Jonathan Gress said:
I think we have been talking at cross purposes. I certainly agree that there are inbuilt mechanisms for adapting to new environments,
You mistake my language. I'm not talking about adaptations. People who become immune to HIV is not an adaptation but a mutation. Adaptation is when your skin becomes darker in the sun. Mutation is when a group of people have a propensity to have high HDL levels, a trait that might fair well in the future of humanity in this country.
which do not involve entropic degradation of genetic information.
What do you mean "do not involve"? They avoid entropy, but all creation is always involved in entropy. Creation fights against entropy, that's the whole idea.
But these are all part of the inherent design of organisms, and do not reflect change from one kind of organism to another.
Yes it does. We have the HIV prone organisms, and we have the HIV non-prone organisms. When these mutations add up over time, over a very very long time, you might end up with a whole different species.
To get Darwinian evolution, you need mutations that cause fundamental alterations in the genetic code,
What do you mean fundamental? Darwinian evolution is one that causes alterations overtime. Eventually, after 10s of thousands of years perhaps, we might see some very fundamental changes.
which ALSO must introduce greater overall complexity, in order to get multi-celled organisms out of bacteria,
There is no "one gene" that causes multicellularity. But we do know using cancer research which genes being affected become so (the use of basement membrane, the use of intercellular communications, etc.), where a cell that is part of a unit all of a sudden becomes its own independent organism attacking your own body. An entropy if you will from what you are to unicellular parasites that bear mutations of your genes. What's amazing is that a lot of these genes seem to have been duplicated and altered from what the cell already had, such as the cell's cytoskeleton. A lot of the genetic markers where cell independence is lost are being found, and have a surprising consistency with the theory of evolution. Therefore, a competent oncologist has to accept evolution in his research for better cancer treatment. One can imagine that one of the traits of cancer disease is a tissue's inability to maintain its multicellular state (entropy). This can prove that we evolved into multicellularity (growth, complexity, etc.)
Now let's see what Anderson says:
Evolutionists frequently point to the development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria as a demonstration of evolutionary change. However, molecular analysis of the genetic events that lead to antibiotic resistance do not support this common assumption. Many bacteria become resistant by acquiring genes from plasmids or transposons via horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal transfer, though, does not account for the origin of resistance genes, only their spread among bacteria.
Correct, he doesn't account for the origin of these, which is usually a mutation in a lucky bacteria that has a sex pillus, which would speed up the evolution of a species of bacteria. Very dangerous in the clinic.
But we also have other examples of mutations, such as duplication of gene in hospital acquired Pneumonia:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20966089
The acquiring of a new gene synthesizing carbapenem drugs (some by plasmids and others by
clonal selection):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21144429
We have mutations that create pumps to pump out the drug faster, mutations that alter the cell wall slightly for the same strength and function with better protection against antiobiotics, mutations that involve enzymes that metabolize the drug, all of which have a variety of mechanisms of mutations, and not "consistently" horizontal transfer.
Mutations, on the other hand, can potentially account for the origin of antibiotic resistance within the bacterial world, but involve mutational processes that are contrary to the predictions of evolution.
On the contrary, due to the study of mechanisms of bacterial resistance, things are getting a lot more predictable now, and has shown us to better understand the mechanism of evolution.
Instead, such mutations consistently reduce or eliminate the function of transport proteins or porins, protein binding affinities, enzyme activities, the proton motive force, or regulatory control systems.
Consistently is incorrect. There's a variety of changes, those that reduce function, eliminate function, add or strengthen function, or add new information. We have plenty of studies on this, and the variety of this causes a big problem for us in the health field trying to find ways to treat evolved bacteria.
While such mutations can be regarded as “beneficial,” in that they increase the survival rate of bacteria in the presence of the antibiotic, they involve mutational processes that do not provide a genetic mechanism for common “descent with modification.” Also, some “relative fitness” cost is often associated with such mutations, although reversion mutations may eventually recover most, if not all, of this cost for some bacteria. A true biological cost does occur, however, in the loss of pre-existing cellular systems or functions. Such loss of cellular activity cannot legitimately be offered as a genetic means of demonstrating evolution.
When there is a biological cost, if it does harm to the bacteria, the bacteria will die. But not all bacteria that evolve do so at a biological cost.
The fact that I only read this abstract by this author and I find very erroneous and misleading information shows how much I cannot take these websites seriously anymore. How would you like it, as a knowledgeable theologian perhaps, if you read someone debunking Orthodoxy by spreading misleading information? That's how I feel right now about this man's so-called "science," where it's all disproven.
For the most part, these mutations are harmful, but even where occasionally they happen to be beneficial, they do not represent increased complexity.
I've presented the case otherwise before. We have proof of increased information, beneficial mutations, and gene duplication studies that eventually would lead to new and exciting genes. And for the most part, mutations are neither harmful nor harmless. As I mentioned before, if you ever really pay attention to what I write, since most of our genome is silent, most of the mutations are silent.
But entropy-avoidance does not extend to increasing the complexity of the organism beyond its original design. I could imagine over hundreds of millions of years a human lineage degrading into bacteria, but not bacteria evolving into human beings.
That's like saying I would expect a human being going from adult to infancy, not the other way around. This argument is a fallacy. You continue to ignore your own argument in how one avoids entropy for growth and reproduction, and somehow, with some misconstrued understanding of science you don't find that courtesy extending to evolution.
I'm not sure if you'll understand anything I wrote, but if you didn't, then it shows you have a lot to learn than from some fool who lies about scientific discoveries.
And just for the record, if you couldn't imagine how a bacteria can evolve in a human species, that's actually understandable. But we can indeed imagine our evolution from an ape species due to astounding similarities in our DNA, where we can even detect where exactly our differences lie genetically and how they occurred. I can personally imagine that.