The scientific evidence for Natural Selection is overwhelming.

Was the mutation that allowed E.coli to ingest citrate a new set of information as my opponent claims? Well, E.coli"s DNA already had the citrate transporter gene citT. This gene encodes a protein which transports citrate into the cell. The mutation merely duplicated the part of the DNA which contains this citT gene. The duplicated citT gene was not hemmed in by the same regulatory control of the original citT gene, and this allowed it to code the protein to transport citrate under normal oxygen levels. (Zachary Blount, et al., "Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population," Nature 489 (2012): 513-518) So instead of creating new information, this experiment merely duplicated already existing information and used this information outside the restrictions of the normal regulatory system. Duplicating AB doesn"t give you new information, it just gives you AB all over again. Using old information for a new purpose doesn"t make it new information, so again, these mutations created nothing new. In fact, I can"t even say for a new purpose, because E.coli already had the ability to ingest citrate, merely under different circumstances. So we don"t have new information, nor do we even have a new function! In fact, the fact that the original citT gene was only expressed under low oxygen levels suggests that it may have suffered a loss of regulation, which brings us back again to recessive traits in the gene. Pro says that "No one who proposes this argument ever defines information for a coherent understanding." Michael Behe gives a nice explanation in his book, Signature in the Cell: "When scientists during the late 1940s began to define information, they did not make reference to physical parameters such as mass, charge, or watts. Instead, they defined information by reference to a psychological state"the reduction of uncertainty"which they proposed to measure using the mathematical concept of probability. The more improbable a sequence of characters or signals, the more uncertainty it reduces, and thus the more information it conveys.10 Not surprisingly, some writers have come close to equating information with thought itself. The information technology guru George Gilder, for example, notes that developments in fiber optics have allowed more and more information to travel down smaller and smaller (and lighter and lighter) wires. Thus, he notes that as technology advances, we convey ever more thought across ever less matter"where the numerator in that ratio, namely, thought, corresponds precisely to information.11 So should we think of information as thought"as a kind of mental chimera etched in stone or burned onto compact discs? Or can we define information less abstractly as, perhaps, just an improbable arrangement of matter? Whatever information is"whether thought or an elaborate arrangement of matter"one thing seems clear. What humans recognize as information certainly originates from thought"from conscious or intelligent activity. A message received via fax by one person first arose as an idea in the mind of another. The software stored and sold on a compact disc resulted from the design of a software engineer. The great works of literature began first as ideas in the minds of writers... Our experience of the world shows that what we recognize as information invariably reflects the prior activity of conscious and intelligent persons." Information is thought being transmitted. When you fax a letter from New York to Washington, the information you sent isn"t the paper and ink that comes out. Those are the medium, not the message. Something traveled between New York and Washington which is entirely separate from the mediums used to carry it. Similarly, "The DNA molecule carries the genetic language, but the language itself is independent of its carrier. The same genetic information can be written in a book, stored in a compact disk or sent over the Internet, and yet the quality or content of the message has not changed by changing the means of conveying it." (DNA: The Tiny Code That's Toppling Evolution, by Mario Seiglie) Since information is the product of a mind, there must be an intelligence which programs this information into bacteria, cells, and DNA. Now Pro was the one who argued that "over 20 years of experimenting, 7,000 flasks and 45,000 generations had passed. For human equivalent it would roughly be a million years to the time of Homo erectus." What do evolutionists believe happened in the last million years? Well, that we made massive strides in evolution from homo erectus, to Neanderthals, to homo sapiens. That we changed in cranial capacity, skeletal anatomy, muscular strength, and way of life, all within a million years, so one would expect that after the equivalent of a million years, bacteria must have made far more evolutionary change. After all, bacteria are more adaptable to their environments than humans and animals; they can survive almost anywhere: "Bacteria were among the first life forms to appear on Earth, and are present in most habitats on the planet. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, and the deep portions of Earth's crust. Bacteria also live in plants, animals", and have flourished in manned space vehicles." (Wikipedia: Bacteria) Yet, after 45, 000 generations, the equivalent to almost a million years of human evolution, all Lenski"s E.coli bacteria were able to do was learn how to eat a new food? No, not even that, because they already had the ability to ingest citrate. They merely developed the ability to ingest it under different conditions? If bacteria does so little after so long and after so many generations, how much less human beings? It goes to show that the real world is far different from the vivid imagination of evolutionists! What"s more, who is to say that blind, unthinking nature would have fed E.coli with a glucose-rich broth? Says who mother earth would have fed them this broth for the right amount of time? Says who mother nature would have protected her specimens from outside contaminants? The real world of nature is quite different from the controlled confines of a lab. Is the intervention of these scientists to guide the process towards the desired result really an example of natural selection, or intelligent selection? Pro then argues that speciation in the wild is more probable than in the lab, and one of the reasons he lists is "intricate struggles for survival," but that is the very reason why speciation is less probable in the wild, because in the wild there would be many more predators available to wipe out creatures before they could even evolve. Take his rabbit illustration to begin with. There definitely won"t be any foxes in the lab, but sooner or later he will catch that rabbit in the wild. At least he has a better chance of doing so if the rabbit isn"t protected in a lab. In the wild, his E.coli would most likely have other chemical elements surrounding it which could contaminate the specimen and prevent the mutations which would lead to its ability to ingest citrate. The lab had a scientist to feed it regular, specific amounts of glucose rich broth every day, but it most likely wouldn"t have access to such in the wild, or at least not on a consistent basis. We could go on and on; so to claim the wild is a more favorable environment for speciation than the lab is nonsense. Even the scientists I quoted in the fruit fly experiment admitted that "the probability of fixation in wild populations should be even lower than its likelihood in these experiments." Pro makes an argument from authority, that people with years of experience in their fields agree that the fossil record shows evolution, but first of all, many in their respective fields with equal years experience disagree with them. Evolutionist Loren Eiseley acknowledged: "After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past." (The Immense Journey, New York, 1957, p. 199) According to New Scientist: "An increasing number of scientists, most particularly a growing number of evolutionists . . . argue that Darwinian evolutionary theory is no genuine scientific theory at all. . . . Many of the critics have the highest intellectual credentials." (June 25, 1981, p. 828) Physicist H. S. Lipson said: "The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it." (Physics Bulletin, 1980, Vol. 31, p. 138) Pro gives a list from homo georgicus to ER 1470 as examples of human evolution, but are these two any more different from each other than Michael Jordan is to a pygmy? Yet, we don"t consider pygmies to be less human than Jordan, you or me; it"s just an example of variation within the kind. If georgicus and ER 1470 were alive today, the general public wouldn"t consider them any less human than the rest of us. It"s only the desperate minds of evolutionist that demean the human race by creating these distinctions to dehumanize our ancestors into some kind of inferior species. Pro goes on to claim that: "There is not a single plausible explanation for why see simpler organisms lower down in the different strata's, while we see more complex beings further to the top." Well, it"s because God created the so-called "simpler" organisms first. In the end, none of the organisms are "simple" at all, because the information content is just too high. There was no simple beginning, only in the minds of evolutionists. Pro didn"t explain how mutation could bypass the repair mechanisms of cells and DNA to evolve us in the first place, more later. Thanks