Evolution Impossible (8 page)

A similar type of molecular recognition system occurs in plants, which means that pollen grains blowing in the wind do not germinate on the stigma (the female part of a flower) of a different plant species.
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Natural hybrids are examples of type 2 evolution and again simply involve the transfer of preexisting genetic information.

Type 3 evolution
would involve the generation of totally new useful genetic information within the DNA code of an organism by some supposed process in nature, which results in a completely new function that has never occurred before. An example would be a worm evolving jointed legs so it could walk or developing eyes so it could see. These new features, when they first form, would require massive amounts of new genetic information to encode for all the parts of the legs, their control mechanisms, and programming of the brain to use them. Similarly, with the first eye, all the components, the lens, focusing mechanisms, the optic nerve, the blood supply, and so on would have to be encoded for in the DNA of the organism. Biophysicist Dr. Lee Spetner, who taught at both Harvard and John Hopkins Universities, points out that this type of evolution — that is, type 3 evolution — has never been observed.
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In fact, there is no proven mechanism that can explain the formation of the large quantities of new genetic information required to produce major phenotypic changes such as the appearance of jointed limbs during the proposed evolution of, for example, arthropods, that is, crustaceans, insects, and spiders. These significant challenges in explaining how this type of evolution could have taken place are now a major and fundamental area of study in biology. As a widely used biology text states:

One concern of macroevolution is to explain evolutionary novelties, which are large phenotypic changes. . . . Studies of macroevolution also seek to discover and explain major changes in species diversity through time.
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One leading educational website puts it even more bluntly:

Biologists are not arguing about these conclusions [that many biologists believe life on earth has evolved]. But they are trying to figure out how evolution happens — and that’s not an easy job.
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To date, evolutionists have no known and proven explanation for these so-called novelties, yet type 3 evolution is
the very type of evolution that underpins Darwin’s theory of evolution and is necessary to generate a new class of organisms.

One of the most recent books arguing that there is evidence for Darwin’s theory is
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins. In this work of 470 pages there is only one example cited as evidence for type 3 evolution. This presumed evidence for new meaningful information entering the genome of an organism is found on page 131.
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Here, Dawkins asserts that some experiments done by bacteriologist Richard Lenski and coworkers constitute evidence for type 3 evolution. So let us look in more detail at this important claim by Dawkins.

Dr. Richard Lenski and a team of researchers at the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University studied mutations in 12 separate but initially identical populations of the bacteria Escherichia for more than three decades. During this time the bacteria had gone through tens of thousands of generations and experienced billions of mutations. This was equivalent to having the possibility of attempting just about every possible point mutation in the 4.6 million nucleobase pairs in the DNA of the bacteria. Yet the only significant evolutionary type change was that after more than 31,500 generations, one of the populations had incurred a mutation that enabled the bacteria to use the chemical “citrate” as a source of food. (
E. coli
bacteria cannot normally use citrate, which is a particular characteristic of this species). However,
E. coli
has the internal metabolism to utilize citrate — it just lacks a transporter molecule. In the citrate-utilizing mutant strain, a mutation has led to the genetic information being available to generate the transporter molecule. Dr. Lenski and co-workers are not sure of the mechanism that produced the change in genetic information. One explanation they suggest is that a once-functional transporter gene silenced by previous mutations was activated. Another explanation, which they think is more likely, is that “an existing transporter has been co-opted for citrate transport.”
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Both possible mechanisms proposed revolve around the use of existing genetic information, and that the potential to produce the new protein was already encoded for in some latent manner within the DNA. This means that it is type 1 evolution.

So the one and only piece of evidence that Professor Dawkins could put forward to support the claim that type 3 evolution can occur turns out to be most likely an example of type 1 evolution, and is definitely not a proven example of type 3 evolution. After tens of thousands of generations, the bacteria were still bacteria — in fact, they were still
E. coli
bacteria.

Dr. Lemski and coworkers also reported other evolutionary changes during their studies. For example, successive generations grew faster and grew larger cell sizes than their ancestors, and three genes in each population were observed to undergo gene substitution. Ten populations developed changes in the physical coiling of their DNA, which is known to affect gene expression. Variations in fitness levels also evolved between the populations. Four of the populations — that is, one-third of the populations — evolved defects in their DNA repair mechanisms that lead to higher mutation rates.

Despite the billions and billions of possible individual mutations that would have occurred during the more than 44,000 generations of the 12
E. coli
bacteria populations Dr. Lemski’s team has been studying, the most significant evolution result was the production of one new transporter molecule, which was most probably already latently encoded for within the DNA of the organism. The
E. coli
bacteria was still
E. coli
bacteria. It had not evolved into another species of bacteria. It had not evolved into another genus of anaerobic gram negative rods like Shigella or Salmonella. It had not evolved a nucleus. In other words, all the billions of mutations had not produced major new genetic information.

Furthermore, studies published in 2008 by Dr. Lemski and co-researchers now show that natural selection is actually a very poor mechanism for optimizing mutation rates in the real world type scenarios, where fitness to survive in the environment is complex.
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Yet type 3 evolution requires lots and lots of new genetic information to be produced so it can select the best for survival. The evolution of a common yeast such as
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
(brewer’s yeast), for example, requires a huge increase in genetic information from, say, around 4.6 million DNA base pairs found in a single-celled bacterium such as
E. coli
, to 12.1 million bases encoding the genetic information in the yeast. The yeast also has about 6,000 genes, nearly 50 percent more than the number occurring in
E. coli
. The yeast genes on average are also much larger (that is, they consist of much more genetic information) compared with the genes in simple single-celled bacteria. If bacteria were to evolve into a yeast, these thousands of new genes all containing thousands of base pairs of new code all have to form by random mutations. And a yeast is still a single-celled organism!

For a multi-celled organism to have evolved requires an even greater amount of new genetic information to be created. The information encoded in a roundworm is contained on 97 million DNA base pairs spread over about 19,000 genes. For a yeast to evolve into a roundworm requires the creation of 13,000 extra genes of new genetic information by random mutations. And the roundworm genes are made up of thousands more base pairs of encoded information compared to yeast genes. That is, they are far more complex in terms of their information content.
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And we are still near the bottom of the evolutionary tree — we are still only up to worms! Yet the amount of totally new genetic information to make these low organisms in the evolutionary tree is enormous. According to the theory of evolution, all this new genetic information arose by chance as a result of successive random mutations over time.

I would like to emphasize that totally “new” genetic information is required for the theory of evolution to work. That is, genetic information that has
not
existed previously is required to evolve a bacterium into a yeast like
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
. The yeast (as a single-cell organism) has a very different structure, with the DNA concentrated in the nucleus. Also, this particular yeast comes as two types A and B, and cells of type A only mate with cells of type B. So the introduction by random mutations of thousands of highly complex new genetic codes of new genetic information is required for a bacteria to evolve into a yeast. However, this evolution has never been observed even though millions of generation cycles have occurred in bacteria colonies in laboratories around the world over the past four decades. Also, on the basis of the levels of mutations observed by Dr. Lemski’s team and the probability calculations we have shown in the previous chapter, the probability of all this new genetic information arising by chance is so close to zero as to be impossible. And we have discussed but one small step near the bottom of the evolutionary tree relating to organisms that turn over new generations very rapidly.

Organisms higher up the evolutionary tree not only have enormously larger genetic complexity but also take much longer to reach the age of reproduction. Most bacteria double in one to three hours, and in the laboratory
E. coli
can produce a new generation every half an hour. For many mammals and reptiles a new generation may take many months or even longer to mature to the age when they can mate and reproduce. This means it takes thousands of times longer for mutations to accumulate in the gamete (reproduction cells), compared with the lab bacteria. Also, the random nondirected mutations have to produce sufficient new genetic information to code unique individual genetic information, which has characterized the DNA of the teeming millions of different species that have ever lived. This includes all the extinct species that we know about as well as all the intermediate species, whose supposed fossils we have not yet discovered. Also, these higher animals have even more complex DNA. Mouse DNA has around 2,600 million base pairs and 25,000 genes, with an average size of 100,000 bases, which means that a mouse gene is 20 times more complex in its code compared to a roundworm. In addition, the mouse also has 30 percent more genes than the worm.
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The mouse is just one of 5,487 mammals, each of which has different genetic information. That is, a rhinoceros has different genes in its DNA, a cow has different genes in its DNA, a bear has different genes in its DNA, and each different type of bear has different DNA with different new genes. Each of all these different genes contains tens of thousands of pieces of unique code, which the theory of evolution indicates must come into existence as a result of chance random mutations. And we have not considered the totally new genes in each of 9,990 species of birds, or the totally new genes in each of 8,734 species of reptiles, or the totally new genes in each of 31,153 species of fish. Neither have we considered the totally new genes that characterize each of the 100,000 different species of insects, nor the billions of different genes, each made up of thousands of pieces of DNA base code that characterize each of the 1,700,000 or so other species on this planet. And this is not to mention all the billions of different genes that existed in the past that have been lost due to extinction.

Not only have scientists not observed any of this new genetic information being generated, but on the basis of probability there is simply not enough time in the supposed four billion years of evolution for all the genetic information required in the genomes of all the millions of different species of bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals to evolve as a result of random mutations. If the evolution of a simple cell is statistically impossible, as we saw in the first chapter, the evolution of these higher organisms is even more impossible. Examples of these probability calculations have been set out and explained in detail by Dr. Lee Spetner, who for many years taught information theory at Johns Hopkins University
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Spetner shows that not only is the random generation of new genetic information to produce a new species statistically impossible, but on the basis of probability theory and information theory, most random mutations are going to produce changes that affect the DNA code in a way that makes sections of the code less usable, with resultant deleterious effects on the organism.
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This is exactly what we observe happening in the laboratory. As University of Rochester biology professor H. Allen Orr points out, “The overwhelming majority of random mutations are harmful — that is, they reduce fitness; only a tiny minority are beneficial, increasing fitness.”
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For example, missing sections of genes and errors in DNA duplications are associated with a wide range of diseases, from cystic fibrosis to Huntington’s disease to familial high cholesterol. Lists of around 10,000 examples of gene mutations or deletions suspected of causing human genetic diseases are listed on the Johns Hopkins online Mendelian Inheritance in Man website.
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