Not By Chance: Adaptive Mutations and Chance


Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution (1998) By Dr. Lee Spetner- See biography in the appendix

Adaptive Mutations

Dr. Lee Spetner in his book Not By Chance (NBC) has researched the area involving adaptive mutations. Following is some of his findings.

- Barbara McClintock, who received the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her work on genetic rearrangements, noted that there are indications that these genetic modifications occur in response to stress.

- Barry Wanner of Emory University has suggested that genomic rearrangements could be part of a control system in bacteria that would produce heritable changes in response to environmental cues.

- John Cairns and his team at the School of Public Health at Harvard University described other experiments with bacteria and concluded: The cells may have mechanisms for choosing which mutation will occur…. Bacteria apparently have an extensive armory of such 'cryptic' genes that can be called upon for the metabolism of unusual substrates. (Spetner 1998)

Dr. Spetner suggests that these experiments which indicate that adaptive mutations are stimulated by the environment, contradict the basic dogma of neo-Darwinism. Mutations are random, and should occur independent of the environment. He further suggests that other organisms, apart from bacteria, also may have latent parts of their genome dedicated to be adaptive to a certain set of environmental conditions that may arise. (Spetner 1998)

A parallel process appears to take place during embryological development. Animal embryos' develop under joint influence of their genetic program and the environment. Signals from both sources act together in the development process. Different cells in an embryo even though they have identical DNA, take different development pathways because their signal inputs are different. Indeed, that's what differentiation in the embryo is all about.

Essentially, we can see different phenotypes of animals and plants depending upon how the environment along with the individual's genetic makeup, affect the developmental pathways. Dr. Spetner wonders how much of the fossil record might be the result of the direct influence of environment on the phenotype without any change in the genotype. (Spetner 1998)

Chance

Spetner has a few things to say about the probability of mutations in living things. For cumulative selection to work, a lot of good mutations have to occur by chance. At each step, a mutant with a positive selective value has to appear. It also has to be lucky enough to survive and eventually to take over the population. Then another good mutation has to appear for the next step, and so on. The neo-Darwinians seem to think the chance of all this happening is large enough to make evolution work. But no one has ever shown that to be so. No one has ever shown that such a thing is likely - or even possible.

Richard Dawkins believes that macroevolution takes place gradually through long chains of many small steps that are cumulative "cumulative selection". Dawkins talked about chance, but he didn't calculate the chance of anything. (Spetner 1998)

The rarity of copying errors is a problem for the neo Darwinian Theory. In bacteria the mutation rate per nucleotide is between 0.1 and 10 per billion transcriptions. But in all other forms of life the rate is smaller…between 0.01 and 1 per billion. Error rates are low only because the cell has a proofreading mechanism which corrects most of the errors made in transcription. The mean geometric rate mutation rate is one in ten billion. (Spetner 1998)

Some other elements that are necessary for cumulative selection to work include the following:

- Each step must have a selective advantage, and they must each on the average add a small amount of information to the genome. (Spetner 1998)

- Each improvement must be significant. Most "slight" improvements will not be the basis for anything. Unless they occur in large numbers they are likely to disappear.

- The mutation that leads to the improvement must also be dominant. If it was recessive, the mutation would have to appear in both a male and female, and they would have to find each other.

- A mutation, even if favorable, will have only a very small chance of establishing itself in the species if it occurs once only. (Spetner 1998)

- Information must be added in small steps. It cannot be much more than one bit, or the change that would affect one nucleotide. If the information seems to have much more than one bit it can't be a part of cumulative selection.

- No mutations that have selective value are known to satisfy these conditions. They either reduce the information in the genome, or they seem to add too much.
(Spetner 1998)

Spetner - Major Points

1. Adaptive mutations are stimulated by the environment. This is a contradiction of the basic tenants of evolution.

2. Animal embryos develop according to a dual process involving the influence of their genetic program and their environment.

3. Cumulative selection has never been demonstrated, whereby a series of positive mutations, each of which must survive, will lead to a new organism.

4. Low mutation rates are a problem for evolution due to a proofreading process that corrects most of the errors in transcription.

5. Information must be added incrementally. New information cannot be accounted for. Losses of information can be accounted for during mutations.

Bibliography

Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution.
The Judaica Press, Inc. p. 187-189.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p.190-192.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p.195-196.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p.162.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p. 91-93.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p.163.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p.101-102.
Spetner, Lee M. 1998. Ibid. p. 106.

Appendix

Lee M. Spetner received the PhD degree in physics from MIT in 1950. He was with the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University from 1951 to 1970, where he was engaged in research and development in signal processing and the scattering of electromagnetic waves from the earth's surface. From 1958 he was a member of the principal professional staff of the laboratory. He spent the academic year 1962-63 on a fellowship in the Department of Biophysics at the Johns Hopkins University. During that time he became interested in evolution and published several papers investigating information buildup in evolution. He taught graduate courses in physics at Howard University for about five years, and for about 10 years he taught information and communication theory at the Johns Hopkins University and at the Weizman Institute. In 1970 he moved to Israel where he took the position as technical director of Eljim Ltd., a new subsidiary of KMS Inc. of the US, engaged in research and development in military electronics. In 1984 he retired and continued his hobby of studying organic evolution which began back in 1964.

Prepared by

Ed Hopkins is a science educator with 32 years of experience teaching science. Ed has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology from George Peabody Teacher’s College, TN and a M.Ed. from Atlantic University, FL. Ed has been working closely with the Creation Studies Institute, Ft. Lauderdale, FL since its inception in 1988.

 

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