The Dawkins question, new "information" in the genome?

Do you mean that the things which look most like modern species look like modern species, well fancy that.I take it that the things which look slightly like modern species but more like other fossils are just freakish coincidences.Could you maybe tell us what you would expect a transitional fossil to look like?TTFN,WK

*SNIP* Keystone Arch *SNIP*

Dear Creationistal,For someone who doesn't understand you seem awfully sure that you know evolution is contradicted by mathematics and the 2nd law of thermodynamics and that there are no transistional fossils.All you are doing is reiterating one of the oldest creationist arguments in the book, the argument from design. As you may know the argument from design has had a lovely new makeover in recent years and is now the cornerstone of the Intelligent Design movement tied up in the idea of irreducible complexity.The main point of the argument from design being that it would be impossible for all of the components of a particular system, a watch or eye in Paley's original argument and a bacterial flagellum for Michael Behe, to evolve in isolation as all the components are required for the whole to be functional.This argument has been rebutted many times over the centuries and the most frequent analogy used to demonstrate the major flaw of 'irreducible complexity' is that of a keystone arch where the structure must first be built using a scaffold but from which the scaffold can later be removed leaving the structure standing.Since all that is happening is that you are bringing up an argument that has been covered dozens of times in many threads on this forum I thought I would miss out all the tedious explaining and just give the keypoint of the argument, think of it as a sort of shorthand. Just put keystone arch into the forum search feature and you would have found many better explanations than mine.TTFN,WK

He explains it very badly indeed. It is an argument from incredulity based on numbers he has reached through his own assumptions and criteria.Does he mean that all 100 amino acids have to be exactly right for functioning? Or that they all have to come about at one time? If so all he is doing is constructing a huge strawman. In many cases a number of amino acids can substitute for each other and leave a protein functional.When one sees calculations like these being bandied around the first thing to do is be very sure of what the assumptions are that it is based on. Such calculations are only as good as their assumptions. This one seems to assume nothing but randomnessThrowing huge numbers around doesn't mean anything unless you are explicit about where those numbers come from.TTFN,WK

Lactase seems a strange choice as I seem to recall a number of studies showing that E. coli with Lac-Z deletions under selective pressure with lactose evolved a number of different novel lactases, often under the same sort of regulation as Lac-Z, but not always.TTFN,WK

Who says it has to? That is why it is a strawman. All of the steps are often proposed to be 'close by' functionality wise or close by in the sequence space of the protein.TTFN,WK

So you want the fossil record of a soft tissue's evolution and evidence of a completely de novo origin for a novel gene?What you seem to be missing is any understanding of evolutionary theory, except through the lens of the strawman caricatures propagated by anti-evolutionary speakers.TTFN,WK