Common descent has occurred on Earth.

As my opponent has instigated this debate, I will assume that he is versed in basic genetics. As such, I will not specify what exactly is "genetic information," which is not "Shannon Information." I will begin my arguments now, his can wait. (Any source that only contains the abstract means that I"m citing the abstract, which is the essence of the article) The Cost is Too High In regards to genetic information, the information coded within the genome, any mutation, by definition, is "new information" in that it is a new allele. However, "new information" does not equate to "beneficial information." Most of the time, it is a very slightly deleterious mutation.[1] This simply means that natural selection cannot act against such mutations in the way that it would act against strongly deleterious mutations (Such as sickle-cell anemia mutation). There are three main types of mutations, "The mutations at 1 of these categories of site are assumed to be neutral, whereas mutations at the other sites are assumed to be strongly deleterious, neutral, or advantageous..."[1] In every human individual (The most widely studied genome), there are about 100-200 new mutations,[2] besides any mutations they might already have inherited. In fact, populations face a risk of extinction simply due to fixation of reverse as well as deleterious mutations. "For a given effective population size, the selection coefﬁcient that maximizes the rate of erosion of mean Malthusian ﬁtness, obtained from delta(sR)=deltas = 0, is the solution of 2Nes + e-2Nes = 1 ors = 0:797=(2Ne). Thus, nearly neutral mutations, with s slightly less than 1/(2Ne), do the most damage to the population... Nearly neutral mutations that maximize the rate of erosion of mean Malthusian ﬁtness also minimize the expected time to extinction. For 2Nes> 1, the expected time to extinction increases almost exponentially with Ne with a constant selection coefﬁcient... [T]he required number of loci ﬁxed for mildly deleterious mutations to cause extinction is only a small fraction of the total number of loci... [M]any mutations, such as large deletions of unique DNA sequence, are not reversible..." [3] Taking into account mutations alone, Kondrashov A.S. has estimated that humans would have died out 100 times over within just the time evolution allows for humans to have been around [4]. Thus, by mutation alone, we can see that not only is common descent in the manner Pro wishes it to happen cannot occur, but that random processes cannot even allow for the retention of information. What all these leads to is something known as Muller"s Ratchet. In [5], Loewe L. estimated from mutations just from within the mtDNA would have caused humans to go extinct within 20 million years. However, if all known data is taken into account, ie. the fact that deleterious mutations occur in other regions besides the mtDNA, the time t to extinction rapidly approaches 0. There is also a very big problem in that any beneficial mutations which would override the effects from a few slightly deleterious mutations would not be capable of being selected for. This phenomena is known as genetic linkage, where a chunk of DNA is inherited in the offspring. Genes tend to clump together in linkage blocks. This means simply that the beneficial and deleterious mutations are banded together and as such deleterious mutations cancel out the beneficial mutations. The ratio between deleterious and beneficial mutations also tends to be incredibly high. (See previous citations) Mutations are also known to cause most of the diseases humans experience [6], besides already being degenerational to the genetic information. All of these point to the fact that mutations can never allow for common descent in the manner MW wishes. I will expand on this with criticism. The fact that he has forfeited does not prove common descent on earth. 1. http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org... (Mol Biol Evol (2008) 25 (6): 1007-1015.) 2. http://www.genetics.org... (Genetics September 1, 2000 vol. 156 no. 1 297-304) 3. http://link.springer.com... (Genetica 102/103: 21"27, 1998.) 4. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (J Theor Biol. 1995 Aug 21;175(4):583-94.) 5. http://journals.cambridge.org... (Genetical Research / Volume 87 / Issue 02 / April 2006, pp 133-159) 6. http://homepages.ed.ac.uk... (Genetics February 1, 2012 vol. 190no. 2 295-304)