Challenges to Carbon Dating Accuracy

1. Sermons From Science -- Jan 2019科学布道-- 2019年1月 Sermons from Science have been published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and their PowerPoint slides and corresponding videos in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org since 2011. Just type “Pastor Chui” in Google Search. The contents of this presentation were taken from different sources and in the Internet. May God have all glory. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 1/1/2020 1

2. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • The Creation.com website published the article on September 8, 2018. I now quote the article below: • “Bill N. of Australia wrote in response to the article How old? When archaeology conflicts with the Bible, saying that 14C, dendrochronology, and uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating techniques are indeed trustworthy, as are the experts and labs that perform these tests. He asks, “What did CMI do to disillusion them, and who is fooling who?” His message is below in red. Responses from CMI’s Gavin Cox (and some from Robert Carteron corals) are interspersed: • “There are several tree-ring chronologies which are reported to agree with each other, and C14 dating of rings enables a calibration curve for C14 against age to be constructed to account for variation of C14 production from time to time due to altered solar activity or volcanism. 1/1/2020 2

3. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 “Multiple annual rings of Bristlecone Pine trees (Pinus longaeva) have been demonstrated to have formed, thus demolishing in one stroke the idea of fixed single annual ring growth as a reliable way to age-date wood. 1/1/2020 3

4. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “Unless the investigator was there to observe and measure all variables, it can never be known for certain that the final observed and measured ratios of a sample under investigation reflect a simple linear relationship going back into deep time. • “Thanks for your question Bill; it is very involved and has multiple lines of reasoning within it. If you follow the link in footnote 25 from my article you will see a link to the Belfast tree ring correlations, so your statement, “There are several tree-ring chronologies which are reported to agree with each other” is already answered. Obviously, I am questioning the conclusions of that study. First, just because several things agree does not make what they agree upon correct or true (i.e., ‘correlation does not prove causation’). 1/1/2020 4

5. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “Second, while agreement on an outcome among several independent techniques is generally considered a good indication of a reasonably reliable outcome, all tree-ring chronologies are derived using the same basic assumptions, so they can hardly be considered to be independent determinations. Thus, the fact of their agreement is not necessarily a compelling argument for the correctness of the result. • “That being said, the Belfast data is a well-known example of a lengthy, (claimed) continuous tree ring chronology, from AD 5 – 2006, but this particular example (methodological assumptions aside) is obviously not a problem for the biblical time-scale. 1/1/2020 5

6. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “I also mention supposed agreement for bristlecone pine (BCP) tree rings in my article, but that depends on matching rings from living and dead trees (“prone wood”) that has been 14C dated to multiple thousands of years. This is highly subjective and goes against common sense, in that the wood should have rotted or disintegrated in all that supposed time. For example, one study published by “a group of researchers from the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Minnesota” concludes fallen conifers will take 57 to 124 years to completely disintegrate,1 while another article reports tree stumps generally take approximately 10 years to disintegrate.2 This, of course, depends on the exact environmental conditions, but fallen trees generally do not last for centuries, let alone millennia. 1/1/2020 6

7. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “Tree ring dating also assumes a single annual growth ring, but this assumption has been demonstrated to be false, in that BCPs have been shown to develop multiple annual rings when under harsher, more arid conditions. My article quoted a secular expert in dendrochronology, Dr. Grissino-Mayer, who openly raised major questions regarding the reliability of dendrochronology at the 2015 Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Chicago. So your implication that 14C and dendrochronology are ‘wholly reliable’ methods is not shared by the experts in those fields. 1/1/2020 7

8. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “These methods are highly subjective, and rely upon a rigid adherence to uniformitarian principles. I also question the idea that 14C calibration can take account of ‘altered solar activity’ as you put it. If these changes in the past have not been observed, then they cannot be accurately quantified and so the models cannot take such changes into account. See the Creation Answers Book, chapter 4 (pp. 68–70), on this subject (available here). The same would be true for volcanism. If the investigator was not there to observe and measure the extra 14C-free volcanogenic carbon dioxide absorbed into the tree, then how can accurate models be calibrated to take this into account? Fellow biblical creationist John Woodmorappe states: 1/1/2020 8

9. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • ““Artificially-inflated 14C dates have been found to occur when trees absorb ‘infinitely old’ carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from local, volcanogenic, subterranean sources. This is not to be confused with wood contamination because the carbon is firmly locked within the wood fibres. A similar effect has long been recognised with the fictitious ‘built-in’ carbon-14 dates that occur in molluscs when they absorb ‘infinitely old’ carbon from carbonate rocks. In addition, creationists recognise that the global atmospheric build-up of 14C after the Creation and Flood would have produced artificially-old carbon-14 dates. However, the widespread emanation of 14C-free volcanogenic carbon dioxide after the Flood would have further inflated the carbon-14 dates of tree rings in a systematic manner in many parts of the world.” (full article here) 1/1/2020 9

10. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “Corals can be dated using U-Th and C14 on the same sample and this produces the same curve. U-Th dates are not affected by solar activity and so that can check C14 dates. Cores of lake beds such as Lake Malawi and Lynch's Crater show a linear increase in C14 age with depth as would be expected. • “Your point is about the absorption by corals of soluble 14C, uranium and thorium (from sea water, and or underlying rock). CMI’s Robert Carter has a PhD in marine biology and happens to be an expert in the ecology of corals. He doubts that two different methods would produce the ‘same curve’ on a sample for the following reasons: • “ 1/1/2020 10

11. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 “Radiometric age-dating of coral relies on assuming the input and outputs of 230Th/234U are known 1/1/2020 11

12. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “1. Uranium is highly soluble in seawater. Thorium is not. (The ratio 232Th/238U in seawater approximates 1x10-5). • “2. Corals readily absorb ambient U and Th from seawater. The amount of each incorporated in the skeleton generally reflects the solubility difference. • “3. How can you age-date something using the 230Th/234U method when the amount of 230Th in recent corals is highly variable? Seawater is not the only source of thorium, and different sources have a different 230Th/232Th ratio. The ratio in carbonates (1x10-2) > deep seawater > surface seawater > atmospheric dust (4x10-6). In young corals, ratios can be between 0 and 2x10-5. 1/1/2020 12

13. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -1碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-1 • “4. 230Th ranges from 0 to 1000 pg/g in modern corals,3 and one can measure different amounts of 232Th from corals of the same age. • “5. Thus, the amount of 230Th in corals is a combination of environmental and radiogenic (from interstitial U decay) sources. • “6. Finally, and this is the crux of the argument, one cannot measure 230Th/234U in ancient coral skeletons without making a lot of assumptions about the starting quantity of both constituents. This is affected by water temperature, nearby sources of both uranium and thorium (e.g. volcanic islands), and incoming thorium (of both isotopes) from various distant sources. The final age is model-dependent, after accounting for multiple correction factors….(Part 2) 1/1/2020 13

14. Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝 1/1/2020 14

15. Sermons From Science -- Jan 2019科学布道-- 2019年1月 Sermons from Science have been published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and their PowerPoint slides and corresponding videos in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org since 2011. Just type “Pastor Chui” in Google Search. The contents of this presentation were taken from different sources and in the Internet. May God have all glory. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 1/1/2020 15

16. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Dr Carter says: • “I highly suspect there are funny things happening with 12C and 14C in coral skeletons as well, but that is another study for another day. Regarding 14C dating of lake sediments, of course there is a correlation of age vs. depth. That is expected by all sides. But we expect there to be an anomalous increase with depth because 14C in the atmosphere is increasing over time. Not only are we not in equilibrium since Creation, but the magnetic field of the earth is continually declining. So any deep lake sediments that were laid down in the early post-Flood centuries will appear to be older than they really are. 1/1/2020 16

17. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Regarding oxygen isotope measurements in corals, yes, this is temperature dependent, but it is also highly tied to circular arguments about climate change (Milankovitch Cycles), etc. You can't really age-date a coral skeleton based on oxygen isotope ratios without already knowing where it is in relation to already-dated corals, for different dates can yield the same ratio. So, they string together many ratios from the same coral at different depths and correlate these to the results of other corals. This is directly parallel to dendrochronology. 1/1/2020 17

18. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Conclusions: The sceptics sound like they have everything tied together in a neat little bundle, with multiple independent correlating measurements. But, how much of this is due to them rejecting any method that did not already give them what they want? And how much of this is due to one or more of the primary methods being based on wrong assumptions and so the following methods only appear to correlate?”4 • “Like I said in my article, unless the investigator was there to measure and observe the inputs and outputs for the history of the sample being tested (whether for 14C or 234U–230Th), it will never be known for certain what the initial conditions were, nor how environmental factors have changed the ratios of parent-daughter isotopes. Therefore, all claims of accurate clocks going back into the unobserved past must be met with scepticism. 1/1/2020 18

19. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Unless the investigator was there to observe and measure all variables, it can never be known for certain that the final observed and measured ratios of a sample under investigation reflect a simple linear relationship going back into deep time. Worse, there are good reasons to reject uniformitarian assumptions. Factors like the decrease in the Earth’s magnetic field, changes in solar activity received by the earth, radical changes to the 12C/14C ratio after the end of the Ice Age, modern factors including the Industrial age, atomic testing, and the all-important Flood, have impacted the ratio in ways for which we cannot fully account. 1/1/2020 19

20. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “There are over 100 C14 labs doing a total of 10s of thousands at least of tests annually. If C14 is so unreliable, why haven't researchers who send their specimens for testing noticed it? What does CMI do to disillusion them? • “But, contrary to your comment, researchers have actually noticed anomalous results for their samples for decades, and CMI has simply reported on their results. There was a major study of 14C reported by the RATE team (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) back in 2005. They listed 90 peer-reviewed papers, going back to 1984, that reported anomalous results for 14C in samples supposedly 100,000 to multi-million-years (in the evolutionary time-scale). Of course, this is an impossible situation, unless these ancient materials are young—which we believe they are. One of the researchers who carried out this study (Dr. John Baumgardner, who holds a PhD in geophysics and space physics and was a career researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory) stated: 1/1/2020 20

21. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 “Dr. John Baumgardner earned his Ph.D. in geophysics at UCLA and worked as a scientist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and was a member of the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) team and led the RATE research effort on carbon-14. 1/1/2020 21

22. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • ““A remarkable discovery made over the past twenty-five years is that organic samples from every level in the Phanerozoic portion [life-bearing] of the geological record, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, display significant and reproducible amounts of 14C. Because the lifetime of 14C is so brief, these AMS measurements pose an obvious challenge to the standard geological timescale that assigns millions to hundreds of millions of years to this part of the rock record…”5 (article pdf available here). 1/1/2020 22

23. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Official calibration curves for C14 have been produced for many years to account for variation in C14 production. If these are not based on good evidence, who is fooling whom? • “Unless the experimenter is claiming to be omniscient, then the further one goes back in time the more unreliable the dates obtained will be. The Hallstat Disaster/Plateau graph discussed in my article is a known example of this, and no amount of calibration can yield accurate dates in the period 400 – 800 BC. And yes, it’s an “official calibration curve”, as you put it, that does exactly the opposite of what you claim, showing for all to see an area of unresolvable inaccuracy. 1/1/2020 23

24. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “A critical factor to consider, that, in my mind, blows most of the claims of accurate 14C dating for very old samples out of the water: Willard Libby, the Nobel Prize winner who invented the 14C method, assumed an equilibrium condition between the production of 14C and its disintegration. It was a critical assumption. Subsequently, scientists have found that the system (Earth and atmosphere) has not yet reached a steady state, which means the Earth cannot be more than a few thousand-years old, because it only takes about 30,000 years to reach equilibrium based on the half-life of 14C. • “Finally, you ask “who is fooling whom?” I would ask, is it the method itself, or the assumption behind the method that is fooling everyone? 1/1/2020 24

25. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “I strongly suggest it is the unprovable assumption of uniformitarianism that is fooling everyone. It is worth re-reading Dr. Grissino-Mayer’s five concluding remarks at the end of my article as an example of a secular expert in his field saying exactly this. And the same things have been pointed out by creationists for years (regarding the faulty philosophical assumptions behind the methods). Hutton defined what uniformitarianism is and explained how he applied it to earth history. He wrote: • “The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. … No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe …”. 1/1/2020 25

26. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Hutton did not derive his assumptions from the geological evidence, he was, rather, imposing unprovable constraints on these observations, determining what explanations would be allowed! Moreover, he was doing it in such a way as to preclude Noah’s Flood as an explanation, no matter how well such an explanation might explain the observations, simply because, (i) we do not see global floods happening now and, (ii) it was a supranatural phenomenon. Uniformitarianism, a-priori, rules-out a supernatural creation, or a global Flood. It is these assumptions that are fooling everyone. It reminds me of this relevant passage of Scripture that seems to prophecy the kind of uniformitarian thinking that leads so many astray: 1/1/2020 26

27. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • ““They will say, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation.’ For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly”—(2 Peter 3:4–7). 1/1/2020 27

28. 14C dating—who is fooling who? -2碳14C年龄 - 谁在愚弄谁？-2 • “Please don’t be fooled into thinking things will ‘continue as they always have’ as per the self-serving uniformitarian assumptions. There was a global Flood in the past and Christ will return to judge the world in the future, this time by fire, I trust you will be ready for His return. • “Sincerely yours,“Gavin Cox” 1/1/2020 28

29. Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝 1/1/2020 29

30. Sermons From Science -- Jan 2019科学布道-- 2019年1月 Sermons from Science have been published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and their PowerPoint slides and corresponding videos in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org since 2011. Just type “Pastor Chui” in Google Search. The contents of this presentation were taken from different sources and in the Internet. May God have all glory. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 1/1/2020 30

31. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • The Creation.com website published the article written by Dr Robert W. Carter. I now quote his article below: • “In the same way that species are not static, neither are genomes. They change over time; sometimes randomly, sometimes in preplanned pathways, and sometimes according to instruction from pre-existing algorithms. Irrespective of the source, we tend to call these changes ‘mutations’. Many evolutionists use the existence of mutation as evidence for long-term evolution, but the examples they cite fall far short of the requirements of their theory. Many creationists claim that mutations are not able to produce new information. 1/1/2020 31

32. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Confusion about definitions abounds, including arguments about what constitutes a mutation and the definition of ‘biological information’. Evolution requires the existence of a process for the invention of new information from scratch. Yet, in a genome operating in at least four dimensions and packed with meta-information, potential changes are strongly proscribed. Can mutations produce new information? Yes, depending on what you mean by ‘new’ and ‘information’. Can they account for the evolution of all life on Earth? No! 1/1/2020 32

33. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 “Mutations are known by the harm they cause, such as the one in the ‘feather duster budgie’ (left), which results in deformed feathers in the budgerigar. However, some genetic changes seem to be programmed to happen, creating variety and assisting in organisms adapting. Is this ‘new information’? 1/1/2020 33

34. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “The phrase, “Mutations cannot create new information” is almost a mantra among some creationists, yet I do not agree. Evolutionists have a number of responses to the idea, although most of them display faulty reasoning. Most evolutionary responses display a lack of understanding of the complexity of the genome. I will explain below why I believe the genome was designed to operate in at least four dimensions and why this causes difficulty for the evolutionary belief in the rise of new information. 1/1/2020 34

35. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Another issue, especially displayed among evolutionists (but creationists, including myself, are not immune), is a lack of understanding of the location of biological information. Most people tend to think DNA (the ‘genome’) is the storage place of information. While it is certainly the location of a tremendous amount of it, this gene-centered view ignores the information originally engineered into the first created organisms. The architecture of the cell, including the cell wall, nucleus, sub-cellular compartments and a myriad of molecular machines, did not originate from DNA, but was created separately and alongside DNA. Neither can exist without the other. 1/1/2020 35

36. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Thus, a large, yet immeasurable, part of biological information resides in living organisms outside DNA. Taking an organism-centric view changes the debate dramatically.1 Yet, because the organism-centric view ultimately involves the creative genius of God, which we cannot begin to fathom, we immediately run into a ‘wall of incalculability’. For this reason, I will focus on one subset of biological information, genetic information, for the remainder of this article. 1/1/2020 36

37. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “A third issue involves the fact that Darwin actually wrote about two different ideas, what I like to call his special and general theories of evolution (described below). Creationist reactions against evolution in general have led to some misunderstanding of the amounts of change we might expect in living organisms over time. There are three basic ideas I would like to introduce in this discussion: 1) In the same way that God was not limited to creating static species, God was not limited to creating static genomes; 2) God may have placed intelligently designed genetic algorithms into the genomes of His created kinds that cause changes in genetic information or even create information de novo; and 3) God could have engineered information in compressed form into the genome that would be later decompressed and seen as ‘new’ information. 1/1/2020 37

38. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “What is a mutation? • “A ‘mutation’ is a change in the sequence of DNA. Mutations can be bad or (theoretically) good, but they all involve some change in the sequence of letters (base pairs) in the genome. A single mutation can be as simple as a single letter swap (e.g. C changed to T) or the insertion or deletion of a few letters. These simple mutations are in the majority. Mutations can also be complex, like the deletion or duplication of an entire gene, or even a massive inversion of a millions-of-base-pairs section of a chromosome arm. 1/1/2020 38

39. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “We have to make a distinction between mutation and ‘designed variation’. • “I do not believe all current human genetic differences are due to mutation. We have to make a distinction between mutation and ‘designed variation’. There are a huge number of single letter differences between people, and these are mostly shared among all people groups.2 This indicates that much of the diversity found among people was designed: Adam and Eve carried a significant amount of diversity; this diversity was well-represented on the Ark and in the Babel population immediately after the Flood, and the post-Babel people groups were large enough to carry away most of the variation present at Babel. 1/1/2020 39

40. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Most deletions (~90%), however, are not shared among the various human subpopulations.3 This indicates that a significant number of deletions have occurred in the human genome, but after Babel. Deletions are apparently not designed variation and are an example of rapid genomic decay. The same can be said of DNA insertions, but they are about 1/3 as common as the same-size deletion. The ubiquity of large, unique deletions in the various human subpopulations worldwide is evidence for rapid erosion or corruption of genetic information, through mutation. 1/1/2020 40

41. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “What is a gene? • “Technically, a ‘gene’ is a piece of DNA that codes for a protein, but modern genetics has revealed that different parts of different genes are used in different combinations to produce proteins,4,5 so the definition is a bit up in the air at the moment.6 Most people, including scientists, use ‘gene’ to mean two different things: either 1) a piece of DNA that codes for a protein, or 2) a trait. This is an important distinction to keep in mind. 1/1/2020 41

42. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “What is information? • “This question, ‘What is information’, is the real crux of the argument, yet the term ‘information’ is difficult to define. When dealing with this subject, in most cases evolutionists use a statistical measure called Shannon Information. This was a concept invented by the brilliant electronic engineer C.E. Shannon in the middle of the 20th century, who was trying to answer questions about how much data one could stuff into a radio wave or push through a wire. Despite common usage, Shannon’s ideas of information have little to do with biological information. 1/1/2020 42

43. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Case in point: A beautiful cut-glass vase can be described quite easily. All one needs is a description of the material and the location of each edge and/or vertex in 3-D space. Yet, a million-dollar vase can be smashed into a worthless pile of sand quite easily. If one wanted to recreate that pile of sand exactly, a tremendous amount of Shannon information would be required to describe the shape of each grain as well as the orientation and placement of grains within the pile. Which has more ‘information’, the pile of sand or the original vase into which a tremendous amount of purposeful design was placed? It depends on which definition of information one uses! 1/1/2020 43

44. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 “Figure 1. A biological system is defined as containing information when all the following five hierarchical levels of information are observed: statistics (here left off for simplicity), syntax, semantics, pragmatics and apobetics (from Gitt, ref. 9). 1/1/2020 44

45. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “In other definitions of ‘information’, the pile of sand could be described quite easily with just a few statistical measures (e.g. average grain size mass of sand angle of repose). In this sense, any number of independent piles of sand can be, for all practical purposes, identical. This is the essence of Zemansky’s use of information,7 yet this also has little to do with biological information, for biology is not easy to summarize, and any such attempts would produce meaningless results (e.g. a statistical measure of the average rate of a chemical reaction mediated by a certain enzyme says nothing about the origin of the information required to produce that enzyme). 1/1/2020 45

46. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “A definition of ‘biological information’ is not easy to come by, and this complicates the discussion of the power of mutation to create information. However, pioneers in this field, including Gitt8 and others, have discussed this issue at great length so it is not necessary to reproduce all the arguments here. I will follow Gitt and define information as, “ … an encoded, symbolically represented message conveying expected action and intended purpose”, and state that, “Information is always present when all the following five hierarchical levels are observed in a system: statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and apobetics” (figure 1).9 While perhaps not appropriate for all types of biological information, I believe Gitt’s definition can be used in a discussion of the main focus of this article: potential changes in genetic information. 1/1/2020 46

47. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Can mutations create information? • “Now we can address the main question, “Can mutations create new genetic information?” • “1) God was not limited to creating static genomes, in the same way that He was not limited to creating fixed species.10 In the 1800s, Darwin pushed back against the popular idea that God created all species in their present form. The Bible does not teach ‘fixity of species’, of course; this idea came from the teachings of older scientists and philosophers, primarily rooted in the writings of Aristotle.11 Today, most creationists do not have trouble with non-fixity of species. 1/1/2020 47

48. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Evolutionists constantly attempt to bring up the straw man argument that we believe in species stasis, even comparing us to people who believed in a flat earth, but both of these are historical myths.12 Most people throughout history believed the earth was round, and there were creationists, like Linnaeus13 and Blyth,14 prior to Darwin who believed species could change (though not beyond a certain limit). CMI, in particular, have published articles and one DVD15 on the subject of how species change over time and have an entire section on the topic on our Q&A page.16 Here is an important question: if species can change, what about their genomes? 1/1/2020 48

49. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 Figure 2. Schematic view of the central role that ‘intelligently-designed’ VIGEs may play in generating variation, adaptations and speciation events in the genomes of living things to induce DNA changes. Lower part: VIGEs may directly modulate the output of (morpho)genetic algorithms due to position effects. Upper part: VIGEs that are located on different chromosomes may be the result of speciation events, because their homologous sequences facilitate chromosomal translocations and other major karyotype rearrangements. (From Terborg, ref 22.) 1/1/2020 49

50. Can mutations create new information? -1突变可以创造新信息吗？-1 • “Not only are species not fixed, but more than several articles have been published in this journal alone on the topic of non-static genomes, including recent articles by Alex Williams,17 Terborg,18 Jean Lightner,19 Evan Loo Shan,20 and others. It looks like God engineered into life the ability to change DNA. This occurs through homologous crossover, jumping genes (retrotransposons,21 ALUs, etc.), and other means (including the random DNA spelling errors generally called ‘mutations’). Terborg has coined a phrase, ‘variation inducing genetic elements’ (VIGEs)22 to describe the intelligently-designed genetic modules God may have put into the genomes of living things to induce DNA sequence changes (figure 2). 1/1/2020 50