didn't read all of that but it starts talking about a kind genetic insertion. In most cases genetic insertions are very very bad, much like deletions. If you think about it a bit it makes sense. Completely removing something or adding something will throw more things off then just one spot being changed to something else.

I would think there would be a disease of some sort that is a insertion. I don't really have time to look for one, but it would be one of the worse kind of genetic disorders. One of the sites I was reading talks about how insertions cause more damage.


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Mutations create new

Mutations create new protiens all the time. And many creationists believe that all things are recycled form parent to offspring, yet that is totally untrue since their are about 100 Nucleobases that you get from neither your mother or father. Knowing this, how could these new Nucleobases be recycled?

And to quote my good man AZpaul3 (from another forum):

"There are plenty of vectors that increase genetic materials: new gene space usage, transcription error in meiosis, viral transfer, symbiotic gene transfer, and other dozens of known vectors that increase the total number of nucleotide space available for new capabilities to be expressed. The creationist contention that"

 


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evilrabbit wrote: Ok, so

evilrabbit wrote:
Ok, so I'm debating evolution with some new world creationist on facebook, and he keeps on saying "There has never been a mutation that has added information", and that mutations are just a loss of information. He keeps asking me to name a mutation where information has been added. Can anyone help me?

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Voiderest wrote:

Voiderest wrote:
Well I think the idea is that if nothing is added then things can't get more complex.
thats not entirely true. they may mutate. that wouldnt be adding, that would be changing. . . wouldnt it? i mean, they are not adding they are becoming more intricate.

 it all depends on how in depth are they looking into "adding" if the floating cloud of miscilaneous electron expands a minute amount wouldnt that be a change without adding. . .

 

if two electron were to be compressed enough to be conjoined nuclearly, that would change the over-all with out adding. . . right? 

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Hmm

Hi-

I am brand new to this wonderful website. I was planning on getting to know the forum a bit before saying anything, but I felt the urge to respond.

The person who presented you with this argument is talking total bollocks and obviously has no background in microbiology.

Certainly, most genetic mutations, which can be nucleotide insertions, deletions, or changes (Guanine to Cytosine), are harmful or have little effect on an organism. However, over evolutionary time, improbable small changes (whether they be insertions, deletions, or changes) do occur and help the species survive. It is not up to you to find examples of specific research....but if you must....I'd look up information on a virus or bacteria. These living things reproduce so quickly and so often that you can observe evolution in a lab.

HIV is a wonderful example of something that we can actually observe evolving in our lifetime. That's what makes it so difficult to cure. It is constantly adding or changing its genetic code through various mutations so that human antibodies don't recognise the surface proteins that it should be attacking*. There are so many strains of HIV in the world - and the virus evolves even within one host (person). You can likely find out much more on the National Institutes of Health website.

A lot of things creationists say make me mad - but if they took a few biology classes, they could look at evolution...not just read the very convincing material...look at it.

By the way, my degree is in Biology, but I haven't used it in a while (I'm doing social work right now), so if someone here sees a glaring error in anything I've said, please correct me.

*I do not mean to speak teleologically here: the virus has no idea that its reproductive habits lead to changing surface proteins and increased survivability.


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I recently had a debate on

I recently had a debate on my forums with someone over this very subject.  Here are a few points discussed:

gene evolution from gene duplication:

Quote:
One of the most important outcomes of gene duplication is the origin of novel function. Although it seems improbable that an entirely new function could emerge in a duplicate gene, there are several examples. For instance, the eosinophil-derived neurotoxin (EDN) and eosinophil cationic protein (ECP) genes of humans were generated in the lineage of hominoids and Old World monkeys via gene duplication [42]. Both genes belong to the RNase A gene superfamily. After duplication, a novel antibacterial activity emerged in ECP. This activity is absent in human EDN and the EDN of New World monkeys, which represents the progenitor gene before duplication. More surprisingly, the antibacterial activity of ECP does not depend on the ribonuclease activity [43]. Molecular evolutionary analysis suggests that the new function is probably conferred by a large number of arginine substitutions that occurred in a short period after duplication [42]. ECP is toxic to bacteria because itmakes their cellmembranes porous; thepositively charged arginine residuesmight be important for establishing tight contact between the ECP and negatively charged bacterial cellmembranes in the pore-formation process [42]. In many cases, however, a related function, rather than an entirely new function, evolves after gene duplication.  One good example is the red- and green-sensitive opsin genes of humans, which were generated by gene duplication in hominoids and Old World monkeys [44]. After duplication, the two opsins have diverged in function, resulting in a 30-nm difference in the maximum absorption wavelength. This confers the sensitivity to a wide range of colors that humans and related primates have.

Source - Zhang, J. (2003). Evolution by gene duplication: An update.  Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 18, 292-298.

Also, gene duplication has been a major player in the evolution of life on this planet.  The new territory broken into by the sequencing of whole genomes has shed light upon how gene duplications have led to the emergence of Homo sapiens.  This is noted by Britten (2005):

Quote:
Amino acid sequence comparisons have been made between all of 25,193 human proteins with each of the others by using BLAST software (National Center for Biotechnology Information) and recording the results for regions that are significantly related in sequence, that is, have an expectation of <1 x 10–3. The results are presented for each amino acid as the number of identical or similar amino acids matched in these aligned regions. This approach avoids summing or dealing directly with the different regions of any one protein that are often related to different numbers and types of other proteins. The results are presented graphically for a sample of 140 proteins. Relationships are not observed for 26.5% of the 12,728,866 amino acids. The average number of related amino acids is 36.5 for the majority (73.5%) that show relationships. The median number of recognized relationships is ≈ 3 for all of the amino acids, and the maximum number is 718. The results demonstrate the overwhelming importance of gene regional duplication forming families of proteins with related domains and show the variety of the resulting patterns of relationship. The magnitude of the set of relationships leads to the conclusion that the principal process by which new gene functions arise has been by making use of preexisting genes.

Source - Britten, R. (2005). The majority of human genes have regions repeated in other human genes.  PNAS, 102, 5466-5470.

Human Endogenous Retroviruses which is part of our human genome.  They constitute approximately 8% of our genome:

Quote:
The precise count of repeats is obviously underestimated because the genome sequence is not finished, but their density and other properties can be stated with reasonable confidence. Currently recognized SINEs, LINEs, LTR retroposons and DNA transposon copies comprise 13%, 20%, 8% and 3% of the sequence, respectively. We expect these densities to grow as more repeat families are recognized, among which will be lower copy number LTR elements and DNA transposons, and possibly high copy number ancient (highly diverged) repeats.

Source - International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. (2001). Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome. Nature, 409, 860–921

The "LTR retroposons" they refer to are the ERVs.


Quote:
Analysis of the human genome revealed that some 45% of it consists of various kinds of transposable elements. Around 8% of the human DNA is derived from retrovirus-like elements. They originate from ancient retroviral infections or are relics of retroviral transposomal activity in the germ-line cells. Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) comprise a part of these elements. They have undergone substantial changes such as mutations of all kinds, deletions and insertions of other transposons, recombinations and mini- and micro-satellite expansion. This is why it is often difficult to identify individual retroviral genes and other retroviral DNA regions.

Source - Pačes, J., Pavlíček, A. and Pačes, V. (2002). HERVd: database of human endogenous retroviruses. Nucleic Acids Research, 30, 205-206.

Retroviruses work by using an enzyme (reverse transcriptase) to copy their RNA into a host DNA.  These copied into the germline cells makes it so that they are passed on to offspring.

Quote:
The retroviruses carry within their virion the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which enables them to make a DNA copy of their RNA.  This is a very important step in the life cycle of these viruses because the DNA copy can be integrated into the cell's DNA. (330)

Source - Batzing, B. (2002). Microbiology. Pacific Grove: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

I was poking around through the latest edition of PNAS and found this relevant article:

Quote:
Results of protein sequence comparison at open criterion show a very large number of relationships that have, up to now, gone unreported. The relationships suggest many ancient events of gene duplication. It is well known that gene duplication has been a major process in the evolution of genomes. A collection of human genes that have known functions have been examined for a history of gene duplications detected by means of amino acid sequence similarity by using BLASTp with an expectation of two or less (open criterion). Because the collection of genes in build 35 includes sets of transcript variants, all genes of known function were collected, and only the longest transcription variant was included, yielding a 13,298-member library called KGMV (for known genes maximum variant). When all lengths of matches are accepted, >97% of human genes show significant matches to each other. Many form matches with a large number of other different proteins, showing that most genes are made up from parts of many others as a result of ancient events of duplication. To support the use of the open criterion, all of the members of the KGMV library were twice replaced with random protein sequences of the same length and average composition, and all were compared with each other with BLASTp at expectation two or less. The set of matches averaged 0.35% of that observed for the KGMV set of proteins.

Source - Britten, R. (2006). Almost all human genes resulted from ancient duplication.  PNAS, 103, 19027-19032.

Hopefully you can pick out the useful information in that jumble.