Mutations don't add information (Talk.Origins)

Claim CB102:


 * Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information.

Source: AIG, n.d. Creation Education Center. So, you’re doing a report on Creation vs. Evolution...

CreationWiki response:

Mutations have been scientifically observed to give an organism a new function or something which makes it more survivable under the given environment. They have not however been observed to make the organism more complex, in that a mutation literally introduces, thus building upon the existing DNA. There must be introduction of truly new information for evolution to truly advance from a fish to man and create vastly more complex genomes.

The fact is mutations only scramble the existing DNA of an organism to achieve a different read-out, resulting in (at times) a beneficial adaptation to the environment producing a type of ecological niche ultimately. This is all mutations have been scientifically observed to do, but with implications of naturalists coupled with evolution it becomes something much more. Observations of these results are then extrapolated to declare unobserved change, such as what evolution ultimately predicts, molecules-to-man.

I have literally asked evolutionists, "Where is a real-world scientifically observable example of a mutation producing new information, thus increasing and building upon the existing DNA resulting in a new organism emerging from what was originally there?" They, fully believing the evolution theory as scientific fact have claimed that a bacterium, called the nylon bug here on out by me, with its adaptation to consuming nylon waste, is scientific evidence of evolution.

Having this bacteria being able to have waste products of nylon as their only source of carbon and nitrogen is quite remarkable but let us focus on just two species of this bacteria.

Flavobacterium K172 and Pseudomonas NK87.

There are three enzymes that are responsible for this ability in Flavobacterium K172, which are; F-EI, F-EII and F-EIII and there are two in Pseudomonas NK87, which are; P-EI and P-EII. The genes for these enzymes are located on three plasmids which are Plasmid pOAD2 in Flavobacterium and pNAD2 and pNAD6 in Pseudomonas.

I will admit that this specific mutation is advantageous for the bacteria as it is able to use the broken down nylon as a new food source but as far as added new functional genetic information to the gene pool, therefore ultimately it is proof of large scale evolution of the genome, it is not.

This type of mutation was a frame-shift and the change in the bacteria was a base pair deletion so that all the bases after that are read differently. Essentially, when the bacteria started to adapt and consume this nylon waste, they passed down the mutated genes to the next generation and ultimately a generation became fully adapted to it genetically at birth.

Here is a simple example of how a frame-shift mutations works:

ONE FAT FOX ATE THE CAT

The frame-shift would delete the first T and would then cause the genes to shift over to replace it, thus it would read:

ONE FAF OXA TET HEC AT

Indeed this example doesn't make the sentence say anything, but in the case of the nylon metabolizing enzyme’s it worked. Because of the environment the bacteria were in it demanded natural selection, they were either able to adapt or die out. In most other cases a frame-shift mutation is not a good thing and causes a disruption to the genes, this is a rare example.

The evolutionist would claim that the bacteria has indeed increased information as it produced a new read-out. But this new read-out is still a subset of the already existing DNA in that organism. The frame-shift mutation did not add onto the existing DNA rather it only scrambled what was there and because it is in an environment to adapt to, it worked! There is no way around it, the variation or changes cannot become massive if all it does is re-arrange the existing DNA, it is severely limited to that.

That the bacteria mutate so that they can break down nylon waste as their food sources can still fall under the creationist model until the bacteria literally become something else. Then and only then will evolution have a strong case in the realm of mutations being the mechanism for the massive changes needed.