Argument #3: Mutations

[Mister Agenda]

Dear Atheist Friends,

Consider the following:
- 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)

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

- 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

OK. I think this shows you're actually trying (I think...). Sanford is an actual botanist with expertise in the field. With Dembski and Behe, he's part of a trimvirate of ID scientists with legitimate credentials, He's also a former atheist who became a young earth creationist. At which point he started drifting off into lala land, despite having previously done a lot of good science. He helped create Mendel's accountant, which supposedly proves genomes deteriortate over time. I'm no scientist, but I suspect it has a lot of flaws: it supposedly indicates a young earth because humans would be extinct by now, since our genome can only last three or four hundred generations. Funny, mice go through multiple generations a year, so they should go extinct pretty much every century, according to the program.

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.

Sanford fails to take neutral mutations, gene duplications, and sexual selection into account. Maybe that's why he's so wrong.

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.

Most mutations are neutral...at the time. It's always possible that changing conditions can make a previously neutral mutation harmful or beneficial.

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.

That's about right, possibly too high, but it's a goodly number of mutations. Sanford did about 20 years of good science until he started presupposing his conclusions.

- 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.

Any self-replicating system will have mutations if replication is not perfect, so you're correct that mutation isn't uniquely biological. We use computer programs that depend on 'mutation' and selection to generate complex protein designs for use as pharmaceuticals. What is the relevance of mutations being applicable to any imperfectly self-replicating unit?

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.

So you're saying it's not the mildly deleterious mutations that are gonna wipe out all life, it's the very slightly deleterious ones that don't keep anyone from reproducing that will eventually keep us all from reproducing? And you think that selection wouldn't weed out individuals who get to that point why? And you think there are no compensatory beneficial mutations despite the links you've been given to examples of them why?

So much damage occurs that it is clearly evident within a single human lifetime.

The theory of evolution does not apply to individuals, it applies to populations.

Our reproductive cells are not immune, as previously thought, but are just as prone to mechanical damage as our body cells.

I wonder if that's why the vast majority of children are born to parents under 30. Do you think it could have something to do with that? Possibly?

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.

If they're all deleterious and most of them are not weeded out. Given how easy it is to demonstrate that Sanford's math fails when it comes to organisms with such short generations that their deterioration could be observed in real time if it was actually happening, this hypothesis has been utterly falsified.

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.

So color me not surprised that, given the overwhelming evidence for life being on earth for billions of years, it turns out that Sanford is wrong rather than all the rest of science.

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

To be true, that sentence should read: Evolution's engine, when profoundly misunderstood, makes some deluded people conclude it's 'evolution's end'.