This page exists so that nobody has to take the article on trust. Every source it rests on is listed here with what it measured or argued, who wrote it, and which way it cuts.
How to read an entry
Direction is assigned by what the source shows for the design and young-earth use of Behe's First Rule, or, for the sources on definitions, of the word "information", and not by what its author believes. supports means it strengthens that use. undercuts means it weakens it. complicates means it does both or changes the question. background means it bears on a neighbouring question.
Verified says how much was read by this project. full means the full text was on disk and every part the article relies on was read in its context. abstract means only the abstract, the first page, or the passages quoted were read. citation means the item was filed and not read. Nothing is quoted in the article unless the passage was read from the source's own bytes.
Status says whether the article cites the source or whether it was considered and not used, with the reason.
Each source is named by its key in the source library. The quotations, page anchoring and access routes are in research/sources.md beside this file, and in research/definitions.md for the sources on definitions.
Definitions of information
These sources support Part 1, which was added on 1 October 2026 when the definitional sections were moved here from How Rare Is a Working Protein?. Their quotations and page anchoring are in research/definitions.md beside this file.
shannon-1948
Shannon, Claude E. "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." The Bell System Technical Journal 27(3):379-423. July 1948.
camp: mainstream method: theory direction: background verified: abstract status: cited
The founding paper of information theory. It sets meaning aside in its second paragraph (p. 379) and shows that entropy is largest when all symbols are equally likely (p. 394), which for DNA is two bits per nucleotide. Read in the two passages quoted, from the Internet Archive's scan. Part 2 of the paper was not read.
szostak-2003
Szostak, Jack W. "Functional information: Molecular messages." Nature 423:689. 2003. DOI 10.1038/423689a.
camp: mainstream method: theory direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
The first definition of functional information: the negative logarithm of the probability that a random sequence does a job at least to a stated degree. An ATP-binding RNA of 70 nucleotides carries about 37 bits against 140 to specify one sequence. It names the limit of alignment-based measures four years before Durston's paper. It gives the design side a real quantity and removes every figure computed from one sequence or one alignment.
hazen-2007
Hazen, Robert M.; Griffin, Patrick L.; Carothers, James M.; Szostak, Jack W. "Functional information and the emergence of biocomplexity." PNAS 104 (suppl. 1):8574-8581. 2007. DOI 10.1073/pnas.0701744104.
camp: mainstream method: theory and measurement direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Formalises the definition and applies it to letter sequences, random Avida programs and GTP-binding RNAs. Functional information exists only for a named function at a named degree, and it needs the distribution of function over all configurations, which the authors call impossible to survey with present technology for RNA pools and not possible for living organisms (pp. 8576-8577). Eleven classes of GTP-binding RNA show several solutions to one job.
wong-2023
Wong, Michael L., and eight co-authors including Robert Hazen. "On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems." PNAS 120(43):e2310223120. 2023. DOI 10.1073/pnas.2310223120.
camp: mainstream method: theory direction: background verified: full status: cited
Proposes a "law of increasing functional information" and reports no measurement. Its own text says the analysis is "not currently feasible for most complex evolving systems." Cited for two facts only: the concept is a live research programme, and its authors cannot yet compute it for a genome. The reply printed in PNAS 121 (e2318689121) was not read.
durston-2007
Durston, Kirk K.; Chiu, David K. Y.; Abel, David L.; Trevors, Jack T. "Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins." Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 4:47. 2007. DOI 10.1186/1742-4682-4-47.
camp: intelligent design (first author) method: measurement direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Computes Fits from Pfam alignments for 35 protein families: 0 for independent random sequences, up to 2,416 for influenza PB2. It finds the binding domain of ubiquitin. The paper draws no design inference. Its S12 example prints 379 Fits where its own table has 359. The measure records conservation among the known members of one family, which is not Hazen's quantity.
matlock-2017b
Matlock, Matthew K.; Swamidass, S. Joshua. "Evolution and Functional Information." bioRxiv 114132. 5 March 2017. DOI 10.1101/114132.
camp: mainstream method: simulation direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
A preprint, never peer reviewed, with no journal version as of 1 October 2026. Sequences descended from one ancestor under no constraint score 2.6 to 0.8 bits per amino acid at 0.25 to 1 mutation per site, inside the range of real families, and the score goes to zero at several mutations per site. It also argues that functional information does not measure the distance from an existing function to a new one.
durston-2017
Durston, Kirk. "On the Astonishing Improbability of Protein Families." Evolution News, 5 April 2017.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary and simulation direction: supports verified: full status: cited
His reply to the preprint. States his hypothesis that only minds produce significant functional information. Reports a simulation with a thousand independent populations that converges on zero bits. Both of his runs put three to five mutations on every site, so they agree with the preprint about where the false score vanishes. The defence rests on more than a billion years of independent evolution. The earlier version of this material, in the rarity article, recorded that no reply had been found.
durston-2017b
Durston, Kirk. "Review of 'Evolution and functional information' by Matlock and Swamidass." Self-published, April 2017.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Five pages, linked from the reply. Grants that the estimate was wrong for the simulated family, says one author of the 2007 paper is an atheist, and says the function the 2007 measure addresses is membership of a structural family.
koonin-2008
Koonin, Eugene V.; Novozhilov, Artem S. "Origin and evolution of the genetic code: the universal enigma." arXiv 0807.4749, the manuscript of IUBMB Life 61:99-111 (2009).
camp: mainstream method: review direction: supports verified: abstract status: cited
Cited for one passage (manuscript p. 17): the origin of the coding principle and the translation system is "perhaps, the most formidable problem of all evolutionary biology," with "a dreary vicious circle" at its centre. It gives the sound part of Gitt's case without his definitions.
kolmogorov-1968
Kolmogorov, A. N. "Three Approaches to the Quantitative Definition of Information." International Journal of Computer Mathematics 2:157-168. 1968 (Russian original 1965). DOI 10.1080/00207166808803030.
camp: mainstream method: theory direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Defines the complexity of an object as the length of the shortest program that produces it (p. 165, PDF page 9). Random strings score highest and a copy adds almost nothing, so it cannot measure function, the same verdict as Shannon's measure. Added in the 2026-10-27 strengthening review.
chaitin-1975
Chaitin, Gregory J. "Randomness and Mathematical Proof." Scientific American 232(5):47-52. 1975.
camp: mainstream method: review direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
A random series is one whose shortest program is about as long as the series (section "Algorithmic Definition"). Cited for the consequence that algorithmic complexity scores noise highest.
adami-2000
Adami, Christoph, Charles Ofria and Travis C. Collier. "Evolution of biological complexity." PNAS 97:4463-4468. 2000. DOI 10.1073/pnas.97.9.4463.
camp: mainstream method: simulation direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Defines physical complexity as length less summed per-site entropy across an "equilibrated ensemble" (p. 4464), the same sum as Durston's Fits, and glosses it as "the number of base pairs in a sequence that are functional" (p. 4463). Watches it rise in Avida (p. 4466). Names the hitchhiking overestimate just after an innovation and at the start of a run (pp. 4465-4466), which is the Matlock-Swamidass objection to Durston seventeen years earlier, and estimates per-site entropy by a scan of all single mutants (p. 4465). Supports the design side on even-handedness (the mainstream twin of Fits carries the same limit) and the mainstream side on direction (the measure rises under selection). Read from the PMC PDF (PDF page N = 4462 + N) and HTML; the PDF prints ‘‘hitchhiking’’ with doubled single quotes, the HTML with double quotes.
schneider-2000
Schneider, Thomas D. "Evolution of biological information." Nucleic Acids Research 28:2794-2799. 2000. DOI 10.1093/nar/28.14.2794.
camp: mainstream method: simulation direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
The ev program. Binding-site information (Rsequence, the same per-site conservation sum) rises from near zero (p. 2794) to 3.983 ± 0.399 bits per site against a predicted 4 bits and a maximum of 12 (p. 2795); a no-mistake organism appears at generation 704. Sixteen sites at about 4 bits is about 64 bits. Moved from "considered and not used" to cited in the 2026-10-27 review, because the article now treats the conservation measures side by side.
montanez-2010
Montañez, George, Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II. "A vivisection of the ev computer organism: Identifying sources of active information." BIO-Complexity 2010(3):1-6. DOI 10.5048/BIO-C.2010.3.
camp: design method: simulation direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
The design reply to ev. Credits ev's success to "a Hamming oracle and a perceptron structure" (abstract, p. 1). Samples random ev genomes to bound the difficulty of ev's target at under 92 bits and then under 90 bits (p. 4). The paper calls this quantity both endogenous and exogenous information in the same section; the article describes it in plain words as the difficulty of hitting the target with random genomes.
schneider-2011
Schneider, Thomas D. "Dissection of 'A Vivisection of the ev Computer Organism.'" Web page, version 1.04, 2011 (evoinfo.org mirror; Schneider's own copy is gone).
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Schneider's reply: ev has selection, so it is not unguided, and "the genetic information in biological systems comes from the environment," which in ev is set by genome size G and site number γ. Shows that both sides agree the 4 bits per site are fixed by the set-up.
ewert-2013c
Ewert, Winston, Robert J. Marks II and William A. Dembski. "On the Improbability of Algorithmic Specified Complexity." Proceedings of the 45th Southeastern Symposium on System Theory, 68-70. 2013. DOI 10.1109/SSST.2013.6524962.
camp: design method: theory direction: supports verified: full status: cited
Defines ASC(X, C, P) = -log2 P(X) - K(X|C) and proves Pr[ASC >= alpha] <= 2^-alpha (p. 69). Grants that K is "unknowable" and only bounded (p. 68), uses the identical-snowflakes DUPLICATE example (p. 68), claims functioning systems are compressible by their function (p. 69), and concludes that a high score is evidence "that the assumed probability distribution was incorrect" (p. 70). Page 68 states the compression bound backwards (compressing 1000 bits to 200 is said to assure K "equals or exceeds 200 bits"); a slip, noted here and not used in the article.
ewert-2015c
Ewert, Winston, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II. "Algorithmic Specified Complexity in the Game of Life." IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems 45:584-594. 2015. DOI 10.1109/TSMC.2014.2331917.
camp: design method: theory direction: supports verified: full status: cited
Opens by granting that Shannon and Kolmogorov measures "are famous for not being able to measure meaning," and calls Durston's model "a special case" of ASC (p. 584). Its worked examples are Game of Life patterns, where the chance model is exactly known. The drop-cap "B" of "Both" and a note mark after "(KCS)" break a whole-sentence byte check; the article quotes the clause after them.
montanez-2018
Montañez, George D. "A Unified Model of Complex Specified Information." BIO-Complexity 2018(4):1-26. DOI 10.5048/BIO-C.2018.4.
camp: design method: theory direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Unifies the specified-complexity measures as statistical tests. States from the design side that "the true distribution of nature is unknown (and possibly unknowable)" and proposes bounding it by a single gene (p. 12, left column). Proposes the uniform-model score as an "entry fee" a proposed mechanism must pay (p. 17, right column). Worked examples are coin flips and simple models; no protein is scored.
devine-2014
Devine, Sean. "An Algorithmic Information Theory Challenge to Intelligent Design." Zygon 49:42-65. 2014. DOI 10.1111/zygo.12059.
camp: mainstream method: theory direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
A physicist at Victoria University of Wellington. His "deficiency in randomness" (length less algorithmic complexity) "provides an information measure with exactly the properties required by Dembski" (p. 50); it is ASC with a uniform model and no context (the article's observation). Living structures are ordered and have short descriptions (p. 49), so a high score flags order, not design. PDF page N = printed 41 + N, checked per page.
Behe's primary texts
behe-2010
Behe, Michael J. "Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and 'The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution'." The Quarterly Review of Biology 85(4):419-445. 2010. DOI 10.1086/656902.
camp: intelligent design method: review direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Defines the Functional Coded elemenT and the three modes, scores about four decades of laboratory evolution in four tables, and states the rule. Hand count of Tables 2 to 4: 66 entries, 6 gains, 21 losses, 39 modifications. The paper calls the rule a rule of thumb, scores a single substitution and several transfers as gains, and concedes that many gains occurred over history. It contains the test for the citrate mutation (p. 429) and the ambiguous case (pp. 429-430) on which Part 5 of the article turns.
behe-2019
Behe, Michael J. Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution. HarperOne. 2019.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: supports verified: full status: cited
Chapter 7 restates the scheme in looser words, adds the competition argument and the claim that helpful losses are permanent, and extends the rule to dogs, polar bears and mammoths. Scores the citrate mutation as a modification (p. 189) and calls it ambiguous (p. 190). The library EPUB carries print-page anchors, and the mapping was checked against five page citations in Lang and Rice's review.
behe-2012
Behe, Michael J. "More from Lenski's Lab, Still Spinning Furiously." Evolution News, 30 January 2012.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: supports verified: full status: cited
Behe's scoring of the phage lambda experiment as a modification of function. His reason is that the same part of the J protein binds both receptors and the receptors are alike in shape. The first point is an inference from retained binding and was not measured.
behe-2019f
Behe, Michael J. "Woo-hoo! In Science Review of Darwin Devolves, Lenski Has No Response to My Main Argument." Evolution News, 7 February 2019.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: supports verified: full status: considered and not used
Behe's first, short reply to the Science review. It restates the rule and promises a longer answer. Not cited because the longer answer, which is cited, makes the same point with reasons.
behe-2019e
Behe, Michael J. "Train Wreck of a Review: A Response to Lenski et al. in Science." Evolution News, 15 February 2019.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: supports verified: full status: cited
The detailed reply. Its strongest point is that the papers cited for gene duplication describe the existence of gene families and do not test how they arose. Behe accepts that the members of each family arose by duplication.
behe-2019c
Behe, Michael J. "A Response to My Lehigh Colleagues, Part 1." Evolution News, 22 March 2019.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Reply to Lang and Rice. Argues that no critic has compared rates. Contains two concessions: the citrate mutation "was not degradative", and chloroquine resistance through PfCRT is an exception to the rule.
behe-2019d
Behe, Michael J. "A Response to My Lehigh Colleagues, Part 3." Evolution News, 26 March 2019.
camp: intelligent design method: commentary direction: background verified: full status: considered and not used
Concerns irreducible complexity and the vacuolar ATPase, which are outside this article. Part 2 of the series was not found at its published address.
The critics
coyne-2010
Coyne, Jerry A. "Behe's new paper." Why Evolution Is True, 12 December 2010.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Grants that Behe's survey is accurate for short laboratory experiments. Rejects the extension to nature for three reasons: the experiments exclude DNA uptake, they are short, and eukaryotes gain genes by duplication and divergence. The third reason rests on comparing genomes.
lents-2019
Lents, Nathan H.; Swamidass, S. Joshua; Lenski, Richard E. "The end of evolution?" Science 363:590. 2019. DOI 10.1126/science.aaw4056.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
One-page review of Darwin Devolves. Grants that advantageous losses are common and charges Behe with selecting his examples. Its evidence for gains is mostly inferred: colour vision, smell receptors and HOX genes. It does not address the rate argument.
lenski-2019b
Lenski, Richard E. "Does Behe's 'First Rule' Really Show that Evolutionary Biology Has a Big Problem?" Telliamed Revisited, 15 February 2019.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
Accepts that breaking mutations are easy to come by and sometimes adaptive. Argues that frequency and importance are different things, and in the comments answers the competition argument with an example of a 5% gain overtaking 1% losses. The example is an illustration and not a measurement.
lenski-2019e
Lenski, Richard E. "Reply to Michael Behe's gentle comment." Telliamed Revisited, 18 February 2019.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: background verified: citation status: considered and not used
Downloaded and filed. Not read in full, because the three numbered posts of the series carry the argument.
lenski-2019d
Lenski, Richard E. "On damaged genes and polar bears." Telliamed Revisited, 22 February 2019.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: undercuts verified: citation status: considered and not used
Lenski's answer on the polar bear genes. Downloaded and filed, not read in full. The polar bear dispute turns on predictions of damage from sequence and belongs to a later article.
lenski-2019
Lenski, Richard E. "Is the LTEE breaking bad?" Telliamed Revisited, 26 February 2019.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
Argues that the experiment is the best possible case for Behe's rule, that reading substitutions as damage assumes a perfect ancestor, and that the citrate mutation is a gain. Says that the effects of most of the mutations have not been measured. Its page numbers for Behe's book are locations in an electronic copy.
lenski-2019c
Lenski, Richard E. "Evolution goes viral! (And how real science works)." Telliamed Revisited, 6 March 2019.
camp: mainstream method: commentary direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
Lenski's account of the lambda experiment and his charge that Darwin Devolves ignores it. The charge was checked against the book and holds.
lang-2019
Lang, Gregory I.; Rice, Amber M. "Evolution unscathed: Darwin Devolves argues on weak reasoning that unguided evolution is a destructive force, incapable of innovation." Evolution 73(4):862-868. 2019. DOI 10.1111/evo.13710.
camp: mainstream method: review direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
The one review in a research journal. Gives specific reasons that losses are over-represented in experiments. Two weaknesses: its figure of 3.5% for loss-of-function variants in humans counts all standing variants and not adaptive ones, and it misstates Behe's definition as accepting only new proteins.
Primary research on the scored cases
blount-2012
Blount, Zachary D., et al. "Genomic analysis of a key innovation in an experimental Escherichia coli population." Nature 489:513-518. 2012. DOI 10.1038/nature11514.
camp: mainstream method: experiment direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
The primary for the citrate mechanism. A tandem duplication of 2,933 base pairs put a copy of the citrate transporter gene under a control region that is active in oxygen. Reporter tests showed the native control region silent and the new unit active.
cooper-2001
Cooper, Vaughn S., et al. "Mechanisms Causing Rapid and Parallel Losses of Ribose Catabolism in Evolving Populations of Escherichia coli B." Journal of Bacteriology 183:2834-2841. 2001.
camp: mainstream method: experiment direction: supports verified: abstract status: cited
All twelve populations deleted part or all of the ribose operon within 2,000 generations, for a gain in fitness of 1 to 2%. Only the first page was read for this article. The sibling article on the experiment read the rest.
meyer-2012
Meyer, Justin R., et al. "Repeatability and Contingency in the Evolution of a Key Innovation in Phage Lambda." Science 335:428-432. 2012. DOI 10.1126/science.1214449.
camp: mainstream method: experiment direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
Phage lambda evolved to use a second receptor in 24 of 96 populations. Four substitutions were required and the first receptor was kept. The paper also reports that the two receptors have the most similar structures of any pair in the host, which supports Behe's reason for his score.
chan-2010
Chan, Yingguang Frank, et al. "Adaptive Evolution of Pelvic Reduction in Sticklebacks by Recurrent Deletion of a Pitx1 Enhancer." Science 327:302-305. 2010. DOI 10.1126/science.1182213.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: supports verified: abstract status: cited
Pelvic loss in freshwater sticklebacks comes from repeated deletion of one enhancer. A loss by Behe's definition, in a wild vertebrate. Inferred from comparing populations.
tishkoff-2007
Tishkoff, Sarah A., et al. "Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe." Nature Genetics 39:31-40. 2007. DOI 10.1038/ng1946.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
Three African variants and one European variant in the same enhancer, each raising transcription of the lactase gene. The abstract does not settle whether a binding site was made or spoiled.
huerta-sanchez-2014
Huerta-Sánchez, Emilia, et al. "Altitude adaptation in Tibetans caused by introgression of Denisovan-like DNA." Nature 512:194-197. 2014. DOI 10.1038/nature13408.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
The Tibetan form of EPAS1 entered the population from a Denisovan-like group. The type case for transfer in an animal.
summers-2014
Summers, Robert L., et al. "Diverse mutational pathways converge on saturable chloroquine transport via the malaria parasite's chloroquine resistance transporter." PNAS 111:E1759-E1767. 2014. DOI 10.1073/pnas.1322965111.
camp: mainstream method: experiment direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
More than 100 variants of the transporter were tested. Two substitutions give low chloroquine transport and four give full activity. Resistant forms carry a cost when the drug is withdrawn.
weinreich-2006
Weinreich, Daniel M., et al. "Darwinian Evolution Can Follow Only Very Few Mutational Paths to Fitter Proteins." Science 312:111-114. 2006. DOI 10.1126/science.1123539.
camp: mainstream method: experiment direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
Five substitutions in a β-lactamase raise resistance about 100,000-fold, and most orders of adding them are closed to selection. Quoted from the abstract. The full text was obtained on 27 September 2026 from a Wayback copy of a course mirror and supplied the detail of the five mutations; Antibiotic Resistance reads it in full and computes about 46,000-fold from its Table 1.
humeniuk-2002
Humeniuk, Christel, et al. "β-Lactamases of Kluyvera ascorbata, Probable Progenitors of Some Plasmid-Encoded CTX-M Types." Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 46:3045-3049. 2002.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: supports verified: abstract status: cited
A chromosomal gene of Kluyvera is 95 to 100% identical to resistance genes carried on plasmids in other bacteria. The type case for transfer in bacteria.
parker-2009
Parker, Heidi G., et al. "An Expressed Fgf4 Retrogene Is Associated with Breed-Defining Chondrodysplasia in Domestic Dogs." Science 325:995-998. 2009. DOI 10.1126/science.1173275.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: undercuts verified: full status: cited
Short legs in 19 dog breeds trace to one inserted copy of a growth factor gene, identical in coding sequence to its source and expressed from its new surroundings. Behe's list of dog mutations does not include it.
uz-zaman-2024
uz-Zaman, Md. Hassan, et al. "Promoter recruitment drives the emergence of proto-genes in a long-term evolution experiment with Escherichia coli." PLoS Biology 22:e3002418. 2024.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
Nine stretches of non-gene DNA began to be transcribed in Lenski's populations, some through new promoters made by point mutation. The authors say that an effect on fitness has not been shown. Read in the passages quoted, not in full.
Rates of loss and gain
hottes-2013
Hottes, Alison K., et al. "Bacterial Adaptation through Loss of Function." PLoS Genetics 9:e1003617. 2013.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: supports verified: abstract status: cited
At least one helpful knockout was found in 139 of 144 growth conditions. Independent support for the rate half of the rule. Read in the passages quoted.
couce-2024
Couce, Alejandro, et al. "Changing fitness effects of mutations through long-term bacterial evolution." Science 383:eadd1417. 2024.
camp: mainstream method: measurement direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
Presumed knockouts are more than half of the early adaptive mutations in Lenski's experiment and about a quarter in the long run. The classes are presumed from mutation type. Read in the passage quoted.
Creationist sources
carter-2025
Carter, Robert W. "Can mutations create new information?" Journal of Creation 25(2):92-98, 2011; web version updated 2025.
camp: creationist method: commentary direction: complicates verified: full status: cited
A young-earth scientist rejects the claim that mutations cannot create new information and moves the argument to the amount and kind of information. He calls information "difficult to define", follows Gitt's definition, and writes that much biological information is "immeasurable". His statement that every example he has seen "involves something breaking" is not true of the citrate mutation or the lambda switch.
gitt-1996
Gitt, Werner. "Information, science and biology." Journal of Creation 10(2):181-187. 1996.
camp: creationist method: theory direction: supports verified: full status: cited
Defines information by five levels and states theorems, among them 4 (a code is necessary), 9 (only what carries meaning is information) and 10 (information traces to a mental source). Theorem 3 calls Shannon's measure unsuitable for meaningful sequences. The conclusion that information needs a mind is contained in the definitions.
gitt-2009b
Gitt, Werner. "Scientific laws of information and their implications, part 1." Journal of Creation 23(2):96-102. 2009.
camp: creationist method: theory direction: supports verified: full status: cited
The later statement of the same definition: information is "an encoded, symbolically represented message conveying expected action and intended purpose" (p. 98). It is a test for presence and gives no amount. It separates new information from "simply copied information" (p. 100), which agrees with this series on copies. Part 2 (pp. 103-109) is in the library and is not cited.
gitt-1994
Gitt, Werner. In the Beginning Was Information. Master Books, 2005.
camp: creationist method: theory direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
Read in the passages quoted, by search inside a print-disabled Internet Archive item. Holds both the claim that "there can be no increase in information" (p. 126) and the admission that measures for semantic information have still to be defined and would rest on "subjective appraisal" (pp. 115, 119).
sarfati-2006
Sarfati, Jonathan. "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use." Creation Ministries International, 2006 and updated since.
camp: creationist method: commentary direction: complicates verified: abstract status: cited
Retires "there are no beneficial mutations" and recommends saying that no mutation has been found "that increases genetic information in ways needed for microbes-to-man evolution to be feasible." The sentence names no unit and no amount. Read in the two entries quoted.
Considered and not obtained
- Behe, "Getting There First" (in Biological Information: New Perspectives, 2013). The formal version of the rate argument. Not fetched. The argument is quoted from the 2010 paper and the 2019 book.
- Behe, "A Response to My Lehigh Colleagues, Part 2". Not found at its published address.
- Zinser et al. 2003 (Genetics 164:1271-1277). The primary for Behe's ambiguous case. The article describes it from Behe's account and says so.
- Näsvall et al. 2012 (Science 338:384). The one observed case of gain by duplication cited in the Science review. It belongs to the article on gene duplication.
- Carothers, Oestreich, Davis and Szostak 2004 (JACS 126:5130-5137). The source of the GTP-aptamer figures. Not sought. The article quotes the figures as Hazen 2007 restates them and says so.
- Adami and Cerf 2000 (Physica D 137:62-69). The theoretical paper behind "physical complexity." Not sought; the measure is cited from Adami, Ofria and Collier 2000 (
adami-2000), which defines and applies it. - Deep mutational scanning compared with alignment conservation (for example the EVmutation and DeepSequence benchmarks). Not sought in the 2026-10-27 review. It is the test that would show how much of a Fit score is constraint; listed under Issues.
- Blount 2012 locators. The text read is the PMC author manuscript (22 pages), so the article's claim footnotes give sections (Abstract; "Evolution of the Cit+ function"), not Nature pages.
- Durston's simulation code, in a Google Drive folder linked from his reply. Not downloaded. The article reports his two stated runs and does not re-run them.
- The printed reply to Wong 2023 (PNAS 121, e2318689121). Not read.
- Gitt 2009, part 2 (
gitt-2009). In the library. Considered and not used: it draws conclusions from the definition in part 1 and adds nothing to the definition. - Yockey 2005 (
yockey-2005). Considered and not used here. It stays in the rarity article, where it bears on the use of his probability figures.