Tag Archives: Mutation

Commentary

Pro-ID scientist Ann Gauger interviewed on Mike Behe’s latest paper

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This is all written up at Evolution News.

First, remember that Behe’s peer-reviewed paper (PDF) was about whether evolutionary mechanisms were capable of creating any new information, that supports new functionality, that confers an evolutionary advantage.

Excerpt:

Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there anymore. Gaining information, building it up slowly from nothing, is quite another and more impressive feat. Yet it’s not the loss of function, and the required underlying information, but its gain that Darwinian evolution is primarily challenged to account for.

That’s the paradox highlighted in Michael Behe’s new review essay in Quarterly Review of Biology (“Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution“). It’s one of those peer-reviewed, Darwin-doubting biology journal essays that, as we’re confidently assured by the likes of the aforesaid Jerry Coyne, don’t actually exist. Casey Luskin has been doing an excellent job in this space of detailing Michael Behe’s conclusions. Reviewing the expansive literature dealing with investigations of viral and bacterial evolution, Dr. Behe shows that adaptive instances of the “diminishment or elimination” of Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs) in the genome overwhelmingly outnumber “gain-of-FCT events.” Seemingly, under Darwinian assumptions, even as functionality is being painstakingly built up that’s of use to an organism in promoting survival, the same creature should, much faster, be impoverished of function to the point of being driven out of existence.

And then the Evolution News post has an interview with Ann Gauger, (whose peer-reviewed publications have been featured before on this blog).

Here’s one of the questions:

… In your own research with Dr. Seelke, you found that cells chose to “reduce or eliminate function.” But with vastly bigger populations and vastly more time, wouldn’t we be justified in expecting gene fixes too, even if far fewer in number?

And her reply in part:

For most organisms in the wild, the environment is constantly changing. Organisms rarely encounter prolonged and uniform selection in one direction. In turn, changing selection prevents most genetic variants from getting fixed in the population. In addition, most mutations that accumulate in populations are neutral or weakly deleterious, and most beneficial mutations are only weakly beneficial. This means that it takes a very long time, if ever, for a weakly beneficial mutation to spread throughout the population, or for harmful mutations to be eliminated. If more than one mutation is required to get a new function, the problem quickly becomes beyond reach. Evolutionary biologists have begun to realize the problem of getting complex adaptations, and are trying to find answers.

The problem is the level of complexity that is required, from the earliest stages of life. For example, just to modify one protein to perform a new function or interact with a new partner can require multiple mutations. Yet many specialized proteins, adapted to work together with specialized RNAs, are required to build a ribosome. And until you have ribosomes, you cannot translate genes into proteins. We haven’t a clue how this ability evolved.

It sounds this problem of getting beneficial mutations and keeping them around is an intractable problem, at least on a naturalist worldview. It will be interesting to see how the naturalists respond to the peer-reviewed work by Behe and Gauger. The only way to know if Behe and Gauger are right is to let the naturalists talk back. It would be nice to see a formal debate on this evidence, wouldn’t it? I’m sure that the ID people would favor a debate, but the evolutionists probably wouldn’t, since they prefer to silence and expel anyone who disagrees with them.

In addition to the new papers by Michael Behe and Ann Gauger I mentioned above, I wrote about Doug Axe’s recent research paper here. He is the Director of the Biologic Institute, where Ann works.

Debates featuring Mike Behe

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News

New study finds that advantageous traits don’t easily infuse in populations

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A new study in Nature (September 30,2010) has found something interesting. (H/T WgButler777)

Excerpt:

Our work provides a new perspective on the genetic basis of adaptation. Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles. This is notable because in wild populations we expect the strength of natural selection to be less intense and the environment unlikely to remain constant for ~600 generations.”

Consequently, the probability of fixation in wild populations should be even lower than its likelihood in these experiments. This suggests that selection does not readily expunge genetic variation in sexual populations, a finding which in turn should motivate efforts to discover why this is seemingly the case.”

What does it mean?

It means that good traits that evolve in a single individual do not necessarily “take” in the entire population, so that will live on in successive generations. If the accumulation of beneficial mutations is required for Darwinism to create all of these new body plans and organ types, then what are we to make of the creative power of Darwinian mechanisms?

Read more about it here at Uncommon Descent.

Polemics

Can you evolve working legs by changing working fins into useless stumps?

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Consider this piece of taxpayer-funded “research” that appeared in the prestigious journal Nature (H/T ECM), and you will know everything you need to know about Darwinism, and whether it is science or mythology.

Excerpt:

The loss of genes that guide the development of fins may help to explain how fish evolved into four-limbed vertebrates, according to a study.

Marie-Andrée Akimenko of the University of Ottawa in Canada and her colleagues may now be able to explain how our ancestors lost their fins: they have discovered a family of genes that code for the proteins that make up fins’ rigid fibres. The actinodin (and) genes are present in the laboratory model zebrafish and in ancient fish, but not in four-legged vertebrates (tetrapods), the team report today in the journal Nature. What’s more, the researchers found that dampening the expression of and genes in zebrafish also disrupts the expression of genes that regulate the growth of limbs and the number of digits in other animals.

These results hint that the loss of and genes is linked to the change from fins to limbs.

[…]But a causal connection is not certain. “The real question is: did we lose these genes because we lost the use of fins, or did we lose fins because we lost the genes?” says Denis Duboule, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). “The problem is that when it’s an evolutionary question, you can’t do the experiment.”

You know what? You can’t do the experiment on the evolution of invisible pink unicorns, either. But you might be able to get your taxpayer-funded speculations about how invisible pink unicorns may have evolved published in Nature, as long as it somehow bashes the idea of intelligent design. To be able to explain evolution, you don’t actually have to test anything in an experiment… you just have to tell a fetching just-so story that may have happened. And then it gets published in the prestigious journal Nature. Because you arrived at the right conclusion, and that’s what matters. That’s science.

The Ottawa Citizen explains more about what the intelligent scientists designed using purposeful, non-random interventions during their lab experiments.

Excerpt:

This is a tough one to understand. How could a fish just grow legs? It mystifies us, and so this part of evolutionary theory is a common target for cheap attacks from creationists. Therefore, it’s extremely valuable that a scientist has now found a way in which a genetic tweaking makes a zebrafish embryo stop growing fins, and start growing an appendage that looks like a leg. If she can tweak a gene in the lab, maybe one of the many mutations that pop up in nature could do the same.

[…]To learn what a gene does, one method is to add a chemical that temporarily stops it from working, and see what happens to the animal. Akimenko’s team “knocked down” two of the four actinotrichia genes in a zebrafish embryo, and found that the fish appeared to stop growing fins.

Instead, it began growing features that look like the “buds” (or embryonic beginnings) of legs.

[…]Akimenko was using a chemical which doesn’t destroy the gene, but only stuns it for a short period, leaving the animal’s DNA intact. It’s like a chemical Taser. After three or four days the gene wakes up and does its normal job, and the fish embryo goes back to growing fins.

Got that? Non-functional “buds” are an important discovery for explaining how legs evolved from fins. Experimenter intervention producing an evolutionary dead-end is hailed as a masterful proof of evolution. Don’t even ask about whether non-functional buds convey an evolutionary advantage. Research that confirms Darwinism doesn’t need to be an actual factual account of what really happened. It doesn’t need to be testable or repeatable.

Notice also that no explanation is given about how the bud-enabled fish developed the ability to breathe oxygen, consume and digest food on land, or modify their excretory system to avoid losing water. None of that is necessary – because none of it is testable. It’s not about finding the truth, it’s about telling a story. A story that contradicts the idea that God exists, that there is objective right and wrong, and one day we will be held accountable for our priorities and decisions. And that’s why this is taxpayer-funded research that is published in Nature.

Is this science? Or religion?