lukija

Ja 'uusia'geenejä tulee tilalle ja vanhat kehittyvät.

Toiseen kappaleeseen:
1. Biological classification is hierarchical; when a new species evolves, it branches at the very lowermost level, and it remains part of all groups it is already in. Anything that evolves from a fruit fly, no matter how much it diverges, would still be classified as a fruit fly, a dipteran, an insect, an arthropod, an animal, etc.

2. There are about 3000 described species of fruit flies (family Drosophilidae) [Wheeler 1987]. "Still fruit flies" covers a lot of range.

3. Fruit flies do not remain the same species of fruit flies. Drosophila melanogaster populations evolved reproductive isolation as a result of contrasting microenvironments within a canyon [Korol et al. 2000]. We would not expect to see much greater divergence in historical times.

Viimeiseen kappaleeseen:
# It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of:

* increased genetic variety in a population [Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991]
* increased genetic material [Brown et al. 1998; Lynch and Conery, 2000; Ohta, 2003; Hughes and Friedman, 2003; Alves et al. 2001]
* novel genetic material [Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996]
* novel genetically-regulated abilities [Prijambada et al. 1995]


If these don't qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

# A mechanism which is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, where a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations which change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances where this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:

* Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors [Lang et al. 2000].
* RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. [Zhang et al. 2002]
* Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. [Brown et al. 1998]

A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references to the biological literature.

# According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation which mutations add to populations is the variation which selection acts upon. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism, so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism. [Adami et al. 2000]

# The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations [Adami et al. 2000; Schneider, 2000].