Another salvo in the Evolution/Creation debate.

Last month, I wrote a post in which I commented upon my inability to understand how scientists could look at the wonder of the universe and still deny God.

Looks like they're still at it.

Nature is reporting (in an essay with the unfortunate title of Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the 'cost of complexity' ) that evolution-only supporters have crossed another bridge. In a nutshell, the idea of cost of complexity is that an the more complex an organism, the more difficult it is for a random genetic mutation not to have unexpected and potentially devastaing effects.

For example, in Scotland there has been discovered an apparent link between hair color and reproductive fitness in sheep. Simply, dark colored sheep are larger, stronger and hardier. So there should be more of them, right? Wrong. They also have shorter lifespans and are less, shall we say, sexually potent. What relationship does the mutation for light wool have to reproductive fitness? No one knows.

In a nutshell, creationists say that a random genetic mutation can have wide-reaching effects in a complex organism. The more complex, the more potentially wider-reaching. That's no way to run a universe, right?

The experiment cited in the Nature article involves changing some genetic markers in mice and looking for other changes. Scientist found that in changing one characteristic, the effects were "largely limited" to related characteristics. This is by no means exclusionary of all non-related characteristics, by the way.

The experiment seems flawed in several ways, not the least of which is that there were in fact unrelated changes in some cases. Of course, the evolution-only crowd won't tell you about that. Second, they really don't understand what they're playing with. These guys are guessing all the way. They haven't even begun to understand how a genome works, especially one as complex as ours.

Now I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, one of these closed-minded, keep-us-in-the-dark, textbook-burning Christian fundamentalists. I believe that there were dinosaurs, that the Earth is about five billion years old, and that organisms mutate and form new organisms. Get the stake and the matches if you want.

I do not however, believe in random mutations. Our universe is a wonderous, mysterious creation, but it is a creation. Period. God has set His plan in motion, no doubt. The Bible says that God placed animals on the earth, and then formed man in His own likeness. The part of man that is like God is not our physicality. It is our spirit, our soul, our heart. That is what makes us different, sets us above the animals and makes us Children of God.

If these scientists really think that dropping some chemicals in a petri dish is the same as God saying "Let us make man in our own image." and breathing life into him, then I feel sad for them.

A scientist says to God, "We don't need you. We can
create life on our own out of nothing."


"Show me." says God.

So the scientist bends down to scoop up some dust.

"Hold on." says God. "Get your own dirt!"

Comments

  1. I'd suggest either going along with the whole creation shebang or accepting that God designed a universe where random mutations could actually result in increasing complexity. I'm not a fan of 'intelligent design' as you've laid it out up there, but who knows - not me.

    BTW I've been re-reading the first 30 chapters of Genesis over the last 2 mornings. I'm wondering if the names listed between Noah and Abraham aren't 'selected' just like they appear to have been elsewhere in genealogies. I'm too lazy to write about it, but it seems to me that there aren't anything like enough generations to provide people for all the things that were done. In addition, the very carefully constructed timelines that some use clash very badly with known historical reality (umerian civilisation firmly established within 75 years of the flood - I don't think so).

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  2. And a nice job of saying it, too. God did it --- the details of the process is what science seeks to uncover, but the chaos didn't take God by surprise & He made sure that what is, is.

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