The Science of Biological Evolution (no politics or religion)

And remember, you don't know anything that you can't observe. Since evolution is not observable, it is NOT science, it is speculation!

....and you believe this Senior ?....without any reservation ?

Come on everyone! Never in the history of mankind has evolution received even the smallest scrap of evidence! There is a 250,000 dollar reward out for anyone who can scientifically prove evolution, and to date NO ONE has even come close to receiving it! You BELIEVE evolution apart from scientific fact even though every scientific law is AGAINST it. I'm not mad at anyone. Please don't take it that way. This is a scientific debate, not a personal jab.

Is it possible that all animals originally had the information for the proper production of vitamin C?  Yes.

It is very safe to say that all animals had an ancestor that synthesised vitamin C. It is rare exceptions that don't even today (there are several independent branches where this capability has been broken separately, in identifiably different ways to the way it occurred in our branch of the primates, for example hamsters and bats). But the ancestry goes back further than merely the animal kingdom, since most plants synthesise vitamin C as well, and some fungi. So the capability is an ancient one of the giant Eukaryote taxon of the tree of life.

Is it possible that a few independently lost this information over time most likely due to common environmental factors?  Yes.

For example, an ancient primate had a mutation which broke vitamin C manufacture in a distinctive way, and this mutation is visible today in humans and some other primates.

Does this provide further evidence that our genetic pool loses information over time? One could argue, Yes.

Of course, information gets lost from DNA - there is a type of mutation called a deletion. But information gets added as well - there are mutations called insertions and duplications.

To avoid pointless protestation, note that an important class of mutations - those where codons are replaced by others - are entirely reversible, so any one step change in one direction can occur in the other (this alone refutes much nonsense and information gain and loss). What guides changes over time of course is the effect of natural selection on this random walk through the range of all possible genomes.

By complexity I am not referring to diversity but rather the end result i.e. us. Who can tell how many mutations are required to change a single-celled organism into an organism that can perform photosynthesis.

It would be rather easy to calculate a minimum number of steps, only permitting selected types of mutations. Of course what happens in practice is an indirect route which is longer. Geneticists have calculated the time needed for such large changes and they are nicely consistent with geological time.

Not only that, all of these mutations would also need to be environmentally beneficial in order to ratified by natural selection.

Near neutrality suffices. Fitness is a random process, and even unfit genes are not weeded out immediately. Typical genetic advantages and disadvantages are of the order of +/- 1% fitness changes or less.

An important point is that in sexually reproducing organisms, mutated genes from separate branches can get combined. This makes evolution much quicker than in purely asexual species. Bacterial genes can also undergo horizontal transfer, which sometimes achieves the same end in a less sophisticated and less efficient way.

 So since I am right about the inefficiency, am I also right not about the diversity but also about the complexity?

The argument goes a little like this, you can't say DNA loses information over time because it isn't useful information in the first place.

It's what makes it possible for organisms to live: of course it's useful.

However many proponents of Intelligent Design would argue that it is useful information in the first place and as such it can be lost.

Biologists would say that. They would also point out that if a loss of DNA is a fitness disadvantage, natural selection will tend to remove individuals with that loss. Why is it that science denialists have such trouble with high school biology?

The computer algorithms you speak usually make the assumption that it isn't useful information in the first place and as such is subject to improvement.

The opposite is that case. Science denialists assume, directly contrary to all empirical evidence, that every genome is perfect in the sense that it is impossible to find either a fitness gain or a diversification into a new niche by mutation. This is dogmatic nonsense that requires complete blindness to all evidence to believe.

Note that fitness is, and always has been a moving target. Moreover, it does not only change over time, it changes with location, and it also varies depending on the niche in a location. There is not the slightest possibility of simultaneous perfect fitness in every genome in a world that is not perfectly static. It is impossible to overstate how wildly far from reality this assumption of universal perfect fitness is. [One trivial example that anyone should be able to understand is that species go extinct. This is a sign of lack of fitness, by definition].

I am indeed speaking about myself, and unfortunately about us all.

Science does not give you facts, it gives models that change sometimes quite significantly with time.

Knowledge and understanding does develop over time, and is always incomplete and uncertain at the edges. The same is true of the adaptation of organisms.

Yes without question.

I can put order in my house, despite having two kids. All I need is energy. Part of it will be dispersed in the form of heat though, no more available for work, so second law won't be violated.

And Elroch, you still cand know for sure anything about something that supposedly happened 4.6billion years ago.