Tuppence wrote: What happens in the vast (well over 99%) of 'evolutionary' mutations is a loss of meaningful information due to the malformation or missing of a portion of the genetic code.

So if I get this correctly, all life forms are very bad at reproducing, making less complex offspring over time. Will we all end up as retarded, gelatinous blobs?

Nope:

[url:1dmtxsn7]http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html[/url] wrote: Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans [Nachman and Crowell 2000]. Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but a significant fraction are beneficial. The harmful mutations don't survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

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I read something about blind cave fish, who evolved from fish with eyes. It was said that loosing their eyes was:

[url:1dmtxsn7]http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2/4361news8-9-2000.asp[/url] wrote:a classic example of a mutation causing a downhill change.

(emp.theirs)

We are seeing evolution at work here. The life forms adapt to their environment. Fish on the surface do have eyes, but the fish in the cave don't. In absolute darkness having eyes actually proofs to be a hindrance!
The soft tissue is bound to get injured and bacteria can cause deadly infections to the fish because of their eyes. We see that fish with eyes slowly but surely start to die out and that the mutations without the eyes (or with skin growing over the eyes) stand a better chance of survival.
That is natural selection, the mechanism that powers evolution.
Moles and bats have employed the same technique. According to Longman Illustrated Animal Encyclopedia 1 in 4 mammals is a bat. They're doing quite well for deformed mutants

We see the same loss of information in bats (bad/no eyes sight. Not all species are blind however). We also see that another sense has started to be specialised! Bats use echo location. So when 1 sense started to become useless, another one got specialised! (their eyesight got worse, but their ears got better)

To claim that new material does not occur in mutations is wrong. Natural selection will keep good mutations and get rid of the bad and good and bad are depending on the environment. If less eyes is good (like in cave fish), we'll end up with a species that has no eye sight. Other animals, like birds of prey, were more successful with very good eye sight, so they moved in the opposite direction.

We should not talk about it as a 'downhill change'. It is beneficial for the fish to get rid of those eyes! They only injured themselves by swimming into walls! If anything, it is an UPHILL change!

We don't think of 6 legged insects as inferior to 8 legged spiders, now do we? If loss of information means that you are more successful as a life form, cast that bag of useless extra genetic material away!


- Nachman, M. W. and S. L. Crowell, 2000. Estimate of the mutation rate per nucleotide in humans. Genetics 156(1): 297-304.