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

So show me where this has been done. You, in fact, don't know enough about this to be able to make such a statement.You'll have to supply the same kind of excruciating detail that regular papers are required to supply. Including all the possible counter arguments to what you are suggesting.

Well, not really. What is required, in some cases, in GADS of attempts. How many organisms are alive at any one time on the planet? If we stick to multicellular it probably (I didn't count 'em) amounts to trillions. If we include microbes the number is BIG. Each of those reproduces and each time there is another roll of the dice. Now to get enough attempts to produce results it may still require rather a lot of time but when generations are hours, days, weeks and maybe a year long a million years is a long time.As for the cambrian, there are a lot of different body plans that appear in the fossil record over are geologicaly short time. However that short time represents (at a guess) a few 100 million generations (we don't know the life span of those critters) each with GADS of creatures in them.In addition, there were things liveing and evolving before the Cambrian explosion. The very skimpy fossil record doesn't help trace the lineages back much though.Now look at the creatures that are preserved in the Burgess shale. While experts have managed to tease out the details and the differences they are not exactly a collection of gorillas, gyre falcons, groupers and the like are they? The diferentiation has just started.You are reading too much into the popular picture of the Cambrian without knowing enough about the details.Before you make decisions on your personal incredulity and lack of knowledge maybe you should look more closely at the information that is available. If you take a 5 or 10 million year time period where there is more of a fossil record you see very significant changes. The fact is that pretty big changes can happen in a short time.

Based on what, though? Your own incredulity? Your refusal to believe that NS + RM has that kind of power, even though it's been demonstrated over and over again?There isn't really that much morphological innovation, anyway. The vast, vast majority of it is slight changes to stuff that was already there. It happens because small genetic change, to small numbers of gene locii, can cause great morphological change.

The first evolutionists were creationists. If evolution is just the result of biased research, how did it get started in the first place? If ideological bias could affect research to that degree, there would never have been any evolution.

I have read often someone asking a creationist, "What is new information?" The general reply to this is a question relating to how a particular complex system evolved which in and of itself is a non answer. I started to wonder to myself what the answer to the question is if I had been asked and I think I have a good one as it relates to evolution based on something I remember being told once that made sense.
It is easy to see how something like a leg might come out of evolution because it is a simple. A fin and a leg have a lot of similarities. THe problem is that most of the time creationsts ask about something that might not be so obvious or something that dosen't fossilize like eyes. Therefore they make it seem like eyes came from nothing and therefore are "new" as opposed to the good example of legs which aren't new but an adaptation of something else which we can actually see in the fossil record. The best answer I can think of to the "where does the new stuff come from?" is that there is no new information the way they are vaguly defining it.
Eyes are not a new feature and the genes needed to create an eye are not innovative. They are just a adaptation of a previous eye-like organ which had many of the same properties of an eye which itself is derived from a less eye-like organ all the way back to something that probably wasn't even an eye at all each of which still performed a usefull function.
If this is a good but fuzzy description of what creationists MEAN by new information then it seems like there really isn't any new information ever.
I see this kind of evolution every day in my work which is computer programming. No one ever really does anything new when it comes to writing a program but yet there are a quite diverse number of programs out there. They are all based on the same algorithms and the same basic principles just subjucated for a different purpose that makes them usefull.
Hope this is helpfull and makes sense.

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-Nasser

My definition of "new information" (as an evo) is a new protein. This includes a modified protein or a novel protein. Of course, random mutations can result in new proteins and therefore new information. When proteins change both function and morphology change. Good changes are kept due to natural selection and so information increases. I don't see any other way of defining information in the genome without separating the form of DNA from the function of proteins.

Right! I was just trying to make the point that the only thing "new" can come from a "change" in something else. I think creationists have the misconception that "new" information should spring up out of thin air completely unrelated to anything else. I totally agree that when something "changes" it IS a "new" thing.It should also be noted that duplication is covered by "change" so in a very real sense, duplication is adding information which blows the whole "if you double the pages of a book it isn't adding information" argument right out of the water.

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-Nasser