Evolution: Observed?

From Creation Ministries International @ http://www.boundless.org


Molecules-to-man evolution is the theory that everything made itself, and that no creator was necessary. But this requires that non-intelligent processes could produce vast quantities of functional complex information. Even the simplest free-living organism carries the equivalent information of a 500-page book; humans have as much information as a thousand 500-page volumes.

A big obstacle for evolutionary belief is this: What mechanism could possibly have added all the extra information required to transform a one-celled creature progressively into pelicans, palm trees and people? Natural selection alone can't do it — selection involves getting rid of information. A group of creatures might become more adapted to the cold, for example, by the elimination of those which don't carry the genetic information to make thick fur. But that doesn't explain the origin of the information to make thick fur.

Also, natural selection by definition is the survival of the fittest, meaning those who leave the most surviving offspring. Therefore it requires self-reproducing entities to start with. So it is powerless to explain the origin of the vast quantities of information of the first self-reproducing cell.

For evolutionists there is only "one game in town" to explain the new information which their theory requires — mutations. These are accidental mistakes as the genetic (DNA) information (the coded set of instructions which is the "recipe" or "blueprint" specifying the construction and operation of any creature) is copied from one generation to the next.

Naturally, such scrambling of information will often be harmful — thousands of hereditary diseases in people, for instance, are caused by just such inherited mutational defects. At best they may be neutral — having no effect on the outcome, or the expressed meaning of the code. Using English as an (admittedly limited) analogy, assume a message were transmitted saying "the enemy is now attacking," which accidentally suffers a one-letter substitution changing it to "the enemy is not attacking." The result is potentially disastrous, like a harmful mutation. Whereas a change to "tha enemy is now attacking" would be neutral; a change, but not affecting the end result.

This is not surprising — an analogy: New computer programs do not arise from old computer programs by copying errors. Instead, the resulting program usually jams.

However, evolutionists believe that occasionally, a "good" mutation will occur which will be favored by selection and will allow that creature to progress along its evolutionary pathway to something completely different.

Summary

1. Evolutionary theory requires some mutations to go "uphill" — to add new information.
2. The mutations which we observe are generally neutral (they don't effectively change the information, or the "meaning" in the code) or else they are informationally downhill — defects which lose/corrupt information.
3. The rare "beneficial" mutations to which evolutionists cling all appear to be like wingless animals, blind cave animals, and many examples of antibiotic resistance. They are downhill changes, losses of information which, though they may give a survival advantage, are headed in precisely the wrong direction for evolution.
4. The examples commonly cited as "evolution happening today" usually involving adaptation by natural selection, are without exception instances in which the net result is a loss of information in the population — either by mutation or by way of reduced genetic variety.