For more
great blogs as this one go to Daniel’s blog site at: www.Mannsword.blogspot.com
John Sanford and the Utter Failure of the Theory
of Evolution
Plant geneticist Dr John
Sanford, research scientist at Cornell University, co-inventor of the gene gun,
and author of Genetic Entropy and the
Mystery of the Genome, had been a true believer:
- I was totally sold on evolution. It was my religion; it
defined how I saw everything, it was my value system and my reason for
being. Later, I came to believe in God…I would not say that science led me
to the Lord (which is the experience of some). Rather I would say Jesus
opened my eyes to His creation—I was blind, and gradually I could see.
- On a personal level this was a time of spiritual
awakening, but professionally I remained “in the closet”…So I felt the
need to take temporary leave from academia and institutional science
because of the tension I felt in this regard, and the enormous potential
hostility I sensed from my academic colleagues. I think the academic
environment is very hostile to the very idea of a living and active God,
making it almost impossible for a genuine Christian to feel open or
welcome.
Eventually, Sanford’s
new-found faith led him to re-examine the “evidential foundation” for the
theory of evolution, and found that it was virtually non-existant:
- Institutional science has systematically “evolutionized”
every aspect of human thought. Contrary to popular thinking, this is not because
evolution is central to all human understanding, but rather has arisen due
to a primarily political and ideological process. Consequently, in the
present intellectual climate, to reject evolutionary theory has the
appearance of rejecting science itself. This is totally upside down…We
cannot really explain how any biological system might have “evolved”, but
we can all see that virtually everything we look at has extraordinary
underlying design.
- I am not aware of any type of operational science (computer
science, transportation, medicine, agriculture, engineering, etc.), which
has benefited from evolutionary theory. But after the fact, real advances
in science are systematically given an evolutionary spin. This reflects
the pervasive politicization of science.’
He subsequently
concluded that evolution into more complex forms is impossible. For one thing,
mutations are the source of de-evolution (the corruption of the genome) and not
evolution:
- Mutations are word-processing errors in the cell’s instruction
manual. Mutations systematically destroy genetic information—even as word
processing errors destroy written information. While there are some rare
beneficial mutations (even as there are rare beneficial misspellings), bad
mutations outnumber them—perhaps by a million to one. So even allowing for
beneficial mutations, the net effect of mutation is overwhelmingly
deleterious. The more the mutations, the less the information. This is
fundamental to the mutation process.’
Sanford also concluded
that natural selection does little to slow the de-evolution process:
- Very rarely a beneficial mutation arises that has
enough effect to be selected for—resulting in some adaptive variation, or
some degree of fine-tuning. This also helps slow degeneration. But
selection only eliminates a very small fraction of the bad mutations. The
overwhelming majority of bad mutations accumulate relentlessly, being much
too subtle—of too small an effect—to significantly affect their
persistence. On the flip side, almost all beneficials (to the extent they
occur) are immune to the selective process—because they invariably cause
only tiny increases in biological functionality.
- So most beneficials drift out of the population and are
lost—even in the presence of intense selection. This raises the
question—since most information-bearing nucleotides [DNA ‘letters’] make
an infinitesimally small contribution to the genome—how did they get
there, and how do they stay there through “deep time”? Selection slows
mutational degeneration, but does not even begin to actually stop it. So
even with intense selection, evolution is going the wrong way—toward
extinction!’
Sanford concludes that:
- The bottom line is that Darwinian theory fails on every
level. It fails because: 1) mutations arise faster than selection can
eliminate them; 2) mutations are overwhelmingly too subtle to be
“selectable”; 3) “biological noise” and “survival of the luckiest”
overwhelm selection; 4) bad mutations are physically linked to good
mutations, so that they cannot be separated in inheritance (to get rid of
the bad and keep the good). The result is that all higher genomes must
clearly degenerate. This is exactly what we would expect in light of
Scripture—with the Fall—and is consistent with the declining life expectancies
after the Flood that the Bible records.
Sanford is not alone.
Many evolutionists share Sanford’s assertions about the problems with
evolution. All the following quotations are taken from John Lennox’s masterful
book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science
Buried God:
- “There is no theoretical reason that would permit us to
expect that evolutionary lines would increase in complexity with time;
there is also no empirical evidence that this happens.” (John Maynard
Smith, E. Szathmary)
- “In the whole experimentally accessible domain of
microevolution (including research in artificial breeding and in species
formation), all variations have certainly remained within the confines of
basic types [species, more or less].” (Siegfried Scherer)
- Cell biologist E.J. Ambrose of the University of London
argued that it is unlikely that fewer than five genes could ever be
involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure, previously
unknown in the organism. He then points out that only one in 1,000 mutations
is non-deleterious, so that the chance of five non-deleterious mutations
occurring is 1 in a million billion replications. [This means that every
organism will probably die before it adds a new organ!]
Nor is there any
experimental evidence to counter-balance these assessments:
- In his book, Grasse observed that fruit flies remain
fruit flies in spite of thousands of generations that have been bred and
all the mutations that have been induced in them…More recent work on the
E. coli bacterium backs this up. In this research no real innovative
changes were observed through 25,000 generations of E. coli bacterium.
(Lennox, 108)
Lennox also informs us
that the fossil record, citing many evolutionists, “gives no good examples of
macroevolution.” Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the design hypothesis!
