Quote:

I shouldn't refer to them as good or bad, that was a bad choice of words to convey what I was trying to say. There are good and bad mutations that we have observed. It would be more accurate to call mutations either progressive or regressive. One is 'upwards' the other is 'downwards' respectively, whether or not they end up being good or bad is irrelevant to evolution. Evolution requires that mutations eventually lead upwards and write data that never existed in the first place. I've since shown you how all the examples where scientists have assumed this has happened have turned out to be false, and are actually regressive, usually leading to a loss of fitness in the wild. Thus the idea of a progressive mutation is a fantastic idea, but an imaginary one nonetheless.



Just because we can observe more regressive mutations than progressive mutations doesn't quite mean anything within evolution. A regressive mutation, which is infact 'damage done' with an effect we would expect, a negative one. Well those last three words aren't actually right, it's more that the mutations didn't decreased the chance of survival, so having this degradation, doesn't really make any difference. For example our ape-like ancestors lost their tails by a mutation, and because in the environment they lived during that evolutionary step, having a tail didn't increase the chance of survival of the species, it dissappeared. Personally I think this degradation of the tail might have taken quite some time, when having no tail, didn't really have a considerable advantage.

Quote:

Evolution requires that mutations eventually lead upwards and write data that never existed in the first place.



Evolution doesn't require anything, evolution is the effect of adaptations to the past by the mechanisms of "survival of the fittest", "natural selection" and "mutations". Wether this means we grow a third hand with data copied from existing gene-info, because we have a big advantage of having that third hand or if we would evolve into a species with fins so we can swim with not yet existing info does not matter. The fin-example might not be very good, because when we look at a certain point in the human's embryo development, then it has fin-like hands, so basically that would be degradation. Maybe wings are a better example then, but then again, when our species would only survive with wings, then there's still the possibility that our species just dies out, because we didn't develop wings with feathers so we could fly. Some things might theoretically be possible, yet may never happen at all. I think that's why regressive mutations play a big role in our evolution. I also think that if those regressive mutations that happened did decreased the chance of survival that the degradation would not have happened, so the degradation or any mutation for that matter will be passed on and only stay within a species when it's either neutral or positive for survival.

Cheers

PHeMoX, Innervision Software (c) 1995-2008

For more info visit: Innervision Software