The question of information? Darwinism has no answer.
So...I gave any and all Darwinists a chance to answer the question of information within organisms. After several posts and dealing with their continual evasions I can say with conviction that they do not know. If they comment on this particular post and claim otherwise I invite you, in fact I implore you to read all the posts on Information on this blog and explore the comments threads as well. You will find a series of evasions, redirected questions and pontifications and ad hominem attacks but not one answer. So I hereby give up on this question because I have given them lots of time and rope and yet no answer.
You see, we see a set of stones like those at Stonehenge and we recognize something that is ordered. Now order is a sign of possible intelligence. No one thinks Stonehenge is the result of random rocks falling down into a particular order. Everyone recognizes that Stonehenge was designed.
Within the nucleus of the cell is DNA, a remarkable coding device filled with more information contained within the average early Microsoft computers, too small to see with your eyes and far more complex than an old set of Encyclopaedia Brittanicas and Darwinists expect you to believe it just happened. Now of course they have hemmed and hawed and failed to give us an explanation.
From a forward to Creation Rediscovered, by Gerard J. Keane
...by Professor Maciej Giertych, Phd, excerpted. The interesting point is that he was a believer in Darwinism until the argument came into his specialty and, when he studied the evidence, realized that Darwinism was not reflective of the science he understood and could defend. Doctor Giertych has authored well over 200 scientific papers and his many accomplishments are summarized below this excerpt:
"...If Evolution were proved in some field I was not familiar with, I understood the need to accommodate my field to this fact, to suggest explanations how it occurred in terms of genetics. But to claim that these attempted explanations are the primary evidence for the theory was quite unacceptable to me. I started reading the current literature on the topic of Evolution. Until then I was not aware how shaky the evidence for Evolution was, how much of what was "evidence" had to be discarded, how little new evidence had been accumulated over the years, and how very much ideas dominate facts. These ideas have become dogma, yet they have no footing in natural sciences. They stem from materialistic philosophies. My primary objection as a geneticist was to the claim that the formation of races, or microevolution, as it is often referred to, is a small scale example of macroevolution - the origin of species. Race formation is, of course, very well documented. All it requires is isolation of a part of a population. After a few generations, due to natural selection and genetic drift, the isolated population will irreversibly lose some genes, and thus, as long as the isolation continues, in some features it will be different from the population it arose from. In fact, we do this ourselves all the time when breeding, substituting natural with artificial selection and creating artificial barriers to generative mixing outside the domesticated conditions.
The important thing to remember here is that a race is genetically impoverished relative to the whole population. It has fewer alleles (forms of genes). Some of them are arranged into special, interesting, rare combinations. This is particularly achieved by guided recombination of selected forms in breeding work. But these selected forms are less variable (less polymorphic). Thus what is referred to as micro-evolution represents natural or artificial reduction of the gene pool. You will not get Evolution that way. Evolution means construction of new genes. It means increase in the amount of genetic information, and not reduction of it. The evolutionary value of new races or selected forms should be demonstrable by natural selection. However, if allowed to mix with the general breeding population, new races will disappear. The genes in select combinations will disperse again; the domesticated forms will go wild. Thus there is no evidence for Evolution here.
Mutations figure prominently in the Evolution story. When in the early '60s I was starting breeding work on forest trees, everyone was very excited about the potential of artificial mutations. In many places around the world, special "cobalt bomb" centers were established to stimulate rates of mutations. What wonderful things were expected from increased variability by induced mutations. All of this work has long since been abandoned. It led nowhere. All that was obtained were deformed freaks, absolutely useless in forestry. Maybe occasionally some oddity could be of ornamental value, but never able to live on its own in natural conditions. A glance through literature on mutations outside forestry quickly convinced me that the pattern is similar everywhere. Mutations are either neutral or detrimental. Positive ones, if they do occur, are too rare to be noticeable. Stability in nature is the rule. We have no proofs for Evolution from mutation research.
It is sometimes claimed that strains of diseases resistant to antibiotics, or weeds resistant to herbicides, are evidence for positive mutations. This is not so. Most of the time, the acquired resistance is due to genetic recombination and not due to mutations. Where mutations have been shown to be involved, their role depends on deforming part of the genetic code, which results in a deformed, usually less effective protein that is no longer suitable for attachment by the harmful chemical. Herbicides are "custom made" for attachability to a vital protein specific for the weed species, and they kill the plant by depriving the protein of its function when attached to it. A mutation that cancels attachability to the herbicide and does not totally deprive the protein of its function is in this case beneficial, since it protects the functionality of the protein. However this is at a price, since in fact the change is somewhat detrimental to normal life processes. At best it is neutral. There are many ways in which living systems protect functionality. This is one of them. Others include healing or eliminating deformed parts or organisms. Natural selection belongs here. So does the immunological adaptation to an invader. Of course such protective adaptations do not create new species, new kinds, new organs or biological systems. They protect what already exists, usually at a cost. Defects accumulate along the way.
Within the genome of a species, that is, in the molecular structure of its DNA, we find many recurrent specific nucleotide sequences, known as "repeats." Different ones occur in different species. If this variation (neutral as far as we know) arose from random mutations, it should be random. How then did the "repeats" come to be? If mutations are the answer, they could not have been random. In this context "genetic drive" is postulated, as distinct from "genetic drift." But Who or what does the driving? The empirical science of genetics knows only random mutations.
Currently there are new suggestions that molecular genetics provides evidence for Evolution. Analyses of DNA sequences in various species should show similarities between related ones and big differences between systematically far-removed species. They do exactly that. Molecular genetics generally confirms the accuracy of taxonomy. But at the same time, it does not confirm postulated evolutionary sequences. There are no progressive changes, say from fishes to amphibians, to reptiles to mammals. Molecular genetics confirms systematics, not phylogeny; Linnaeus, not Darwin. No. Genetics has no proofs for Evolution. It has trouble explaining it. The closer one looks at the evidence for Evolution, the less one finds of substance. In fact, the theory keeps on postulating evidence and failing to find it, and moves on to other postulates (fossil missing links, natural selection of improved forms, positive mutations, molecular phylogenetic sequences, etc.).
This is not science. A whole age of scientific endeavor was wasted searching for a phantom. It is time we stopped and looked at the facts! Natural sciences failed to supply any evidence for Evolution. Christian philosophy tried to accommodate this unproved postulate of materialist philosophies. Much time and intellectual effort went in vain, leading only to negative moral consequences. It is time those working in the humanities were told the truth. Gerard J. Keane is doing exactly that. In clear and simple language, he reviews the present status of the Evolution-Creation controversy. I am very happy to be able to recommend this book. Indeed, Creation Rediscovered by science comes to the rescue of Christianity."
Professor Maciej Giertych, B.A., M.A. Oxon, Ph.D. Toronto, D.Sc. Poznan Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Dendrology, 62-035 Kornik, Poland
Copyright © 1999 by Gerard J. Keane, Tan Books and Publishers Home Page Creation/Evolution Theotokos Catholic Books - Creation/Evolution Section - www.theotokos.org.uk
Bio for the Doctor:
Maciej Giertych was born on March 24th, 1936 in Warsaw, Poland. He received a bachelor's and master's degree at Oxford University after which he spent his next four years as a graduate student at the University of Toronto. Maciej Giertych defended his PhD thesis in 1962 at which point he returned to Poland and began research at the Institute of Dendrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1970, he obtained his habilitation degree in forest genetics at the Poznań Agricultural Academy. In 1981, he was nominated associate professor and in 1989 became a tenured professor in forestry.
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While living in the UK and Canada, he was active in Polish émigré youth organisations. On return to Poland, he was active in consolidating traditionalists opposed to the communist system. He secretly distributed Polish-émigré right wing and conservative literature. He located unpublished historiosophical works of Feliks Koneczny, had them typed and transferred to his father in London to be published there. After 1989, they were republished in Poland.From 1986 to 1990, he served as a member and vice-chairman of the Roman Catholic Primatical Council of Cardinal Glemp, the Primate of Poland. He sat on the Consultative Council of the Chairman of the State as an opponent to the Communist regime from 1986 to1989. On the invitation of Pope John Paul II, he participated as a lay observer in the Synod of Bishops in Rome on the role of the laity in the Church in October 1987.
Maciej Giertych is married to Antonina nee Jachnik and they have four children and twelve grandchildren.