Layers of Information: Spetner's take (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 04, 2016, 14:45 (3213 days ago) @ David Turell

It must be obvious that the information needed to make an amoeba is much less than the information required for a whale. Spetner's point is that Darwin's theory does not supply an answer, and in fact most adaptive gene changes require a loss of information:-http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/02/information_and102571.html-"Twenty years ago I wrote: "No random mutation has been observed that adds information to the genome." I repeated this in my latest book and the statement still stands. It bothers the Darwinists because it refutes common descent and Darwinian evolution. -"How does one know that a mutation has occurred and how does one know it is random? If two closely related species have similar proteins or DNA, Darwinists assume the differences in the sequences represent random mutations that occurred in the evolutionary divergence of the species. No one knows that those genetic changes were random -- they are simply declared random according to the dogma of the Modern Synthesis (MS). -***-"Random mutations have never been shown theoretically to be able to lead to the kind of evolution assumed to yield common descent. To show that they can do so requires a calculation of the probability of common descent, showing it to be reasonably high, but every attempt to make that calculation has shown the probability to be vanishingly small. The evidence offered for common descent is circumstantial only. There is no observation, for example, of any portion of the long line of the alleged evolutionary steps (i.e., actual births) from fish to amphibia. It is all inference based on circumstantial evidence. To connect circumstantial evidence to the conclusion of common descent requires a theory. There is no theory that predicts common descent and it is therefore a failed concept.-***-"For example, mutations can increase the rate of a biochemical reaction in a circumstance where this would be of benefit to the organism, but this benefit derives from the mutation's having disabled a repressor, allowing a gene to be transcribed without control. Such a mutation cannot contribute to common descent because no matter how many millions of times mutations may disable a repressor they cannot build the information required for common descent. Such a mutation, again, loses information rather than gains it.-"In the last fifty years it has become recognized that if evolution occurs in the sense of common decent, information has to be built up. For a primitive cell to evolve into an elephant, for example, the evolutionary process has to increase the information from that in the cell until an elephant's worth of information has been achieved. There is no theory that can account for such a thing."-Comment: Remember the genome carries the instructions (information) to create an organism from the zygote and then set up and guide the organic chemistry processes that make the organism live.