The new red herring from ICR

[gluadys]

Seems the new red herring from ICR is "equivocal" vs. "unequivocal" beneficial mutations.

http://www.icr.org/article/3466/

According to the article "unequivocally beneficial mutations are nonexistent in nature."

Of course, their examples are such things as bacteria which have developed anti-biotic resistance being less fit than other bacteria when the anti-biotic is no longer part of the environment.

If being less fit in a different environment qualifies a mutation as being only "equivocally beneficial" why is it a surprise that all beneficial mutations are equivocally beneficial? What are they looking for, a mutation that would be beneficial in all possible environments? How would such a mutation be selected since selection is a function of the local environment?

What gets me even more than the newest jargon is the sad repetition of arguments that should long ago have been abandoned. Shades of mark kennedy, he even uses the fact of genetically linked diseases as a supposed refutation of evolution. He repeats the fallacy that evolution is a program of improvement and even suggests that deleterious mutations will accumulate along with beneficial ones, thus wiping out the benefit of the latter. How can someone so completely misunderstand natural selection?

 

[birdan]

Not to mention the fact the author is an M.D.

This newest spin seems to follow old patterns of partitioning off defensible boundaries. First there was the argument that evolution was not possible, but when that became indefensible, the terms micro-evolution and macro-evolution came into play. Ditto with historical vs. operational science.

It seems to be more circling of the wagons to me, and I take it as progress that they are now admitting beneficial mutations, even with all their caveats. However, refutations will also become more tedious with a doubling of arguments to refute:

Creationist: Well, what about macro-evolutionary operationally scientific equivocally beneficial mutations?

Creationist: Well, what about micro-evolutionary historically scientific unequivocally beneficial mutations?

...

ad nauseum

Edit: If you can't beat them with science and facts, beat them with semantics!

 

[shernren]

Not only is this red herring theoretically inaccurate, it's factually inaccurate, too!

ICR thinks:

In bacteria, several mutations in cell wall proteins may deform the proteins enough so that antibiotics cannot bind to the mutant bacteria. This creates bacterial resistance to that antibiotic. Does this support evolutionary genetic theory? No, since the mutant bacteria do not survive as well in the wild as the native (non-mutant) bacteria. That is, the resistant (mutant) bacteria will only do well in an artificial situation, where it is placed in a culture medium with the antibiotic. Only then can it overgrow at the expense of the native bacteria. In the wild, the native bacteria are always more vigorous than the mutant bacteria.

Medical science reveals:

Policies aimed at alleviating the growing problem of drug-resistant pathogens by restricting antimicrobial usage implicitly assume that resistance reduces the Darwinian fitness of pathogens in the absence of drugs. While fitness costs have been demonstrated for bacteria and viruses resistant to some chemotherapeutic agents, these costs are anticipated to decline during subsequent evolution. This has recently been observed in pathogens as diverse as HIV and Escherichia coli. Here we present evidence that these genetic adaptations to the costs of resistance can virtually preclude resistant lineages from reverting to sensitivity. We show that second site mutations which compensate for the substantial (14 and 18% per generation) fitness costs of streptomycin resistant (rpsL) mutations in E. coli create a genetic background in which streptomycin sensitive, rpsL+ alleles have a 4-30% per generation selective disadvantage relative to adapted, resistant strains. We also present evidence that similar compensatory mutations have been fixed in long-term streptomycin-resistant laboratory strains of E. coli and may account for the persistence of rpsL streptomycin resistance in populations maintained for more than 10,000 generations in the absence of the antibiotic. We discuss the public health implications of these and other experimental results that question whether the more prudent use of antimicrobial chemotherapy will lead to declines in the incidence of drug-resistant pathogenic microbes.

(emphasis added) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/en...t_uids=9332013

Sucks to be on the wrong side of biological reality, no?

And busterdog, if:

Well, apparently most of DNA is junk, meaning we don't know what it does, but we know for sure when a "mutation" is a "random" change. Yeah. I am not buying it.

why don't you ask people who actually know how scientists showed that mutations are random. The shock! Evolutionists actually test some things they say! You could, say, google the Lederberg experiments to start with.

 

[sfs]

How can someone so completely misunderstand natural selection?

Long, arduous hours of practice.

[Line stolen from Buffy.]

 

[Impaler]

I don't think it's possible to change anything without having some sort of negative effect. The idea in creationist circles seems to be that evolution can only progress on 100% benifical mutations. This is of course false.

Take the evolution of reptiles for example. In order to become as good on land as they are now reptiles had to lose a lot of the things that made amphibians good in water. It's the same the way humans can't climb trees as well as other primates, flying birds can't run as fast as theropods and eukaryotes can't breed as fast as prokaryotes.

Though there have been benificial mutations that are hard to find negative effects for, such as those after a gene duplication.