Posts Tagged ‘mutations’

Genetic evidence now points to one ugly fact for the theory or evolution; Autism and Alzheimer’s disease are the result of genetic mutations.

ScienceDaily on May 3 reported that investigators at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, that new research has uncovered two additional genes involved with autism.

An estimated one in 110 U.S. children has autism, which negatively affects behavior, social skills, and communication.

The risk for the disorder can be now be considered an inherited genetic disease, based on a study performed by professors Daniel Notterman at Penn State, and Ning Lei at Princeton University.

Lei and colleagues analyzed data from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) on 943 families, most of whom had more than one child diagnosed with autism and had undergone genetic testing. Investigators compared the prevalence of 25 gene mutations in the AGRE families with a control group of 6,317 individuals without developmental or neuropsychiatric illness.

Mutations in four genes within the AGRE families were identified. Two of the genes previously were shown to be associated with autism and often are involved in forming or maintaining neural synapses — the point of connection between individual neurons.

One of the new genes identified was neural cell adhesion molecule 2 (NCAM2). NCAM2 is expressed in the hippocampus of the human brain — a region previously associated with autism.

“While mutations in the NCAM2 gene were found in a small percentage of the children that we studied, it is fascinating that this finding continues a consistent story — that many of the genes associated with autism are involved with formation or function of the neural synapse,” Dr. Lei said. “Studies such as this provide evidence that autism is a genetically based disease that affects neural connectivity.”

According to Jerry Coyne in his widely acclaimed book entitled Why Evolution is True, evolution originates from mutations. Coyne explains,

The first is the idea of evolution itself. This simply means that a species undergoes genetic change over time. That is, over many generations a species can evolve into something quite different, and those differences are based on changes in DNA, which originate as mutations.

With Autism, however, the genetic change is certainly not beneficial. The same is true for the newly discovered genetic mutation associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

 In the June 10 online issue of the journal Cell, researchers from New York Universty’s Center of Excellence on Brain Aging and the Silberstein Alzheimer’s Institute, reported their findings that a mutation of a gene associated with early onset Alzheimer’s blocks a key recycling process necessary for brain cell survival.

The gene, presenilin 1 (PS1), performs a crucial house-cleaning service by helping brain cells digest unwanted, damaged and potentially toxic proteins. Once mutated, however, the gene fails to recycle and eliminate the potential toxins from causing cellular damage to brain cells resulting in Alzheimer’s disease.

“We believe we have identified the principal mechanism by which mutations of PS1 cause the most common genetic form of Alzheimer’s disease,” said study co-author Ralph A. Nixon, professor in the departments of psychiatry and cell biology as well as director at New York University.

Scientific evidence from Autism to Alzheimer’s disease, rather than supporting evolution as campaigned evolution militants like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins, contradicts the theory of evolution.

Evolution is a theory in crisis. No small wonder, even ardent atheists Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were compelled to write “Why Evolution is Not True” (2010).  

Richard Dawkins, the most popular evolution advocate, explains that the mechanism of evolution is “nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions”. For Dawkins, evolution occurs through the nonrandom selection of randomly generated genetic mutations. This defines modern neo-Darwinism.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in their new book entitled What Darwin Got Wrong, delivers a stunning exposé on the Dawkins’s inane assertion that 1) natural selection is a logical theory, and 2) natural selection is nonrandom.

Seasoned by decades of scientific investigation, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini begin by demonstrating that even “Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed”. Not only flawed, they view the concept of natural selection is simply an “intensional fallacy”.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are not lone critics. With over 20 pages of references, the authors demonstrate that the theory of natural selection is no more than circular reasoning: a tautology.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini explains: “[T]here is at the heart of adaptations theories of evolution, a confusion between (1) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and (2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits… Darwinism is committed to inferring (2) from (1)”. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini conclude, “We think this argument, although ubiquitous in the literature, is fallacious.”

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini also address Dawkins’ issue of “nonrandom survival”, by pointing out that nonrandom processes require a mechanism to overcome entropy—randomness. The obvious question is – what is the mechanism that natural selection uses to overcome nature’s tendency towards randomness?

To answer this question, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini quotes from Gabriel Dover (2006), the British geneticist that coined the term “molecular drive”: “Selection is not a process as such with predictable outcomes based on fixed, selective ‘powers’ of individual genes controlling aspects of phenotype.”

The evidence demonstrates that natural selection does not deliver “predictable outcomes”. Lack of evidence for a predictable outcome, highlights the fact that natural selection does not have an operational mechanism to overcome randomness to increase complexity—the essence of evolution.

Despite over 150 years of investigation since the publication of The Origin of Species, no known natural law has been discovered to guarantee  natural selection as a nonrandom process. Currently, there are no known natural mechanisms to overcome the general tendency of all nature towards randomness without an intervention. Contrary to Dawkins’ assertion, natural selection is simply a random process.

What is the role of natural selection, then? For Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, “We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not composing the melody.” This is not the nonrandom force of evolution as championed by Dawkins.  

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, like Richard Dawkins, are evolutionists and “out-right, card-carrying, sign-up, dye-in-the-wool, no-holds barred atheists.” On the subject of natural selection acting as a nonrandom agency, however, the contrasts could not be more acute. 

Consensus that natural selection cannot possibly be a nonrandom process has reached a tipping point. Mutations are random. Natural selection is random. Dawkins contention of “nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions” is now clearly emerging as simply “breathtaking inanity.”