Doesn't really matter. That poor sap who wanks evolution and makes his career out of that pseudo science failed to give one example of a mutation adding information to a creature. Can you give me an example?
I just finished a haematology rotation and saw enough of God’s work that makes you really question his capacity for intelligent design.
Some of the most common hereditary causes of anaemia are the result of mutations that protect against other diseases.
The most well-known example is Sickle-cell trait and disease. This is an autosomal recessive mutation in the beta-globulin of haemoglobin (the oxygen carrier molecule in red-blood cells) – particularly it’s a mutation that replaces a single amino-acid glutamic acid which is hydrophilic with valine (hydrophobic).
What information does this mutation add? Well, to make a complex story short red-blood cells with haemoglobin-S (the mutated form) are much more efficiently removed by the reticuloendothelial-system than haemoglobin-A1 (the variant found in the absolute majority of the human population). And this turns out to be highly protective against malaria, especially the plasmodium-falciparum the most deadly form of malaria.
Now there are two genes for the beta-globin chain and so there are two permutations of the sickle-cell mutation – you can get a single or double mutation. When you get a single mutation you end up with sickle-cell trait whereas a double mutation gives you full-blown sickle cell disease.
Sickle cell disease is a rather nasty condition to be afflicted with – in addition to anaemia you get all sorts of problems as a result of the sickle shaped red blood cells occluding the blood supply to various tissue, e.g. patients often lose their spleen as a result of splenic infarct (which then makes them prone to various nasty infections because the spleen is an important part of the immune system), they get regular episodes of very severe pain when the blood supply to their bones are occluded and every now and then they get occlusion of the blood supply to their lungs which can be fatal.
What’s more interesting is sickle-cell trait where, because there is only a single mutation, patients have just less than half of their A1 haemoglobin being the mutated variant. It turns out that this is below the threshold for sickling of the red-blood cells and most of these patients, those with the sickle cell trait because of a single mutation, do not develop any of those aforementioned problems. You get protected against malaria and none of the nasty health-problems that come with sickling of the red blood cells.
Clearly God designed the sickle-cell trait (the single mutation) but what the sickle-cell disease (double mutation), perhaps that was the work of Satan?
Well actually evolution isn’t that efficient of a system except in very long times of selection.
You see – even the sickle cell trait has its downsides. The renal medulla is a part of the kidneys where there is hypoxia and altered tonicity so extreme that the threshold for sickling is lowered so that even people with that single mutation get sickle-cells in the medulla of their kidneys. If there is even more precipitative stress (hypoxia, dehydration, acidosis) on the sickle cell trait patient’s body they can eventually develop microinfarcts in their kidneys, leading to permanent and irreversible impairment of their kidney function (which, of course, leads to all sorts of morbidity).
The sickle-cell mutation is found in as much as 10% of certain African population, it is the most common hereditary disease associated with protection from malaria but hardly from the only one. Thalassemia is another mutation-based disease that in mild forms can protect against malaria – unfortunately it’s severe forms are even worse than sickle cell disease. There are a number of other mutations that protect against malaria but they don’t do so as efficiently and all are pathological.
Clearly God needed to put some more thought into malarial protection.