Evolution (Con) vs. Creationism (Pro)

My opponent forfeited, so I'll use this round solely to address the point regarding beneficial mutation I left open in my last argument, specifically concerning the Lenski experiment and MDR germs. Regarding the MDR germs there is little I can do to prove you wrong. While the source you mentioned to prove the existence of MDR bacteria in fossils is only semi-reliable (All links on the Internet I saw regarding the book or the find linked directly to non-scientific creationist sites, and I didn't come across any independent confirmation), I cannot disprove the possibility that MDR germs were always around in very small numbers. That hypothesis does raise the question why God would create them, and how he knew what kind of medicine would be used millennia later, but trying to answer those kind philosophical questions would not benefit this debate. Because of that I have to take back MDR germs as a solid proof for evolution. They still remain as evidence though since they behave exactly as predicted by evolution, which is a great confirmation for a scientific theory. The Lenski experiment is a different matter though. As you quoted, the most likely explanation the scientists came up with is "that an existing transporter has been co-opted for citrate transport under oxic conditions. This transporter may previously have transported citrate under anoxic conditions (43) or, alternatively, it may have transported another substrate in the presence of oxygen.” You claim that this is a loss of specificy and therefore a loss of information. That claim is, forgive me to say this, kind of ridiculous. Each aspect of an organism's metabolism is usually highly specialized to its role. If a transponder cannot transport a certain matter under aerobic conditions, this is not because it has a switch installed that shuts it off if there is oxygen around, but because it for example works with the osmotic pressure of oxygen molecules, or is reliant on other substances that aren't around under aerobic conditions As I mentioned in an earlier argument, in this specific case the reason is that a certain protein is necessary for the transport, which the metabolism only generates in anaerobic surroundings. In order to make the transport process work in aerobic conditions, the metabolism needs to find a workaround by either making the protein redundant, or by producing it elsewise under oxic conditions. This obviously requires new genetic information. What we are looking at is basically a less complex version of a fish learning to breathe air. While it does come with the loss of specificy between air and water, you wouldn't go ahead and say that it has become less complex in the process, would you? In the end it doesn't matter, whether the species co-opted it's gill's to also work with air, developed lungs in addition to gills, or even replaced the gills with lungs, each time a fundamental change in the DNA is required that can definitely not be explained away as pure information loss. You also said that evolution would have to explain how single-cell organisms evolved to multicellular organisms where different cells work together. This is an explanation I can happily provide. The answer is that the development didn't happen in a single step. In fact it is very likely that the first multicellular organisms were made up by simply two "normal" cells pepped together, which can happen through an unlikely, but possible mutation. The new population of two celled organisms would have no evolutional advantage over the single celled ones, as the change is ambivalent. However, they also have no evolutional disadvantages. Because of that the two populations develop in parallel for some time, until a second mutation makes the two cells work together and thus more efficient. A very interesting video on how ambivalent mutations can lead to positive results in long run can be found here: (It is actually about "evolving" clocks in a pc program, but it provides a very good example for how blind evolution can lead to complex organisms despite the unlikelihood of beneficial mutations.) I also want to stress again, that even should you manage to disprove Lenski, MDR germs and every other example of observed beneficial mutations I throw at you, you won't manage disprove evolution that way. Beneficial mutations are extremely rare. Evolutionary processes take millions of years and we have started to specifically look for beneficial mutations for less than 150 years. Even worse, even when we do come across a mutation never seen before, there is most of the time no way to disprove that it didn't already exist on some rouge island for eons, but never was found before. Because of that the (supposed) lack of observation does not count as an argument against the existence of beneficial mutations. I would really like to see a biological or logical explanation, why beneficial mutations are supposed to be impossible. So far not a single creationist has ever been able to provide me with one.