Why Evolution is science

Confidence,Welcome to the mix. I agree with RazD, you need to tell us what you mean by the difference is between evolution and natural selection to you. It seems like evolution means speciation or macroevolution, or something. Actually, I don't think it would be a bad idea for you to start a new post where you articulate your evolutionary views.Also:

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But evolution predicts mutations that gain information

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I'm not quite sure what is meant by evolution or by information, but if you were to more clearly define these terms, I'm sure myself or others here could either find a problem with your definition, or suitable evolutionary examples that fit into your definition.

As noted by others natural selection is part of evolution. The other part is mutations that provide the variety for natural selection to act on, thus any demonstration that shows natural selection has occurred actually demonstrates both elements have occurred (natural selection cannot operate on mutations\variations that do not exist in the populations).Another definition of evolution is the change in the frequency of alleles within a population - this is a little more technical, but really means the same thing. Thus when moths or finches are selected for one variation in a feature over another, that changes the frequency of alleles within that population, and when the selection pressure swings back and selects features as they were before, that too changes the frequency of alleles within the population. This is part of the population dynamics, especially in sexual species, where populations continuously oscillate about mean values for alleles in the population.Only when you have speciation events do you in essence "lock in" a population to a shift in the mean values for some alleles where they are different from mean values of the previous population (although there can still be some overlap in many genes). Thus speciation is the best confirmation that evolution has occurred that has produced a lasting (until they change again or go extinct) change. This shift can be as small as a change in the time of day that a population breeds.For some examples of speciation I suggest reading
Observed Instances of SpeciationIt has a discussion of the arguments currently on-going in the science of evolution (as they are ongoing in all sciences) and of the definitions and mechanisms. But just to hit the highlights, it lists a number of speciation events in multicellular species where sexual speciation can be more easily documented.

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5.1 Speciations Involving Polyploidy, Hybridization or Hybridization Followed by Polyploidization.

5.1.1.1 Evening Primrose (Oenothera gigas)
5.1.1.2 Kew Primrose (Primula kewensis)
5.1.1.3 Tragopogon
5.1.1.4 Raphanobrassica
5.1.1.5 Hemp Nettle (Galeopsis tetrahit)
5.1.1.6 Madia citrigracilis
5.1.1.7 Brassica
5.1.1.8 Maidenhair Fern (Adiantum pedatum)
5.1.1.9 Woodsia Fern (Woodsia abbeae)

5.2 Speciations in Plant Species not Involving Hybridization or Polyploidy

5.2.1 Stephanomeira malheurensis
5.2.2 Maize (Zea mays)

5.2.3 Speciation as a Result of Selection for Tolerance to a Toxin: Yellow Monkey Flower (Mimulus guttatus)

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5.3 The Fruit Fly Literature

5.3.1 Drosophila paulistorum
5.3.3 Selection on Courtship Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster
5.3.4 Sexual Isolation as a Byproduct of Adaptation to Environmental Conditions in Drosophila melanogaster
5.3.5 Sympatric Speciation in Drosophila melanogaster
5.3.6 Isolation Produced as an Incidental Effect of Selection on several Drosophila species
5.3.7 Selection for Reinforcement in Drosophila melanogaster
5.3.8 Tests of the Founder-flush Speciation Hypothesis Using Drosophila

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There are more. Each one is discussed with some pros and some cons. Most of the literature is not so much about speciation occurring but about the mechanism by which it occurs. This fits with #4 in the caveats that go with the above article:

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The literature on observed speciations events is not well organized. I found only a few papers that had an observation of a speciation event as the author's main point (e.g. Weinberg, et al. 1992). In addition, I found only one review that was specifically on this topic (Callaghan 1987). This review cited only four examples of speciation events. Why is there such a seeming lack of interest in reporting observations of speciation events?

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In my humble opinion, four things account for this lack of interest. First, it appears that the biological community considers this a settled question. ...

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Second, most biologists accept the idea that speciation takes a long time (relative to human life spans). Because of this we would not expect to see many speciation events actually occur. ...

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Third, the literature contains many instances where a speciation event has been inferred. ...

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Finally, most of the current interest in speciation concerns theoretical issues. Most biologists are convinced that speciation occurs. What they want to know is how it occurs.

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I also note in passing that only ONE speciation event needs to be documented for the process to be validated, as that totally invalidates (falsifies) the concept that it canNOT occur.That is in current day species. Another source of data is the fossil record, but here there is less consistent data -- there is not a continuous fossil record due to the infrequency with which organisms fossilize, whether plant or animal or other.In one case though we have a pretty good record over a substantial amount of time: Geology Dept article 3
article 8Two different articles about the same study involving an order (taxon level above species, genus and family) of single cell protozoa called foraminifera:

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Often heard shortened to "forams," the name comes from the Latin word foramen, or "opening." The organisms can be likened to amoebas wearing shells, perforated to allow strands of protoplasm to bleed through. The shell shapes range from the plain to the bizarre.

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Tropical and sub-tropical seas around the globe abound with forams, which are generally divided into two types: the free-floating, planktonic form, which is uniformly small (usually less than a 50th of an inch long); and the benthic or bottom-dwelling variety, which is typically much larger.
But it's the planktonic variety that chiefly interests Parker and Arnold. ...

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... Advanced deepsea drilling techniques, combined with computer-assisted analytical tools, have ushered in a whole new vista of foram research. Arnold and Parker are two of the first scientists to harness sophisticated technology to a foram project for the express purpose of studying evolution.

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As he spoke, Arnold showed a series of photographs, taken through a microscope, depicting the evolutionary change wrought on a single foraminiferan species.

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"This is the same organism, as it existed through 500,000 years," Arnold said. "We've got hundreds of examples like this, complete life and evolutionary histories for dozens of species."

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Counting both living and extinct animals, about 330 species of planktonic forams have been classified so far, Arnold said. After thorough examinations of marine sediments collected from around the world, micropaleontologists now suspect these are just about all the free-floating forams that ever existed.

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..."But these fossils are almost perfectly preserved, despite being millions of years old. We have the whole creature, minus the protoplasm."

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By being so small, the fossil shells escaped nature's grinding and crushing forces, which over the eons have in fact destroyed most of the evidence of life on Earth. The extraordinary condition of the shells permits Parker and Arnold to study in detail not only how a whole species developed, but how individuals physiologically developed from birth to adulthood.
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"We've literally seen hundreds of speciation events," Arnold added. "This allows us to check for patterns, to determine what exactly is going on. We can quickly tell whether something is a recurring phenomenon -- a pattern -- or whether it's just an anomaly.

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The foram record clearly reveals a robust, highly branched evolutionary tree, complete with Darwin's predicted "dead ends" -- varieties that lead nowhere -- and a profusion of variability in sizes and body shapes. Moreover, transitional forms between species are readily apparent, making it relatively easy to track ancestor species to their descendants.

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330 species covering 500,000 years of geological time with virtually no missing members: a jigsaw puzzle with maybe 5% of the pieces missing is still enough to see what the picture looked like. But that is not all that the fossil record of these organisms show:

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The resulting data base thus holds unprecedented power for evolutionary studies, Arnold said. Not only can he and Parker use it to describe how evolution has worked in a particular species, but they can use it as a standard by which evolution theories -- of which there's a growing number -- may be tested.

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The geologic record has been prominently scarred by a series of global cataclysms of unknown, yet hotly debated, origin. Each event, whether rapid or slow, wreaked wholesale carnage on the planet's ecology, wiping out countless species that had taken nature millions of years to produce. Biologists have always wondered how life bounces back after such sweeping devastation.

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One of the last great extinctions occurred roughly 66 million years ago, and according to one popular theory it resulted from Earth's receiving a direct hit from a large asteroid. Whatever the cause, the event proved to be the dinosaurs' coup de grace, and also wiped out a good portion of Earth's marine life -- including almost all species of planktonic forams.

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Some scientists have theorized, but never been able to demonstrate, that in the absence of competition, an explosion of life takes place. The evolution of new species is greatly accelerated, and a profusion of body shapes and sizes bursts across the horizon, filling up vacant spaces like weeds overtaking a pristine lawn. An array of new forms fan out into these limited niches, where crowding soon forces most of the new forms to spin out into oblivion, as sparks from a flame.

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As revealed by the ancient record left by the foram family, the story of recovery after extinction is every bit as busy and colorful as some scientists have long suspected.

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"What we've found suggests that the rate of speciation increases dramatically in a biological vacuum," Parker said. "After the Cretaceous extinction, the few surviving foram species began rapidly propagating into new species, and for the first time we're able to see just how this happens, and how fast."

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Now personally I am not surprised to find that "punk eek" (punctuated equilibrium) did not occur in these organisms, because they are single cell protozoa and not a sexual species. This makes a difference to the population dynamics that allow sexual species to revert (as the moths and finches have done) by re-spreading a gene that was common before and which is favorable to the population as a whole again. In asexual species there is no prevalent mechanism to share old deselected genes back into the population, so what generally occurs is just more evolution in the ones that have it while those that don't have it die out. Sexual selection would tend to select for best overall average allele combinations and thus would drive a "trendency" towards stasis when there is no selection pressure on a population to change, a mix and remix of alleles that cannot occur in asexual species.As a final note, AiG agrees that speciation occurs, from "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use":

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“No new species have been produced.”
This is not true -- new species have been observed to form. In fact, rapid speciation is an important part of the creation model.

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Now of course you will claim that this is only "micro"evolution and it does not show that "macro"evolution can occur, and to that end I have these comments:

1. the issue for creationists is not evolution per se but the concept of a common ancestor or pool of ancestors from which current life forms -- including man -- have evolved.
2. the "goo to you" argument is really irrelevant, as the evolution of primates, then apes and then man does not need to involve a "goo" formation of life in order to invalidate the concept of man as a special creation (unless evolution is the process by which that special creation - from clay? - is realized, and if THAT is the case then there is no problem at all with evolution).
3. "macro"evolution as used by evolution biologists is really just an artifact of taxonomy, and the differences between levels in the taxon chart are differences in the quantity of change not in the quality of change: they all start with speciation, and at no point is change larger than speciation needed. It is like watching a tree grow and determining when a twig is a twig and when it becomes a branch -- all the branches start as twigs.
4. "macro"evolution, "micro"evolution, evolution, speciation, natural selection, mutation, and other concepts that are NOT the same as ones used by evolution biologists are irrelevant - if you are discussing these altered concepts then you are not discussing what the biological science says but some irrelevant fantasy instead.

If you have any questions on this, then by all means trot out your definitions of these terms and ask questions, and people here will be happy to show you where they are inconsistent with modern evolution biology and what evolution means.Enjoy.

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Thanks for your reply, I think this forum will help me better understand the evolutionists point of view. I will start by your suggestion, define evolution and natural selection as I see it and you can judge on what I am doing wrong.I believe natural selection happens. I do not believe evolution happens. I also believe speciation happens. I do not believe evolution happens.Right now you might say I am contradicting myself. Let me explain:
Natural selection, the selection of genes/allelles(or whatever scientific name we have for the information being selected for) that benefits the organism. This involves the loss of some other information (Hence the selection). The key part is, that natural selection selects from existing information. That is, natural selection does not imply evolution (I will get to this definition in a moment). An example, the poodle is a mutated dog that can be traced back to a dog 'kind' that was on the Noah's ark. Not all dogs we know today had to be on the ark. The dog representative (a wolf kind?) had the information for all the dogs we know of. As environments change, and generations of mutations that loses information, different kinds of dogs appeared. ( I think the poodle is at its end of the gene pool for selection, the poodle is one dog with many problems).Speciation happens when enough information has deteriorated so that interbreeding no longer occurs between other species of its 'kind'. So speciation has happened. I will talk more about what I believe about speciation after evolution is finished.The evolution theory also uses, and requires, natural selection. Natural selection is observed, it is a fact. But, evolution in my mind is the line of random mutations that lead to a new function previously not there. For instance, the scales of dinosaurs, over millions of years after building up the mutations, which natural selection selects, which turn in feathers (technically evolution is never finished, mutations continue to happen).Evolution includes ALL kinds of mutations whether good or bad. Good mutations are mutations that eventually lead to a new function. Bad mutations are mutations that result in a destruction of a function but can both be beneficial and harmful(depending on the environment and the effect it has on the creature). But a bad mutation does not eventually get replaced by a new function. The problem is that no mutation, or line of mutations, have confirmed the 'good' one. I am saying that no line of mutations will ever produce feathers, if no previous information for feathers were present. (Saying otherwise, is saying that random mutations and many years of natural selection will be able to do this. This type of example has not been observed, and never will be according to creationism.)So what type of examples do we have today? I believe that mutations exist that can be beneficial and can be selected for. This is acceptable within creationism. But these type of mutations are destroying functions that hampers the organism given a certain situation. But in the end, this loss of function/information, cannot be regained by lots of random mutations. Loss of information can only be regained by breeding of same species with the information/function desired or inserting it in artificially.So when we have mosquitoes that are resistant to DDT, that is because there were already mosquitoes present that were resistant, but they were selected for when the situation presented itself(spraying of DDT). But this is natural selection, not the kind of evolution that creationists have a problem with.Speciation can also occur by gaining new functions so that it no longer can be classified in its previous species type. (dino to bird evolution) But this speciation, I believe, does not occur.I will stop for the moment, no one likes to read so much in one go.
I look forward to your reply.

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“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur,” Feduccia says. “But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ”paleobabble’ is going to change that.”Allan Feduccia, Professor of biology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms”, Science, Vol. 259, 5 February 1993, p. 764

Hi Confidence, The thing that's great about evolution is that it insists that new forms are subsets of previous ones - not new forms at all. Thus birds can be classified in its previous 'species type'. This is how it works:Birds (bipedal, warm-blooded, oviparous vertebrate animals characterized primarily by feathers, a wishbone, forelimbs modified as wings, and (in most) hollow bones)areTherapods (bipedal (probably warm blooded), oviparous, vertebrate animals, with a wishbone, hollowish bones and sometimes feathers)That is to say, birds are a specific kind of Therapoda.Therapods are a specific kind of Saurischian which are a specific kind of Dinosaur.So a bird is a very very very specific kind of dinosaur. No magic kind leaps are necessary. A bird is just a microevolved dinosaur kind.

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I'll leave it at just one point - I'm sure RAZD will cover the other points (as well as this one) anyway. I just happen to enjoy talking about the nested structure of life.

Hi, Confidence. There are some errors in your post; they may seem minor, but they really affect how one looks at the broad picture.

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Good mutations are mutations that eventually lead to a new function.

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No. Good mutations are mutations that lead to individuals that have a better chance at surviving and leaving behind progeny. Period. Now it might be possible for a single mutation to produce a novel function, but in most cases this is not what happens. Would you be surprised to learn that the evolution of lungs from a widening of the throat, or the middle ear bones of mammals from the jaw joint of reptile-like ancestors did not involve acquiring any new functions?

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

This is the centerpoint of your argument. You do not believe that new information can be created by randon mutations. Right now it stands as a simple statement of belief, an unsuported asertion. Since there is apriori no reason for us to believe that information cannot be created that way, could you elaborate a little more on your reasons to believe it? My very first post at EvC was on a topic closely related to that question. You might be interested in reading that forum. I don`t know how to make links, but if you click on my name, and scroll down to my first post you will find a link for that forum.Edited by fallacycop, : typoEdited by AdminWounded, : Added link to post, to see how use peek.

Confidence-A few questions, which are sort of unrelated, but ones I would like to know your answer to. How old is the earth? Is Archaeopteryx a bird or a dinosaur? I'm assuming your claims are along the lines of god creating the archtypes of each taxonomic group, after which each taxanomic group underwent natural selection into separate species. Where do you draw the line? Did god create an archetypical canine, or an archetypical carnivora, or an archetypical mammalia? This is important to know, since we must know what group to start with from which no new functions are added.Also, it would be nice if you could define what you mean by information. DNA is a code- but it produces proteins, which have a physical shape and function. When you talk about adding information, do you mean adding new proteins to a system? Because this is a rather strange way of defining information, and because if this is how you define information, then we have proof that information is added- or new proteins are present- in recently evolved species.Your theory of natural selection and evolution is fine in my mind. It is not evolutionary theory as most biologists think of it. The idea of good and bad mutations is foreign; in the conventional theory, mutations either benefit an organisms survival and are selected for, or they do not. But if we were able to find "good" mutations, under your definition, then I think it is safe to say that your theory is flawed.To recap what examples need to be shown to prove your theory false:

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Good mutations are mutations that eventually lead to a new function.

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The problem is that no mutation, or line of mutations, have confirmed the 'good' one.

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My favorite example, to make this case, will be Chrysopelea, the genus of flying snakes. http://www.flyingsnake.org/ These are snakes that glide through the air through modifying their body. Their ribcage is flexible, and is pulled outward through specialized muscles, which increases their surface area and gives them a more aerodynamic shape. All of the species in this genus can parachute, though a few are actually able to glide ( a minor distinction that refers to their equilibrium glide angle being >45 degrees; in both parachuting and gliding, lift is still being produced). All the species can move across the ground and up trees just as well as other snakes. In other words, their increased flexibility comes with no loss of functionality, only additional functionality. The same can be said of flying squirrels, and bats. Of course you could claim that bats (and flying squirrels) were their own archetype, and that the sister group of lemurs and flying lemurs have their own archetypes. But it is pretty hard to make that claim about flying snakes. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a flying snake a regular snake until you threw them out of a tower, at which point one falls haphazardly and the other locomotes quite far away (this has been done). Therefore, starting with an archetypical snake, you find one with a new function, or a "good" mutation.There are other examples I can give, but I will also keep this post short.

Hello everyone, again...There still seems to be some misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. But in general I think we all came a few steps forward from where we last left off to a understanding. (not quite there yet). I am not certain if most people agree with that. But I believe creationists can accept this as true. As long as you are saying that birds have something in common with dinosaurs that can put them in that same kind. However, birds did not spring up from dinosaurs without wings. Since this requires new functions, as in instead of forelegs, we now get wings. Actually, I believe I have the evidence for this on my side. It is the random processes that create information that lacks any evidence. For where do we see information being randomly assembled? Nowhere. Information can only come from other sources of information (like intelligence). Which we see all the time. (engineers making new designs, cell duplication, us chatting right here on evc, etc). This is what makes the claims we as creationists make science, the very thing we are dismissed for. The claims are full fledged science, the implications are religious.A few answers for you platypus.
-I believe the earth is about 6000 years old, give or take a few.
-Archaeopteryx, I am no expert, but it looks like a dinosaur with feathers, and maybe able to fly. So a flying dinosaur... But I do not believe this causes it to be a 'missing' link. Correct, But I do not draw the line, God drew the line. He decided how much information is present in the species. To find the limit we must use experiments to see how far a species can diversify. I believe there have been such experiments conducted with bacteria, and there is a boundary somewhere.Information, this is a good question, I will send you to a different source
Information, Science and Biology | Answers in Genesis
Dr. Werner Gitt has the paper on that one. It is not too hard to read. Maybe I missed something here, I do not see how this is an example of the 'good' mutations. For what we see here is this:
The snakes may have not required additional body parts, but there is something called information that is different in these snakes than regular ones. These snakes have the information to grow bones and muscles differently to allow themselves to flatten in this way. Even if this is not required, information is required to enable the snake to tell when it needs to flatten itself, but also something needs to tell the snake that it has the ability to do this to its body in certain conditions. There are layers upon layers of information that is 'invisible' to the naked eye that most people forget. You have not shown that this additional information is caused by natural selection, but is merely assumed. I as creationist claim that God has created this information in the beginning the original snake kind. (There may have been more than one snake kind that God created at the beginning).

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We have already shown that life is overwhelmingly loaded with information; it should be clear that a rigorous application of the science of information is devastating to materialistic philosophy in the guise of evolution, and strongly supportive of Genesis creation. Information, Science and Biology | Answers in Genesis

I can't speak for most people, but I can show it to be widely held. Quickly, the wiki article for birds says:

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Birds are categorised as a biological class, Aves. The earliest known species of this class is Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period. Modern phylogenies place birds in the dinosaur clade Theropoda. According to the current consensus, Aves and a sister group, the order Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of an unranked "reptile" clade, the Archosauria.

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Thus: birds are in the dinosaur clade. It might be that, strictly speaking, birds aren't a special kind of dinosaur - instead they are a special kind of [something much like a dinosaur]. The consensus (ie most cladists) is that they are one of the few remaining special kinds of Archosaur. Well, birds have scales, three toed feet, feathers, and a wishbone. Many dinosaurs likewise. There are quite a lot. The thing about kinds is that they are a bit vague. Evolution helps us classify easily - it hands us a classification system...forces it upon us. The creationists have a problem. They can say that all birds are all the bird kind because they have inherited them from an ancestral bird with some specialisations along the way. However they stop there and refuse to carry on the argument...special plead for their perceived kinds. Special pleading is not science.In the case of birds they don't say - but birds all have features that seem to be derived from this other group. Thus birds are a therapod kind. Evolutionists use the same logic applied to the 'bird kind' to define what 'kind' a bird is. And what 'kind' that is (eg a vertebrate kind) and so on and so forth. Quite right. They probably sprung up from special kinds of dinosaurs/[something like dinosaurs] that had wings or wing like structures. Those structures became more wing like and less arm like. They would have been forearms, much like a bats wings, rather than forelegs. Yes, it would require new functions and creationists have a hard time arguing that new functions cannot arise because they have been observed. They have to say that those functions were there all along but we weren't able to see that, or that the function existed, mutated away and then mutated back, or somesuch.Nevertheless, 'new' functions are simply slightly different ways of doing an older function. Indeed. If evolution relied on animals just randomly getting better I along with many other smart people would have long ago laughed at it. Fortunately, heredity and selection are not random - they have a statistical element but random is an entirely inappropriate word for it.Simply because some of the variation in life is down to chance doesn't mean that evolutionary biologists assert that the variation in life was acquired purely by chance. The environment contains a lot of information, and it is the environment that decides who passes on the genes and who doesn't. That is where the information comes from, it is a copy.For example, one can look at a bird's design and conclude that it came from somewhere with an suitably viscous atmosphere and a gravity that wasn't too strong.Here is the wonderful thing when you are doing science - you go away and do the test yourself. First define information. Then calculate how much information is in an organism. Each generation calculate the information. Repeat for say, 1,000 generations. Collate the results and decide if information has increased or decreased and calculate the confidence level and error bars.Then: ask the theory of evolution: what do you predict that information, as I have defined it, will do?If your experiment is at odds with the theory of evolution - you have a point. If ToE fails that prediction we have an issue that needs to be addressed!If creationists are doing science, I'm sure you'll be able to find an example of them doing this rather trivial piece of science. The Discovery institute said they have spent millions of dollars on ID recently - perhaps they have done this scientific experiment to confirm or falsify this common claim?

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A quick aside: rather than posting generic posts - which get a little confused, try using the reply button attached to the post you want to reply to. It makes it easier to follow the debate then. It helps keep the threads tidy. Also I realise the existence of the 'pile on' going on here, but always try to keep focussed on the topic at hand. You have done so, I think, for the most part. However, I can see this kind of post sparking a divergence from the main topic quite easily. Just a friendly tid bit there, keeps the admins happy, you know?

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With that in mind - is there any positive science that creationism has done? It all seems to be focussed on trying to falsify evolution. What explanatory framework can we spring board off using God did It, that can help us predict things as well (or better) than evolution?

To add to what others have noted: No, I would say that you are contradicting the way evolution is defined in the science, and thus you are no longer really talking about evolution science at all but some straw man or fantasy version of it. This would be like someone discussing the problems with the bible using the Koran.See Definitions, Daffynitions, Delusions, Logic and Critical Thinking. for a longer discussion of this problem.Stating that what evolution biology defines as evolution happens, but that it is not evolution by your definition, is not refuting evolution at all, but exposing your concept of evolution as false. That allows the organism with the genes\alleles to survive or reproduce with higher probability than ones without the genes\alleles. The word "benefit" has connotations of good versus bad that are irrelevant, and the relative survival and reproductive success is not always cut and dried. Sigh.In order to say this as anything but a bare assertion, the concept of information needs to have been defined for a biological species, there needs to be a metric to measure the actual amount of information in a specific organism according to that definition, and studies that actually show a change in the measured amounts of biological information need to have been completed, documented, published, peer reviewed and replicated by skeptics.As far as I know this has not even been started, but feel free to correct me and post this information if you have it. That makes this a loose undefined term with no real meaning in it. It cannot have any scientific validity without being documented.I also would like to discuss the problem with reversals as regards this issue. Certainly we see with the peppered moths (Peppered Moths and Natural Selection) and galapogos finches (Galapagos finches, Finches named for Darwin are evolving) that reversals in the distributions of genes\alleles happen. When they occur within a species (as in the above cases) it is because the {is it information?} is obviously NOT lost.Likewise when a population separates into two new populations that share most genes\alleles but not all of them, there is also OBVIOUSLY no "loss" in {is it information?} -- it is just divided between populations that are now free to diverge as they diversify.But we ALSO have cases where a feature is lost in one species by natural selection and then a later species regains that feature:(Copied to save bandwidth - original sources: Nature Article Loss and recovery of wings in stick insects, Nature 421, 264 - 267 (16 January 2003); doi:10.1038/nature01313, and Supplemental Figure 1. (for the article))Also see Walking sticks regained flight after 50 million years of winglessness (news article) and Message 18.The bottom line: no wings, wings, no wings, wings (Lapaphus parakensis - just below the middle of Figure 1 above).So, was the {is it information?} to make wings lost and later added back, or was the {is it information?} on how to use the {is it information?} to make wings lost and later added back?Either way IF your claim that {is it information?} was lost in the process at one point is valid THEN it is invalidated by the addition or regaining of replacement {is it information?} at a later date.Thus we see that if {whatever you call it} is lost in one instance then it must also be added at another: the concept that loss is always present is invalidated, the concept that "information" is a useful term is invalidated. Dogs are wolves but wolves are not dogs - one evolved from the other and will always be a member of the parent clad.Wolves are canines, but not all canines are wolves - wolves evolved from a canine clad defining species and will always be a member of the parent clad.Thus dogs will also always be canines.Thus dogs will always be dogs does not mean that evolution within the dog clad will stop and that offspring of dogs cannot become new species that do not breed with parent or other offspring species.History does not prevent the future. If this is your later "definition" (if you can even call it that ... "impression" would be closer to what's given), it too is contradicting the way evolution is defined in the science, and thus you are no longer really talking about evolution science at all but some straw man or fantasy version of it.Mutations happen, natural selection takes the randomness out of the equation, selecting the ones that lead to increased survival or reproduction. This is like throwing 200 dice and only selecting the "1's" to set aside and throwing the rest again until they are all "1's" versus trying to throw 200 "1's" all in one throw.Some throws there are no "1's" at all -- sometimes there are no variations within a population that allow an organism to survive or reproduce and the population goes extinct. Stuff happens.In evolution, to carry this analogy to the breaking point, getting 200 "1's" is a new feature or function that was previously not there: the same selected value on all dice. Beneficial, as in adding "information" that allows an organism to survive or reproduce with higher frequency than one without it? As pointed out, they will always be classified in the clads of their ancestors. A poodle is a dog and a wolf and a canine. This is consistent with evolution as used by evolution biologists. Again this is like a twig growing on a tree becoming a branch as the tree gets older, with twigs growing from it.And whether you believe it happens or not has absolutely no influence on the reality of the universe.You may want to read evolutionary chain particularly the stuff on horse evolution starting at Message 145 and ending with Message 149 where it is noted that the horse hoof acts like an auxiliary pump to increase blood flow in the legs.Enjoy

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So it seems it is difficult for me to explain myself, for I seem to confuse everyone when I mention information. Everyone operates on a basis of some understanding, for instance, the english language. We use it all the time. We assume that we agree with the definitions of the words we use. Likewise, when I use information, think of it as information, a code, language, or anything that conveys a message from a sender to recipient. DNA is like that. English is like that. A computer code is like that. Information. For instance; information to build a foot is different than that information for making a hand. However there are similar coding in both instances. Bone is common in both, skin, veins, capillaries, in fact all physical systems in a hand and a foot are similar. What is different is the information that locates the bones, veins, and skin. The sizes of nails, fingers/toes are different. We can perform science on how much information is present in certain systems. Scientists have shown that DNA is the most densely packed piece of information we have available to us at the moment. You know the four letters they use? T,G,C,A I believe. It is like a binary system in a computer. It is information.
Information to build everything of that living thing. Therefore it is common sense to say that a human being will have more information in their DNA that is useful than a single celled organism that has less functions.So here is the problem with mutations causing more information. That is, information to build a hand over time, when previously there was no information for it in the DNA. First you need some mutation in the DNA when it gets copied to start with the location of where this new hand will form, again, it does not mean I believe the hand has to be completely there. Just a mutation in the DNA of where a hand is supposed to start. Then you need a mutation to tell it how many hands, a mutation to start with the blue print. Then you need mutations that need to make switches on when to stop growning etc. Again, some of these mutations need to be copying errors for a foot lets say. But all in all you need a lot of mutations, but also simultaneous errors that need to work together. For instance you need the hand to grow straight. If it grows crooked, you need a special feed back system in place to tell it to grow the other way etc... anyways, this problem is similar to a problem a human engineer faces. However, there are no engineers floating around in the DNA, nor is evolution, natural selection or chance, or random a engineer. If you observe the world around you, you realize that by saying that natural selection in hand with random mutations in the DNA produces this complex system? This is not a case where the problem gets tough and we call in God to explain things. No ,this is a case where scientifically it is not sound to think this way. Information does not assemble like that. No example you give will show this.The example of the wings, no wings, wings, no wings, is a case where a switch is turned on or off for making wings or stop making wings. That is not a increase or decrease of information. Just some switching that is not an improbable event to occur. The information for wings was there with all those generations, some did not use it, others did.And more on information. It is not a new concept, but definitely a new field in science that is a must. For we cannot ignore information, it is there. I was at university when this Christian with a PhD in Biology, and a degree in engineering that is conducting tests on what information is ( he was referring to Shannons information theory) but also on how to test when something is designed, and when something does not have enough information so that chance could possible be the source of it.Here is a page with a paper on information, by Wiliam A. Dembski (not the same Christian I was talking about).
http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idtheory.htm

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We have already shown that life is overwhelmingly loaded with information; it should be clear that a rigorous application of the science of information is devastating to materialistic philosophy in the guise of evolution, and strongly supportive of Genesis creation. Information, Science and Biology | Answers in Genesis

I think you'll find that that that was RAZD's point. Your hypothesis regarding "information" loss is clearly refuted in this instance.Question: Do snowflake structures arise from "information" or from the physical nature of water?
Snowflakes and Snow CrystalsDembski is refuted at great length here:
Not a Free LunchWhen reading Dembski, but the way, have you ever noticed that his work is entirely lacking in any positive evidence whatsoever? Have you also noticed his inability (or unwillingness) to define his designer?Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

You really don't need to explain the relevance of information to us. We understand the argument you are putting forward. What we don't understand is whether you actually have any conception of 'information' which could actually be measured so as to show whether it had increased or not.You have mentioned Shannon information and there is absolutely no reason to doubt that Shannon information can increase through mutation given that in terms of Shannon information a mere increase in message length is sufficient to increase information, provided the message consists of more than one symbol.Dembski's paper therefore dismisses Shannon's theory of information when he concludes that... If you think you know a way of applying Dembski's measure of information usefully to a genome which doesn't rely on you making an awfully large number of assumptions about probabilities then I think we would all like to know what it is.At the moment your conception of information is far too loose to know what you will accept as an increase in information. Is the evolution of protein binding site sufficient? Is the neo-functionalisation of a duplicated gene sufficient? Without a specific definition from you of what measure of information you go by there is no way we can usefully try and produce an example which will satisfy you.TTFN,WKP.S. It might make the thread easier to follow if you used the 'reply' button to reply to specific messages rather than just a string of general replies.Edited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

To get back to the topic, I want to give Confidence some credit. What he/she has outlined is in fact a scientific theory, unlike a lot of what has come up on these forums. Confidence is in fact arguing that current evolutionary theory is wrong, and that his/her theory is correct. What will hereby be refered to as Confidence Theory, CT, is this- the mutations that lead to a new function never occurs: the only mutations are ones that infer a loss of information/function. This implies that all forms were present since the beginning of time (6000 Years Ago), since no new forms with new information could be created. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.Now to address CT directly.
Species have evolved new functions with new information. I gave a clear cut example of this- flying snakes. Your response was simply that the information to encode this new function was present from the beginning of time, it was simply switched on or off( expanding your argument about wings). This is quite a copout answer. What's to say that god didn't create only one original species, with genes to code for every possible variation that has arisen in life and a whole hell of a lot of switches? You've created a theory that can always defend against legitimate examples of "good" mutations by adding in a dormant gene and a switch. Is this really the theory you want? Because if we really push this issue, you are going to have to argue for a hell of a lot of dormant genes and switches.As a separate point, in 6000 years, there is not enough time for the flying snakes to speciate from the other snakes, meanign that flying snakes had to be created as a new archetype since the beginning of time. Yet flying snakes are very similar to other snakes. Which leaves you the problem of answering the question in the original post:

quote:

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Why do some species look more alike than others? Evolution claims that they are related phylogenetically. Creationism, as far as I know, makes no attempt to explain this basic trend, and many others. Why did God make creatures that look alike, or better yet, make creatures that have large amounts of DNA in common?

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A note to everyone else- the example with wings is not enough to prove CT wrong. That example simply shows that information is not neccessarily always lost in mutation events, which is compatible with
CT. We need a mutation that brings about new functions.

No, the problem is when you claim that "information" is lost or that "information" is not added.In order to do that you have to have an actual measurement of the amount of "information" before and after, not just assert one result and deny the other.The other problem is that IF "information" can be lost, changed and added, then there is no usefulness to the term.Thus it is meaningless until there is a metric to measure the amount of "information" in an organism, and talking about it is just wasted time and bandwidth. Then go and develop the science until you have a metric that can be used to measure the amount in an organism, study the levels and SEE if this is a useful term before pre-concluding a result and basing an argument on it. Snakes get added vertebrae by copy mutations. Scientists can put a gene for 'leg' at the place for the gene for 'feeler' and the fly will grow a leg instead of a feeler.Point refuted. So is the mutation that turns the switch "on" added "information" or the one that turns the switch "off" added "information"?Or is there a switch that turns the switch that turns the wings on and off? And is the mutation that turns the switch "on" that then turns the switch "on" added "information" or the one that turns the switch "off" that then turns the switch "off" added "information"?Or is there a switch that turns the switch switch that turns the switch that turns the wings on and off?If something is lost in one process then how is it regained when the process is reversed without SOMETHING being added?Without knowing precisely what you are talking about you really cannot say. You just don't have enough information on the information about information.Enjoy.

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