Argument #3: Mutations

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Again, Rev, because you clearly don't know what you're talking about, I'm not sure why you're seeking to lecture people on this?

Generally speaking people don't talk as though they're experts on subjects they don't know anything about. It kind of makes them look a bit foolish.

[max-greece]

It is a change of already existing information.


I can give an equally supported refutation to this: no, they don't fail to achieve a 'gain in functioning' mutation.


In fact, we do.

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

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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


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

Interesting.

Makes you wonder..

How can an omniscient being be such a poor creator?

Sometimes I swear its almost as if he doesn't exist.

hock:

[The Grand Nudger]

So what if he did. There's his method, his "magic". Unimpressive.

[Tonus]

It's quite true that mutations that seem to confer no immediate benefit (or might even be deleterious) can be passed down from generation to generation if they do not prevent the population from breeding. In time a 'bad' mutation may prove useful if there is a change in the organism's surroundings. A fish that develops the ability to breath air may be at a disadvantage at first (having to surface to breathe and at risk of drowning), but it may be the only survivor when the lake dries up or when larger, lake-bound predators appear and the land becomes the safer option.

The fact that so many mutations are either useless or harmful would not speak to an intelligent designer, but fits within the framework of evolutionary theory and the evidence that has been found so far. A great many of the creatures which have existed have long since gone extinct, while some have continued to breed and survive for millions of years, sometimes with seemingly few changes (sharks, for example). This apparent randomness speaks more towards a natural process and not an "intelligent" one.

[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'.

[naturestubbs1]

Carl Sagan, stated that evolution was caused by "the slow accumulations of favorable mutations." However, mutations which apparently result in new traits in an organism are due to the corruption of existing information rather than the formation of mutations gaining new information. This reality conflicts against what would be expected for the advancement of evolution.

A mutation cannot "gain new information." A mutation is just a random error and errors cannot gain information. Now if that "error" results in a positive response of an organism to its environment then there is a better chance of that error being passed on. Its a bit more feasable than the notion that a bearded leprechaun sprinkled pre-formed humans (sorry, forgot about the whole rib thing) into a garden like parmesan cheese onto spaghetti.

---

The so called new information that many evolutionists claim that takes place is a result of a corruption of already existing information. The examples you cite fail to achieve a "gain in functioning" mutation. In fact if there were an evolution from molecule to man we should readily see an abundance of this occurrence, we don't.

Honestly??? Have you ever taken biology? You are positing your argument as if it was a new "chicken" that just popped out of an egg with some magical superpower. It is simply the REACTION or lack thereof as a result of a MISTAKE!!! Try some of your wordsmithing on your good book.

It kills me to hear you christians argue about the minutia of a concept. It is a THEORY! If you put even a scintilla of time and thought into being honest about your faith you would see just how absurd it really is. I think your reaction demonstrates your insecurity about your faith. Your brain already knows what the preponderance of evidence supports you just need to be intellectually honest with yourself and cut the bullshit. Get out of the bronze age and into the 21st century. Your external persona makes you look like a 3-year old throwing a tantrum. I pity you.

[Revelation777]

No way a series of "beneficial mutations" led to the various species of today. This article takes a good look at this.

http://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html

- Evolutionists had identified "more than 2000 genes as potential targets of positive selection in the human genome", and they expected that "diversity patterns in about 10% of the human genome have been affected by linkage to recent sweeps." So what did they find? "In contrast to expectation," their test detected nothing, but they could not quite bring themselves to say it. They said there was a "paucity of classic sweeps revealed by our findings". Sweeps "were too infrequent within the past 250,000 years to have had discernible effects on genomic diversity." "Classic sweeps were not a dominant mode of human adaptation over the past 250,000 years." --Hernandez, Ryan D., Joanna L. Kelley, Eyal Elyashiv, S. Cord Melton, Adam Auton, Gilean McVean, 1000 Genomes Project, Guy Sella, Molly Przeworski. 18 February 2011. Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution. Science, Vol. 331, no. 6019, pp. 920-924.

Dear Atheist Friends,
It is time to look to the Creator for answers not empty theories grasping at straws.
Rev 777

[Esquilax]

No way a series of "beneficial mutations" led to the various species of today. This article takes a good look at this.

http://www.newgeology.us/presentation32.html

So, no... just... no.

Did you actually read the article? I did, and then I stopped when I got to the first outright lie; to get there I had to wade through quite a bit of general misunderstanding about what evolution is. I don't have time to debunk every bit of that complete embarrassment of an article, but I found someone who did.

Rev, you may be tempted to just skip over that article I just linked to, but I warn you: if you do so you will be mercilessly grilled. To do so would be dishonest, and you don't want to lie, do you?

- Evolutionists had identified "more than 2000 genes as potential targets of positive selection in the human genome", and they expected that "diversity patterns in about 10% of the human genome have been affected by linkage to recent sweeps." So what did they find? "In contrast to expectation," their test detected nothing, but they could not quite bring themselves to say it. They said there was a "paucity of classic sweeps revealed by our findings". Sweeps "were too infrequent within the past 250,000 years to have had discernible effects on genomic diversity." "Classic sweeps were not a dominant mode of human adaptation over the past 250,000 years." --Hernandez, Ryan D., Joanna L. Kelley, Eyal Elyashiv, S. Cord Melton, Adam Auton, Gilean McVean, 1000 Genomes Project, Guy Sella, Molly Przeworski. 18 February 2011. Classic Selective Sweeps Were Rare in Recent Human Evolution. Science, Vol. 331, no. 6019, pp. 920-924.

Did you read the paper that quote came from? Or did you just stick with the snarky commentary from idiots that confirmed what you already believed?

I went and looked up the actual article. What they were saying was that this specific kind of natural selection was uncommon within a relatively small space of evolutionary time. It certainly doesn't say what your fraudster creationist sources are trying to make it say, which is that they couldn't find any evidence of evolution. No, what the people who wrote the paper were saying was that one specific kind of it wasn't present within that period of human adaptation.

You are being lied to by every one of your sources, Rev, and you don't even seem to care.

Dear Atheist Friends,
It is time to look to the Creator for answers not empty theories grasping at straws.
Rev 777

Boy did you ever speak to soon.

[Cyberman]

Don't give up now, Rev! You've got four more proofs to go yet before you get to the punchline!

[Anomalocaris]

He is the punch line.