dan said:
Any organism can adapt to its environment, this is not evolution.
That depends on the adaptation involved. An inherited change in the genome whose expression is an adaptation is an evolutionary step - evolution.
dan said:
Mutations have never been observed to provide new information sufficient to explain vertical evolution.
Mutations and other additions to a genome have been observed, that add information previously not present. These changes have been selected, and the result a more robustly reproducing genome. The rate and nature of the these changes is easily capable of duplicating the evolutionary record observed - the actual problem is otherwise: we observe long periods of relative stability in the record, when the background rate of genomic change and stochastic drift must be countered somehow.
dan said:
New species developing does not provide evidence for evolution. This again is downward change resulting from isolated gene pools.
Except when it isn't, of course. If you are just assuming the change was always "downward", you should compare that unlikely hypothesis with wideranging and thorough observations
dan said:
Evolution must have new information to advance, and lots of it
Last I checked, the amount of new DNA involved in antibiotic resistance sometimes added up to a third of the bacterial genome.
A much larger change than the difference between albatrosses and penguins.
And that is without symbiosis, incomplete ingestion, parasitism, or any of the other common ways in which organisms pick up enormous amounts of new DNA in chunks.
dan said:
Gene duplications are not new information. Two copies of the same newspaper doesn't really add much to the news.
Part of the info is rate and quantity, so that duplicated genes do provide new info. But that is trivial, compared with the new info obtainable through the accumulation of different mutations in the two copies.
But no doubt you are familiar with this common knowledge, from your many years of teaching evolution.
dan said:
Atheists don't believe in sins.
As with so many of your assertions, a false statement.