Cornell Geneticist John Sanford argued that Darwinism is wrong because the rate of genetic deterioration is so high that natural selection could not arrest it. If natural selection cannot arrest genetic deterioration, how then could it be the mechanism for evolutionary improvement?
Sanford predicted through his research that human genome is deteriorating. This was a daring scientific prediction, and now Michael Lynch of the elite National Academy published on the topic for his inaugural paper. The NAS has now made the paper available to the public free of charge.
Read it, and weep, literally:
Rate, Molecular Spectrum, and Consequences of Human Mutation
Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that most of the mutation load is associated with mutations with very small effects distributed at unpredictable locations over the entire genome, rendering the prospects for long-term management of the human gene pool by genetic counseling highly unlikely for all but perhaps a few hundred key loci underlying debilitating monogenic genetic disorders (such as those focused on in the present study).
Thus, the preceding observations paint a rather stark picture. At least in highly industrialized societies, the impact of deleterious mutations is accumulating on a time scale that is approximately the same as that for scenarios associated with global warming—perhaps not of great concern over a span of one or two generations, but with very considerable consequences on time scales of tens of generations. Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.
HT: T. lise