Creation: Darwinian Engines of Evolution
A guest post today from my brilliant husband, Gregg.
A Finite Universe and Finite Time
Darwinists used to have the comfort of infinity to lend the odds of life occurring by random chance in their favor. The oldest example of it I could think of is, “Given infinite time, an infinite amount of typewriters, infinite typing paper, and infinite monkeys typing away, one of them would eventually produce the collected works of William Shakespeare in order without error.”
The obvious answer to this for me at age 14 was, “Yes, but that exercise would also produce an INFINITE amount of waste, infinite reams of gibberish that were NOT the collected works of William Shakespeare written in order and without error. Look around the universe. Where is the infinite waste?”
Behold the wonder that is life in our finite universe. Even supposing the universe is 15 billion years old, that is a finite amount of seconds (47,304 x 1010 seconds) in which an infinite amount of changes must occur for Darwinism to be true. Even supposing the earth is 5 billion or so years old, a single cell has to assemble itself from dirt and rocks and such by an undirected, unguided, random process –and for that simple single cell to appear, a nearly infinite number of random occurrences must take place in order, without error, in only 15,768 x 1013 seconds. The best estimates put it at a greater than 1 in 10100,000,000,000 chance.
That is more zeros than there are atoms in our galaxy. There is an almost infinitely higher probability — exactly 1 chance in 4.6 x 1029,120 — that my son will win the lottery every single week for the rest of his life purchasing only one lottery ticket per week.
Faced with these odds, Darwinists began to scramble for “engines” that would “drive” Darwinian evolution. This is admittedly an attempt to, once more, skew the odds to make their idiotic theories of creation without a Creator somewhat plausible by compensating for the limiting factors of finite time and matter.
Why is not all nature in confusion instead of being, as we see them, well-defined species?”
-—Charles Darwin (1866), quoted in H. Enoch, Evolution or Creation, p. 139.
The Four Darwinian Engines of Evolution
Darwinists invented theoretical “engines” that “drive” or speed up evolutionary change. I could say a good bit about the fallacy of reification but that will be a later post.
I will say this. When we ascribe concrete characteristics to concepts which do not possess those characteristics, it always leads to fallacious conclusions. For example, “nature” is simply what we call the arrangement of things and the order of events in the universe that we experience. Nature does not have a personality. Nature does not have a mind. Nature cannot look into the future, anticipate future shortfalls, and stockpile in advance of the event. Nature cannot construct useless things in one generation because it “knows” it will need those useless things and find a use for them in future generations. Nature is mindless and, by and large, a terrible logistician.
Setting reification aside for the moment, the “engines of evolution” past and present are:
- Larmarkism
- Natural Selection
- Mutation
- Punctuated Equilibrium
Larmarkism
I have already written on Lamarkism, the notion of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” The fairy tale notion holds that, for example, a deer can dream of a long neck and his descendants will have transformed into giraffes as a result of his magical wish. I also stated that I believe Darwinian theory has come full circle, all the way back to Lamarkism, which presently serves as the unstated philosophical foundation of all present Darwinian evolutionary theory. Please note my intentional use of the word philosophical as opposed to scientific. Darwinism, as I hope you will soon see, has no scientific foundation.
Natural Selection
With respect to Natural Selection, I would like to carefully state that natural selection DOES occur in nature. For instance, when only the Alpha Wolf gets to breed with the females in the pack, only the Alpha Wolf’s pups come into being in the next generation of wolves.
But they are still wolves.
When a zebra stud breaks his ankle and is eaten by lions, the next most fit zebra stud gets to breed and the next generation of zebra colts are all his.
But they are still zebras.
In other words, what natural selection does is not as important as what it does NOT do. What it does NOT do, not ever, is drive any kind of macro-evolutionary change that generates brand new species. Even Darwin admitted this after publishing his last revised edition of his racist diatribe.
Horses and zebras can interbreed. I firmly believe they have a common ancestor –probably some kind of horse. Dogs and wolves can interbreed. I also believe they have a common ancestor. It was probably some kind of dog.
No one can demonstrate that zebras can come from wolves or vice versa. There is no such thing as macro-evolution. Simple natural selection has never been shown to produce such sweeping changes, either, even granted infinite time and matter, which does not exist in this finite universe.
Mutation
What about mutation? Discovering that certain chemicals—and especially radiation—could cause abundant mutations, thus speeding up “the process of evolution,” Darwinists were certain that soon they would prove Darwin right. Finally, the crackpot theory they worshiped would be vindicated! They were certain they could produce wonderful new, robust species. They immediately started blasting fruit flies and tadpoles and what not with all kinds of toxins and radiation. All that has been produced in the last 60 years is weakened creatures which generally die soon after coming into the world or, if they live, do not produce any offspring.
There are only two facts that stand in the way of Mutation being a viable evolutionary engine: (1) Mutations are always harmful and frequently lethal; and (2) mutations never, never change one species into another species.
Wait a minute! What about sickle cell? Doesn’t that provide an immunity to malaria? Well, yes. Yes it does. And cutting off your feet provides an immunity to athlete’s foot.
Sickle cell is not a beneficial mutation by any definition. If you think it is, ask someone who has it. They suffer horrible and debilitating pain and the condition shortens their lives. In the same way, maleria brings horrible and debilitating pain and a shortened lifespan.
Punctuated Equilibrium
Steven Jay Gould proposed the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium and it became the basis for what is now called neo-Darwinism. He theorized that “since evolution is true” then at set intervals in time (Which kind of implies a directed process, but don’t question him. He’s an expert after all.) an offspring, let’s say a male offspring, is produced which contains every possible “beneficial mutation” that his parents can contribute. Simultaneously — and as the exclusive result of utterly random chance — a female offspring is born who contains every possible “beneficial mutation” of her parents. Randomly, and driven by “as yet unknown evolutionary forces,” these two somehow meet — maybe on some online mutant dating service, I’m not sure — they fall in love, get married, and have beneficially multi-mutated offspring for “millions of years” until they produce a whole new species and Punctuated Equilibrium happens all over again.
Leave aside that there are no beneficial mutations and that the entire process is clearly a description of a directed process, it sounds okay except that it turns out that, in addition to defying logic and challenging common sense, the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium lacks some other important factors. It lacks things like scientific evidence, data, facts, and such. Essentially, it is a gigantic placeholder while Darwinists attempt to come up with a better justification for believing their idiotic theory in the absense of any proof. It’s nothing but an intelligent sounding rationalization after begging the question on a rather massive scale.
Full Circle
Which brings Darwinists firmly back to Larmarkism. As a good Darwinist, you have to believe that a deer can transform into a giraffe because he had a dream. You have to believe it. You must believe that a fish wanted to breath air and walk on dry land. You must have FAITH!
In addition, you must ignore any evidence to the contrary. As a good Darwinist, you must ignore and belittle any such evidence and threaten anyone who brings such evidence to light. As a good Darwinist, you must falsify data –at the least –if it does not support Darwinian theory, or construct an out-and-out full-blown fraud if you feel it would be more effective.
Truth:
The truth is that there are no Darwinian “engines of evolution” because simple life forms did not spring forth from dirt, complex life forms did not spring forth from simple life forms, cows did not evolve from whales, lizards did not evolve from fish, birds did not evolve from lizards, and man did not evolve from apes.
The truth is that Darwinism is in crisis. For a century and a half it has pervasively invaded our culture lacking logic, evidence, or proof of any kind outside of fraud, misdirection, and half-baked guesses. It is now, sadly, limping along based on philosophy, mockery, and threats. The thing you may wish to notice, though, is the delight Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins take in philosophizing, mocking, threatening, and lying.
Scripture promises that if we believe lies and take pleasure in unrighteousness, we will be damned. 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12 reads (in part) …for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
The truth is that God created the known universe and all living things IN the known universe — just as He said He did. Man brought death into the world and spoiled God’s perfect creation. We live in a fallen world.
Man’s wickedness after the fall was so great that God destroyed the earth by laying it flat under a blanket of ice and water. When man returned to wickedness after the flood, God sent his son, Jesus, to redeem the fallen world that we might live in His glory by his amazing grace. We are saved by grace through faith alone.
This is a truth worth knowing because it is a truth with a promise. I entreat you to embrace the truth of the Bible and shun the lie of Darwinism.
God Bless you and yours. Gregg
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I don’t think you have a basis for saying it is a fact that mutations are always harmful and frequently lethal. It is not true that mutations are always harmful. Many are essentially neutral in their effects. Some are harmful, some are lethal, but many are not.
Please list a beneficial mutation.
See what you think about these.
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One example is the ability to keep making lactase, the enzyme that digest the milk sugar lactose, in adulthood. In much of the world’s population, lactase is not made after a certain age, so that adults have difficulty digesting milk, But in some groups, one of which is many people with some northern European ancestry, the gut keeps making lactase throughout life. There are also some groups of people in Africa and some people in the Middle East who have this ability but the exact mutations in the DNA are different. (The mutations happened long ago and became established in those populations.) Is it a beneficial mutation to be able to make lactase as an adult? It might have been slightly negative for people who did not raise animals for dairy products because there would have been a slight cost to make an unneeded enzyme. But for people who were raising dairy animals, this would have been a useful mutation. The mutation in the European and African examples was a single change of one DNA letter.
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Another example is a mutation that was able to be observed at the time it happened. I read about a sheep that was born with very muscular hind legs. The farmer was interested in the sheep for meat production. I think you could imagine that heavily muscled legs might have given a wild sheep a better ability to escape from predators. It’s not possible to know whether this would have been a beneficial mutation or not in a wild sheep; it might be that for some reason it was not useful to a wild animal. But I think it’s reasonable to think it might have been beneficial. The sheep was healthy and it was able to pass the trait on to some of its offspring. (There was some unusual feature about how the trait was passed on, but it was passed on and the animals were healthy and fertile.) Again the mutation was a change in just one DNA ‘letter’ of the code. So that’s two examples.
I suppose I should ask you what qualifies as a mutation in your estimation because these examples seem to be of what I would consider natural changes within kind.
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For example, is blond hair a mutation? Is dark/light skin a mutation? Is a Chihuahua a mutation of an ancestral wolf? Or are all these just manifestations of the natural result of hybridization over time — loss of original genetic information or altering of original genomic information based on commingling of compatible chromosomes?
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To be clear, I think of mutations as, for example, the famous four winged fruit fly cited in nearly every middle school text-book in America. Or the Sickle Cell Anemia mutation that prevents the Malaria parasite from bonding with blood cells. Or the bacterial mutation that prevents certain staf bacteria in a population from ingesting certain enzymes which makes them resistant to certain types of antibiotic drugs.
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So please clarify what you mean by a mutation, if you could. And do realize that I am genuinely seeking clarity and clarification so that we may have a mutual and agreed upon basis for debate.
I’m thinking about how to answer this.
A mutation is a change in the DNA sequence.
It could be as small as a one nucleotide changing to a different one (for instance, C to T) or it could be an insertion or duplication or deletion of some section of DNA in the genome, or a whole chromosome could be changed: translocated, or even duplicated. (Or the whole genome couuld even be duplicated.)
There are more details, but I’ll start with that.
Some mutations to the DNA could cause profound changes in the organism (like a four-legged chicken). Some could have no effect at all.
Some genetic changes are very rare but others are extremely common in a population. Genetic changes that occur in more than 1 percent of the population are called polymorphisms. They are common enough to be considered a normal variation in the DNA. Polymorphisms are responsible for many of the normal differences between people such as eye color, hair color, and blood type. Although many polymorphisms have no negative effects on a person’s health, some may influence the risk of developing certain disorders. For example, fair skinned folk are more susceptible to skin cancer. Dark skinned folk are more likely to be lactose intolerant. Strictly speaking, polymorphisms are considered normal variations in the DNA and NOT considered mutations.
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A gene mutation is a permanent change in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene. Mutations range in size from a single DNA building block (DNA base) to a large segment of a chromosome.
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Gene mutations manifest in only two ways: they can be acquired during a person’s lifetime (somatic) or they can be inherited (hereditary) from a parent.
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Acquired, or somatic, mutations occur in the DNA of individual cells at some time during a person’s life. These changes can be caused by environmental factors such as radiation, drugs, chemicals, or carcinogens and occur when a mistake is made as DNA copies itself during cell division. Acquired mutations in somatic cells (cells other than sperm and egg cells) cannot be passed on to the next generation.
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Hereditary Mutations are mutations that are passed from parent to child. They are also sometimes called germline mutations because they are present in the egg and/or sperm cells, which are also called germ cells. This type of mutation is present throughout a person’s life in virtually every cell in the entire body.
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Mutations that occur only in an egg or sperm cell, or those that occur just after fertilization, are called new, or de novo, mutations. De novo mutations may explain genetic disorders in which an affected child has a mutation in every cell, but has no family history of the disorder.
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Mosaicism are mutations that occur in a single cell within an early embryo. As all the cells divide during growth and development, the individual will have some cells with the mutation and some cells without the mutation. This is called a compromised genome and usually has a “syndrome” attached to it based on morphology. Examples include Down’s, Chimerism, Horners, and other compromising syndromes, none of which could be considered a positive change. Without modern medical techniques, many children born with such mutations would not live beyond very early ages.
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In most cases of severe mutation, the result is sterility. Four winged fruit flies are sterile, for example. They do not produce baby four winged fruit flies. Four footed chickens do not breed because prospective mates outrun them. Things like that. Furthermore, somatic mutations are not inheritable mutations. De novo mutations usually result in severe deformities, weakened immune systems, and/or shorter life spans. Polymorphisms never result in new species. Assuming two albino snakes were to breed, they would produce a batch of baby albino snakes. They would not produce fish or any other species even given millions or billions of years.
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Given these facts, I do not understand how you can continue to argue that mutation can drive Darwinian evolution. So please explain it to me.
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God Bless,
Gregg
I was trying to write an answer about hair color, but some of it is covered in your comment so I can probably skip it.
If you are meaning that polymorphisms are different from mutations, that’s not correct. Polymorphisms are the result of mutations.
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/mutationsanddisorders/neutralmutations
Another type of mutation:
http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/mutationsanddisorders/copynumbervariation
You asked if light hair was a result of mutation or a result of hybridizing. There are several genes that affect hair color in mammals. We have the mostly same genes as dogs and mice, although our genes don’t have the same exact sequences. In dogs there are several variants of several genes which affect hair color. For instance there is one variant of one gene which is common in labradors – if a lab inherits the same variant from both parents, it will be a yellow lab. This variant allele is assumed to be the result of a mutation which happened in dogs at some point in the history of dogs and was passed down. So a yellow lab is not the result of a current mutation that occurred in its parents or itself, but it is the result of a mutation which happened at some point in the past. That variation is the result of a single nucleotide change. Single nucleotide changes are assumed to happen at a low but steady rate. Single nucelotide changes which cause a color change have been observed in some mouse strains. So there’s no reason to think that the original variation in yellow labs (and some other yellow dogs) was not the result of a mutation. But when you get a puppy in a litter that doesn’t match its parents, chances are its color is not a result of a mutation which just happened, but the result of a mutation in the past which had been inherited by the puppy’s parents, grandparents, etc.for however many generations since the mutation occurred.
(also there are other genes and variations which result in the yellow color of some other breeds, so it can be complicated to figure out which gene is causing the effect without some kind of analysis on the DNA.)
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(From your comment before, I thought you were suggesting that color differences did not come from mutations originally. If a pair of dogs were created as in Genesis, then you could imagine they were created with four different alleles in the original dogs (two per dog). Maybe they could all have been passed down through reproduction. But in the same gene in humans that causes the yellow color in labs, there are more than 16 different genetic variations. Some have no effect, some cause red hair. There could not have been 16 alleles in Adam and Eve (unless heredity worked differently at that time). So there had to have been mutation at some time between then and now.
But I think most creationists have no problem with mutations happening after the Fall, as long as they aren’t considered to have been able to ‘drive evolution’, as you said. So I was surprised when you asked about hair color in your previous comment.)
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A mutation that makes a fish albino is not by itself going to create a new species. A mutation which has a small effect on the exact shape of the head or the fins, a change which is small enough not to affect the animal’s survival or reproduction, might be the start of a change to a new species. A change in color might make an animal better camoflauged in some locations, and that could be the start of a change to a new species.
(Your comment talked about somatic mutations not being passed on. I guess this is interesting information, but it doesn’t relate to the question since no one would expect them to be passed on.)
from your comment:
” Strictly speaking, polymorphisms are considered normal variations in the DNA and NOT considered mutations.
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A gene mutation is a permanent change in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene. Mutations range in size from a single DNA building block (DNA base) to a large segment of a chromosome.”
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The orginal question was about whether mutations could be a source of variation for evolution.
Supppose there is a mutation which is neutral or has only a mild effect. When the mutation first occurs, the organism that carries the mutation is the only one in the population which has that altered gene. If the organism reproduces successfully, the mutated gene gets spread into the population. At first it is rare. At some point it reaches the 1% level that you mentioned in your comment, so that altered gene is now called a polymorphism: there are now two versions of that gene in the population, the original (wild type) allele and the mutated allele, although the altered version is still at a very low level. As time passes, the mutated gene can become common in the population. The gene variant is still the product of the original mutation though. Calling it a polymorphism just reflects its frequency in the population and the fact that the mutation is one that happened in the past and has been spread into the population by reproduction. It is possible that this allele could spread and/or be so successful that eventually all the animals in some population have only the mutated version of the origianl allele. So the species has been changed by that mutation. Having the original mutation becoming common enough to be a common variation in the population, a polymorphism, is exactly how a mutation contributes to evolution.
(This repeats my previous comment somewhat, but maybe it is clearer.)
You asked about wolves and Chihuahuas and mutations. The short answer is that yes, mutations have occurred between wolves and the Chihuahua breed of dogs. But since I’m not sure what you had in mind with the question, I’m going to give some background to the question, in a very long answer; it may have to be in several parts.
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The conclusion of evolutionary biology, as you know, is that organisms have a common ancestry, and in particular all mammals had a common ancestry from some type of tetrapod, all species in the order Carnivora had a common mammalian ancestor, all canid species had a common carnivoran ancestor, etc, so there are nested subsets of relationships. If you look at the genes for a particular function, you can see that we have most of our genes in common with the other mammals. The gene sequences are not identical, and the farther away on the ancestral tree the animals are, the more differences there will be. But some regions of the genes, the ones which are most critical for function, are likely to have mostly the same or similar amino acids, and similar DNA sequences. There are many many examples of this related similarity. All the differences in genetic sequence between animals are considered to be the result of mutations somewhere in the hereditary tree. There is no time machine to go back and see what exactly happened, but genetic information contains traces of the past, so it is a useful tool for trying to understand how things happened.
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That’s the evolutionary biology view of differences in genes between different mammals, etc.: they are assumed to be a result of mutations accumulating over time. But if you believe that each species, or else each ‘kind’ of mammal was created separately, then you would assume that the differences (or most of the differences) were not caused by mutations but were there from the creation of that species or that ‘kind’.
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The tree-like pattern of genetic heredity that we see is just what is predicted by the ideas of biological evolution. It is not necessarily predicted by the idea of separate creation of all the species one way or another. I think that according to your belief, it would have been possible for God to have created each ‘kind’ of animals etc. with different genes. If each mammal kind had a completely different set of genes instead of having genes with the tree-like similarity that they do have, it would have been a big problem for evolution. But in fact the genetic evidence is what evolution predicted. However it can also be argued that God could just as easily have used a common design for the different ‘kinds’ of animals etc., and so that the pattern we see is explained by variations on a common design. (However there are some weaknesses in that view based on the genetic sequences.)
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According to evolutionary biologists, dogs are a domesticated form of wolves. In fact, the taxonomic classification of dogs which used to be Canis familiaris is now often written as Canis lupus familiaris – instead of a separate species it is classified as a subspecies of the wolf (although this has not become universal). In the past there was an idea that the ancestors of dogs might have been jackals, but genetic analysis has been convincing that their ancestors were wolves. It will be interesting to see what specific genetic differences there are between dogs and wolves.
Since genetic differences are what are responsible for the differences between species, it makes sense to me that a series of the right changes in genetic sequences – mutations – could be able to eventually transform one species or subspecies into another.
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One example of a genetic difference between wolves and dogs that relates to size is a particular allele of one gene, IGF1, found in small dogs but not in large dogs or wolves or coyotes, jackals, or the types of foxes tested . The sequence of the variant indicates that it was caused by a mutation of the normal gene in wolves. The fact that all the small dog breeds have the same allele suggests that the mutation happened early in the history of dogs. Other mutations would have contributed to the other difference between wolves and dogs and the difference between each dog breed. (By the way, dog breeds are not the same things as species or subspecies, in case that is not clear.) So this is an example of a mutation that would have happened between the wolf and the Chihuahua breed according to biology. All the differences between wolves and any breed of dog including the Chihuahua would have been the result of mutations.
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That is the biological view. I am not sure what the creationist view would be. The Bible does not say what exact types of animals were originally created, and it also does not say what types of animals were on the ark. Among creationists there are different views. Which species of animals were included in each biblical ‘kind’ that Noah took on the ark? It is not clear what a ‘kind’ is (sometimes called a baramin). Some creationists would say that it is not a species but more like a family level classification. Some creationists think there were only one pair of animals at the taxonomic family level, for instance only one dog-like pair, and that after the ark landed that pair was able to produce all the species – wolves (and dogs), jackals, coyotes and foxes. This view is used to support the idea that there was enough space on the ark for every ‘kind’ – there would be fewer family-level ‘kinds’ than species-level ‘kinds’.
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Do you think dogs and wolves were both originally created? Were dogs and wolves both on the ark? Then you would assume that dogs were not descended nor domesticated from wolves despite their great similarity and the fact they can breed together. From that view, I think you would assume that either the first pair of created dogs had both the normal large dog allele and also the small dog allele of the IGF1 gene and there was no mutation involved, or else that the mutation happened sometime after creation or after the flood. From that view, wolves and Chihuahuas would not be different because of mutation but because they were created that way.
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What about coyotes and jackals? Were they originally created species in your view, and were they on the ark? They can both hybridize with wolves although they are considered separate species. Were foxes on the ark? They are more different from wolves genetically. And what about the cat species – lions, tigers, house cats, cheetahs, etc? Were they created separately? Were they all on the ark? Several cat species tested all have the same mutation in the gene that makes a receptor for tasting sweetness; the mutation makes the taste receptor for sweetness nonfunctional. Since cats eat a meat diet they have no need to taste sweet foods, so the biological assumption is that a mutation happened early in an ancestral felid population, and because it was not a problem for cats it stayed in the genome as a useless gene (pseudogene). If tigers, house cats and cheetahs were all separately created, why do they all have this gene with the identical mutations? Of course God could have chosen to make them that way, but there’s no logic to it. It would make more sense if the gene had been omitted, instead of being created as an inactive gene containing what look like random mutations that spoiled its function.
Thank you for expanding.
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Believers in the truth of creation as revealed in scripture and Darwinists both believe in common descent to a degree. Creationists believe that God created every living thing, each to its own kind. A good example of this in the fossil record is called the Cambrian explosion where every body type in existence suddenly appears. Darwinists believe that life somehow magically happened entirely by accident and random chance and from THAT single so-called common ancestor, ALL known life in the universe “evolved” into gradually higher and higher forms of life and that the process of becoming more sophisticated and “better” beings is still ongoing.
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Of course all kinds of dogs share a common ancestor. Of course all kinds of cats share a common ancestor. However, speaking as a believer in the revealed truth of God’s creation, I do not believe that dogs and cats share a common ancestor. Darwinists believe and preach that dogs and cats DO share a SINGLE common ancestor — which also spawned plants, reptiles, avians and so on — but there is absolutely no evidence that they do. It is merely a belief based on the 200 year old racist notions of a phobic who married his first cousin.
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As an aside, that racist ideology and unshakable belief in primal common descent has prompted Darwinists to perform some major atrocities in recent history. Darwin was, to be blunt, a racist. Darwin’s book title contains the very phrase, “The Preservation of the Favoured Races” and Darwinism was used to justify actions like the near genocide of the so-called “aboriginal” tribes in Australia. What does “aboriginal” mean? If white anglo-saxon types are “original” then does “aborginal” mean that they came from a separate branch of the “tree of life” all according to Darwinist evolutionary theory? Yes, it does.
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The same ideology allowed for the kidnapping and displaying of South American Pygmies in both living and recently vivisected form at the world’s fair. The living displays were sold to zoos, a very well documented account is of a man named Ota Benga who was sold to the Bronx Zoo. Adolf Hitler later followed this ideology, likely also prompted by Darwinists such as Neitche and Malthus, in the attempted extermination of his own designated hairy-apemen, the Jews.
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Believers in God’s creation know that ALL human life came from a set of primal human common ancestors, Adam and Eve. We did not begin from rocks and dirt that nature animated and spread like different strains of more and more complicated virus as Darwinists believe.
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I believe that God created the original forms. There is evidence that this is so. I believe that He created original tulips, for example, which hybridized from pink tulips into red tulips and white tulips. I do not believe that red and white tulips are the result of mutation. I believe God created some kind of original horse and that over a few thousand years of hybridization, we have everything from Shetland ponies to Clydesdales. I believe that He created original dogs, probably big wolf types, who hybridized into every known breed of dog.
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Slowly changing the length or color of dog fur over a few thousand years never results in any other species other than dog and hybridization is not mutation. I’ll stick with the tulip example. Original pink tulips had all of the genetic information needed to create more pink tulips, and also white and red tulips. When white tulips result, this is not a mutation, it is simple probability. When a red tulip springs up in the middle of a sea of white tulips, it also isn’t a mutation.
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Darwinists believe, that any genetic variation that naturally occurs as a result of hybridization, can be categorized as a mutation. Because the religious belief in Darwinian evolution begs the logical question, there is an assumed (and I believe entirely errant) premise to any investigation. Furthermore, Darwinists assume that because pink tulips can make red and white and pink tulips, that all tulips came from some other type of ancestral plant that wasn’t a tulip — this is where we get into the religious beliefs — and that that ancestral plant long ago and far away came from one original life form — the “seed” of the “tree of life.”
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In short, I don’t believe that nonsense and every single time the Darwinists assumptions are removed as the premise of the scientific investigation, neither does anyone else. It is not a predictive model nor is it every observed. It is only ever assumed.
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None of this is said in an attempt to “win” an argument. I only hope it is explanatory of my personal beliefs which were arrived upon only after discarding anything that relied upon fallible assumptions. Again, thanks for your comments.
From your post:
“…and from THAT single so-called common ancestor, ALL known life in the universe “evolved” into gradually higher and higher forms of life and that the process of becoming more sophisticated and “better” beings is still ongoing.”
No, that’s wrong. Biology says nothing about “better” beings.
“Higher”, more sophisticated” – depends on how you are using the words – you could say that multicellular organisms are more sophisticated than single-celled organisms.
I think you are wrong that the idea of common descent is inherently racist. Certainly the idea of separate creation has been used in a racist way in the past. In any case, whatever Darwin personally thought is not relevant to biology. I’m not interested in discussing the ‘evils of Darwinism’ idea though. I think it is incorrect in many ways but it’s not something I want to argue about. (There are places on the web which give arguments against your points, if you have an interest in seeing what those arguments would be.)
From your example of tulips, pink tulips which carry the genes for both red and white colors, could through reproduction produce red tulips and white tulips. That would not be mutation. But I don’t see how you can say that a red tulip showing up in a field of white tulips is not a mutation. If no other color genes are involved, and if the parent tulips have only the white genes, then it could definitely have been from a mutation. DNA analysis would be able to show this. I don’t see how you can disagree with this.
I’ve enjoyed commenting on your posts. It’s stimulating for me to think about the topics and read about them and try to give good answers. I think my writing is not as clear as it should be.
Sorry but I thought of one more thing to add about the tulips. Really I know very little about plants and nothing about tulips. I don’t know how likely it is that a mutation could happen in white tulips to make a red tulip. But there’s an idea there that I want to explain, and I’ll use the tulips as an example. But because I don’t know much about plants, I might get the details wrong. But maybe the idea will come through.
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Suppose it takes several steps to make a red pigment, each step using a different enzyme, and then some more steps to get it distributed in the petals. It’s easy to see how a mutation that interfered with the function of any one of the enzymes or other proteins at any of those steps could keep the plant from producing red pigment in the petals. It seems possible (to me, anyway) to envision how a white tulip could appear in a population of red tulips because of a mutation.
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It is a different proposition to imagine a red tulip appearing by mutation in a population of white tulips. It is not reasonable to think that a random mutation would suddenly produce or change half a dozen enzymes at the same time so that red pigment would be produced where there was none before. And that is not what evolutionary biology would predict. What biology would predict, if a red tulip did appear in a population of white tulips, is that there would already be in the genes and physiology of that type of tulip the basic information to produce red pigment in the petals. The red pigment might be made in the leaves (but concealed by the green of the chlorophyll) and a mutation might make that pigment also be produced in the petals. Or there might be a tiny bit of pigment in the petals, too faint to make the petals look pink, but a mutation might cause a greater expression of that pigment. Or maybe a molecule in the petals which did not have a red color could be slightly changed in its chemistry but in a way that made it look red. Maybe a molecule would be pale at one pH and a change in DNA that changed the pH in the petals would make it red. I hope you understand that these are made-up examples; I’m just trying to get across the idea that if such a mutation happened from white to red, evolution would not predict the magical appearance of a whole set of new enzymes through mutation. It would predict that there was already something in the plant that by a single mutation could make the color change.
You said this:
…” I believe that He created original tulips, for example, which hybridized from pink tulips into red tulips and white tulips. I do not believe that red and white tulips are the result of mutation….Original pink tulips had all of the genetic information needed to create more pink tulips, and also white and red tulips. When white tulips result, this is not a mutation, it is simple probability. When a red tulip springs up in the middle of a sea of white tulips, it also isn’t a mutation.”
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I tried to find an example of tulip mutations but couldn’t find the right collection of info. But I did find two examples of apparent mutations that happened in wild soybean flower colors, one where a white flower appeared in a planting of purple flowers and another where a light purple flower appeared in a natural population of purple flowers. In the second case they found two point mutations in a particular gene relating to petal color. For the first case, it may have been a mutation in the same gene but the tests were different in the two papers.
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But I wonder if you still think that a mutation could not be the cause of a change in flower color. Reading this older post I think you have changed your view on mutations somewhat, but maybe I am reading things into your words in later posts. In this post you said that mutations are always harmful but I think in your new series on mutation you are no longer saying that; would you agree?
….”Original pink tulips had all of the genetic information needed to create more pink tulips, and also white and red tulips. When white tulips result, this is not a mutation, it is simple probability. When a red tulip springs up in the middle of a sea of white tulips, it also isn’t a mutation.”
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There’s a point here that I don’t think I mentioned.
Colors can be complicated and sometimes result from a number of genes. But when you talk about a pink tulip being able to produce pink, red and white tulips, it sounds like you’re talking about a single gene with two alleles, which could be labeled R and r; A plant with RR genotype would be red, with Rr would be pink, and rr would be white. This is the classic Mendelian genetics that someone might learn in school. Unless there additional factors, if you cross two pink Rr plants, you would expect the offspring to be on average 25% Red (RR), 50% pink (Rr) and 25% white (rr) by as you say, simple probability.
But for this particular example, if you have a field of all red plants, they will all be RR and as far as this gene goes, no combining will result in a white or pink flower. And the same would be true if all the plants in the field were white (rr): no red flowers could result.
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A situation in which you might see a white flower showing up in a field of red flowers would be an example of a gene for which the r allele is completely recessive to the R allele. Then a plant would be red whether it had the genotype RR or Rr, and white only if it had the genotype rr. There would be no pink flowers. In that case there might be a field of all red flowers but some might have the genotype RR and others Rr. If two Rr red flowers were crossed, some of their seedlings would be white.