2. I will respond to your “age is dependent on assumptions” in a separate post which will track back to this one. I take the time to do this not because you raise anything new, but because you provide an excellent example of self-destructive apologetics.

3. Finally, as for genetic mutations, the claim that mutations cannot increase information is very simply false. You can start here if you are actually interested in some data. Gene reduplication, for example, followed by mutation, can quite clearly increase information.

Contrary to your assertion Henry, age is dependent upon assumptions, i.e. age is not something that can be measured. See the article Immeasurable age.

Also, there is no one at Creation Ministries International (the publisher of Journal of Creation) who would disagree with the last sentence of your blog above. There most certainly are some beneficial mutations, but they invariably involve loss of specified complexity (genetic information) whereas evolution would require massive increases. Consider the case of CCR5-delta32: a very beneficial mutation.

As for the environment question, I can’t particularly put my thumb on it, but maybe it comes from all the recent discussions on global warming. There seems to be a lot of language that implies that there is one system (mother nature) and then there is the results of our intentional tampering (CO2 emissions from human industrial activity) and the two always seemed to be treated as separate. In my own mind it creates a division between a “human induced” world and a natural world. I probably extrapolate that to the situations you described thus leading me to view the lab as separate from the “natural world” in the way that I did. As you point out, it’s probably not a real distinction.

I guess my other line of thought would be more to the idea that the lab stress conditions, might never be encountered in the natural world and thus while they may show some change, they don’t indicate what might happen under natural stress conditions. Your geological separation example is appropriate here. If I understand correctly, evolution would predict change in this case, but the timeline and the forcing function is vastly different than what we do in the lab. So does the lab merely show an accelerated view of what happens or an incorrect view because our inputs are vastly different. I’m not an expert in the field so I can’t really speculate, but nonlinear systems (as I would suspect evolutionary systems are) can behave very differently with even small input changes so I would want to keep that in mind when looking at lab results.

On your second, I’d like to hear more. It seems to me that captivity, for example, is an environment to which an animal can adapt. Adapting to one environment doesn’t necessarily mean that one remains well adapted to another.

I’d compare it to a situation where a population becomes isolated on an island, say some insects that arrive on a floating log, or in the longer term those that get separated by geological processes (Australia, for example). How does this differ? Those on the island or the separate land mass adapt to the environment with which they are presented, and that may make them less survivable in the former environment. Even our human intelligence has its downside under certain circumstances.

I simply fail to see how this is an argument against evolution, or even a very exciting observation. It all seems rather obvious. What am I missing?

To your last point, I didn’t find as much disdain for the logic used by Dr. Anderson as you did. Take for example animals in captivity who develop changes that adversely affect how they will survive in the wild. I don’t think it’s inappropriate to raise a concern that a lab environment may not accurately reflect the larger environment. The burden lies on both sides of the argument to perform due diligence in deciding on whether the lab conditions can be extrapolated to the environment at large. Drug companies face this struggle all the time.