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Post details: Coffee!! You cannot be naturally selected to win big if you are well-armed against tropical diseases at Earmuff Central

03/08/11

by Denyse O'Leary 05:12:18 am, Categories: Commentary - OpEd, 415 words

Coffee!! You cannot be naturally selected to win big if you are well-armed against tropical diseases at Earmuff Central

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend put me onto this human genetic research program (no, no, it all sounds reasonable, keep your shirt on; no one is looking for the missing link and you are him and the genetic police are waiting outside ... wake UP, will you?):

Ethnically diverse people are donating DNA to science, and the wealth of genomic data emerging from the project already is shedding light on human evolution.A decade ago it was a big deal to spell out the entire DNA sequence of a single human being. That event marked the success of the initial Human Genome Project. Now hundreds of human genomes have been decoded. Scientists who study human evolution are using the new data to make discoveries about how Homo Sapiens may have adapted to an ever-changing, ever-challenging environment.

But a puzzling claim immediately follows:

New traits become established in human populations because they confer a survival and reproductive advantage. In Darwinian terms they are "positively selected." Individuals who lacked the genetic variant responsible for an important trait often did not survive long enough to leave progeny.Mutations in general may be harmful or of no consequence, but some mutations make for a better-adapted organism. Over time these new and advantageous genetic variants can usurp those that dominated previously.

Yes, but one problem that set me thinking was loss of adaptive traits. I tried explaining it to a friend in this way:

Let us say that, as an evolutionary legacy, a woman is immune to leprosy. She has always lived in a northern climate where she was unlikely to be exposed to the disease. If her daughters marry immigrant men who do not have that immunity and the trait is lost over time, it would still be of no consequence provided they all stayed in that climate. In the end, no one would get leprosy, maybe no one would know about the existence of the trait, and the trait, which doesn't matter where they live anyway, would just get lost.

So, I asked, don't beneficial evolved traits get lost all the time? Is this correct?

The friend wrote back to say,

Yes, they do get lost all of the time, and they are more likely to be lost when there is no consequence to the loss.

Hmmm. Still more trouble for Darwinism: The rare beneficial trait that results from natural selection has no special protection from just getting lost.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

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We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
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Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
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