Atheists do you have any examples of microevolution?

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, here, but duplication errors are VERY common during DNA transcription. Occasionally, such errors even result in the duplication of entire chromosomes (as in trisomy).

What do you mean by "an increase in genetic information"? How do you measure that?

EDIT:

An increase that results in a positive trait? How about the evolution of nylonase? There are certain strains of bacteria that have evolved the ability to utilize nylon byproducts as a food source by producing an enzyme called nylonase. This enzyme breaks down nylon into chemicals that the bacteria can use for food.

This trait has been observed in the field and in laboratories, and experimentation has shown that bacterial colonies that lack the gene encoding to produce nylonase can be induced to evolve the trait, given an appropriate environment. The exact mutation that produces nylonase involves the duplication of an existing gene for another enzyme, coupled with a frame-shift error. The duplication provides the extra DNA needed to encode a new gene. The frame-shift error changes the coding of the duplicate gene, resulting in an entirely new gene for an entirely new enzyme.

sure, the capability of inactivating antibiotics.

the capability of using oxygen as an electron acceptor lead to the majority of species around us. Look up anaerob and aerobic respiration.

but as you said microevolution, a well known example is the peppered moth. The dark forms produce an additional pigment, not have lost one. And yes, it did benefit the species.

I could go on for a few hours, but doubt you would appreciate it. If you really are interested here is a site to start:

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

any good genetics class will give you knowledge about quite a number of mechanisms/ways to achieve an increase in information.

could you ask more difficult questions? Those easy ones get boring.

Yes. For increased genetic variety in a population try

Lenski, R. E., 1995. Evolution in experimental populations of bacteria. In: Population Genetics of Bacteria, Society for General Microbiology, Symposium 52, S. Baumberg et al., eds., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 193-215.

and

Lenski, R. E., M. R. Rose, S. C. Simpson and S. C. Tadler, 1991. Long-term experimental evolution in Escherichia coli. I. Adaptation and divergence during 2,000 generations. American Naturalist 138: 1315-1341.

For increased genetic material try:

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/8/931...

For novel genetic material try:

Park, I.-S., C.-H. Lin and C. T. Walsh, 1996. Gain of D-alanyl-D-lactate or D-lactyl-D-alanine synthetase activities in three active-site mutants of the Escherichia coli D-alanyl-D-alanine ligase B. Biochemistry 35: 10464-10471.

and

Knox, J. R., P. C. Moews and J.-M. Frere, 1996. Molecular evolution of bacterial beta-lactam resistance. Chemistry and Biology 3: 937-947.

For novel genetically-regulated abilities, try

Prijambada, I. D., S. Negoro, T. Yomo and I. Urabe, 1995. Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 61(5): 2020-2022.

This is directly from a evolution naysayer website isn't it? The oddball presumtion that evolution means "increased Information" and of course the insistence that this just can't happen.

It keeps getting repeated as though it has some meaning. It reminds me of the flawed and discredited notion of "irreducible complexity" whose promoters thought that if they just said it enough it would gain credibility.

===

"I don't get any of my questions off websites, the question is about microevolution, and what I didn't want was people to give me examples of something that was not in really evolution."

What are you talking about? People gave you very credible verifiable and absolute example of evolution. This is a perfect example of "retreat and redefine".

You ask for X insisting it doesn't exist. Then when proven wrong you retreat and redefine what you're demanding. The problem is the scientific theory of evolution doesn't belong to you. You don't get to redefine it. You only get to retreat.

"What I mean is changes that increase genetic information, not sorting of information or loss of information."

You really have no idea what evolution is, do you? Why does evolution always have to have an increase in genetic information? Why are you under this impression?

All paralogous genes are caused by duplication, including the ones you use to smell things.

Duplication is actually quite common in mammalian DNA.

Translocation also causes an increase in genetic data, this happens in Burkitts Lymphoma. Especially in instances where the translocation is partially repaired.

And you don't know what evolution means, and I'm not an atheist.

Why are you lying about what evolution means? Are these your lies or the lies of another you've passed on.

mutations that increase genetic information? that's easy. people with down syndrome. their DNA has 47 chromosomes, even thought their parents only have 46.

http://www.ds-health.com/trisomy.htm

that isn't what "microevolution" is by the way.

Here is an example of genetics changing over a short period of time.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/l_0...

And here is a rebuttal to the claim that mutations don't add information.

http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

Claim CB102:

Mutations are random noise; they do not add information. Evolution cannot cause an increase in information.

Response:

1. It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of

* increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)

* increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)

* novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)

* novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)

If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

2. A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:

* Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000).

* RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002)

* Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)

The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.

3. According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism (Adami et al. 2000).

4. The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations (Adami et al. 2000; Schneider 2000).

Links:

Max, Edward E., 1999. The evolution of improved fitness by random mutation plus selection. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness

Musgrave, Ian, 2001. The Period gene of Drosophila. http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr01...

References:

1. Adami et al., 2000. (see below)

2. Alves, M. J., M. M. Coelho and M. J. Collares-Pereira, 2001. Evolution in action through hybridisation and polyploidy in an Iberian freshwater fish: a genetic review. Genetica 111(1-3): 375-385.

3. Brown, C. J., K. M. Todd and R. F. Rosenzweig, 1998. Multiple duplications of yeast hexose transport genes in response to selection in a glucose-limited environment. Molecular Biology and Evolution 15(8): 931-942. http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/8/931.pd...

4. Hughes, A. L. and R. Friedman, 2003. Parallel evolution by gene duplication in the genomes of two unicellular fungi. Genome Research 13(5): 794-799.

5. Knox, J. R., P. C. Moews and J.-M. Frere, 1996. Molecular evolution of bacterial beta-lactam resistance. Chemistry and Biology 3: 937-947.

6. Lang, D. et al., 2000. Structural evidence for evolution of the beta/alpha barrel scaffold by gene duplication and fusion. Science 289: 1546-1550. See also Miles, E. W. and D. R. Davies, 2000. On the ancestry of barrels. Science 289: 1490.

7. Lenski, R. E., 1995. Evolution in experimental populations of bacteria. In: Population Genetics of Bacteria, Society for General Microbiology, Symposium 52, S. Baumberg et al., eds., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 193-215.

8. Lenski, R. E., M. R. Rose, S. C. Simpson and S. C. Tadler, 1991. Long-term experimental evolution in Escherichia coli. I. Adaptation and divergence during 2,000 generations. American Naturalist 138: 1315-1341.

9. Lynch, M. and J. S. Conery, 2000. The evolutionary fate and consequences of duplicate genes. Science 290: 1151-1155. See also Pennisi, E., 2000. Twinned genes live life in the fast lane. Science 290: 1065-1066.

10. Ohta, T., 2003. Evolution by gene duplication revisited: differentiation of regulatory elements versus proteins. Genetica 118(2-3): 209-216.

11. Park, I.-S., C.-H. Lin and C. T. Walsh, 1996. Gain of D-alanyl-D-lactate or D-lactyl-D-alanine synthetase activities in three active-site mutants of the Escherichia coli D-alanyl-D-alanine ligase B. Biochemistry 35: 10464-10471.

12. Prijambada, I. D., S. Negoro, T. Yomo and I. Urabe, 1995. Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution. Applied and Environmental Microbiology 61(5): 2020-2022.

13. Schneider, T. D., 2000. Evolution of biological information. Nucleic Acids Research 28(14): 2794-2799. http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/

14. Zhang, J., Y.-P. Zhang and H. F. Rosenberg, 2002. Adaptive evolution of a duplicated pancreatic ribonuclease gene in a leaf-eating monkey. Nature Genetics 30: 411-415. See also: Univ. of Michigan, 2002, How gene duplication helps in adapting to changing environments. http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/Releases/2002/Feb02...

Further Reading:

Adami, C., C. Ofria and T. C. Collier, 2000. Evolution of biological complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 97(9): 4463-4468. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/9/4463 (technical)

Hillis, D. M., J. J. Bull, M. E. White, M. R. Badgett, and I. J. Molineux. 1992. Experimental phylogenetics: generation of a known phylogeny. Science 255: 589-92. (technical)

"changes that increase genetic information, not sorting of information or loss of information."

What the hell are you talking about?