New Information

[UTEOTW]

There was a thread in the News and Current Events section that veered off topic onto information. ( http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/1/2360.html ) I thought it might be a good idea to take up the information part here in keeping with the spirit of the news forum. This just seems like a better place.

A little history.

On page two Gup 20 posted:

You, UTEOTW, haven't even been able to give me a single example of matter giving rise to information.

I responded with a list** of examples of new information I had given on another recent thread.

Gup20 responded

So you resort to posting an ornate ammount of data that you are well aware I haven't got time to look up just because you can't offer a single shred of Biblical support for evolution?

I don't personally have time to figure out why in each and every instance... but I can tell you without a doubt that molecules to man evolution did not happen.

and

[in response to asking how many of the examples he had read] I don't know... 4 or 5. However, in every single case, I could "make a logical case that they were not examples of new information". I simply didn't have time to look up them all.

I tell you what - give me the BEST one... the one that you think has the greatest chance of being an example of increased information, and I will research and refute it.

To which I responded

If you are not aware of the details of the inordinate amount of data that supports evolution and the other old earth sciences then you have no reason to assert that they cannot be true.
...
But how can you know that these are not examples if you do not investigate every claim?
...
Then why did you not make the case for those four or five? If you look here

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/28/2807/8.html#000112

which is where I started posting this list of citations, you will see that none of them are addressed directly. If you found fault with the first four or five, why did you not bother to post your objections.

Which led to the challenge that will start as the subject of this thread. Gup20 offered that if I would purge my current list of over a dozen to one, he would research it and refute it. I offered to meet him about 3/4ths of the way there and trim it to 3. That will be the next post.

There are other reasons to have such a dedicated thread on information. For example Helen recently made the statement that "I do know that not all mutations are apparently harmful. I am willing to go out on this limb, however, -- all changes involve a loss of function in one way or another." ( http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/66/15.html#000012 ) The items here have a direct bearing on such statements.

 

[UTEOTW]

The challenge...

I'll make it easier on you. Since you said that you looked at the first several already and found them refutable, then let's do the first three since they are three separate mechanisms. OK?

First.

"Selective sweep of a newly evolved sperm-specific gene in Drosophila," Nurminsky DI, Nurminskaya MV, De Aguiar D, Hartl DL, Nature. 1998 Dec 10;396(6711):572-5.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9859991&dopt=Abstract

You have two genes that are beside each other. They get duplicated. In one of the copies, some of the sequence between the two genes gets deleted. This allows the genes to combine into one chimeric gene. You have the two original genes intact and you have a new gene.

Second.

"Adaptive evolution after gene duplication," Hughes AL, Trends Genetics, 2002 Sep.18(9):433-4.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12175796&dopt=Abstract

In this case a gene, RNASE1, was duplicated such that we had a new gene, RNASE1B. These genes occur in the colobine monkey, douc langur and make pancreatic ribonuclease. Through a change in diet, the conditions within the digestive tract of the monkey were altered. Through delective pressure, the B copy of the gene mutated until it was adapted to digest single stranded bacterial RNA.

Again, we have new information. The original gene still exists to perform its original function. The gene was duplicated. When the copy mutated, then there was information that was not there previously, namely the new DNA sequence. The second copy eventually mutated until it performed a new digestive process.

Third.

"Syncytin is a captive retroviral envelope protein involved in human placental morphogenesis," Mi S, Lee X, Li X, Veldman GM, Finnerty H, Racie L, LaVallie E, Tang XY, Edouard P, Howes S, Keith JC Jr, McCoy JM, Nature 2000 Feb 17;403(6771):785-9.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=20155476&dopt=Abstract

In this case, a retrovirus inserted a section of DNA into the genome. In this case, humans have co-opted the gene to serve an important role in the area of human placental morphogenesis. The purpose of the original gene was as the envelope gene of the virus. So humans gained a gene and a function which they previously did not have. The information of the human genome was thus increased.

-------

A few more clarifications were added in later posts.

As you attempt your information challenge, please be aware, if it is not obvious, that in all three cases the original DNA of the organism remains unchanged while a new sequence with a new function has been added. You should also give a specific, concise definiton of information on which you will base your refutation. I would like it if you gave a specific example of a hypothetical change in the DNA of an organism that you would consider to be new information.

and

I am still looking for this offer. You made it. I narrowed the list for you. (Though, if you are going to make the claim you should be able to dispute them all.) Remember, we will first need a well defined, concise, accepted definition of information, why this definition is the proper definition for discussion, and how these three examples fail to meet the claim.

If possible, I would also like to hear a scenario that you would consider to be new information.

There were also a few other topics that were hinted at such as Snowball Earth and the presence of the same retroviral inserts in humans and the other apes and primates.

 

[UTEOTW]

**The list of items posted recently.

"Selective sweep of a newly evolved sperm-specific gene in Drosophila," Nurminsky DI, Nurminskaya MV, De Aguiar D, Hartl DL, Nature. 1998 Dec 10;396(6711):572-5.

"Adaptive evolution after gene duplication," Hughes AL, Trends Genetics, 2002 Sep.18(9):433-4.

"Accelerated protein evolution and origins of human-specific features: Foxp2 as an example," Zhang J, Webb DM, Podlaha O, Genetics. 2002 Dec;162(4):1825-35.

"Syncytin is a captive retroviral envelope protein involved in human placental morphogenesis," Mi S, Lee X, Li X, Veldman GM, Finnerty H, Racie L, LaVallie E, Tang XY, Edouard P, Howes S, Keith JC Jr, McCoy JM, Nature 2000 Feb 17;403(6771):785-9.

"Origin of antifreeze protein genes: A cool tale in molecular evolution," John M. Logsdon Jr. and W. Ford Doolittle, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA,Vol. 94, pp. 3485-3487, April 1997.

DeVries, A. L. & Wohlschlag, D. E. (1969) Science 163, 1073-1075.

"A carrot leucine-rich-repeat protein that inhibits ice recrystallization," Worrall D, Elias L, Ashford D, Smallwood M, Sidebottom C, Lillford P, Telford J, Holt C, Bowles D, Science. 1998 Oct 2;282(5386):115-7.

"Recruitment of a double bond isomerase to serve as a reductive dehalogenase during biodegradation of pentachlorophenol," Anandarajah K, Kiefer PM Jr, Donohoe BS, Copley SD, Biochemistry 2000 May 9;39(18):5303-11.

"The Tre2 (USP6) oncogene is a hominoid-specific gene," Paulding CA, Ruvolo M, Haber DA, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science U S A 2003 Mar 4;100(5):2507-11.

"The human genome contains many types of chimeric retrogenes generated through in vivo RNA recombination," Anton Buzdin*, Elena Gogvadze, Elena Kovalskaya, Pavel Volchkov, Svetlana Ustyugova, Anna Illarionova, Alexey Fushan, Tatiana Vinogradova and Eugene Sverdlov, Nucleic Acids Research, 2003, Vol. 31, No. 15 4385-4390.

"The narrow sheath Duplicate Genes: Sectors of Dual Aneuploidy Reveal Ancestrally Conserved Gene Functions During Maize Leaf Development," Michael J. Scanlona, K. David Chenb, and Calvin C. McKnight, IV, Genetics, Vol. 155, 1379-1389, July 2000.

"The maize duplicate genes narrow sheath1 and narrow sheath2 encode a conserved homeobox gene function in a lateral domain of shoot apical meristems," Judith Nardmann1, Jiabing Ji, Wolfgang Werr, and Michael J. Scanlon, Development 131, 2827-2839 (2004).

 

[UTEOTW]

The challenge is not met, but I thought I would add another, general method of creating new information. There are genes called long interspersed elements, or LINEs, that can have sections easily copied into other sections of DNA forming new sequences. They also have the ability to take sections of other DNA and insert them into new regions creating new genetic sequences.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=10742098&dopt=Citation

"Human LINE retrotransposons generate processed pseudogenes," Esnault C, Maestre J, Heidmann T, Nature Genetics 2000 Apr;24(4):363-7.

Long interspersed elements (LINEs) are endogenous mobile genetic elements that have dispersed and accumulated in the genomes of higher eukaryotes via germline transposition, with up to 100,000 copies in mammalian genomes. In humans, LINEs are the major source of insertional mutagenesis, being involved in both germinal and somatic mutant phenotypes. Here we show that the human LINE retrotransposons, which transpose through the reverse transcription of their own transcript, can also mobilize transcribed DNA not associated with a LINE sequence by a process involving the diversion of the LINE enzymatic machinery by the corresponding mRNA transcripts. This results in the 'retroposition' of the transcribed gene and the formation of new copies that disclose features characteristic of the widespread and naturally occurring processed pseudogenes: loss of intron and promoter, acquisition of a poly(A) 3' end and presence of target-site duplications of varying length. We further show-by introducing deletions within either coding sequence of the human LINE-that both ORFs are necessary for the formation of the processed pseudogenes, and that retroviral-like elements are not able to produce similar structures in the same assay. Our results strengthen the unique versatility of LINEs as genome modellers.

 

[jcrawford]

"New Information" implies that something new has been created. In order for something "new" to be created, it has first to be intelligently caused by intent and design.

 

[UTEOTW]

Here is another general study revolving aroung gene duplications and the different ways that they can eventually lead to new, functional genes.

“The Structure and Early Evolution of Recently Arisen Gene Duplicates in the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome “, Vaishali Katju and Michael Lynch, Genetics, Vol. 165, 1793-1803, December 2003

The significance of gene duplication in provisioning raw materials for the evolution of genomic diversity is widely recognized, but the early evolutionary dynamics of duplicate genes remain obscure. To elucidate the structural characteristics of newly arisen gene duplicates at infancy and their subsequent evolutionary properties, we analyzed gene pairs with 10% divergence at synonymous sites within the genome of Caenorhabditis elegans. Structural heterogeneity between duplicate copies is present very early in their evolutionary history and is maintained over longer evolutionary timescales, suggesting that duplications across gene boundaries in conjunction with shuffling events have at least as much potential to contribute to long-term evolution as do fully redundant (complete) duplicates. The median duplication span of 1.4 kb falls short of the average gene length in C. elegans (2.5 kb), suggesting that partial gene duplications are frequent. Most gene duplicates reside close to the parent copy at inception, often as tandem inverted loci, and appear to disperse in the genome as they age, as a result of reduced survivorship of duplicates located in proximity to the ancestral copy. We propose that illegitimate recombination events leading to inverted duplications play a disproportionately large role in gene duplication within this genome in comparison with other mechanisms.

 

[jcrawford]

Originally posted by UTEOTW:
Here is another general study revolving aroung gene duplications and the different ways that they can eventually lead to new, functional genes.

“The Structure and Early Evolution of Recently Arisen Gene Duplicates in the Caenorhabditis elegans Genome “, Vaishali Katju and Michael Lynch, Genetics, Vol. 165, 1793-1803, December 2003

Evolutionary Rubbish!

 

[Gup20]

Hey UTEOTW - choose the best of these three and I will fulfill your challenge.

While I am refuting that - perhaps you could give us a non-literal verse-by-verse exegesis of Genesis 1 - 3, or show us where evolution is supported by Genesis. Indeed, Genesis is an origins story - show us how it lines up with evolution and evolution's predictions.

 

[UTEOTW]

I had at least a dozen. I have reduced it to three. That is meeting you 3/4ths of the way there. To be fair, you should have to refute each and every one of the original list. You said you had already researched the first several and knew how to refute them. I think I am being more than fair by reducing it to three. Each of the three gives a very different method. This would at least let you critique three different methods. If you cannot do this then just pick one of the three. The challenge will NOT be met but maybe I can still get out of you a concise and specific definition of information that could be used to judge the other cases without you, a hypothetical and reasonable case of what you think would qualify as new information and a specific and factual reason why the chosen case is not new information. That would be a start.

I think others have previously given you your non-literal verse-by-verse reading of Genesis. My position has long been that you cannot get the details of the creation from Genesis so you should not expect me to pull out a verse that says "I'm God and I used evolution to create the life froms you see." Genesis is meant to establish God as the Creator among other issues it deals with and is not meant to give a blow by blow account. At that, Genesis does say that God commanded the earth and the waters to bring forth life. That is at least a hint towards evolution in my book. I am not disagreeing with Genesis. I think it is silent on the methods of creation. I am disagreeing with your interpretation. I think your request is the equivilent of asking me to give you the verse in the Bible that supports general relativity or the kinetic theory og gasses. It is silent on those issues just as it is silent on evolution and the details of the geologic history of the earth or on the details of the astronomical history of the universe.

 

[jcrawford]

Creation by evolutionary ways and means is still creation, it seems.

 

[Gup20]

First -

In this case you have a gene, and a mutated copy of a gene and are connected. The 'new gene' is not new information as it does not give any specified complexity. It is simply a normal gene connected to a screwed up gene. For example, if I had two copies of a book, and I tore pages out of one book and then glued the two books together - How much more information would I gain from reading this 'new book'?

From http://wrpx00.bioch.virginia.edu/cellmig_mol/get_cellmig_one.cgi?acc=dynein :

Mutations in these genes result in abnormal ciliary ultrastructure and function associated with primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) and Kartagener syndrome.

Two items to note: first off, mutations in this gene cause a real loss of information; second, when the mutated (loss of information) gene attaches to an unmutated gene there is a greater quantity of information, but it is more of the same information. The gain in quantity is limited to the gene being duplicated - minus whatever was lost in the mutation. For example... If I make 15 copies of one page ... then I begin blotting words out on that page... I am going to have more quantity of the same information... and as the mutations get more severe (as I blot more out on the page), more of the information in the page is lost. I can then combine as many of these pages into a book as I want, but the FIRST page is going to contain the most information, and all the subsequent pages will contain 1) no new information, and 2)less information that the first page.

In the same way genetically, we can combine mutated forms of genes... or proteins we have never seen before ... but these are simply mutated forms of the originals - they are originals that have lost information. Their content is limited to what was available to work with at the start. You can continue combining "page after page" of the same, or of altered/mutated genes, but they all specify the same thing, or try to specify the same thing (depending on the severity of the mutation, some will specifiy that thing better than others). You still have failed to create any new information.

Some ‘variation within a kind’ can occur by this mechanism. In chrysanthemums, for example, the regular number of chromosomes is 18, but 27, 36, 54, 72, 90 and 198 also occur, together with odd combinations like 19, 26 and 37. However, a chrysanthemum with 198 chromosomes is still a chrysanthemum. From AiG

But surprisingly, the all-time champion of genetic multiplication is a super-giant bacterium. Epulopiscium fishelsoni is the world’s largest bacterium. It is half a millimetre long and weighs in at a million times the mass of a typical bacterium. In fact no-one believed it was a bacterium until genetic tests proved it. And it has a whopping 25 times as much DNA as a human cell. The number of multiple copies of one of its genes has been counted and found to be no less than 85,000.

Humans have about 46 chromosomes. So we can see that quantity does NOT infer new information. In the bacterium (with 25 times the ammount of DNA as a human cell) after all those multiplications, it is STILL A BACTERIA. Why? Because the information available to be added to the bacteria through gene duplication and mutation is limited to the ammount of information that was there to start with. For example, the fruit fly will never gain the information for a wasp's stinger - why? Because it was originally created without that information, and it can never gain that information (unless a fruit fly were to successfully mate with a wasp). Now a fruit fly could certainly gain or loose fruit fly parts but this is STILL not an increase of information. For example, if a fruit fly leg grew where a fruit fly wing should be this is STILL not new information. It is the same thing as a bunch of those blotted pages we copied and used to make our new book are - a malformed version of the original page. If anything this demonstrates man-to-moluecules de-evolution, not molecules-to-man evolution.


Second -

This one was far easier and required far less research and dictionary time as the first. I needed only to read the abstract you posted for my refutation:

This example is a good illustration of how specialization of protein function after gene duplication can be as source of novel protein functions.

This is exactly what creationists have been claiming and predicting - that things are going from fully informative, less specific to less informative and more specific. Here you have a specific line in our "book of copied pages" that is fucntional and useful being singled out for mass production. Again, there is no new information, but only what was available at the original creation. Existing genes being duplicated or re-arraged fits just fine with the YEC model, and within the Bible's definitions of Kinds. There is nothing in scripture to say that a dog can't mutate into some other form of dog - it simply says that dogs don't turn into birds, and that dogs and birds didn't have common ancestors.

1Cr 15:39 All flesh [is] not the same flesh: but [there is] one [kind of] flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, [and] another of birds.


Third -

Here you have one retrovirus which supposedly helps fend off another retrovirus.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12664292&dopt=Abstract

Human endogenous retrovirus type W (HERV-W) envelope glycoprotein (Env) has recently been reported to induce fusion in cells expressing the RD-114 and type D retrovirus receptor (RDR) and to serve as a functional retroviral envelope protein.

So this retrovirus has a beneficial action - it blocks the recepters that can get attacked by another virus. This is the same thing as with the supposed resistance to the AIDS virus that I refuted a while back. Basically, it has no increased information because it is actually hindering the receptor cells that the virus attacks. These cells are normally used for the transport of neutral amino acids for the immune system (src). While this retrovirus does INDUCE protection from the virus, it hinders function as those receptor cells have more function than simply recieving viruses. You have LOST the original function and information in order to convey this beneficial novelty. Is it any wonder that more and more people are born with allergies and health problems when immune transport genes are being hindered? It's like cutting off your hand to make sure your figers don't get frost bite in the cold.

 

[Gup20]

Creation by evolutionary ways and means is still creation, it seems.

I might go along with that, however, it is not simply that evolution is an alternative - it is contradicted by much scripture.

For example:

1Cr 15:39 All flesh [is] not the same flesh: but [there is] one [kind of] flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, [and] another of birds.

Here we see that all flesh is not decended from common ancestors - but they are separate.

Rom 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
Hbr 2:14 Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil;

Here we see that #1 - sin didn't enter the world until Adam, and #2 death didn't enter the world until sin. Furthermore, the Bible describes the Devil as 'him that had the power of death'. Therefore, we can see that if there was no death before Adam's sin, and death is evil -- that God having declared his creation Good up to and including the creation of mankind means that there was no death leading up to and including the creation of man. Therefore, if there is no death, there is no natural selection, and therefore no mechanism for evolutionary change.

Moreover, Jesus himself quotes Genesis -

Mat 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made [them] at the beginning made them male and female,

Gen 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Gen 1:27 So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

So God created man "in the beginning". If the creation of man is 'in the beginning' then evolution is wrong. According to the evolutionary time table, the beginning was billions and billions of years ago, and man has only been around for a few thousand years. That would put the creation of man not at the beginning of the world, but near the end/present.

 

[Gup20]

think others have previously given you your non-literal verse-by-verse reading of Genesis. My position has long been that you cannot get the details of the creation from Genesis so you should not expect me to pull out a verse that says "I'm God and I used evolution to create the life froms you see."

Yet Genesis describes in good detail a story of creation - either that story is true and happened or it is false and did not happen. Please demonstrate how not believing what the Bible says in regards to creation means that you think that Genesis is true. Genesis is not written in poetic or allegorical form - it has a historical/record form. It's written to be taken literally.

You have yet to give a satisfactory explaination of how saying that you believe Genesis is true, but that you believe it was written non-literally, and you believe evolution is true is anything but lip service to Genesis followed by dismissal of Genesis and replacement of the story of creation in Genesis with humanistic evolution.

So again, I challenge you - give us IN YOUR OWN WORDS a non-literal exegesis of Genesis 1- 3 that allows for or agrees with the hypothesis of evolution.

Genesis is meant to establish God as the Creator among other issues it deals with and is not meant to give a blow by blow account.

Then why does it give a 'blow by blow account'? What does the 'blow by blow account' literally mean? Even non-literal speach (such as 'sunrise is at 5am) has a literal meaning.

I think your request is the equivilent of asking me to give you the verse in the Bible that supports general relativity or the kinetic theory og gasses. It is silent on those issues just as it is silent on evolution and the details of the geologic history of the earth or on the details of the astronomical history of the universe.

The Bible does have something to say about general relativity. It says a day with the Lord is as a thousand years. It says God is light. Today we know - according to Einstein that as you get right up close to the speed of light, one day is as a thousand years - relatively speaking.

The Bible also has a HUGE ammount to say about geologic changes on the earth - including a world-wide simultaneous geologic catastrophe. You can get billions of years of geologic data in the space of one year with such an event. It is clearly an extremely significant item which is entirely ignored by evolutionary science.

The point is - the Bible is NOT silent on origins. It describes in detail the exact sequence of events. If the Bible were silent on it, I might agree with you - however the Bible is NOT silent, and your dismissal of Genesis is simply your refusal to listen to the Word of God.

[ December 01, 2004, 02:50 PM: Message edited by: Gup20 ]

 

[UTEOTW]

First

I am unclear about your objections here. It hurts that you never give us the definition of information that we will be judging the examples by.

First off, it was not one copy being combined with an existing gene. The annexin and dynenin genes were duplicated together, then the intervening sequences deleted to form a single new gene. So you initially had two genes. Then you had four, but two were duplicates. Then the two were combined to form a new gene with a new function. So where you initially had two, you now have three. None of the specified complexity of the two original genes were lost. And new, complex specified information was generated.

I am not quite sure what the purpose was in going into dynein, chrysanthemums, and Epulopiscium fishelsoni.

"For example, if I had two copies of a book, and I tore pages out of one book and then glued the two books together - How much more information would I gain from reading this 'new book'? "

You continue to use a faulty analogy. Genes are not like the pages in a book. The very thing which you say is not new information ["In the same way genetically, we can combine mutated forms of genes... or proteins we have never seen before ... but these are simply mutated forms of the originals - they are originals that have lost information. Their content is limited to what was available to work with at the start. You can continue combining "page after page" of the same, or of altered/mutated genes, but they all specify the same thing, or try to specify the same thing (depending on the severity of the mutation, some will specifiy that thing better than others). You still have failed to create any new information."] is the very way that genetics works in evolution. New genes are not hypothesized to just appear from out of the clear blue. Things get duplicated. Things get combined. Things get swapped from other organisms. Things get deleted. Things get mutated. But it all happens to what exists. New genes from the sky is not part of evolutionary theory. So you can define such things as not being new information if that makes you happy. But you should realize that in that case, new information is not needed for evolution to proceed.

The first example is judged as having failed to meet the burden of proof to show that no new information was generated.

 

[UTEOTW]

Second

"Here you have a specific line in our "book of copied pages" that is fucntional and useful being singled out for mass production."

Huh? Genes are not pages in a book. Why do you think a gene that gets duplicated and then evolves a novel function is the same as a page in a book getting mass produced?

"This is exactly what creationists have been claiming and predicting - that things are going from fully informative, less specific to less informative and more specific."

Nope. You have one gene that digests one thing. It gets duplicated. The copy mutates until it digests something else. They are both fairly specific about what they digest. The old gene will not digest the single stranded bacterial RNA of the new gene.

So once again you have an increase in information. The old gene still has all of its original specified complexity and the new gene has added to the specified complexity of the organism.

"Again, there is no new information, but only what was available at the original creation. Existing genes being duplicated or re-arraged fits just fine with the YEC model."

Then fine. Evolution does not need to produce new information according to the definition you seem to be laboring under. Since duplication and rearrangment is fine with you and the rest of YE (according to your statement) then the methods of evolution must be capatible with what is acceptable to you.

The second example is judged as having failed to meet the burden of proof to show that no new information was generated.

 

[UTEOTW]

Third

I am beginning to think that giving you the full citation plus a link to the abstract was not enough. I give you one abstract and you debunk something different. I am not really sure what the problem is. You cite a different abstract from a different set of authors in a different journal from a different year on a different subject. You did the same thing with the first one. I posted about one thing and you responded to another.

"Here you have one retrovirus which supposedly helps fend off another retrovirus."

Nope. The one I listed is a retrovirus gene that has been coopted to be "important in human placental morphogenesis."

The third example is judged as having failed to meet the burden of proof to show that no new information was generated largely because the example given was not even addressed.

So there we have it. We never got a definition of information that we can used to judge potential cases of new information. And for two fo the three, you did not even bother to address the examples provided to you. The one time that you did address the example given, you did not make a factual case for why it was not an increase. Of course that may be difficult to do without defining infomation.

The definition of information that you intimate does not seem to be one that has any bearing on evolutionary theory. You also state rather explicitly that the methods that evolution uses to generate novel genes is not at odds with what you as a YEer are willing to accept.

The result: evolution is not at odds with information theory.

 

[UTEOTW]

"The Bible does have something to say about general relativity. It says a day with the Lord is as a thousand years. It says God is light. Today we know - according to Einstein that as you get right up close to the speed of light, one day is as a thousand years - relatively speaking. "

You really think these verses are speaking of relativity? Really?!? I don't think so. Maybe you can point the direction where some writer interpreted these verses in this manner before the publishing of "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies."

"You can get billions of years of geologic data in the space of one year with such an event."

Really? Demonstrate such. You have been asked to demonstrate all sorts of things. Like the Snowball earth thread which sits ignored. Like the sorting of animals in the fossil record. Life layers of ash of debris from asteroid impacts right in the middle of what you would call Flood layers. Like the details of fossilization (predation, scavenging, preserving of delicate parts, variety of methods of burial, etc.) The dating of the Hawaiian volcanoes and their degree of erosion. Just the Grand Canyon presents an emormous challenge to your thinking.

 

[jcrawford]

Originally posted by UTEOTW:

The result: evolution is not at odds with information theory.

Neither is information theory at odds with design theory.

 

[Gup20]

Really? Demonstrate such.

Err... I have before. For example, when Mt. St. Helens blew in the 80's it laid down THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of layers (that look remarkably like Grand Canyon layers actually) in the space of 1 hour.

Furthermore, we can see canyons hundreds of feet deep (which evolution scientists say takes thousands or hundreds of thousands of years) happen in 6 days.

These are geologic events caused by catastrophism on a minute fraction of scale as to what happened to the world during Noah's Biblical world-wide flood. And Noah's Flood lasted for a year, not an hour... not 6 days.

Like I said... the Bible is definitively NOT silent on these issues, you have simply chosen to dismiss the portion of scripture that talks about it. You have selectively listened to scripture, ignoring the portions you don't happen to agree with because of worldly criticism. You have chosen to listen rather to 'the world' and 'man' above the Word of God.

 

[UTEOTW]

"Err... I have before. For example, when Mt. St. Helens blew in the 80's it laid down THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of layers (that look remarkably like Grand Canyon layers actually) in the space of 1 hour. "

So maybe you can tell me about layers in the Mt. St. Helens canyon that resembles layers in the Grand Canyon. Where are the layers that resemble the “Granite Gorges” where sedementary rock was later metamorphosed by intrusions of granite forming magma? How long do you think these layers of magma took to cool? When where they formed in your scenario?

What about the layers that appear to have been deposited in a shallow, coastal marine environment? Do you have some layers from the Mt St Helens eruption that look like these? When were these laid down in your scenario?

What about the sandstone layers? Do you see sandstone layers at Mt. St. Helens? How were the ones in the Grand Canyon formed?

What about the shale layers? Do you see sandstone layers at Mt. St. Helens? How were the ones in the Grand Canyon formed?

What about the limestone layers? Do you see sandstone layers at Mt. St. Helens? How were the ones in the Grand Canyon formed?

Does the Mt. St. Helens canyon exhibit meanders like the Grand Canyon?

Maybe you can explain the angular unconformities of the Grand Canyon. Bet you cannot!

"Furthermore, we can see canyons hundreds of feet deep (which evolution scientists say takes thousands or hundreds of thousands of years) happen in 6 days."

You know, the last time you posted something along these lines it turned out to be a tiny canyone eroded through mud that was soaked in water for days before. As we all know, you cannot get the high, sheer cliffs and meanders in such a situation.

"These are geologic events caused by catastrophism on a minute fraction of scale as to what happened to the world during Noah's Biblical world-wide flood. And Noah's Flood lasted for a year, not an hour... not 6 days."

So, can you tell us which layers are original, which are pre-flood, which are from the flood, and which are post flood?

Maybe you can tell us how the flood managed to sort all of life such that cladistic and stratigraphic data match so well.

http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/publs/Benton/1999SystBiol.pdf

The truth is that YE has NOTHING to offer along such lines.