What's Genes Got to Do With It
By Mike Ecklund
This year’s poll of most religious areas of the country lists Mississippi and the south being the highest, and Vermont and the northeast sections being the least. A check of the states with the most educated people—those with high school and college educations, versus the least educated shows the same areas in reverse. It has been argued and will continue to be a finger pointing issue that faith in God and the Bible requires blind belief by the ignorant as such polls might seem to indicate.
There is a growing and dedicated group of professional scientists, some represented by Creation Ministries International that are most efficiently removing the image of the naive back-woods, hillbilly that some have of Christians. By deductive reasoning and sound rebuttal of current scientific dogma, they are breaking down many of the barriers that have kept the masses from acknowledging the complete and utter truthfulness of God’s Holy Word.
One such author and scientist is Dr. John C. Sanford, a semi-retired Cornell University Professor for more than twenty-five years is an expert in the field of genetics. His book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome covers his journey from his previous acceptance of the established guidelines of academia to his present acknowledgement of God’s design. His years of experimentation in genetic engineering of plants and his understanding of the complexity of the building blocks of life led him to question what is known as the “Primary Axiom.”
Its foundation demands that evolutionary origins of life depend on the upward movement or net gain of genetic information during frequent mutations over millions of years. His research found instead that mutations almost always were neutral, had no effect on the organism; or were negative, resulting in a net loss of information and degradation. Under artificial conditions, plant and animal breeders have successfully selected a limited number of traits by using what are known as “blocking techniques, replication, statistical analysis, truncation selection and highly controlled environments.” By contrast, Mother Natures’ natural selection is blind and uncontrolled.
Dr. Sanford uses the story of frog eggs: Some are eaten by fish, the tadpoles are picked off by birds, a truck tire squashes a few and floods or drought kills some more. What remains is “survival of the luckiest”— a primary finding that species survival is determined many times more by external environmental factors than by genetic superiority. Using tools such as Haldane’s Dilemma, Kimura’s Quandary, Muller’s Fear and Mueller’s Ratchet among others, Dr. Sanford effectively argues that there are numerous problems that make forward, positive mutations resulting in advancement of a species impossible; the time required; number of actual mutations positive or negative affecting the genome, and the complexity of the genome, itself. Irreducible complexity is defined as a system which has multiple parts and each part has no function in and of itself. All the parts must come together at one time in a designed order for it to function; such as a mousetrap, Swiss watch and, as Dr. Sanford believes, the genome.
He made the profound statement, “The extinction of the human genome appears to be just as certain and deterministic as the extinction of the stars and the heat death of the universe.” We are in fact suffering from generations of “lost information” due to hundreds of mutations per human being. Dr. Sanford uses an excellent analogy of his own text: Remove or change a few hundred letters throughout the book will not change the readability initially. But continue this process as well as losing bits of it over a period of years and eventually it will not be usable.
This is in perfect agreement with the Scriptures looking back to the originally genetically perfect parents of Adam and Eve and come to where we are today. The longevity of Man decreases after Noah by a biological decay curve as seen by the documentation in the book of Genesis. This can also be proved by looking at cancer rates. Our bodies develop cancer as a result of genetic mutations. Each time a cell dies, it must be replaced by replication of DNA/RNA and each replication results in some additional mutations.
While this increases cancer risk with age, we also see an over-all increase in all age groups. Medical News Today posted an article that states there will be a greater than 75% increase in cancer in developed countries and a greater than 90% increase in developing countries by the year 2030. Breast cancer has increased from 640,000 in 1980 to 1.6 million in 2010.
Many of you may have seen Ray Comfort’s movie about evolution where he asks different students and educators to produce evidence by naming a transitional fossil of kind to kind; i.e. fish or reptile to bird, reptile to mammal and so on. No one was able to name one. Dr. Sanford’s book goes into depth about why these types of changes are not possible and that God did indeed create “each after its own kind.” I highly recommend this book even though it can be difficult to understand for the lay person (there is a helpful glossary).
But with some diligence on your part, it will give you the needed ammunition in the fight for God’s authorship in creation. There is also a companion book called the, Creation Answers Book I recommend that covers many scientific questions that you have asked about (or others have asked you). The Creation Ministries team has compiled and addressed such thorny issues as, “Where did Cain’s wife come from, was there a worldwide flood, is the world really only 6000 years old” and many others. Both of these along with other helpful publications are available at the Creation Ministries International website.
mecklund@cebridge.net
