Over at Creation-Evolution Headlines, Dave Coppedge reports that two recent journal article’s have confirmed Cornell’s John Sanford’s “genetic entropy”: An accumulation of mutations always decreases fitness (contrary to neo-Darwinists’ hopes):
For mutations under epistasis to produce innovation, there must be a way for them to work together (synergistic epistasis). This is often assumed but has not been observed. Most experiments have shown beneficial mutations working against each other (antagonistic epistasis; see 12/14/2006), or causing even less fitness than if they acted alone (decompensatory epistasis; see 10/19/2004). In a new paper in Science,3 Khan et al, working with Richard Lenski [Michigan State], leader of the longest-running experiment on evolution of E. coli, found a law of diminishing returns with beneficial mutations due to negative epistasis.
Diminishing returns?
Like this, for example?: An increased number of spelling errors in a letter retyped in series by a number of different people does not add up to a new, better letter over time?
Coppedge also notes the way the science media handled the news, for example:
“The more mutations the researchers added, the more they interfered with each other,” was one of the “surprising” results.
Surprising to whom? Not to Dembski and other members of the No Free Lunch club.
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