Mr Snail.

Thank you for the indication of what the hell you were talking about. My estimation of your intelligence has increased by orders of magnitude.   

Does it take the whole genome being change for a "useful change" Or as Mr Ken Ham would say a change in function to be manifest?

I was talking about combinations of the four letters within individual genes, which are not all that complex, as opposed to whole genomes which are of course complex systems of genes.

I was thinking about the combinations of the four letters genes required to trigger any particular trait.

Maybe that is orders of magnitudes off. But the genes for the membrane around a single cell have been around for a couple of billion years. In many creatures they reproduce many times a day. There are billions of them in your gut for example as per Mr. Nye. Those are a lot on reproductive events. Of course the more complex and recent the gene sequence, the fewer times it has had a chance to show "useful mutation". But the numbers in my mind are high enough to make the emergence of what pete might refer to as "new information" or Ham might call "new function" more likely than not.