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Originally Posted by (fogus,) Can any one give me a documented example of a mutation giving rise to new genetic information which was seen as being benificial to an organism?<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>Allow me to repost a response I made to jpapadpapa on page 5, as I'm sure the same goes for you:
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Originally Posted by (jpapadpapa,) Actually, I don't believe that you did establish that [in your essay on page 1]. You showed that sometimes a loss of genetic material can be beneficial, but isn't this just natural selection? There is a common misconception that Creationists do not believe in natural selection. There is no doubt that occasionally a genetic mutation will be beneficial, but it is still a loss or corruption of genetic information.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>What you are misusing here is Shannon information theory[1], first published in the late '40s by Claude Shannon. He was working for Bell Labs, attempting to better encode information for transmitting over a noisy link. With the transmitter as the only source of information, the noise (randomness) takes on the role of entropy in the link -- decreasing the information content, but never producing it. This form of information theory does not apply to evolution, because the randomness is not separate from the source of information content. It is not trying to communicate from one station to another, it is simply acting.
The alternative is Kolmogorov, Chaitin, and Solomonoff's information theory[2]. The difference between KCS IT and Shannon's theory, is that KCS IT deals with algorithmic complexity, rather than a statistical comparison of the coherency of information from a single source. In this theory, the randomness in a "string"
is the information, and the word entropy takes on a new meaning as a measure of information. The more randomness contained, the more information is present because of a low occurrence of redundancy. An increase in redundancy would mean a decrease of randomness, and so you would have less information. When applied to evolution, KCS IT suggests that information is constantly added and removed from the genome. This is not just theoretically possible, it has been observed in the real world.
Flavobacterium (species K172) was discovered in bacterial mats growing in a waste pond behind a factory in Japan[3]. Upon inspection in the laboratory, scientists discovered something extraordinary. The bacterium had apparently undergone a Frame Shift mutation, that produced an entirely new enzyme. This new enzyme, called nylonase, enables the hydrolysis of nylon for metabolization. Nylon is a synthetic polyamide that wasn't around before the 1930s. The evolution of a whole new protein that responds to nylon oligomers, developing in a naturally occurring bacterium floating in the discarded sludge of a nylon factory, presents a tough case to dispute of a mutation clearly adding information.
Footnotes 1 More information on Shannon Theory:
http://www.lucent.com/minds/infotheory/ 2 Wikipedia entry on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_i...ormation_theory 3 Thomas, D. (2000)
Evolution And Information: The Nylon Bug.
http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm