Question 050114a:
Evolution requires the appearance of new information and new genes.
"older" and "simpler"
organisms generally have less genes than "more advanced" organisms. Can
mutation be a mechanism for the formation of new infromation and new
genes?
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Answer 050114a: No, it cannot. Whenever mutation occurs, information is
changed, but not created.
David DeWitt of Liberty University wrote: “Successful
macroevolution requires the addition of new information and new genes that produce new proteins that are found in new organs and systems” (2002,
emphasis in original).
Take the following illustration:
By "mutating" one character in the following sentence, I changed its
information content, but I
did not add any new information.
I know that you are in your house. -> I knew that you are in your house.
This is an example where the "mutation" leads to a new information,
which is in a sense "positive", since it still is grammatical correct.
But at the same time, the original information is lost.
Of course mutation also could lead to a completely nonsensical, or even
corrupted sentence:
I know that you are in your house. -> I know that you are in your mouse.
I know that you are in your house. -> I know that you are in youx house
Statistics tells you that the former case is much, much rarer than the
later ones.
Going back to the biological mutations, Lester and Bohlin noted:
"The usual answer given to the dilemma of new genetic information is
that as a gene continues to mutate, eventually something different will
arise. But immediately, several questions come to our
minds. What function, for example, is this protein performing
while all this mutating is going on? Is its function slowly
changing? If so, is its former function still needed? If
not, why not? And if so, then how is the former function being
handled?"
Evolutionists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in "Acquiring
Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species" in 2002:
"We certainly agree that random heritable changes, or gene mutations,
occur. We also concur that these random mutations are expressed
in the chemistry of the living organism…. The major difference
between our view and the standard neodarwinist doctrine today concerns
the importance of random mutation in evolution. We believe random
mutation is wildly overemphasized as a source of hereditary
variation. Mutations, genetic changes in living organisms, are
inducible; this can be done by X-ray radiation or by addition of
mutagenic chemicals to food. Many ways to induce mutations are
known but none leads to new organisms. Mutation accumulation does
not lead to new species or even to new organs or new tissues. If the
egg and a batch of sperm of a mammal is subjected to mutation, yes,
hereditary changes occur, but as was pointed out very early by Hermann
J. Muller (1890-1967), the Nobel prizewinner who showed X-rays to be
mutagenic in fruit flies, 99.9 percent of the mutations are
deleterious. Even professional evolutionary biologists are hard
put to find mutations, experimentally induced or spontaneous, that lead
in a positive way to evolutionary change."
They continue:
"We agree that very few potential offspring ever survive to reproduce
and that populations do change through time, and that therefore natural
selection is of critical importance to the evolutionary progress.
But this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular
half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by
the religious ferocity of its rhetoric. Although random mutations
influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss,
alteration, and refinement…. Never, however, did that one
mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear.
Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or
deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of hereditary
change shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even
with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation."
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