Talk:Point mutation

Genetic Information

Philip, I have to ask about this addition, point mutations do not add information to the genome. Whereas they do not change the genome size they can change what is actually produced. For example, the sentence "I love my cat" vs. "I love my hat". Both are of the same size however the information is different. While this was a simple explanation it does apply to genomic expression. Many proteins are duplicated on the genome, this actually allows for gene regulation. Based on the promoters and regulatory proteins it is possible to have a point mutation in one of the duplicated sequences that changes the function of the protein expressed, thereby increasing the information (original protein and mutant now expressed) but not changing genomic size. Unless you are equating genomic size with information. It might help if I write about gene regulation sometime, most are not exposed to it in college since it is a very specific topic.--Able806 09:33, 4 February 2009 (EST)

Rather a late response, and pointless, given the merge, but I was primarily correcting the wording to what the reference was actually claiming. Philip J. Rayment 09:41, 11 February 2009 (EST)

Thank you, I had guessed that after reading through the reference a bit. Something I have to ask, the papers published by the ICR and such groups, are they available for scientific review? I would like to research their position about genetic information particularly in relation to increase of information. From what I know of molecular genetics and information molecules, the ability for information to be increased through mutation is possible and has been observed. I would like to research the claims of ICR and such as to why they believe these examples fail. If you could be of assistance with this I would greatly appreciate it.--Able806 10:33, 11 February 2009 (EST)

Almost all such papers are available for anybody (scientists or otherwise) to "review" (read and comment on), as they have been published. But is that what you are asking? Are you asking about peer review? Papers published in the Journal of Creation and the CRS Quarterly are peer-reviewed. I don't know about ICR papers, but I suspect that ones published in Impact would be also.

This page list a number of layman's articles and technical papers which cover the information aspect in more detail. Also, Werner Gitt's In the Beginning was Information is available online.

Philip J. Rayment 21:08, 11 February 2009 (EST)

Thank you, Philip. This does help. I am looking for tech papers due to the description of the method used to gather the data. I understand their position; I am trying to understand why they believe it to be impossible. A quick example

The old dog ran.

The old doe ran.

The first example provides the relative age of the animal, the animal, and the action. The second example provides the relative age of the animal, the animal, the action, and the gender of the animal. No increase in letters and only one letter switched however more information is provided. Now I know this is an overly simplified example but it is possible with codons. I will give an example of a sequence as soon as I find my codons to AA matrix.--Able806 09:19, 13 February 2009 (EST)

in my experience people struggle with the concept of a substitution mutation increasing information. Duplication is much easier to understand. Try this. If you're still not getting through, you need to make sure the subject has an appropriate understanding of the definitions of information and new information. Alexkm 09:59, 13 February 2009 (EST)

See the start of the last page (p.31) of this article. Philip J. Rayment 00:38, 14 February 2009 (EST)

I have no problem with understanding the idea of information addition, what I am trying to understand is why those who have problems with the idea of mutation leading to new information have issue with it. I want to know what experiments and calculations they have done to infer this. Just saying it does not make it so.--Able806 15:18, 13 February 2009 (EST)

I'll give an expanded answer on this below. Philip J. Rayment 00:38, 14 February 2009 (EST)

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A good, information-increasing point mutation that comes to mind is the LRP5 substitution, which "[enhances] skeletal mass without causing complications of osteopetrosis". Some users may be confused by the term "High-Bone-Mass Disease". If so, please see the medical definition of disease. Some people are unwilling to open their minds to this being an instance of increased information. If that is the case, please proffer a definition of information in this context. MattL 10:48, 11 February 2009 (EST)

Most claims of information-increasing mutations turn out to nothing of the sort, and the linked extract of this paper does not have enough information to say one way or the other in this case. However, a mutation that merely changes the quantity of something (mass in this case) is likely not an information-increasing mutation, just like a cake recipe that has a "mutation" in the quantity of flour is not adding new information. Philip J. Rayment 21:08, 11 February 2009 (EST)

I would disagree; most gene regulation is done by concentrations of protein. Therefore changing the amounts would change the expression. A prime example would be the insulin receptor. This transmembrane protein is activated by insulin and causes several things to occur within the cell, however the concentration of insulin determines the order of events therefore, change the concentration gets a different result. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Able806 (talk)

How different? Anything actually new? Philip J. Rayment 00:38, 14 February 2009 (EST)

Can you write some simple introductory material about the genome, genome expression, regulatory proteins, gene regulation, and mutation? Nearly all of our readers need to know about the basics before they can learn about advanced topics such as point mutation. --Ed Poor ^Talk 09:39, 4 February 2009 (EST)

Sure, let me check out what we have already and work with that, many of these topics do overlap.--Able806 09:57, 4 February 2009 (EST)

After looking atMutation I believe this article should be merged with it. There is a section for Substitution mutations where point mutations would fall. Ed, can I move the text over to the mutation article and you can delete this page?--Able806 10:06, 4 February 2009 (EST)

How about you move the text over and then reduce this page to a redirect. Do you know how to do that? --Ed Poor ^Talk 10:09, 4 February 2009 (EST)

Sure.--Able806 10:10, 4 February 2009 (EST)

I already added to mutation.--Able806 10:15, 4 February 2009 (EST)

Thanks, I see it now. --Ed Poor ^Talk 10:30, 4 February 2009 (EST)

Genetic information (continued)

Here I want to elaborate a bit on the various claims about genetic information.

Could it occur, in principle?.

Werner Gitt, who wrote In the Beginning was Information, argues that information is a message, and that a message requires a message sender. He therefore argues that information cannot arise naturalistically. Here he is obviously not talking about information of the form that was not intended as a message, such as the "information" we glean from astronomy about the composition of stars, for example. Or the "information" that a particular site must have been inhabited gleaned from the stone tools found there. Indeed, he is talking about coded information—information that is conveyed by means of arbitrary symbols. That is, symbols that only have meaning to someone who already knows the code. Alphabetic writing uses such arbitrary symbols. This is clear from the fact that the same symbols can mean different things to different people (i.e. different languages using the same alphabet). So in English, a "gift" is a present, whereas in German a "gift" is a poison (which concerns German postal staff handling parcels marked "gift"!). DNA is such a coded information system.

Does it occur in observation?.

Lee Spetner, who wrote Not by Chance[1], says that information has not been observed to arise by chance, not that it can't.

All point mutations that have been studied on a molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not increase it. (Spetner, p. 138)

Note that this is not the negative argument "we haven't seen it so it doesn't occur". The argument is that "we have seen lots of mutations, and they all decrease the genetic information". That doesn't say that it's impossible. It says that you're arguing from faith (or wishful thinking), not the evidence, if you want to argue that mutations increase genetic information.

Realising that this is a powerful argument against evolution, evolutionists now make various claims that new information has arisen from mutations, and various claims about how it could in theory. Both groups of claims have been answered by creationists, and I think it's fair to say that most such claims have been debunked. For example, two of the arguments are that organisms acquire new genetic information from other organisms, and that they acquire new genetic information by means of gene duplication. But both these arguments don't stand up to scrutiny. Acquiring genetic information from other organisms explains nothing about where the genetic information came from in the first place. It is existing genetic information, not new information. And duplication is a second copy of existing information, not new information. But of course then they go on to more sophisticated arguments. Another very common argument is acquired resistance to antibiotics and the like, but most if not all of these turn out to be either an existing resistance that natural selection causes to become widespread in the population, or due to a loss of information.

Would a few examples solve the problem?

For microbe-to-man evolution to have occurred, a huge amount of new information would have had to be generated. So supplying a handful of questionable examples, which is all that has been offered so far, hardly solves the problem. And when Richard Dawkins was interviewed for a video, he was unable to supply any examples of new genetic information arising in nature.

Indeed, a creationary biologist has told me that he doesn't totally rule out the possibility of the extremely rare trivial information-gaining mutation. I've seen this alluded to in creationary literature, although I'm not sure that I've ever seen it said explicitly. However, I gather that Michael Behe's The Edge of evolution (which I haven't read) covers this point. See here for a mini-review of Behe's book.

John Sanford (Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome), writing mainly about human evolution, points out that a few examples wouldn't solve the problem anyway.

We can, at best, wave our hands when we speculate about how selection might synthesize new information. It is inherently hypothetical. In a sense it becomes a philosophical question and is not really subject of scientific analysis. Strong arguments can be made against mutation/selection creating new information, but theorists can always speculate to the contrary (it is very difficult to prove that something can never happen). However I believe the "going down" aspect of the genome is subject to actual scientific analysis. It is for this reason that I have focused on the issue of the degradation of information. I believe that it is subject to concrete analysis. Such analysis persuasively argues that net information must be declining. If this is true, then even if it could be shown that there were specific cases where new information might be synthesized via mutation/selection, it would still be meaningless since such new information would promptly then begin to degenerate again. The net direction would still be down, and complex genomes could never have arisen spontaneously. (Sanford, p. 105, his italics)

Philip J. Rayment 02:32, 14 February 2009 (EST)

Thank you, for your summary. I will take some time out to read some of these recommendations. I believe the issue at the base of all of this is the term information. I do not know if the issue with this term is the fact that the encoded proteins are not just the result of the code from the DNA, thereby making the term information an oversimplification or if it is the inference of some needed form of result due to the order of the code. I will write more on this at a later date, I am a bit behind this week.--Able806 15:33, 17 February 2009 (EST)

I should have said a bit about the definition of information itself. The following comments are my understanding, although I've not read much of Dembski.

Claude Shannon studied information from the point of view of how much capacity was needed to hold it. Like how many bytes it takes to store a given amount of data. Thus compression techniques etc. are relevant. However, Shannon's "information" ignored the meaning of the data. Thus purely random bits take more space to store than meaningful data, because the meaningful data has redundancies that can be compressed, whereas random bits can not be compressed (much) at all.

Gitt defines information in "structural" (my word) terms, talking about its syntax, semantics, etc. See information for a summary.

Dembski et. al. describe information in a more "mathematical" manner, looking at "specified complexity"; trying to measure the specific complexity of some data and thereby determine whether it has more or less information than some other data. (In other words, does a mutation increase or decrease the specific complexity of the gene.)

I'm not sure that I understand your penultimate sentence, so I won't comment on that.

Philip J. Rayment 17:21, 17 February 2009 (EST)