Beetle bloopers
Flightless insects on windswept islands
Even a defect can be an advantage sometimes
by Carl Wieland
A big obstacle for evolutionary belief is this: what mechanism could possibly have
added all the extra information required to transform a one-celled creature progressively
into pelicans, palm trees, and people? Natural selection alone can’t do it—selection
involves getting rid of information. A group of creatures might become more adapted
to the cold, for example, by the elimination of those which don’t carry enough
of the genetic information to make thick fur. But that doesn’t explain the
origin of the information to make thick fur.
For evolutionists there is only ‘one game in town’ to explain the new
information which their theory requires—mutations. These are accidental mistakes
as the genetic information (the coded set of instructions on the DNA which is the
‘recipe’ or ‘blue-print’ specifying the construction and
operation of any creature) is copied from one generation to the next. Naturally,
such scrambling of information will tend to either be harmful,1 or at
best neutral.2
However, evolutionists believe that occasionally, a ‘good’ mutation
will occur which will be favored by selection and will allow that creature to progress
along its evolutionary pathway to something completely different.
The wrong type of change
Are there ‘good’ mutations? Evolutionists can point to a small handful
of cases in which a mutation has helped a creature to survive better than those
without it. Actually, they need to take a closer look. Such ‘good’ mistakes
are still the wrong types of changes to turn a fish into a philosopher—they
are headed in precisely the wrong direction. Rather than adding information, they
destroy information, or corrupt the way it can be expressed (not surprising, since
they are random mistakes).
For example, beetles losing their wings. A particular winged beetle type lives on
large continental areas; the same beetle type on a small windy island has no wings.
What happened is easy to imagine. Every now and then in beetle populations, there
might be a mutational defect which prevents wings from forming. That is, the ‘wing-making’
information is lost or scrambled in some way.
The damaged gene (a gene is like a long ‘sentence’ carrying one part
of the total instructions recorded on the DNA) will then be passed to all that beetle’s
offspring, and to theirs, as it is copied over and over. All these descendant beetles
will be wingless.
If a beetle with such a wingless defect is living on the Australian mainland, for
example, it will have less chance to fly away from beetle-eaters, so it will be
more likely to be eliminated by ‘survival of the fittest’ before it
can leave offspring. Such so-called ‘natural selection’ can help to
eliminate (or at least reduce the buildup of) such genetic mistakes.
Blown away
However, on the windy island, the beetles which can fly tend to get blown into the
sea, so not having wings is an advantage. In time, the elimination of all the winged
ones will ensure that only those of this new ‘wingless’ variety survive,
which have therefore been ‘naturally selected.’ ‘There!’
says the evolutionist. ‘A favorable mutation—evolution in action!’
However, it fails to make his case, because though beneficial to survival, it is
still a defect—a loss or corruption of information. This is the very opposite
of what evolutionists need to demonstrate real evolution.
To support belief in a process which has allegedly turned molecules into man would
require mutations to add information. Showing that information-losing defects can
give a survival advantage is irrelevant, as far as evidence for real evolution is
concerned.
In short,
- Evolutionary theory requires some mutations to go ‘uphill’—to
add information.
- The mutations which we observe are generally neutral (they don’t change the
information, or the ‘meaning’ in the code) or else they are informationally
downhill—defects which lose/corrupt information.
- The rare ‘beneficial’ mutations to which evolutionists cling, all appear
to be like this wingless beetle—downhill changes, losses of information which,
though they may give a survival advantage, are headed in precisely the wrong direction
for evolution.
All of our real-world experience, especially in the ‘information age,’
would indicate that to rely on accidental copying mistakes to generate real information
is the stuff of wishful thinking by ‘true believers,’ not science.
Notes
- Thousands of hereditary diseases in people, for instance, are caused by just such
inherited mutational defects.
- That is, having no effect on the outcome, or the expressed meaning of the code.
Using English as an (admittedly limited) analogy, assume a message were transmitted
saying ‘the enemy is now attacking,’ which accidentally suffers a one-letter
substitution changing it to ‘the enemy is not attacking.’ The result
is potentially disastrous, like a harmful mutation. Whereas a change to ‘tha
enemy is now attacking’ would be neutral; a change, but not affecting the
end result.
(Available in Czech and Finnish)
|
