Can mutations generate information?
Even if we grant evolutionists the first cell, the problem of increasing the total information content remains. To go from the first cell to a human means finding a way to generate enormous amounts of information—billions of base pairs (‘letters’) worth. This includes the recipes to build eyes, nerves, skin, bones, muscles, blood, etc. In the section on variation and evolution, we showed that evolution relies on copying errors and natural selection to generate the required new information. However, the examples of ‘contemporary evolution’ presented by Teaching about Evolution are all losses of information. This is confirmed by the biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner, who taught information and communication theory at Johns Hopkins University: In this chapter I’ll bring several examples of evolution, [i.e., instances alleged to be examples of evolution] particularly mutations, and show that information is not increased. … But in all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve ne
