Human evolution Intelligent Design

We could have come from two parents

Posted on Author News Comments(32)
Spread the love

Says a new paper at BIO-Complexity by Ola Hossjer and Ann Gauger.

It is definitely possible for us to have come from a starting point of two. Whether by a bottleneck or by a unique event the numbers say it is possible. 2 million years corresponds to the time of the first hominid to be called Homo, Homo erectus. His exact time and place of origin are unknown but are thought to be in Africa. The 500,000-year mark is near the time of the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

But these numbers are not fixed in stone. They are subject to change: a change in population structure, mortality, mutation rate, birth rate, migration, selection, all can influence the results. The amount of initial diversity, or its distribution, can as well. Changing the population size or time by half can be reversed by multiplying the mutation rate by two. In other words, we have a relationship than can be tweaked and studied, and its parameters can be worked out, but as one of its creators said, the model is “underdetermined.” That’s putting it mildly.

Once again, the precise age of the first couple is not the main point of this study. That there could be a first couple at all is the point.

Ann Gauger, “New BIO-Complexity Paper: We Could Have Come from Two” at Evolution News and Science Today

Paper.

32 Replies to “We could have come from two parents”

  1. 1
    Bob O'H says:
    October 24, 2019 at 2:07 am

    The authors looked specifically at two scenarios:

    Scenario 1 A single couple 100,000 generations ago(about 2mya) having zero heterozygosity (identical homozygous chromosomes), grows rapidly to a population of 10,000 people, then grows slowly and linearly to 16,000 people near the present.
    Scenario 2 A single couple 25,000 generations ago (about 500kya) having primordial heterozygosity of 0.012, grows rapidly to a population of 16,000 people, then holds steady.

    So you need to add the caveat that this is true if there are 16,000 people on this planet. I would advice Hossjer and Gauger not to go to see a Seahawks game when Hossjer is visiting, as the cognitive dissonance might not be good for their mental health.

  2. 2
    Latemarch says:
    October 24, 2019 at 6:24 am

    Bob,
    Might want to go re-read that….or maybe you intended a straw man argument.

  3. 3
  4. 4
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 8:07 am

    Hey Bob, what about the cognitive dissonance that arises in believers of blind watchmaker evolution?

  5. 5
    sherlock says:
    October 24, 2019 at 8:34 am

    Hey,

    Some time ago I saw on UncommonDescent a quote about great complexity of cell. In that quote, the cell was compared to the city with a huge traffic. Could you help me find this quote?

  6. 6
  7. 7
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 8:50 am

    One problem with looking into a single couple giving rise to all humanity is the mechanism that could do it. Given God or an Intelligent Designer the changes would have planned and not random/ accidental. Recombination could have been plentiful. Designed insertions, deletions and transposable elements could easily account for the many different alleles observed.

    The point is looking at this scenario from an BWE PoV will never work.

  8. 8
    Latemarch says:
    October 24, 2019 at 9:31 am

    ET,
    BWE? Bundesverband Windenergie eV?

    Maybe I need another cup of coffee…

  9. 9
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 9:37 am

    Blind Watchmaker Evolution

  10. 10
    Latemarch says:
    October 24, 2019 at 10:00 am

    ET
    *slaps forehead*
    You even used it in post 4!
    In my defense I don’t recall seeing it as an acronym before. Then again I’m getting so old that I can forget the name of the woman that has shared my bed for the last 50 yrs. I smile and say good morning Honey. She smiles back so I guess her name is Honey.

  11. 11
    sherlock says:
    October 24, 2019 at 10:39 am

    Thank you, ET! This is the quote I was looking for. Thank you very much!

  12. 12
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 10:41 am

    You’re welcome. I was pretty sure I knew the quote you were looking for so the site’s search engine led me right to it.

  13. 13
    DerekDiMarco says:
    October 24, 2019 at 10:45 am

    @Bob how is it part of Intelligent Design that humanity came from two people? Creationism says that, Intelligent Design DOES NOT.

  14. 14
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 10:47 am

    Another thing is that in any Design scenario in which there are only two founding members there would be a high degree of heterozygosity between the two. That is the two founders would be as genetically different as possible at every locus (and still allow for successful mating/ fecundity).

    And we haven’t even started with the immaterial information that drives it all.

  15. 15
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 10:48 am

    @ Derek- Bob is just responding to the new paper @ BioComplexity

  16. 16
    massam says:
    October 24, 2019 at 11:02 am

    Can anyone give me some actual examples of non random mutations? I’ve seen people claiming that evo is false because of non randomness, yet I’ve been searching this site all over and I can’t seem to find a single example.

  17. 17
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 12:39 pm

    Massam- Read “Evolution: A View from the 21st Century”, for a start. Then consider transposons- they carry within their coding sequence the code for two of the enzymes required for the TE to be moved around.

    Also ID is not anti-evolution. The debate is whether or not blind and mindless processes can produce what we see within biology.

  18. 18
    massam says:
    October 24, 2019 at 12:48 pm

    ET
    Thanks

  19. 19
    ET says:
    October 24, 2019 at 12:53 pm

    My apologies for not being more specific- for one, there is a mechanism called the SOS response, of all things, that seems to activate a cellular mutagenesis that allows it to repair extensive DNA damage.

  20. 20
    bornagain77 says:
    October 24, 2019 at 5:31 pm

    WOW, Stephen Meyer’s new video from PragerU has already received nearly a half a million views in only 3 days:

    Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven
    448,398 views
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOIbcOoaxuY

  21. 21
    johnnyb says:
    October 24, 2019 at 6:17 pm

    @Massam –

    For directed mutations, I have several videos which are probably the most accessible way to communicate. The short-short version is here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D720rzuIuv8

    A longer discussion is here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5_4ihFK8v8

    Also relevant:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwkde6xA-gs

    And

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=744wv4V1VpM

  22. 22
    Bob O'H says:
    October 25, 2019 at 1:30 am

    Latemarch @ 2 – can you explain what you think is wrong with my comment at 1? I hope it’s clear that the insinuation that most Seahawks fans are imaginary was snark, but both scenarios assume the population now (or close to now) is 16000 people.

  23. 23
    Bob O'H says:
    October 25, 2019 at 1:39 am

    DerekDiMarco @ 13 – as ET has pointed out, I’m responding to Hossjer and Gauger, so your question should really be addressed to them. Latemarch has a link to the backstory @ 3. FWIW, creationism (including young earth creationism) are a part of ID: the “big tent strategy” was to allow them to argue amicably within the big tent.

  24. 24
    DerekDiMarco says:
    October 25, 2019 at 6:32 am

    @Bob; I am very annoyed by creationists mixing up their stuff with ID. CSI and the Explanatory filter etc have nothing to do with Adam and Eve, that is creationism. Nothing in the science of information and design detection say anything about any Adam and Eve. If creationists keep trying to sneak their stuff into ID, ID will never be taken seriously as a science.

  25. 25
    ET says:
    October 25, 2019 at 6:42 am

    Derek- Creation is a subset of ID. That is just the way it is.

  26. 26
    bornagain77 says:
    October 25, 2019 at 9:38 am

    Venema has argued:

    “Put most simply, DNA evidence indicates that humans descend from a large population because we, as a species, are so genetically diverse in the present day that a large ancestral population is needed to transmit that diversity to us.”
    – Venema
    https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/new-bio-complexity-paper-we-could-have-come-from-two/

    And of course the counter proposition is that the genetic diversity was created by God in the first pair with a winnowing of genetic diversity from that initial pair.

    In science, empirical evidence is SUPPOSE to have final say. What does the empirical evidence say? Well, as usual, the empirical evidence does not bode well for the Darwinian model:

    Specifically, scientists find the differences of the ‘younger’ human races (i.e. Chinese, Europeans, American Indians, etc.. etc..) are losing genetic information when compared to the original race of humans which is thought to have migrated out of east Africa some 50,000 years ago.

    “We found an enormous amount of diversity within and between the African populations, and we found much less diversity in non-African populations,” Tishkoff told attendees today (Jan. 22) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Anaheim. “Only a small subset of the diversity in Africa is found in Europe and the Middle East, and an even narrower set is found in American Indians.”
    Tishkoff; Andrew Clark, Penn State; Kenneth Kidd, Yale University; Giovanni Destro-Bisol, University “La Sapienza,” Rome, and Himla Soodyall and Trefor Jenkins, WITS University, South Africa, looked at three locations on DNA samples from 13 to 18 populations in Africa and 30 to 45 populations in the remainder of the world.-

    New analysis provides fuller picture of human expansion from Africa – October 22, 2012
    Excerpt: A new, comprehensive review of humans’ anthropological and genetic records gives the most up-to-date story of the “Out of Africa” expansion that occurred about 45,000 to 60,000 years ago.
    This expansion, detailed by three Stanford geneticists, had a dramatic effect on human genetic diversity, which persists in present-day populations. As a small group of modern humans migrated out of Africa into Eurasia and the Americas, their genetic diversity was substantially reduced.
    http://phys.org/news/2012-10-a.....nsion.html

    Finding links and missing genes: Catalog of large-scale genetic changes around the world – October 1, 2015
    Excerpt: “When we analysed the genomes of 2500 people, we were surprised to see over 200 genes that are missing entirely in some people,” says Jan Korbel, who led the work at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany.,,,
    African genomes harboured a much greater diversity overall.
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....094723.htm

    At the 48:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Robert Carter comments on the surprising (non-Darwinian) findings he found in his detailed analysis of the genetic diversity of humans:

    The Non-Mythical Adam and Eve – Dr. Robert Carter – 2014 video
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_nMuq_lH4

    Of related note: In their imaginary mathematical models, Darwinists simply ignored the fact that the vast majority of random mutations are now known to be deleterious

    Defending the validity and significance of the new theorem “Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection With Mutations, Part I: Fisher’s Impact – Bill Basener and John Sanford – February 15, 2018
    Excerpt: While Fisher’s Theorem is mathematically correct, his Corollary is false. The simple logical fallacy is that Fisher stated that mutations could effectively be treated as not impacting fitness, while it is now known that the vast majority of mutations are deleterious, providing a downward pressure on fitness. Our model and our correction of Fisher’s theorem (The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations), take into account the tension between the upward force of selection with the downward force of mutations.,,,
    Our paper shows that Fisher’s corollary is clearly false, and that he misunderstood the implications of his own theorem. He incorrectly believed that his theorem was a mathematical proof that showed that natural selection plus mutation will necessarily and always increase fitness. He also believed his theorem was on a par with a natural law (such as entropic dissipation and the second law of thermodynamics). Because Fisher did not understand the actual fitness distribution of new mutations, his belief in the application of his “fundamental theorem of natural selection” was fundamentally and profoundly wrong – having little correspondence to biological reality. Therefore, we have reformulated Fisher’s model and have corrected his errors, thereby have established a new theorem that better describes biological reality, and allows for the specification of those key variables that will determine whether fitness will increase or decrease.
    http://theskepticalzone.com/wp.....rs-impact/

    Geneticist Corrects Fisher’s Theorem, but the Correction Turns Natural Selection Upside Down – December 22, 2017 | David F. Coppedge
    A new paper corrects errors in Fisher’s Theorem, a mathematical “proof” of Darwinism. Rather than supporting evolution, the corrected theorem inverts it.
    Excerpt: The authors of the new paper describe the fundamental problems with Fisher’s theorem. They then use Fisher’s first principles, and reformulate and correct the theorem. They have named the corrected theorem The Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection with Mutations. The correction of the theorem is not a trivial change – it literally flips the theorem on its head. The resulting conclusions are clearly in direct opposition to what Fisher had originally intended to prove.,,,
    The authors of the new paper realized that one of Fisher’s pivotal assumptions was clearly false, and in fact was falsified many decades ago. In his informal corollary, Fisher essentially assumed that new mutations arose with a nearly normal distribution – with an equal proportion of good and bad mutations (so mutations would have a net fitness effect of zero). We now know that the vast majority of mutations in the functional genome are harmful, and that beneficial mutations are vanishingly rare. The simple fact that Fisher’s premise was wrong, falsifies Fisher’s corollary. Without Fisher’s corollary – Fisher’s Theorem proves only that selection improves a population’s fitness until selection exhausts the initial genetic variation, at which point selective progress ceases. Apart from his corollary, Fisher’s Theorem only shows that within an initial population with variant genetic alleles, there is limited selective progress followed by terminal stasis.,,,
    The authors observe that the more realistic the parameters, the more likely fitness decline becomes.
    https://crev.info/2017/12/geneticist-corrects-fishers-theorem/

    Also of note: The real world is NEVER kind to Darwinian presuppositions:

    Critic ignores reality of Genetic Entropy – Dr John Sanford – 7 March 2013
    Excerpt: Where are the beneficial mutations in man? It is very well documented that there are thousands of deleterious Mendelian mutations accumulating in the human gene pool, even though there is strong selection against such mutations. Yet such easily recognized deleterious mutations are just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of deleterious mutations will not display any clear phenotype at all. There is a very high rate of visible birth defects, all of which appear deleterious. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Why are no beneficial birth anomalies being seen? This is not just a matter of identifying positive changes. If there are so many beneficial mutations happening in the human population, selection should very effectively amplify them. They should be popping up virtually everywhere. They should be much more common than genetic pathologies. Where are they? European adult lactose tolerance appears to be due to a broken lactase promoter [see Can’t drink milk? You’re ‘normal’! Ed.].
    African resistance to malaria is due to a broken hemoglobin protein [see Sickle-cell disease. Also, immunity of an estimated 20% of western Europeans to HIV infection is due to a broken chemokine receptor—see CCR5-delta32: a very beneficial mutation. Ed.] Beneficials happen, but generally they are loss-of-function mutations, and even then they are very rare!
    http://creation.com/genetic-entropy

    Human Genetic Variation Recent, Varies Among Populations – (Nov. 28, 2012)
    Excerpt: Nearly three-quarters of mutations in genes that code for proteins — the workhorses of the cell — occurred within the past 5,000 to 10,000 years,,,
    “One of the most interesting points is that Europeans have more new deleterious (potentially disease-causing) mutations than Africans,”,,,
    “Having so many of these new variants can be partially explained by the population explosion in the European population. However, variation that occur in genes that are involved in Mendelian traits and in those that affect genes essential to the proper functioning of the cell tend to be much older.” (A Mendelian trait is controlled by a single gene. Mutations in that gene can have devastating effects.) The amount variation or mutation identified in protein-coding genes (the exome) in this study is very different from what would have been seen 5,000 years ago,,,
    The report shows that “recent” events have a potent effect on the human genome. Eighty-six percent of the genetic variation or mutations that are expected to be harmful arose in European-Americans in the last five thousand years, said the researchers.
    The researchers used established bioinformatics techniques to calculate the age of more than a million changes in single base pairs (the A-T, C-G of the genetic code) that are part of the exome or protein-coding portion of the genomes (human genetic blueprint) of 6,515 people of both European-American and African-American decent.,,,
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....132259.htm

    Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation George Montañez 1, Robert J. Marks II 2, Jorge Fernandez 3 and John C. Sanford 4 – May 2013
    Excerpt: It is almost universally acknowledged that beneficial mutations are rare compared to deleterious mutations [1–10].,, It appears that beneficial mutations may be too rare to actually allow the accurate measurement of how rare they are [11].
    1. Kibota T, Lynch M (1996) Estimate of the genomic mutation rate deleterious to overall fitness in E. coli . Nature 381:694–696.
    2. Charlesworth B, Charlesworth D (1998) Some evolutionary consequences of deleterious mutations. Genetica 103: 3–19.
    3. Elena S, et al (1998) Distribution of fitness effects caused by random insertion mutations in Escherichia coli. Genetica 102/103: 349–358.
    4. Gerrish P, Lenski R N (1998) The fate of competing beneficial mutations in an asexual population. Genetica 102/103:127–144.
    5. Crow J (2000) The origins, patterns, and implications of human spontaneous mutation. Nature Reviews 1:40–47.
    6. Bataillon T (2000) Estimation of spontaneous genome-wide mutation rate parameters: whither beneficial mutations? Heredity 84:497–501.
    7. Imhof M, Schlotterer C (2001) Fitness effects of advantageous mutations in evolving Escherichia coli populations. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98:1113–1117.
    8. Orr H (2003) The distribution of fitness effects among beneficial mutations. Genetics 163: 1519–1526.
    9. Keightley P, Lynch M (2003) Toward a realistic model of mutations affecting fitness. Evolution 57:683–685.
    10. Barrett R, et al (2006) The distribution of beneficial mutation effects under strong selection. Genetics 174:2071–2079.
    11. Bataillon T (2000) Estimation of spontaneous genome-wide mutation rate parameters: whither beneficial mutations? Heredity 84:497–501.
    http://www.worldscientific.com.....08728_0006

    Thus, Venema’s prediction that we are “so genetically diverse in the present day that a large ancestral population is needed to transmit that diversity to us”, simply does not line up with the empirical evidence. If Darwinian evolution operated as a normal science, instead of a religion for atheists, this SHOULD count as a direct empirical falsification of Venema’s prediction. But alas, Darwinism is far from a normal science:

  27. 27
    Latemarch says:
    October 25, 2019 at 2:37 pm

    Bob@22
    They stopped the simulation at 16000. No need to go further.

  28. 28
    Fasteddious says:
    October 26, 2019 at 3:48 pm

    For YECS types, another option to explain the genetic variability of humans is that God created Eve with each of her eggs having a different genetic makeup. Then, of course, all her children would be very different genetically, even though fertilized by the one man. I’m not saying I actually believe this, but it is an intriguing angle for YECS people.

  29. 29
    Bob O'H says:
    October 27, 2019 at 4:16 am

    latemarch – why not? The human population is much larger than 16000, and has been for a long time. They don’t give any justification for their choice of simulations – is 16k close enough to many millions to be a good approximation? They don’t say.

    They also don’t say why they think any of their choices for their scenarios are reasonable. The consensus is that the human population has been growing at a faster than exponential speed, so why do they grow the population exponentially, and then slow it down? And then there’s the usual bugbear of panmixia.

    All models are wrong, of course. But if you’re going to make some unrealistic assumptions, you need to justify them. I don’t see that here at all.

  30. 30
    ET says:
    October 27, 2019 at 7:01 am

    Bob, if you want unrealistic assumptions there is no need to look any further than blind watchmaker evolution. Blind watchmaker evolution doesn’t even have a mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes and evos can’t even create a computer simulation showing such a thing can be done.

  31. 31
    PREDATORbyDESIGN says:
    November 8, 2019 at 3:32 pm

    “@Bob how is it part of Intelligent Design that humanity came from two people? Creationism says that, Intelligent Design DOES NOT”

    How could it be Intelligent Design without a creator?

    I believe in a Creator. I don’t believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. I go believe that life -whatever the first form was-came about through the intelligence of a Creator.

    Information requires intelligence. Where did the instructions for the first one come from? Bill Gates once compared DNA to computer programs. We all know that someone put coding onto a computer or a DVD… DNA is far more complex than anything man is capable of. Who coded DNA?

    Creation requires an intelligent Creator.

  32. 32
    bornagain77 says:
    November 8, 2019 at 6:44 pm

    Bob O’H states

    “if you’re going to make some unrealistic assumptions, you need to justify them.”

    I wonder if Bob is willing to live by his own advise of justifying his assumptions? Bob believes in Darwinian evolution. Bob assumes that random mutations and natural selection created all the amazing diversity of life we see around us. Bob’s first assumption, i.e. random mutations, is shown to be a problematic assumption on several fronts. First off, the vast majority of mutations are now shown to be ‘directed’ mutations, not random mutations.

    “It is difficult (if not impossible) to find a genome change operator that is truly random in its action within the DNA of the cell where it works. All careful studies of mutagenesis find statistically significant non-random patterns”
    James Shapiro – Evolution: A View From The 21st Century – (Page 82)

    WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Fully Random Mutations – Kevin Kelly – 2014
    Excerpt: What is commonly called “random mutation” does not in fact occur in a mathematically random pattern. The process of genetic mutation is extremely complex, with multiple pathways, involving more than one system. Current research suggests most spontaneous mutations occur as errors in the repair process for damaged DNA. Neither the damage nor the errors in repair have been shown to be random in where they occur, how they occur, or when they occur. Rather, the idea that mutations are random is simply a widely held assumption by non-specialists and even many teachers of biology. There is no direct evidence for it.
    On the contrary, there’s much evidence that genetic mutation vary in patterns. For instance it is pretty much accepted that mutation rates increase or decrease as stress on the cells increases or decreases. These variable rates of mutation include mutations induced by stress from an organism’s predators and competition, and as well as increased mutations brought on by environmental and epigenetic factors. Mutations have also been shown to have a higher chance of occurring near a place in DNA where mutations have already occurred, creating mutation hotspot clusters—a non-random pattern.
    http://edge.org/response-detail/25264

    How life changes itself: the Read-Write (RW) genome. – 2013
    Excerpt: Research dating back to the 1930s has shown that genetic change is the result of cell-mediated processes, not simply accidents or damage to the DNA. This cell-active view of genome change applies to all scales of DNA sequence variation, from point mutations to large-scale genome rearrangements and whole genome duplications (WGDs). This conceptual change to active cell inscriptions controlling RW genome functions has profound implications for all areas of the life sciences.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23876611

    Secondly, the vast majority of mutations that have a measurable effect on a organism are now known to be deleterious. As Behe showed in ‘Darwin Devolves’, Sanford showed in ‘Genetic Entropy’, and Spetner showed in ‘The Evolution Revolution’, this overall tendency towards degeneration includes mutations that happen to increase fitness.

    “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain – Michael Behe – December 2010
    Excerpt: In its most recent issue The Quarterly Review of Biology has published a review by myself of laboratory evolution experiments of microbes going back four decades.,,, The gist of the paper is that so far the overwhelming number of adaptive (that is, helpful) mutations seen in laboratory evolution experiments are either loss or modification of function. Of course we had already known that the great majority of mutations that have a visible effect on an organism are deleterious. Now, surprisingly, it seems that even the great majority of helpful mutations degrade the genome to a greater or lesser extent.,,, I dub it “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.
    http://behe.uncommondescent.co.....evolution/

    Sanford: “What is Genetic Entropy? It is the genetic degeneration of living things. Genetic entropy is the systematic breakdown of the internal biological information systems that make life alive. Genetic entropy results from genetic mutations, which are typographical errors in the programming of life (life’s instruction manuals). Mutations systematically erode the information that encodes life’s many essential functions. Biological information consists of a large set of specifications, and random mutations systematically scramble these specifications – gradually but relentlessly destroying the programming instructions essential to life.”
    https://www.geneticentropy.org/whats-genetic-entropy

    Gloves Off — Responding to David Levin on the Nonrandom Evolutionary Hypothesis – Lee M. Spetner – Sept. 2016
    Excerpt: I wrote in this book (as well in an earlier book) that there is no example of a random mutation that adds heritable information to the genome, and that statement still stands. The statement is important because evolution is about building up information (Spetner 1964, 1968, 1970). Some have offered what they think are counterexamples of my statement, but they are often not of random mutations at all, or they otherwise fail to be valid counterexamples.
    Levin finds the statement astonishing, and it may well astonish someone who believes evolutionary theory represents reality. But it happens to be true, and I am not surprised that it astonishes him because it deals a deathblow to evolutionary theory.
    – per evolution news

    Thirdly, mutations to DNA don’t even determine the overall architectural plan of an organism in the first place as Darwinists had originally presupposed.

    ‘Now one more problem as far as the generation of information. It turns out that you don’t only need information to build genes and proteins, it turns out to build Body-Plans you need higher levels of information; Higher order assembly instructions. DNA codes for the building of proteins, but proteins must be arranged into distinctive circuitry to form distinctive cell types. Cell types have to be arranged into tissues. Tissues have to be arranged into organs. Organs and tissues must be specifically arranged to generate whole new Body-Plans, distinctive arrangements of those body parts. We now know that DNA alone is not responsible for those higher orders of organization. DNA codes for proteins, but by itself it does not insure that proteins, cell types, tissues, organs, will all be arranged in the body-plan. And what that means is that the Body-Plan morphogenesis, as it is called, depends upon information that is not encoded on DNA. Which means you can mutate DNA indefinitely. 80 million years, 100 million years, til the cows come home. It doesn’t matter, because in the best case you are just going to find a new protein some place out there in that vast combinatorial sequence space. You are not, by mutating DNA alone, going to generate higher order structures that are necessary to building a body plan. So what we can conclude from that is that the neo-Darwinian mechanism is grossly inadequate to explain the origin of information necessary to build new genes and proteins, and it is also grossly inadequate to explain the origination of novel biological form.’
    – Stephen Meyer – Functional Proteins and Information for Body Plans – video – 5:55 minute mark
    https://youtu.be/hs4y4XLGQ-Y?t=354

    Darwinism vs Biological Form – video (2017)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w

    Thus Bob’s primary assumption of random mutations is certainly not ‘justified’.

    As to Bob’s second assumption, i.e. natural selection. Natural selection is now known to be, via Bob’s own specialty, population genetics, to be grossly inadequate.

    The waiting time problem in a model hominin population – 2015 Sep 17
    John Sanford, Wesley Brewer, Franzine Smith, and John Baumgardner
    Excerpt: The program Mendel’s Accountant realistically simulates the mutation/selection process,,,
    Given optimal settings, what is the longest nucleotide string that can arise within a reasonable waiting time within a hominin population of 10,000? Arguably, the waiting time for the fixation of a “string-of-one” is by itself problematic (Table 2). Waiting a minimum of 1.5 million years (realistically, much longer), for a single point mutation is not timely adaptation in the face of any type of pressing evolutionary challenge. This is especially problematic when we consider that it is estimated that it only took six million years for the chimp and human genomes to diverge by over 5 % [1]. This represents at least 75 million nucleotide changes in the human lineage, many of which must encode new information.
    While fixing one point mutation is problematic, our simulations show that the fixation of two co-dependent mutations is extremely problematic – requiring at least 84 million years (Table 2). This is ten-fold longer than the estimated time required for ape-to-man evolution. In this light, we suggest that a string of two specific mutations is a reasonable upper limit, in terms of the longest string length that is likely to evolve within a hominin population (at least in a way that is either timely or meaningful). Certainly the creation and fixation of a string of three (requiring at least 380 million years) would be extremely untimely (and trivial in effect), in terms of the evolution of modern man.
    It is widely thought that a larger population size can eliminate the waiting time problem. If that were true, then the waiting time problem would only be meaningful within small populations. While our simulations show that larger populations do help reduce waiting time, we see that the benefit of larger population size produces rapidly diminishing returns (Table 4 and Fig. 4). When we increase the hominin population from 10,000 to 1 million (our current upper limit for these types of experiments), the waiting time for creating a string of five is only reduced from two billion to 482 million years.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC4573302/

    In fact, besides this monumental failure of natural selection within Bob’s own field of population genetics, Bob also has no empirical evidence that he can point to to support his assumption of natural selection.

    Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila – 2010
    Excerpt of concluding paragraph: “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.”
    http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/.....202010.pdf

    “some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a unique creative force that solves all the difficult evolutionary problems without a real empirical basis.”
    “The Third Way” – James Shapiro, Denis Noble, and etc.. etc..,,,

    “the uncritical acceptance of natural selection as an explanatory force for all aspects of biodiversity (without any direct evidence) is not much different than invoking an intelligent designer”
    Michael Lynch – The Origins of Genome Architecture, p 368

    Moreover, although Darwinists will often wax poetic in the literature about the supposed unfettered creative power of natural selection, the fact of the matter is that natural selection creates nothing.

    Let’s Not Begin With Natural Selection – Talbott – 2019
    Excerpt: The miracle of it all is that, if evolutionary rhetoric is to be believed, the empty formula of natural selection explains just about everything you could imagine — all based, as this rhetoric consistently informs us, on some form of “blind” agency.,,,
    Darwin himself spoke about how,,
    “natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.”
    (Darwin 1859, p. 84)
    This sort of language is all but universal (in evolutionary literature).,,,
    It would be truer to say that the famously simple and compelling logic of natural selection, misconceived as the “foundation” of a powerful theory, has been a primary source of hokum in evolutionary thinking. It is a kind of blank template upon which overly credulous biologists and lay people can project their faith.,,,
    It happens that the explanatory vacuity of the logic of natural selection has been recognized by some of the most prominent and reputable evolutionary biologists for more than 150 years. They have been concerned about how complex adaptive innovations are achieved,,,
    The influential Dutch botanist and geneticist, Hugo de Vries, framed the matter this way during the first decade of the twentieth century:
    “Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts. It retains only what variability puts into the sieve. Whence the material comes that is put into it, should be kept separate from the theory of its selection. How the struggle for existence sifts is one question; how that which is sifted arose is another.2”
    It was de Vries who gave currency to the catchy phrasing that has since been repeated many times: “Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest”.3 The concern is not easily dismissed. Other biologists have added their own accents, and it is worth pausing a moment to trace a theme that some might see as a kind of subterranean, or largely hidden, history of evolutionary thought — a history beginning no later than the year after the original publication of The Origin of Species in 1859:
    “If we take the three attributes of the deity of the Hindoo Triad, the Creator, Brahma, the preserver or sustainer, Vishnu, and the destroyer, Siva, Natural Selection will be a combination of the two last but without the first, or the creative power, we cannot conceive the others having any function.”
    (Sir Charles Lyell [1860], Scottish geologist who laid the crucial uniformitarian foundation for Darwin’s theory)
    “It is exceedingly improbable that the nicely adapted machinery of animals should have come into existence without the operation of causes leading directly to that end. The doctrines of ‘selection’ and ‘survival’ plainly do not reach the kernel of evolution, which is, as I have long since pointed out, the question of ‘the origin of the fittest’ … The law by which structures originate is one thing; those by which they are restricted, directed, or destroyed, is another thing.”
    (Edward Drinker Cope [1887, p. 225], noted American paleontologist and formulator of “Cope’s Rule”, which proposed that the organisms of an evolutionary lineage tend to increase in size over time)
    “Selection permits the viable to continue and decides that the non-viable shall perish … Selection determines along which branch Evolution shall proceed, but it does not decide what novelties that branch shall bring forth.”
    (William Bateson [1909, p. 96], a founder of the discipline of genetics)
    “The function of natural selection is selection and not creation. It has nothing to do with the formation of new variation.”
    (Reginald Punnett [1911], British geneticist who cofounded the Journal of Genetics; quoted in Stoltzfus 2006)
    “The actual steps by which individuals come to differ from their parents are due to causes other than selection, and in consequence evolution [by natural selection] can only follow certain paths. These paths are determined by factors which we can only very dimly conjecture. Only a thorough-going study of variation will lighten our darkness.”
    (J. B. S. Haldane [1932, pp. 142-3], a major contributor to the twentieth-century consensus theory of evolution)
    Regarding specific traits, natural selection “might afford a reason for their preservation, but never provide the cause for their origin.”
    (Adolf Portmann [1967, p. 123], preeminent zoologist of the middle of the twentieth century)
    “Natural selection is the editor, rather than the composer, of the genetic message”.
    (Jack King and Thomas Jukes [1969], key developers of the idea of “neutral evolution”)
    “In evolution, selection may decide the winner of a given game but development non-randomly defines the players.”
    (Pere Alberch [1980], Spanish naturalist and embryologist, sometimes spoken of as the founder of Evo-Devo — evolutionary developmental biology)
    “Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.”
    (Lynn Margulis [2011], microbiologist and botanist, pioneer in exploring the role of symbiosis in evolution, and co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis)
    http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/bk/ns1.htm

    Thus Bob’s assumption of natural selection, like his assumption of random mutations, is completely unjustified.

    Again Bob said that “if you’re going to make some unrealistic assumptions, you need to justify them”. Will Bob heed his own advice and admit that he has no justification for his ‘unrealistic’ assumptions?

    1 Thessalonians 5:21
    But test everything; hold fast what is good.

Leave a Reply