mutations

Recently, we noted that John Sanford was speaking at NIH on human health and mutations. Philip Cunningham writes to mention a 2017 paper by Sanford and S. T. Cordova, Nylonase Genes and Proteins – Distribution, Conservation, and Possible Origins on whether the ba cteria that digest nylon evolved new genes: We began this work hoping to better understanding the various claims regarding the de novo origin of certain nylonase genes. The idea that nylonases would have arisen very recently, de novo, was based upon the widely-held assumption that nylonases would have been essentially non-existent prior to the artificial manufacture of nylon. This basic assumption would not be justified if there were any nylonlike polymers in nature, or if nylonase activity Read More ›

Geneticist John Sanford is also the author of Genetic Entropy: and one of the editors of Biological Information: New Perspectives: Proceedings of a Symposium Held May 31 Through June 3, 2011 at Cornell University Note: In a distinctly unsavoury move, devout Darwinians managed to get Biological Information dropped by Springer. It is all the more valuable to read for that reason. Nick Matzke famously got the publishing company Springer to suppress the publication of the papers of a conference held at Cornell. See here. He did this without having seen, much less read, any of the papers. Obviously, his motivation could not have been the content of the papers. He was motivated by the mere fact that several of the Read More ›

Which make the effects of mutations harder to predict than hoped. Of course, it’s also a blow for genetic determinism. From ScienceDaily: Ever since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, genetic research has been focused heavily on understanding genes so that they could be read like tea leaves to predict an individual’s future and, perhaps, help them stave off disease. A new USC Dornsife study suggests a reason why that prediction has been so challenging, even for the most-studied diseases and disorders: The relationship between an individual’s genes, environment, and traits can significantly change when a single, new mutation is introduced. “Individuals have genetic and environmental differences that cause these mutations to show different effects, and those make Read More ›

The remarkable “powers” of evolution are now shown to degrade (aka “mutate”) the human genes essential to intelligence.

Remarkably, they found that some of the same genes that influence human intelligence in healthy people were also the same genes that cause impaired cognitive ability and epilepsy when mutated, networks which they called M1 and M3.

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Geneticist Gerald R. Crabtree reviews evidence showing genomic mutations are degrading the 2000 to 5000 genes needed for our intellectual and emotional function:

New developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology predict that a very large number of genes underlie our intellectual and emotional abilities, making these abilities genetically surprisingly fragile. . . . Read More ›

I am always aghast that in the 21st century people still make the claim that mutations are unguided. This is a hold-over idea from before the discovery of DNA, simply because some mutations were found to occur independently of selection. However, modern evidence has showed that mutations are actually in large part due to mechanisms geared for adaptive purposes, just like the rest of biology. And, just like hearts have heart attacks, mutation systems can break down, too, and lead to disease. Just like bacteria, we discovered mutations first by noting the ones that were causing disease, but with every closer look we see that these are the exception rather than the rule. To point to a simple example (and Read More ›

A very interesting programme on the problem of inbreeding with pedigree dogs has recently been shown on BBC 1 in the UK; “Pedigree dogs exposed,” Tuesday 19th August 2008 21.00 BST. Although this programme didn’t set out to be anti Darwinian, there are some very interesting observations that come out of it that are really quite damaging to neo-Darwinian explanations. In fact the programme stated that the whole concept of purebred dogs came out of the eugenics movement of the 19th century.

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