Bad scientific arguments against evolution: Part 1

[one.opinion]

17 hours ago, Spock said:

That should work. Thanks. 

 

I usually don't like communicating through web links, but there are a couple here that are really too good to pass up.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/evolution-watching-speciation-occur-observations/

This link contains a good introduction and contains a few examples.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html

This link contains more information and gets a little technical, but it explains more about the different mechanisms of speciation.

This last link is from Answers in Genesis (AiG) and discusses speciation from a YEC perspective. I find this very interesting because I grew up YEC and heard many times that scientists had never observed any speciation. YEC organizations like AiG and ICR have had to alter their views as  examples of observed speciation became too numerous to ignore. The concept of exactly what a Biblical "kind" is had to be adjusted rather dramatically.

https://answersingenesis.org/natural-selection/speciation/

[The Barbarian]

On 8/21/2018 at 3:40 PM, Guest shiloh357 said:

Those mutations would have to produce new information in order for evolution to works. So, where is the evidence that mutations produce new information not previously contained in the genes of an animal or person?

Since there's a mathematical definition of "information",  it's easy to test.

According to Claude Shannon's theorem, information is:

 

Where: H= information and p(x) equals the frequency of allele x in the population.

So, consider if we have a gene with 2 alleles (different versions of the same gene), each with a frequency of 0.5, we can find the information for that gene to be the negative sum of the products of the frequencies and the log of the frequencies.      So then  -2(0.5 X log(0.5)), which is about  0.301.

Now, suppose a new allele happens by mutation and eventually each allele has a frequency of about one-third. 

Then it would be  -3(0.333..X log(.0333..)) or about o.477.    Hence, any new mutation in a population increases the information in the population genome.  However, evolution can work just as well by decreasing information.

Evolution is a change in the allele frequencies of a population over time, so if for some reason, one of the alleles go extinct, and only two remain, the information will then be about 0.301 again,

In fact, because speciation often happens in small, isolated populations, it is frequently the case that the new species will at first have less information than the species from which it evolved.  Since all organisms have dozens of mutations (almost all of them neutral) that weren't in either parent, this usually changes over time.

Edited September 11, 2019 by The Barbarian
erer

[The Barbarian]

On 3/26/2019 at 7:40 AM, one.opinion said:

The concept of exactly what a Biblical "kind" is had to be adjusted rather dramatically.

Yes.   Most YE creationist organizations admit that new species, genera, and even families of organisms evolve.  But that's about as far as they are willing to go.

Edited September 10, 2019 by The Barbarian
erer