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Author | Topic: Can mutation and selection increase information? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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bluegenes writes: It seems to be a common creationist claim that evolutionary processes either cannot produce new "functional information," or that if they can, they cannot produce enough to account for the life forms we see in the world today. Yet I've never known any creationist show that either is actually the case. Additionally, I have yet to see a creationist demonstrate that evolution needs to produce "new genetic information" in order to produce all the species we see today from a universal common ancestor. In my experience, they define "new genetic information" so that the mechanisms of evolution can not produce it, but in the process their definition no longer has any bearing on actual biology. To use an analogy, they insist that a baseball has to travel 1,000' in order to be a home run. All the while, no baseball player has ever hit a baseball 1,000', yet they have hundreds of home runs to their credit. Their definitions have no bearing on reality, and can therefore be ignored.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: No mutations needed, no extra alleles needed, just the combining of the two-form genes through sexual recombination. (I'm only thinking of sexually reproducing creatures). That just doesn't work. You can't get all of the species living today and all the species that have existed from a universal common ancestor using just two alleles per gene.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes:
Would you please explain to me how genes duplicate? Since they occupy a position along the DNA strand, and they are thousands of codons long, and the replication process follows the strand codon by codon how does a copy of a gene get separately inserted into the strand?
One of the mechanisms of gene duplication (if memory serves) is homologous recombination. This whole process is caused by the chemical characteristics of DNA. DNA bases on separate strands of DNA can stick to one another through a process called hydrogen bonding. However, not all bases will stick to all other bases. Instead, the hydrogen atoms have to be lined up for the bonding to occur. Therefore, only A will stick to T, and only G will stick to C (and vice versa). These are called complementary bases:
Any time you have enough complementary bases you can get two strands of DNA to stick to one another, like the meshing of a zipper. Most of the time this results in perfectly aligned strands of DNA where the same pieces of DNA are always across from one another. However, during meiosis there is a stage where pieces of each pair of chromosomes is switched back and forth between each other, and during this process you can get more distant pieces of DNA to stick together. This can cause a gene to be duplicated elsewhere in the chromosome. You can read more here: Gene duplication - Wikipedia
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: My first answer is what I think was the plan at the Creation, but the question usually comes up in discussions of what evolution actually does -- that is, the process of evolving loses information, that's how you get new phenotypes. I prefer to describe it as losing alleles which I think is clearer than "information." And the example I use because it's so clear is domestic selection or breeding: to get a purebred animal requires losing all the genetic material, alleles, for other breeds. You select them out of the breeding pool, so you get the purebred on the basis of homozygosity at the loci that are the main traits of your breed, and that means eliminating all the other alleles. Let's start with a common ancestor for humans and chimps. Those branches separate and then each branch accumulates mutations that change both species into what we see today. Are you saying that you would classify all of those mutations that led from an ape-like human ancestor to modern humans as losses in genetic information?
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: How do they duplicate? Does the strand break apart to admit a whole new segment or what? That can be another way that gene duplication occurs. The sugar-phosphate backbone of DNA can break and then be reattached to another piece of DNA floating around. Homologous recombination can also occur, as detailed above. The proteins that copy DNA can also fall off of the DNA and strand and start again elsewhere, causing a duplication of DNA (replication slippage). Needless to say, gene duplication does happen and biologists understand the mechanisms by which it happens.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: I would figure it had managed to replicate an existing allele probably at another gene, not anything actually new, but so far I'm not convinced that anything new at all, even in that sense, is ever created by a mutation. If we started with the chimp genome and changed that genome at 40 million places to end up with the human genome, would you consider that a new genome with new information?
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: If that paper is above Percy's pay grade as he put it, it's certainly above mine. I read what I was able to read, and nothing you said gave evidence that new alleles actually exist. By your own admission, you wouldn't be able to spot the evidence if it does exist, so you can't claim that the evidence doesn't exist.
You seem to think that paper actually shows that new alleles give immunity to different parasites, but it doesn't. You can't claim ignorance of what a paper says, then turn around and make claims about what the paper says.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: I understood what I understood, and interestingly you don't say one thing that shows I'm wrong about that. The paper already demonstrates you are wrong.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Faith writes: Quote it if it demonstrates I'm wrong. You have already refused to read or understand the paper, so what would be the purpose of that?
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Vlad writes: All in all, spontaneous evolution takes place, in the model, and the new form bite evidently contains 33.3% more meaning heritable information than the primordial noun bit. What about "bit" to "bat"? Is that an increase in information?
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Vlad writes: Say, mutant form bat is quite viable yet the quantity of information it carries remains the same as in the primordial noun bit. Then your definition of an increase in information is irrelevant to how biology actually works. Substitution mutations, those that change one base to another DNA base, do change phenotype and are responsible for the difference in phenotype seen between species. You have effectively argued yourself out of the conversation by using a definition for information that has no biological relevance.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
caffeine writes: I would agree that the analogy is not really relevant, but not because an SNP mutation does increase information. Does it? Does it matter if a creationist will not accept an SNP as an increase in information? We once again run into the creationist game of focusing on definitions instead of reality. It really doesn't matter if a mutation meets their criteria for an increase in information. All that matters is if the mutations can produce the biodiversity we see today.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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CRR writes: The problem you evolutionists have is that you all have different definitions of what evolution and the ToE are. You all believe different things. Every time you use this argument it is a transparent attempt to avoid the evidence or a question you don't like.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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CRR writes: Who says? Science is not a religion, so quotes from scientists carry no weight. There is no scripture in science. You need to present evidence, not quotes.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1
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Vlad writes: Would spontaneous evolution be able to originate such form as, for instance, counterrevolutionary? Or any other 20-character English noun? Here is the amino acid sequence for human cytochrome c, an active and functional enzyme: MGDVEKGKKIFIMKCSQCHTVEKGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAPGYSYTAANKNKGIIWGEDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMIFVGIKKKEERADLIAYLKKATNE Do you see any 20-character English nouns? Edited by Taq, : No reason given.
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