Tag Archives: natural selection

Mendel’s Accountant

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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 Glory of the Peacock

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Have you ever seen a peacock? The tail – “train” – opens like a fan, and explodes with colors and patterns. Here’s a short video:

The sight is glorious.

How did the peacock get its tail? The secular world insists all creatures “evolved” by a process of keeping the best mistakes, by mutations that just, “accidentally,” happened to create incredible technology. I’ve shown mathematically why that theory, Darwin’s “goo-to-you” theory of evolution, is nonsense, why mutations only destroy information; they can’t create it.

Darwin knew nothing about DNA and genes, but he did know his theory did not explain the peacock. The oversized, glorious tail of the peacock slows it down. The tail does not help the peacock get food, avoid predators, or otherwise survive. How did such a beautiful tail “evolve” without God? In 1860, a year after he published his theory, Darwin wrote:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

Eleven years later Darwin tried to solve the problem. He invented a “theory of sexual selection.” The basic idea was that the peacock’s tail had the value of attracting females (peahens), and therefore had “evolved” without God. In other words, Darwin claimed that peacocks with sexier tails had better luck with the peahens, and passed on their genes to the next generation. It’s a “just-so” story worthy of Kipling, and does nothing to explain how the whole process got started, where the information and technology came from to build the first peacock tail, but it was enough of a fig leaf to satisfy generations of Darwinists that the problem had been solved.

Until a research team tested it. After a seven year study, researchers announced in 2007 that “the peacock’s train is not the object of female sexual preference – contradicting Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.” In other words, females mated with “poor-quality” peacocks as often as with “flashy, high-quality” peacocks. Darwin’s ‘theory of sexual selection’ fails to explain the very thing Darwin concocted it for! More hard scientific evidence (like the rejection of “junk” DNA and the absence of intermediary forms in the fossil record) that Darwin was wrong.

And the colors! Those brilliant, iridescent colors of the peacock don’t come from dyes. They are produced by super small geometric structures of atoms, designed to intensify certain wavelengths of light. To design that structure, and to build the factories to produce and assemble it, is stunning, futuristic technology.

Just like Darwin in 1860, evolutionary biologists today should feel sick looking at the glory of the peacock. A glory that reflects, in a very small way, the glory of God.

Thanks for reading. Please share the good news of true science. Together we can change the world.

Doug

Is Darwinism a Scientific Theory?

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Tom Wolfe is a powerful thinker and writer. His books include The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Bonfire of the Vanities (the last two were adapted into motion pictures). His most recent book, The Kingdom of Speech, annihilates claims that Darwin’s theory of evolution is science:

There are five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Has anyone observed the phenomenon – in this case, Evolution – as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” tests)? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution … well … no … no … no … no … and no.

[Tom Wolfe – The Kingdom of Speech, 2016, p. 27.]

Let’s look more closely at how evolution scores.

1. Has anyone observed the phenomenon?

There has never been a case where anyone has observed a new biological system or technology being created from random mutations and natural selection. Franklin Harold, a Darwinist, admits: “We must concede that there are presently no detailed accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” Scientists see systems that they imagine “evolved,” but they have never observed evolution in action. In one decades-old experiment involving 65,000 generations of bacteria, no new systems were created. Instead, systems not needed to survive during the controlled conditions broke down.

If you look at the complexity of life, and in particular at the fantastic improbability of ever forming by chance a single new functional protein, much less a complete new biological system, it’s not hard to see why. See Counting To God, pages 105 to 112.

2. Could other scientists replicate it?

Obviously, no. Scientists can’t observe or replicate Darwinian evolution.

3. Are there facts which, if false, would contradict the theory?

To me this is the most important test for a scientific theory. If a theory is scientific, there must be a way to test it, to create an experiment that, if the results don’t turn out right, would show the theory is false. Quantum Physics and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity have each been confirmed to about 13 decimal places. A tiny discrepancy could prove either theory false. Karl Popper wrote: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”

Here’s Cornelius Hunter:

Being an evolutionist mean there is no bad news. If new species appear abruptly in the fossil record, that just means evolution operates in spurts. … If clever mechanisms are discovered in biology, that just means evolution is smarter than we imagined. If strikingly similar designs are found in distant species, that just means evolution repeats itself. If significant differences are found in allied species, that just means evolution sometimes introduces new designs rapidly. If no likely mechanism can be found for the large-scale change evolution requires, that just means evolution is mysterious. If adaptation responds to environmental signals, that just means evolution has more foresight than was thought. If major predictions of evolution are found to be false, that just means evolution is more complex than we thought.

Evolution cannot be falsified because it makes no predictions (other than change happens). Evolution has no mathematical equations. Karl Popper wrote: “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.”

4. Could scientists make predictions based on it?

Scientists have made predictions based on Darwinism, and those predictions have consistently been proved false. One major prediction was that, because according to Darwin we were created from random mutations, most of our DNA is “junk.” This was disproved by over 400 scientists in 2012 as part of the ENCODE project. See Counting To God, pages 153 to 158.

5. Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science?

Darwinism has not led to a single scientific discovery. It has led millions to lose faith in God. It has led to a disregard for human beings, and two major world wars. It gave Hitler, Stalin, and Mao justification to kill 100 million people.

Darwinism is a delusion to deny God. Here’s a video that goes into more detail on this subject.

And let’s not forget about the multiverse, another major and unprovable fantasy of Atheists who seek to deny God. The multiverse by definition cannot be observed or replicated – because it is not in the observable universe. There are absolutely no facts or experiments that can contradict the multiverse delusion – all we can do is observe and experiment in our universe. The multiverse leads to no predictions and no new science.

The complexity and beauty of life prove the existence of God. The complexity and fantastic fine-tuning of our universe, fine-tuning in the constants of physics, the laws of physics, and even the structure of time and space, prove the existence of God. There is no scientific theory that can explain these proven facts without God. In each case, the scientific evidence of design is overwhelming. True science proves God.

Thanks for reading.

Information Revisited – New Proteins

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Last week I explained why random events cannot create meaningful information. This week let’s see how recent laboratory results confirm that, by looking at the creation of new proteins.

Proteins are biological machine parts. They are manufactured using the code in DNA by snapping together the specified sequence of amino acids. All life uses the same 20 amino acids, and they are snapped together, like plastic building blocks, and folded into a functional protein, a working biological machine part. Functional proteins are rare, in exactly the same way that a random collection of letters is rarely going to form a coherent paragraph.One very recent estimate is that human beings have about 19,000 functional proteins.

In 2009 researchers at the University of Oregon found that Darwinian, chance-based evolution doesn’t work in reverse – that is, once you have a new protein, there is essentially zero chance that natural processes will somehow be able to recreate the original protein. In June 2014, in an article published in prestigious Nature magazine, they found tremendous problems with forward evolution. They found that to get from one protein to another you had to assume a fantastically unlikely exact sequence of intermediate steps.

In other words, they disproved Darwinian evolution –it all happened solely by chance and natural selection. They verified in the lab that natural processes alone cannot create information. Of course, they don’t admit it. Just like most scientists worldwide seek to ignore the ENCODE results of 2012, that substantially all of our human DNA serves a function, and that we have multiple levels of information in our DNA coding.

So where does information come from? Where did the DNA coding come from to build the thousands of functional proteins in our bodies?

“If you start with a protein that has a particular function, to some extent you can generally change some of the amino acids in its sequence, and the protein will still perform that same function. But you can’t rationally expect to “accidentally” mutate from one functional protein to another amino acid sequence with a new function. The odds of that are one in 1063 for 92 amino acid sequences and one in 1077 for 150 amino acid sequences, and far worse for longer amino acid sequences.” Counting To God, p. 158.

Thanks for reading.