Muddy Waters

What science has discovered about genetics,
that Darwin didn't know...

by Carl Wieland

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Editorial note: Science has discovered quite a lot in the 100+ years since Darwin. His observations about natural selection, "survival of the fittest", hold true. But some of Darwin's conclusions (nearly 150 years ago) run contrary to what science has discovered regarding DNA, genetics and heredity. The following article explains...

Natural selection is often referred to as 'survival of the fittest' or, more recently, 'reproduction of the fittest'. Many people are confused about it, thinking that evidence for natural selection is automatically evidence for the idea that molecules turned into microbes, which became millipedes, magnolias and managing directors.

What does natural selection do?

Natural selection is really a very straightforward, commonsense insight. A creationist, the chemist/zoologist Edward Blyth (1810-1873), wrote about it in 1835-7, before Darwin, who very likely borrowed the idea from Blyth.¹ An organism may possess some inheritable trait or character which, in a given environment, gives that organism a greater chance of passing on all of its genes to the next generation (compared with those of its fellows which don't have it). Over succeeding generations that trait or character has a good chance of becoming more widespread in that population. Such an improved chance of reproductive success (i.e. having offspring) might be obtained in several ways:

• A greater chance of survival. I.e. the organism is 'more fit to survive'. This is what 'survival of the fittest' means, by the way; it does not necessarily refer to physical fitness as commonly understood. If you are more (or less) likely to survive, you are correspondingly more (or less) likely to have offspring, and thus to pass your genes on. For instance, genes for longer hair will improve an animal's chances of surviving in a cold climate. Genes for white colouring will improve the camouflage of a bear in a snowy wilderness (camouflage does not just help an animal avoid being caught and eaten; it can also help a predator to sneak up on prey). By thus being more likely to avoid starvation, a lighter-coloured bear is more likely to be around to pass its lighter colouring on to the next generation.
  
  
• A greater chance of finding a mate. If the females of a fish species habitually prefer mates with longer tails, then male fish with genes for longer tails will have more chance of reproducing, on average, so that their genes (which include those for long tails) have more chance of getting copied. The long-tail genes (and thus the long-tail variety) will therefore become more common in that population.
  
  
• Greater reproductive success. Consider a plant species, the seeds of which are dispersed by wind. If it has genes which give its seeds a shape that confers on them slightly better aerodynamic 'lift' than the seeds of its fellows, then the genes for that particular trait (and thus the trait itself) will be favoured, i.e. 'selected' in this 'natural' way, hence the term. Conversely, if that plant species happens to be on a small island, seeds which travel far are going to be more likely to be 'lost at sea'. Hence genes which give less 'lift' will be favoured. Presuming that genes for both short-distance and long-distance seed air travel were available, this simple effect would ensure that all the members of an island population of such plants would eventually produce only 'short-flight' seeds; genes for 'long-flight' seeds would have been eliminated.

Adaptation

In such a way, creatures can become more adapted (better suited) to the environment in which they find themselves. Say a population of plants has a mix of genes for the length of its roots. Expose that population over generations to repeated spells of very dry weather, and the plants most likely to survive are the ones which have longer roots to get down to deeper water tables. Thus, the genes for shorter roots are less likely to get passed on (see box bottom left). In time, none of these plants will any longer have genes for short roots, so they will be of the 'long root' type. They are now better adapted to dry conditions than their forebears were.

Darwin's evolution

This adaptation, really a 'fine-tuning to the environment', was seen by Darwin to be a process which was essentially creative, and virtually without limits. If 'new' varieties could arise in a short time to suit their environment, then given enough time, any number of new characteristics, to the extent of totally new creatures, could appear. This was how, he believed, lungs originally arose in a lungless world, and feathers in a featherless one. Darwin did not know how heredity really works, but people today should know better. He did not know, for instance, that what is passed on in reproduction is essentially a whole lot of parcels of information (genes), or coded instructions.

It cannot be stressed enough that what natural selection actually does is get rid of information.

It is not capable of creating anything new, by definition. In the above example, the plants became better able to survive dry weather because of the elimination of certain genes; i.e. they lost a portion of the information which their ancestors had. The information for the longer roots was already in the parent population; natural selection caused nothing new to arise in, or be added to, the population.

The price paid for adaptation, or specialization, is always the permanent loss of some of the information in that group of organisms. If the environment were changed back so that shorter roots were the only way for plants to survive, the information for these would not magically 'reappear'; the population would no longer be able to adapt in this direction. The only way for a short-rooted variety to arise as an adaptation to the environment would be if things began once more with the 'mixed' or 'mongrel' parent population, in which both types of genes were present.

Built-in limits to variation

In such an information-losing process, there is automatically a limit to variation, as gene pools cannot keep on losing their information indefinitely.

This can be seen in breeding, which is just another version of (in this case, artificial) selection--the principle is exactly the same as natural selection. Take horses. People have been able to breed all sorts of varieties from wild horses--big working horses, miniature toy ponies, and so on. But limits are soon reached, because selection can only work on what is already there. You can breed for horse varieties with white coats, brown coats and so forth, but no amount of breeding selection will ever generate a green-haired horse variety--the information for green hair does not exist in the horse population.

Limits to variation also come about because each of the varieties of horse carries less information than the 'wild' type from which it descended. Common sense confirms that you cannot start with little Shetland ponies and try to select for Clydesdale draft horses--the information just isn't there anymore! The greater the specialization (or 'adaptation', in this case to the demands of the human breeder, who represents the 'environment'), the more one can be sure that the gene pool has been extensively 'thinned out' or depleted, and the less future variation is possible starting from such stock.

These obvious, logical facts make it clear that natural selection is a far cry from the creative, 'uphill', limitless process imagined by Darwin.

Evolutionist theoreticians know this, of course. They know that they must rely on some other process to create the required new information, because the evolution story demands it. Once upon a time, it says, there was a world of living creatures with no lungs. Then the information for lungs somehow arose, but feathers were nowhere in the world--later these arose too. But the bottom line is that natural selection, by itself, is powerless to create. It is a process of 'culling', of choosing between several things which must first be in existence.

What about mutations - do they point to evolution?

Since natural selection can only cull, today's evolutionary theorists rely on mutations (random copying mistakes in the reproductive process) to create the raw material on which natural selection can then operate. But that is a separate issue. It has been shown convincingly that observed mutations do not add information, and that mutation is seriously hampered on theoretical grounds in this area.² One of the world's leading information scientists, Dr Werner Gitt from Germany's Federal Institute of Physics and Technology in Braunschweig, says, 'There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.'³ His challenge to scientifically falsify this statement has remained unanswered since first published. Even those mutations which give a survival benefit are seen to be losses of information, not creating the sorely needed new material upon which natural selection can then go to work.⁴

[NOTE: The above article was written by Dr. Carl Wieland, and used by permission from www.AnswersInGenesis.org. For their complete article on mutations, please see: Arguement: Some mutations are beneficial]

Editorial Note:

Mutations will bring about new traits, such as the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. But even with these kind of mutations, no new genetic information has been produced. Even helpful, adaptive traits, arise through the loss of genetic information.

There have been cases where the amount of genetic information has increased, but not the DNA information itself. In other words, evolution would need new genes, new genetic information to come about in a species, so feathers could appear on reptiles, for example. However, even when genes mutate, they are merely increasing the amount of DNA, not adding new, functional genetic information.

God has told us that he has placed all the elements here. The Bible's Genesis chapter 1 says that vegetation, plants and trees were all created "according to their various kinds". The same is true of animal life. We're told that sea animals, birds, livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals were created "according to their kinds" (Gen 1:21, 24). The different animal species all came about at once, not gradually through time, and did not evolve from one species of animal to another.

Genesis tells us that God created man "in His own image" (Gen 1:26), which was not the case with plant or animal life. Man was of a different "kind" than plants and animals.

God desires each one of us to begin a relationship with him, so that we could know God for who he is and relate to him on a personal level. Evolution suggests that humans are most closely related to animals and nature. Yet God has created us as humans to relate not only to our environment, but also enjoy a relationship with himself. The following article discusses What You Have in Common with God. To know how to begin a relationship with God, please see: Knowing God Personally.

(1) Taylor, I., In the Minds of Men (TFE Publishing, Toronto, Canada, pp. 125-133, 1984).
(2) From a Frog to a Prince video, produced by Keziah, distributed by Answers in Genesis. See also Spetner, L.S., Not by chance! (The Judaica Press Inc., New York, 1998).
(3) Gitt, W., In the beginning was information (Christliche Literatur-Verbreitung, Germany, p. 79, 1997).
(4) Wieland, C., "Beetle bloopers," Creation 19(3):30, 1997.

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