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Daily link icon Saturday, April 12, 2003

Professing Creation Science

Over at AnswersInGenesis.org (great site, by the way), there's an interview with Dr. Walter Veith, who holds the chair of zoology at a university in South Africa. The interview is excellent, and this quote jumped out at me, because it emphasizes exactly what I've always said. That it takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution.

'The very name "selection" implies that you're choosing between two or more variants. So that means that the end result is extinction of one in favour of the other. Natural selection never increases the number of variants; it only decreases them. So my problem with it was, "how does a mechanism that makes less and less end up making more and more"?

'The answer obviously is, it doesn't. That leaves chance mutations as the only source of the new information. You have to have all these new genes coding for new features, all interacting precisely with one another, continually arising as animals get more complex, by chance. To believe that, you have to have a lot of faith. It's certainly not something I see in my work as a zoologist.'

He also talks about lots of other neat things, like "latent DNA" (all the neat stuff that's in there that people think is left-over "junk" DNA), the fossil record, animal physiology and eating habits, and genetic engineering. Good read.

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Comments XML gif

Bill wrote:

Dr Veith uses an illogical foundation for his misguided attack on the concept of natural selection. He completely removes it from the realm of science where it belongs in order to mislead others. He may honestly be misleading himself. Either way, it is unfortunate. There is no need for faith when you are making observations of a natural process.

Natural selection is the term used to describe an observed process of trait survival. That is it ladies and gentlemen. There are no decisions being made, and there are innumerable characteristics in every organism that can be selected in or out depending on environmental factors, so mutation need not apply. When mutution does occur, it is usually detrimental or useless and does not get passed down, but over the course of millions of years, the word usually becomes a certainty, meaning mutations do find their way into evolution, but it is misleading to connect natural selection to mutation as Dr Veith did.

∴ Bill | 20-Mar-2007 2:31pm est | #10029

Keith (http://keithdevens.com/) wrote:

Bill, he's talking about mechanisms of increasing information in the genetic code. Natural selection only reduces information within a species, and, to simply quote him "That leaves chance mutations as the only source of the new information. You have to have all these new genes coding for new features, all interacting precisely with one another, continually arising as animals get more complex, by chance. To believe that, you have to have a lot of faith." We have not observed genetic mutations creating an increase in genetic information over millions of years... it's simply not an observable process.

Keith | 20-Mar-2007 2:45pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #10030

69.141.113.74 wrote:

seemed apropos in this discussion:
Interspecies Sex: Evolution's Hidden Secret? - National Geographic

Had always learned that this sort of this was impossible.

∴ 69.141.113.74 | 20-Mar-2007 7:19pm est | #10031

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