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ncp as in non-character person, you know noobie.

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Dispite the very many things I could say I'll just ask: how does dna last even a million years.

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It is arguable. [See I just argued against it. (just as good as your argument)]

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You know, I'd never thought about it that way before, but New Earth Creationists really have some explaining to do about ancient civilizations that go back earlier than 4004 B.C.

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Is this a whole new kind of weird that UBB has blessed us with, or am I not getting something?

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First, (Dintiradan hit this point) macro evolution is the adding of genes. This is what I disagree with.
Second, micro evolution is the changing of genes. I agree with this.
Third, mutations just take away genes. This, I agree with too.

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Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but a significant fraction are beneficial. The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

Beneficial mutations are commonly observed. They are common enough to be problems in the cases of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing organisms and pesticide resistance in agricultural pests (e.g., Newcomb et al. 1997; these are not merely selection of pre-existing variation.) They can be repeatedly observed in laboratory populations (Wichman et al. 1999). Other examples include the following:
Mutations have given bacteria the ability to degrade nylon (Prijambada et al. 1995).
Plant breeders have used mutation breeding to induce mutations and select the beneficial ones (FAO/IAEA 1977).
Certain mutations in humans confer resistance to AIDS (Dean et al. 1996; Sullivan et al. 2001) or to heart disease (Long 1994; Weisgraber et al. 1983).
A mutation in humans makes bones strong (Boyden et al. 2002).
Transposons are common, especially in plants, and help to provide beneficial diversity (Moffat 2000).
In vitro mutation and selection can be used to evolve substantially improved function of RNA molecules, such as a ribozyme (Wright and Joyce 1997).

Whether a mutation is beneficial or not depends on environment. A mutation that helps the organism in one circumstance could harm it in another. When the environment changes, variations that once were counteradaptive suddenly become favored. Since environments are constantly changing, variation helps populations survive, even if some of those variations do not do as well as others. When beneficial mutations occur in a changed environment, they generally sweep through the population rapidly (Elena et al. 1996).

High mutation rates are advantageous in some environments. Hypermutable strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa are found more commonly in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients, where antibiotics and other stresses increase selection pressure and variability, than in patients without cystic fibrosis (Oliver et al. 2000).

Note that the existence of any beneficial mutations is a falsification of the young-earth creationism model (Morris 1985, 13).

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It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of

increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)

If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:
Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000).
RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002)
Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)
The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.

According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism (Adami et al. 2000).

The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations (Adami et al. 2000; Schneider 2000).

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Originally written by Dikiyoba:

But would it make a good Avernum-style game?

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