Argument #3: Mutations

[Esquilax]

Dear Atheist Friends,

Consider the following:

Why? You won't consider any of what we're saying.

- Even among evolutionary apologists who search for examples of mutations that are beneficial, the best they can do is to cite damaging mutations that have beneficial side effects (e.g. sickle-cell trait)

That's funny, because I supplied an example just yesterday that was beneficial alone; flavobacteria that are now able to digest nylon as a food source. There's no downside to that, it doesn't otherwise affect the organism, and it has been induced in a lab.

Oh, additionally? Here's one in humans: a mutation that grants resistance to HIV, and nigh immunity if one inherits it from both parents. No downside. You're just factually wrong, here, which means you either didn't bother to research, or you got sold a dishonest bill of goods from creation.com.

I think you were lied to, Rev.

Carroll, S.B., The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the ultimate forensic record of evolution, Norton, New York, pp. 174–179, 2006.

Sean B Carroll, the evolutionary biologist?

It's funny how you keep citing sources that evidently see something very different in the evidence than you're attempting to construct. Could it be that the people who agree with you don't have degrees in relevant fields? If this says what you think it says, why would Carroll still accept evolution?

- Within neo-Darwinian theory, natural selection is supposed to be the guardian of our genomes because it weeds out unwanted deleterious mutations and favours beneficial ones. Not so, according to genetics expert Professor John Sanford. Sanford, J.C., Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome, Elim Publishing, New York, 2005

This isn't news; if the negative mutation isn't enough to kill the organism then that organism will persist, that's just common sense. Nobody here is saying otherwise, and that claim also doesn't say anything about the regularity of negative mutations like you're talking about anyway, so I don't know why you brought it up. Are you just slinging mud wildly now in the hopes some of it will stick?

Natural selection can only weed out mutations that have a significant negative effect upon fitness (number of offspring produced). But such ‘fitness’ is affected by a huge variety of factors, and the vast majority of mutations have too small an effect for natural selection to be able to detect and remove them.

Yes, neutral mutations happen too. So what?

Furthermore, if the average mutation rate per person per generation is around 1 or more, then everyone is a mutant and no amount of selection can stop degeneration of the whole population. As it turns out, the mutation rate in the human population is very much greater than 1. Sanford estimates at least 100, probably about 300, and possibly more.

Actually, though it shouldn't be surprising, that information is out of date. The number now is closer to sixty mutations on average, rising to two hundred in particularly strong cases. But that doesn't matter anyway, since "degeneration," isn't a term that makes sense here to begin with; there's no "pure" human genome that we're all straying away from. It's just changes happening.

- Mutations are not uniquely biological events that provide an engine of natural variation for natural selection to work upon and produce all the variety of life. Mutation is the purely physical result of the all-pervading mechanical damage that accompanies all molecular machinery. As a consequence, all multicellular life on earth is undergoing inexorable genome decay because the deleterious mutation rates are so high, the effects of the individual mutations are so small, there are no compensatory beneficial mutations and natural selection is ineffective in removing the damage.

Did you just make that up? Citation, please. Real citations, not creationist drivel.

So much damage occurs that it is clearly evident within a single human lifetime. Our reproductive cells are not immune, as previously thought, but are just as prone to mechanical damage as our body cells. Somewhere between a few thousand and a few million mutations are enough to drive a human lineage to extinction, and this is likely to occur over a time scale of only tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This is far short of the supposed evolutionary time scales. Like rust eating away the steel in a bridge, mutations are eating away our genomes and there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Seriously, your pretend evolution doesn't represent a problem for the real thing. Either demonstrate your claims, or stop making them. But this is just nonsense.

Evolution’s engine, when properly understood, becomes evolution’s end.

http://creation.com/mutations-are-evolutions-end

Except that all of that, the entire thing, was made up.