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

We infer it from the observation of the same kind of change occuring today

I don't see how you get from that to elephants without having some sort of "evolution". Do you see what I am getting at?

Did a population of tapirs suddenly have kids with long trunks?

If so, where is *any* showing of this in the fossil record, or anywhere else for that matter?

Yes but you aren't observing new functions or organs being *developed* by natural selection, are you?

You can observe changes, but not additions at a functional level, right?

When someone wins the lottery, do you grapple with the incredibly small chance that they would have won? Why or why not? It seems to me like you accept improbable events all the time.

What's the fundamental difference between humans and single-celled organisms? Aren't they both based on genetics?

It doesn't explain how homosapiens have pieces of genetic information in us that operate organs and functions that *don't work without each other*. The same goes for any number of living things in the world. There are things that either aren't worth keeping by evolving slowly, or things that couldn't evolve without something else at the same time.

Organs don't just spring into being. They don't have to - organs develop evolutionarily over time; the function of tissues is not constant.

*SNIP* Keystone Arch *SNIP*

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.

creationistal writes:I'm still undecided on how much of the current ToE I can accept given mathematics and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. There is a certain quality to life that is undeniable, that it does indeed flourish where it shouldn't, or we think couldn't, etc.

As you said, "So it is with life. We are not picking a fixed target and attempting to approach it with mutations. There are many possible goals and many paths to each one." The problem is that every path is long no matter which path is taken. In fact, when it comes to certain complex functions in living things, the average distance of a path to any one of a number of possible goals is so large that even with a huge population taking many different paths, the time required to reach any of the potentially beneficial targets is still huge. For example, take those functions that require at least 100 amino acids to perform them. How many of these functions would be beneficial to a given organism in a particular environment? Maybe a billion? or a trillion? Maybe a trillion trillion? Maybe, but most likely not anywhere near the 1 x 10e130 different potential 2D sequences that could be had. By far the vast majority of these 1 x 10e130 proteins would be of no beneficial use to any particular organism. If even a trillion trillion functions could be of some beneficial use, this is still a tiny fraction of the total leaving only slightly less than 1 x 10e130 different proteins that would not be beneficially functional.This means that each one of the trillion trillion functions would be surrounded by 1 x 10e106 proteins that would not be beneficially functional. In moving from one function to any one of the other trillion trillion functional sequences out there, one would have to cross a vast sea of nonfunction... no matter which direction one started out in. These functions are like tiny islands in a vast sea. No matter how many beneficial functional islands there might be out there somewhere in this ocean, the waters of nonfunction that separate them are vast indeed. The boat of neutral evolution just drifts around on this sea randomly until it comes across some new function that can be recognized as beneficial by natural selection. However, until this new function is realized, natural selection is blind to all neutral/nonfunctional genetic changes that occur in the meantime.This leaves random chance as the loan power for change. And, random chance alone simply takes too long to cross this sea to any one of the billions, trillions or even zillions of possible functions that may be out there.

For example, take those functions that require at least 100 amino acids to perform them.

They were specifically talking about the lactase function in E. coli, and how even under supreme ideal circumstances development of a specific function would not arise even after thousands upon thousands of generations.

It is not a difficult thing to evolve a particular function if that function is only one point mutation (one step) away from realization. The odds that one particular point mutation will happen rapidly in an average sized bacterial colony are extremely good. Such evolution is really not a problem. The problem comes when a particular function cannot be achieved with just one point mutation. Hall's experiment is quite interesting as far as demonstrating that some beneficial functions are only one mutation away from what is already present in certain gene pools, but it does not explain how functions that are, on average, multiple neutral mutations away from any new and beneficial type of function can be realized in a reasonable amount of time.