Unfortunately, AiG has made an assertion which it claims to be true even though it is actually false. In laymen's terms this is called "lying", but some people seem to be quite sensitive about creationists being called on that (while having no trouble calling evolutionists deceiving sons of the devil ... ), so for the rest of this post I will censor that troublesome word and its cognates.
How about this, seems I am right again.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/feedback/2003/0221.asp
And the point of that is not being "right" (that and 1.25 gets me a cup of coffee). The point is that the Darwinist interpretation is so predictable and easily attacked on the same basis over and over. Like the speciation thing. Its another example of some valid evidence for the Darwinist proposition, but it is demonstrably overblown evidence because that is what the philosophy behind it demands and that is all it can see. Since there is no alternate theory to Drawinism that gets the faintest recognition, where else could you possibly go as a Darwinist with this evidence of HDL metabolism?
So, the creationists are paying attention and are armed with science, and not the kind you get from correspondence school.
Let's look closer at that:
What has happened? One amino acid has been replaced with a cysteine residue in a protein that normally assembles high density lipoproteins (HDLs), which are involved in removing ‘bad’ cholesterol from arteries. The mutant form of the protein is less effective at what it is supposed to do, but it does act as an antioxidant, which seems to prevent atherosclerosis (hardening of arteries). In fact, because of the added -SH on the cysteine, 70% of the proteins manufactured bind together in pairs (called dimers), restricting their usefulness. The 30% remaining do the job as an antioxidant.
The dimerization is a red herring: the unmutated protein also frequently dimerizes and in fact oligomerizes (not just forming pairs, but complexes with multiple copies of the protein). Are bicycle wheels less effective because they, too, frequently come in pairs?
Indeed, Apo-AIM dimers are more stable than Apo-AI monomers (no prizes guessing what the extra M stands for), hanging around for longer and so creating more HDL, and so the mutant protein is arguably
more effective than the original one. Therefore saying that dimerization restricts the mutant protein's usefulness is a L__.
Now in gaining an anti-oxidant activity, the protein has lost a lot of activity for making HDLs. So the mutant protein has sacrificed specificity. Since antioxidant activity is not a very specific activity (a great variety of simple chemicals will act as antioxidants), it would seem that the result of this mutation has been a net loss of specificity, or, in other words, information. This is exactly as we would expect with a random change.
And again, the statement "the protein has lost a lot of activity for making HDLs" is a L__, but that's not all. AiG is quite right that a great variety of simple chemicals will act as antioxidants. AiG however seems to be unaware that a great variety of simple chemicals, such as pure sodium or lithium (both of which are fantastic reductants or anti-oxidants), will also outright kill you if you ingest them. I'd probably say that the fact that Apo-AIM doesn't kill its hosts is probably quite a lot of specificity.
Add to that the fact that Apo-AIM's activity isn't actually unspecific. In fact, Apo-AIM cannot quench superoxide anions, and cannot prevent the oxidation of cytochrome c. Thus this protein's anti-oxidant activity is quite specific to lipid oxidation. Say it with me, the claim that Apo-AIM's antioxidant activity is not very specific is a L__.
Note that quantifying the amount of information is not as easy as just counting the number of functions or even the number of base pairs (‘letters’ in a gene. This is simplistic reasoning. It is firstly, but not only, a question of specificity. For example, if I said, ‘Fix the Porsche,’ this conveys more information than ‘Fix the automobile,’ although the latter has more letters. If I said, ‘Fix the car and the truck,’ we now have two ‘functions’ in this sentence, but does it contain more information than ‘Fix the Porsche’? We are now comparing a command with two ‘functions,’ but both of low specificity, with a command with one function and high specificity.
Unfortunately, the Apo-AIM protein performs HDL removal with high specificity,
and performs an anti-oxidant function with specificity as well. The better comparison, if the original protein is "Fix the Porsche", is that Apo-AIM is "Fix the Porsche, and then charge the customer twice the amount he was supposed to pay, but only if he looks gullible enough."
Now tell me whether that's an increase of information or not. I'd say once again that AiG has been caught telling a L__, but by this point, saying that wouldn't really amount to an increase of useful information would it?
http://toarchive.org/faqs/information/apolipoprotein.html