Evolving New Information

Sort of. Being heterozygous for the sickle cell gene grants the malaria resistance, but being homozygous confers the actual anemia. So, I would consider anemia to be an error and being heterozygous to be the advantageous set that keeps the possibility of anemia in the population. But, since I'm not an expert, I could be speaking out my ass.

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I'm not saying that a designer inserted/subsituted/deleted the mutations in many cases

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That wasn't my point. My point is that looking for a specific change is thinking about it in the wrong way.

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I agree. If you could prove that it can only be done (not, can it be done?) with Darwinian processes and not (NGE) natural genetic engineering, then it would shut me up.

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Unless you specify how your "natural genetic engineering" works that isn't a question I could answer. And it's probably the wrong question anyway.

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I don't remember that being the case. It is a matter of perspective I guess.

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I checked the message, and it looks to be right.

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Once again, that is a matter of perspective and you're entitled to it.

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So you are saying that the leaders of the ID movement are wrong about what ID is ? That's a pretty odd perspective. They seem happy to include YEC (especially the YECs among them).

Yes, the fact that they are rare is because the odds of the right mutation at the right spot (or in actuality, any non-positive mutation occuring anywhere in a coding part of a gene) are relatively small...until we factor in the sheer number of births taking place. So, the instances of beneficial mutations occuring are rare ( we all assert this) but again, when you take the sheer number of births happening, the odds of a beneficial mutation occuring is close to 1.The number of pregnancies that don't go to term is, of course, an estimate, but the estimates are quite high, on the order of half to perhaps even 90%, so in that case, deleterious mutations occur very often, but the mother either rejects the fetus, or the fetus just doesn't/can't survive, resulting in a miscarriage. So, there is a mechanism for weeding out the vast majority of harmful mutations, while letting neutral and good mutations through with a few harmful ones that are just good enough to make it. Those reasons and more. I don't see what this has to do with your point, unless you're agreeing with me that mutations occur all the time for many, many reasons. But there is no specific effect being "looked for." You could shuffle and deal cards all day looking for the right set of circumstances that will lead you to a royal flush, but if you stop worrying about a specific outcome and merely look for the hand that will beat the other hands at the table, you find them quite regularly. And in fact, the odds of you getting that exact full house of 8s over 2s is just as unlikely as the royal flush. Yes, the exact mutation to help organism A overcome hurdle B that we see in nature is exceedingly low on the probability table, but one of the organisms in the population finding some way to overcome hurdle B and thus being able to survive better is very high on the probability table, even if each and every specific "answer" is low. That's what we're (especially PaulK) is trying to get across. You're looking at the probability of a specific mutation (or a specific card hand) and people who know about evolution, if they even consider this question at all, know to look at the probability of any old mutation that would help. Yes, and they do. The vast majority of which are so harmful that the fetus spontaneously aborts before completing gestation. That's because ID was hatched by Creationists who wanted to get their brand of religion taught in schools instead of evolution, and is promulgated by creationist institutions and creationist lay people who want to find a "scientific" basis for their religiously derived beliefs. That there are a couple non-creationists out there who also favor ID doesn't stop the fact that the vast majority are creationists who want to hide that fact from school boards and the public.

This is a very important point that I do not think a lot of people actually grasp. We have many IDers come to this forum and they vociferously deny that ID has anything to do with religion or creationism. How can this be if the leading advocates and the creators of ID clearly are very comfortable with the idea that it has religious roots. They are duping the people on the ground with one argument but when pressed in court and in the media they do not deny at all that it is a religious idea.I have yet to hear of a prominent IDer disavow the creationists. Have any? Have any IDers presented actual scientific research? It is kind of hard to objectively study origins of species when you start with a position that the bible guides everything you do and believe.If ID is not creationism in sheep's clothing, why have all the creationists flocked to it?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

This is gross exaggeration, every newborn child has something like 30 de novo mutations distinguishing it from its parents. Were your claim to be true the levels of spontaneous abortion would be orders of magnitude higher than they actually are, even allowing for your highest figures.Most mutations are considered neutral or 'nearly neutral'. Deleterious mutations almost certainly do considerably outweigh beneficial mutations but they are very far from constituting 'the vast majority' of mutations, and this is even less true for embryonic lethal mutations.TTFN,WK

Thanks. I had heard some estimates that up to 90% of pregnancies ended in spontaneous abortions, and I assumed, if that were true, then many of them would have been from mutations that caused the fetus to be unable to survive.But yeah, I understand that even if one mutation is detrimental enough to cause spontaneous abortions, there could have been any number of other mutations that may have been beneficial or neutral that got wiped out because of the one really bad one.I guess I should make sure I'm clearer when I make sweeping generalizations.

The Wikipedia article on spontaneous abortions cites research indicating that the rate is around 30%. Like you I thought I remembered hearing of higher rates, but of around 50%.--Percy

Wiki apparently is only considering those cases where a zygote has implanted, to actually start a pregnancy, as the starting point of their 30% figure. Something like 55% of zygotes miss implanting, so 60% of 45% leaves 27%% of total zygotes reaching development stages capable of live births.Miscarriage - Wikipedia

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Miscarriage or spontaneous abortion is the spontaneous end of a pregnancy at a stage where the embryo or fetus is incapable of surviving, generally defined in humans at prior to 20 weeks of gestation. Miscarriage is the most common complication of early pregnancy.[1]

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A fetus that dies while in the uterus after about the 20—24th week of pregnancy is termed a "stillbirth"; the precise gestational age definition varies by country. Premature births or stillbirths are not generally considered miscarriages, though usage of the terms and causes of these events may overlap.

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Labour resulting in live birth before the 37th week of pregnancy is termed "premature birth", even if the infant dies shortly afterward. The limit of viability at which 50% of fetus/infants survive longterm is around 24 weeks, with moderate or major neurological disability dropping to 50% only by 26 weeks.[5] Although long-term survival has never been reported for infants born from pregnancy shorter than 21 weeks and 5 days,[6] infants born as early as the 16th week of pregnancy may sometimes live for some minutes after birth.[7]

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(NOTE: this thread is NOT about abortions - see Legal Death, Legal Life, Personhood and Abortion Message 45 - this information was provided): Those numbers are missing the spontaneous abortions\misscarriages that occur between week 12 and week 20, so that could easily account for the difference in the numbers.Looks like a 1/3 to 1/4 success rate overall, but not sure it is reasonable to include the implant missing zygotes, as it is hard to say if the reason for missing implantation is a genetic disorder or just bad luck, however, this might be the cause of thinking the numbers were higher.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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Rebel American Zen Deist
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That ol' burden of proof is getting a bit heavy for you, isn't it?Show me that only my dog could have been responsible for the disappearance of all the salami from the fridge while I was out the other day, and that magic fairies couldn't have been involved.And none of your materialist dogma about how there's no evidence that magic fairies exist, or the usual atheistic prating about so-called "Occam's Razor". Daminit, it you're going to introduce parsimony into the debate, then I could hardly believe in magic fairies at all.

I'm not very competent with quoting others - if there's an easier way than by hand using the "peek" button, I don't know what it is....but to answer your smart comment: First, that's a really good point! It gets to the heart of the matter.Now for the answer, and I may be wrong (I am not a geneticist but a layman), but genetics IS a language, and it already exists.Where it came from is another, bigger, grander question that I can't answer (somebody else may though).To further the chinese whispers analogy, if you did get a sentence that devolved so far into gibberish that the next kid just went "huh?" then you could see that as being a failed mutation - one too large to result in a working organism. Don't forget, that something like 3 out of 4 pregnancies terminates before the woman even knows she was pregnant (statstics pulled out of hat - verification anyone?).I'm not saying that after X amount of years, the creature in question would fail to be able to have kids (don't take this analogy TOO far), just that it's not ONE row of kids, it's millions. Billions, perhaps. Billions of billions, as every single mating pair/group of organisms is but one example of that species' link in the chain, of which there are many, many species.failed mutations results in a terminated pregnancy, or even no pregnancy in the first place.A successful mutation (and every one of us is a mutated copy of our parents) results in the next generation.mutations (and changes) add up...and hey presto.Any real scientists here care to point out major fallacies or tell me I'm sort of getting it right?

Ah, I see they DID glue (not staple) moths to trees...but (from what it seems to say) to test whether moth colour and environment colour affects predation levels, yes?It wasn't some sort of darwinist plot to..do..something..actually why are creationists against the idea of the peppered moth and it's varieties?Of course, now I can't prove that the point mutation occured and flourished because of the pollution (flourished yes, and I gather that whether it was dominant or recessive was influenced during this time?) y'all can just claim that godidit and made both colours, amirite? fair enough, and interesting reading! oh well now I have to disagree, to a certain extent - after all, natural selection favouring one mutation over the other due to a change in the breeding locale causing a shift in the allele density in a population...and that's not evolution?oceans made of drops, yada yada, journey begins with one footstep, etc, etc.

So far as I can tell the protographs that creationists object to were simply taken for illustrative purposes. It's simply the easiest way to get a good comparison.If there was a practical way to get an equally good illustration (with the technology of the time) without setting it up in some way, I'd like to know what it is.

ID is creationism. The infamous court case that revealed this had two books (was it the panda's thumb and...something else?) which were identical except for language covering god and the bible being replaced by a nameless, faceless creator.No alternative for god as the creator has ever been given. there is no science behind ID, and the judge rightly threw the book at them.What the Dover Case Says

He didn't say it wasn't evolution he said it wasn't an example of mutation. Of course you, me and RAZD all think that the origin of the melanic moth was a genetic mutation at some point in the species history, but so far science has not found the specific genetic basis for melanism in this instance, nor witnessed it arising de novo. So we are not in a position to definitively state that the allelic variants arose through genetic mutation, though I doubt any reasonable person would question the assumption. But if IDist/creationists were reasonable people we wouldn't keep having these same debates over and over again.TTFN,WK

I'd tend to disagree with this. I can certainly accept that DNA can be considered a code, but I am not sure it is helpful to think of it as a language, it is certainly very far removed from being like a human language. It may fulfill several abstract properties for the philosophical conception of languages though. As RAZD noted above, it is a pretty big assumption that the reason for all spontaneous abortions is an embryonic lethal mutation. This drastically reinterprets the categorisation of mutations into embryonic lethals and then everything else. This sort of 'truncation selection' is perhaps the most extreme form of selection as the allelic variant never enters the breeding pool. There are vast numbers of mutations, I'd go as far as to say the majority of deleterious mutations but I'm not 100% sure, which impair an organisms fitness but do not result in its death before it has a chance to reproduce. Again, no. All these mutations need to be is 'not lethal'. To consider any non-lethal mutation a success, is highly idiosyncratic.TTFN,WK