I’m including some quotes from a Science magazine feature that is just out. I just posted the other day about results that conflict with Darwinian expectations/predictions. We’ll just add this to the list. You know, you really have to be a true believer to keep insisting that your idea is correct when almost invariably every true prediction made using your idea turns out to be wrong. I’m beyond even being surprised any more. Here goes:
“It was the most radical of a flurry of recent discoveries of human genes that evolution has strongly favored, a process called positive selection. Four years ago, researchers thought that they would find hundreds of examples in which an advantageous mutation spread rapidly in a particular population. That prediction, based on the first scans of human genome sequence data, did not pan out, and by last year, some researchers were ready to give up.
A growing number of researchers now think it is rare for a particular mutation to spread rapidly to most people within a population, as was the case with the EPAS1 gene.”
The bottom line to all of this is that population genetics is dead. (Have I said that before?!) Notice, though, how the Darwinists talk about it amongst themselves:
‘”In only a handful has there been much progress in identifying the causal mutations and extracting these biological insights about their function,” Sabeti wrote in the 12 February issue of Science (p. 883). Says McVean: “That’s why the whole field—the program of trying to find selective sweeps—kind of ground to a halt.”‘
Never able to admit that they might be wrong, they had to begin all over again in a new and different way.
“Yet McVean and others were convinced that positive selection had shaped much of the genome but lay beneath the radar of methods used to detect it. . . . “It’s very likely that many traits that are different between populations are coded by different alleles; any one may not be so strong,” says population geneticist Pleuni Pennings of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany.
Consequently, earlier this year Pritchard and his colleagues proposed an alternative to strong selection on single new mutations. In Current Biology, they argued that selection on more than one gene at once could allow a new trait—such as increased height—to sweep more rapidly through a group.
Detecting such polygenic selection is one of the new frontiers. . . .”
Notice that they are “convinced”. They just know. Isn’t this wonderful?
For those who are interested, we might take a look at whether this makes any sense using simple population genetic metrics. They say polygenic selection works. Let’s see……the mutation rate of the human genome is 1 in 10^8 bp. The human genome is 10^9 bp. So the odds of any single bp changing during an individual human replication is (1 x 10^-9)–the probability of a particular site on the genome changing—times (1 x 10^-8)—the mutational rate = 1 x 10^-17. For the studies they’re conduction, we can assume a population size of 50,000, given the time when this would have occurred and the areas involved. We can assume 8 children born to a couple over a generation time of 20 years; and we can assume that only 60% of the offspring will make it to reproductive age. That means 5 children/2 people over a twenty year period, or 1/8 th of a human per year per member of the population.
So, 50,000 X 1/8 X 10^-8 X 10^-9 = specific bp change/yr = 6.25 X 10-13. For “polygenic” (let’s assume only two—this makes it easy for the Darwinists) “positive selection”, this means the probability of all three sites changing “at once” (6.25 X 10^-9)^2 = approx. 4 X 10^-17 specific bp change/ yr. IOW, for that size population, and this is a very reasonable guess for size, it would take almost twice the life of the universe for them to take place “at once”.
Oh, but, of course, they don’t all have to happen at once. But, wait, they’ve already ruled out “positive selection” as having taken place one gene at a time; so what are we left with except simultaneity? Thus, the invocation of “randomness” in this whole process is pure nonsense. We’re dealing with some kind of programmed response if, in fact, “polygenic selection” is taking place. And, that, of course, means design.