Gene duplication, polyploidy, insertions, etc. do not help they represent an increase in amount of DNA, but not an increase in the amount of functional genetic informationthese create nothing new. Macroevolution needs new genes (for making feathers on reptiles, for example).
In plants, but not in animals (possibly with rare exceptions), the doubling of all the chromosomes may result in an individual which can no longer interbreed with the parent typethis is called polyploidy. Although this may technically be called a new species, because of the breeding isolation, no new information has been produced, just repetitious doubling of existing information. If a malfunction in a printing press caused a book to be printed with every page doubled, it would not be more informative than the proper book. (Brave students of evolutionary professors might like to ask whether they would get extra marks for handing in two copies of the same assignment.)
Duplication of a single chromosome is normally harmful, as in Downs Syndrome. Insertions are a very efficient way of completely destroying the functionality of existing genes. Biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner in his book Not By Chance (see graphic, right) analyses examples of mutational changes that evolutionists have claimed to have been increases in information, and shows that they are actually examples of loss of specificity, which means they involved loss of information (which is to be expected from information theory).
The gene duplication idea is that an existing gene may be doubled, and one copy does its normal work while the other copy is redundant and non-expressed. Therefore it is free to mutate free of selection pressure (to get rid of it) . However, such neutral mutations are powerless to produce new genuine information. Dawkins et al. point out that natural selection is the only possible naturalistic explanation for the immense design in nature (not a good one, as Spetner et al. have shown). The proposal is that random changes produce a new function, then this redundant gene becomes expressed somehow, thus comes under the selective process and is tuned.
Its all a lot of hand-waving. It relies on a chance copying event, genes somehow being switched off, randomly mutated to something approximating a new function, then being switched on again so natural selection can tune it.
Furthermore, mutations do not just occur in the duplicated gene; they occur throughout the genome. Consequently, all the deleterious mutations have to be eliminated by the death of the unfit. Mutations in the target duplicate gene are extremely rareit might represent only 1 part in 30,000 of the genome of an animal. The larger the genome the bigger the problem. This is because a larger the genome, the lower the mutation rate that can be sustained without error catastrophe, which means one has to wait longer for any mutation, let alone a desirable one, in the duplicated gene. There just has not been enough time for such a naturalistic process to account for the amount of genetic information that we see in living things.
Dawkins and others have recognised that the information space possible within just one gene is so huge that random changes without some guiding force could never come up with a new function. There could never be enough experiments (mutating generations of organisms) to find anything useful by such a process. Note that an average gene of 1,000 base pairs represents 41000 possibilities that is 10602 (compare this with the number of atoms in the universe estimated at only 1080). If every atom in the universe were an experiment every millisecond for the supposed 15 billion years of the universe, this could only try a maximum 10100 of the possibilities. So such a neutral process cannot find any sequence with specificity (usefulness), even allowing for the fact that there may be more than just one sequence that is functional to some extent.
So Dawkins and company have the same problem as the neutral selection theory advocates. Increasing knowledge of the molecular basis of biological functions has exploded the known information space such that mutations and natural selection, with or without gene duplication, or any other known natural process, cannot account for the irreducibly complex nature of living systems.
