[Torrere]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

There has NEVER been any record of information GAIN in any life form scientists have studied. Mutation and Speciation happen, but these involve LOSS or CORRUPTION of EXISTING material.

However --

Information GAIN certainly does occur. One example is gene duplication: occasionally, when DNA is passed from generation to generation, sequences of DNA are duplicated. Usually the duplicate information immediately follows the original information, but sometimes it moves to an entirely different location. Gene duplication is widely acccepted, and has been examined for over 30 years now. According to this article published in 2001 in Science,

Observations from the genomic databases for several eukaryotic species suggest that duplicate genes arise at a very high rate, on average 0.01 per gene per million years.

This page is a good starting point for looking into gene duplication and explains it reasonably well for the laity.

One of the interesting experiments concerned depriving cells which normally required glucose of glucose and providing them instead with another sugar, xylose.

Cells from the chemostat were analysed and found to have gained multiple copies of genes responsible for an early stage in glucose metabolism. These additional genes occured as tandem repeats, a section of DNA repeated a number of times over in sequence.

In this situation multiple copies were advantageous because the gene responsible for glucose break down was not 100% specific for glucose. The enzyme had a weak side specificity for xylose. By amplifying the gene, that is having multiple copies, enough of the enzyme was produced to metabolise xylose.

In case you require extra special evidence, this paper, entitled "Multiple Duplications of Yeast Hexose Transport Genes in Response to Selection in a Glucose-Limited Environment" describes the preceding experiment (or a verification of it).

We analyzed a population of baker’s yeast that underwent 450 generations of glucose-limited growth. Relative to the strain used as the inoculum, the predominant cell type at the end of this experiment sustains growth at significantly lower steady-state glucose concentrations and
demonstrates markedly enhanced cell yield per mole glucose, significantly enhanced high-affinity glucose transport, and greater relative fitness in pairwise competition.

Not only was information gained [information was duplicated and hence there was more overall information], but the extra information was an improvement over the information existing at the beginning of the experiment.