Hi Creation Team
God bless you guys in your ministry efforts. I love science but I am not a scientist, so I only grasp the basics.
I have read up on this question on Answers in Genesis website but still need clarity on this issue. I watched this clip put out by an evolutionist that basically says there is evidence for increase of information in organisms. He used the example of the Nylonase bacteria. To sum up his conclusion he said that the Frame Shift Mutation caused the bacteria to make up an entirely new gene which added 2352 bits of information using the Shannon theory of information to calculate this.
I read this explanation on the AIG site with its summary statement (under section Frame Shift Mutation) said “So again, the overall effect was a loss of information, and the DNA strand became smaller due to this mutation.”
The way I understand these two conclusions is that the evolutionist said that an entirely new gene was made and therefore new information or an increase of information was caused, whereas AIG stated the overall effect was a loss of information: “the DNA strand became smaller”
My question is: Was there an increase / new information or not?
Firstly, I want to endorse what my good friend, Bodie Hodge, has written in his excellent article on the Answers in Genesis website. I endorse all the points that he made.
It is possible for evolutionists to claim a statistical increase in information, by the Shannon model of information. However, Shannon information is completely inadequate to explain information. Information scientists refer to five levels of information, in increasing complexity.
- Apobetics 
Shannon deals only with level 1. But the information in DNA operates at all levels, up to and including level 5.
For example, here is a word cloud.
These attractive images give an idea of the frequency of word use. The bigger the font, the more frequently the word is used. The word cloud that I have included has been compiled from my book “The Six Days of Genesis”.
You can gain some information from this word cloud. You can see that I must have used the word “Genesis” a lot. You can also see that I used the word “earth”. The relative sizes tell you that I used the word Genesis more than the word earth! But the word cloud is NOT the book. Statistical information is valid, but not useful.
Many evolutionists ignore this, and claim that information has been spontaneously added to DNA. But they are referring only to Shannon information – statistical information. DNA also has syntax, semantics, pragmatics and apobetics. A full description of what these mean is found in Werner Gitt’s book “In the Beginning Was Information”.
Dawkins fell foul of the same nonsense, when he illustrated “new” information, by getting children to randomly pick a letter out of a bag of Scrabble letters, until three successive children picked CAT. So he announced that information had happened randomly. But this info does not tell us what the CAT does, what it looks like, or what its pet name is! Also, he ignored the fact that CAT is only a logical word in English! If he had been addressing an audience of German people, the example would be meaningless. Similarly, a new sequence in DNA could only “mean” something if there was also code available to interpret its meaning. That requires level 5 apobetic information, so a simple increase in statistical information will always be meaningless.
The simplest explanation that I have seen of these issues is to be found in Jay Seegert’s DVD, “Evolution? Probable or Problematic“:
1 Bodie Hodge, Are Mutations Part of the “Engine” of Evolution?, < http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab2/mutations-engine-of-evolution >, return
2 Werner Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information, < http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/itbwi/five-levels-information-concept >, return