Stiffening? Bony plates on the skin for protection? Bony horns, again for protection. Horns do not need muscles.
Read Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish” for a much better explanation than I can provide here.
Look at the bones in the fins of a fish; one function is to stiffen the fin. Look at the wings (aka fins) on a squid. Those wings do not have bones, but do have the muscle attachments to move; see here. Add a stiffening bone to a muscular wing and you have a functioning bone in a wing/fin which already has the muscles to move. Attachments between bone and muscles can come later. The assembly is functional without the muscle attachments to the stiffening bone.
Mutations don’t add anything. Mutations remove information. Mutations can’t add a stiffening bone.
Falsehoods.
Do mutations ever add a single bit or byte? If a mutation and code removal ever manages to be beneficial, does it not come at the cost of accompanying deleterious side effects?
Yes, gene duplication mutations do as well as several other well known types of mutation events.
Computer programs don’t biologically reproduce. ‘Code’ isn’t a perfect analogy, it’s still chemistry.
Not biologically, but there is no requirement to limit life to organic life. There are computer viruses, which can and do adopt to new environment. The problem is that people think about carbon-based forms as the only way for life. The silicon based existence is not an organic form of life, but it fulfills the only only definition of life that exists: “Complex responses to complex stimuli.”
This is false, as @Dan123 pointed out. Your sources are lying to you. Mutations can remove information; mutations can leave information unchanged; mutations can increase information.
The Qur’an tells me that the Creator is Allah. The Bhagavad Gita tells me that the Creator is Vishnu. Tauber and Tauber (1977) tells me that ordinary evolutionary mechanisms, three mutations in this case, can cause a new species to evolve. I pick number three.
Another piece of advice, almost every site that calls evolution “Darwinism” is going to be lying to you. You need to learn to avoid those sites if you want to avoid untruths.
Have a read of “The Invincible” by Stanislaw Lem.
How do mutations increase information? How does a random mutation write even one bit or byte of new information that isn’t total nonsense? Who is the author of this information?
Of course I did! Also the Cyberiad, and Mymosh the Self-Begotten.
We both just mentioned types of mutations that duplicate and change parts of DNA. It’s chemistry, ‘information’ is only a metaphor, so information needing an author doesn’t in and of itself means these new genes do. It would be like asking who ‘wrote’ a photocopy of a piece of paper.
I just showed you how a duplication followed by a point mutation can increase both Kolmogorov information and Shannon information. If you disagree that both Shannon information information and Kolmogorov information have increased in my example, then please tell us why you disagree, together with your calculations of the information before and after.
You talk about “random mutation” and then ask about an author. It is random, so there is no author. As I said, you need to find better sources if they cannot answer this simple question for you.
No I am not. I am Buddhist, not pantheist. Gods are one specific type of living being and the whole universe is not a living being.
A mutation is a defect in replication. It doesn’t exist in isolation. A mutation is part of a cell. A cell is part of a type of tissue, the tissue is part of structures within an organ. An organ is part of a system (respiratory, skeletal, digestive, reproductive, etc.). A mutation by itself introduces a defect. Part of the original is lost. Unless on mutation is coordinated with many complementary mutations, it is meaningless and invisible to blind natural selection.
How do you know it is a defect? You have not shown us your calculation of the information before or after. A mutation is a change. That change may be neutral (which most are), deleterious (the majority of the non-neutral mutations) or beneficial (the rarest, but they do occur).
Natural selection is not blind; it is very affected by the environment. Why do you think that animals living in the Arctic have evolved white fur while animals living further south have not? Some have even evolved white fur in winter and brown fur in summer where the snow melts for some of the year. Again your sources are misinforming you. You need to find better sources.
The classification into neutral, deleterious or beneficial is arbitrary and judgmental. Neutral is an imprecise concept. Something always breaks the tie. If the existing genetic code is blindly changed by the mutation, then that type of change is not neutral but damaging.
So ‘deleterious’ is arbitrary and judgemental but you’re allowed to say damaging and not be held to the same standard?
Your sources are lying to you again. Have you not yet realised that you are being grossly misinformed by what you are reading? You are in a very obvious bubble of anti-evolution misinformation, and your errors are being shot down every time you post them
Bwahahahaha! Blue eyes are caused by a mutation in the human genome. Have a look a chimp’s eyes or gorilla’s eyes if you doubt me. Are you seriously trying to say that having blue eyes is a “damaging” mutation? Is blonde hair or red hair “damaging”?
That is not true, there are many things which can be said to be works in progress. There are partial results but not the complete answer: