Tag Archives: mutation

Mendel’s Accountant

Science, , ,

Given the confusing and radically opposed arguments on evolution, wouldn’t it be nice if there were an analytic tool to settle the debate? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a computer program that carefully modeled the effects of mutation and survival of the fittest for hundreds of generations?

That program has existed for 10 years, and is called “Mendel’s Accountant.” The program tracks all the mutations that occur among individuals in a modelled population using a process the authors call “genetic accounting.” Accumulating mutations get mixed into various combinations along each chromosome. Since children randomly inherit half of their father’s and half of their mother’s genome, some mutations are immediately lost. When it comes time to reproduce, some individuals fail to reproduce because they carry a greater load of harmful mutations. These individuals and their genomes are eliminated, similar to the way Charles Darwin imagined natural selection to work. The program is extremely flexible, and can model various rates of selection and fitness.

Mendel’s Accountant is the most accurate software available for realistically simulating evolutionary genetic models. It was created by the Institute for Creation Research. Crude forerunners of this software were created earlier by evolutionists, but, since the software did not support their theory, they abandoned it.

Mendel’s Accountant shows that mutations accumulate in a highly linear manner. In other words, almost all mutations do not have a noticeable effect on fitness, they “sit below” the selection threshold. This results in a continuous increase in the number of mutations in each succeeding generation. It means that all genomes decay over time. Natural selection can only remove the worst mutations, and the majority of mutations, the mutations that are only slightly deleterious, accumulate relentlessly and without limit. These “nearly neutral” deleterious mutations accumulate like rust on a car. Even though an individual spot of rust does not affect the fitness of a car, accumulating rust spots will eventually destroy it. There is no way, for the human race or any other species, to get rid of slightly deleterious mutations.

In other words, the arrow of evolution is down, not up. Evolution means “change over time,” and that certainly does occur. But average fitness declines with each generation. In “Genetic Entropy,” Cornell Professor John Sanford estimated that average human fitness declines by 1% each generation.

There is no peer-reviewed paper that even attempts to refute the methods or conclusions of Mendel. After a decade, this silence proves Darwin’s theory is wrong. It cannot explain the origin of complex genetic information. The arrow of evolution is down, not up.

Thanks for reading. Please share the good news of modern science with others. Together we can defeat the empty Atheist paradigm of a meaningless world.

Doug Ell

The Death of Man

Science, , , ,

This week I return to J.C. Sanford, and his eye-opening book – Genetic Entropy. J.C. Sanford is a highly regarded geneticist. He is the author of over 100 technical papers in theoretical genetics, and he taught at Cornell. His first published Genetic Entropy in 2005, and the most recent Fourth Edition includes scientific developments through 2014.

Sanford uses the word “entropy” in its normal sense – the universal tendency for things to deteriorate, unless an intelligent agent intervenes. The following description is from his website, geneticentropy.org:

Genetic entropy is most easily understood on a personal level. In our bodies there are roughly 3 new mutations (word-processing errors), every cell division. Our cells become more mutant, and more divergent from each other every day. By the time we are old, each of our cells has accumulated tens of thousands of mutations. Mutation accumulation is the primary reason we grow old and die. This level of genetic entropy is easy to understand.

There is another level of genetic entropy that affects us as a population. Because mutations arise in all of our cells, including our reproductive cells, we pass many of our new mutations to our children. So mutations continuously accumulate in the population – with each generation being more mutant than the last. So not only do we undergo genetic degeneration personally, we also are undergoing genetic degeneration as a population. This is essentially evolution going the wrong way. Natural selection can slow down, but cannot stop, genetic entropy on the population level.

We humans have 3.2 billion letters of DNA – biological information coding. Sanford estimates our mutation rate is at least 100 letters per generation. We are all mutants. Genetic Entropy analyzes how fast our genes are degenerating, whether Darwinian evolution can fix the problem, and the fate of the human race.

Sanford shows that natural selection cannot overcome this deterioration. Lethal errors can be weeded out, but those are rare. It is the gradual accumulation of “mildly deleterious mutations” that dooms us. They are invisible to natural selection. Sanford cites one study that “the extinction time is just slightly longer than 100 generations.” Another study found “the decrease in viability from mutation accumulation is now 1% to 2% per generation.”

Sanford destroys the Darwinian delusion. It’s not just that the mutation/selection mechanism cannot produce new systems or new species. Mutations destroy information, and all life – especially human beings – need information to survive and reproduce. We are in the process of mutational meltdown.

Without God, we are doomed. One hundred generations is about 2,000 years, and that ignores increasing mutation rates due to environmental pollution.

Pray.