Dr. Anjeanette Roberts: Why Cannot Mutations Produce Information

Oh, that's a great question. Mutations are thought of as the basic mechanism for generating novelty in the evolutionary story, right? But when we start to talk about evolutionary novelty I think this is one of the biggest hurdles that evolution theory faces because novelty doesn't mean that I'm just duplicating something that's already there or rearranging something that's already there, scrambling and hoping that once I scrambled it or rearranged it that I've produced a novel information. We can also get genes passed in from other organisms that might introduce novelty but when we realize they were already in another organism then it's not really, truly novelty that’s being driven through these basic evolutionary mechanisms like mutations. So, I think evolutionary novelty is a very high hurdle for naturalistic explanations and I think that's one of those things that points us strongly to design because information is difficult to generate this way.